Some of the elements are entirely individual; I am uniquely the eldest child of my parents, whose deaths happened at specific times of my life, and I have made personal choices about my career, lifestyle, political activities, and pleasures. In contrast, I share my identity as ‘an academic’ with tens of thousands of others, my generational identity with millions of post-World War II “baby boomers”, and my personal preferences with many people who have similar social and/or educational backgrounds. Like many UK citizens, I had grandparents who were immigrants, and grandparents who had long-standing links to a particular part of the UK - in my case, Yorkshire. I have significant interests and enthusiasms in common with fellow opera-goers, trade unionists and cheese-lovers.

So secondly, to take a more analytical viewpoint, my view of ‘identity’ is [1] that it is complex and many sided, and [2] that it combines individual and shared elements. It is often hard to disentwine the varied strands of a person’s identity, and equally hard to see the distinctions between individual elements and elements they have in common with other people. There is also a further question about the relationship between the way in which people choose or change aspects of their own identity, such as when a student is the first in their family to go to university, and the way in which their ‘student’ identity is also shaped by others, such as academics or townspeople. For me this means that ‘identity’ is dynamic and unstable, as the influences of its varied elements shift and interact. But it is also contested, because these influences are not always compatible. As I sit in a seminar with students I (and they) experience tensions between common identities (“historian”, “member of the University of York”) which emerge from working together, and those which divide us (“tutor” and “student”, older and younger, male and female).

It can be seen from the examples above that ideas and experiences of identity involve distinguishing one person or group of persons from others. Such divisions and identities may express forms of unequal power, differentiating the people who set and mark exams from those who sit them, or those who have studied a subject for many years from those who have done so for just a few weeks. They may express different experiences or perceptions of experiences, as with someone from outside the UK contrasted with someone who has lived there all their life, or with the way society treats specific groups (for example women as opposed to men, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy). They may express the affiliations, labels and loyalties which shape the identity of religious or political groups, of football fans, or of particular professions and occupations. They may be sharpened in particular situations – I tend to have a stronger sense of “British” or “European” identity when I encounter people in Egypt or New Zealand.

Thirdly, I would say that identities are historically constructed and transmitted, rather than inherited in the way we inherit red hair or brown eyes. It has been human beings acting in the world who have given force and meaning to notions such as being “British”, or “Christian” or “middle class”, or even being “human”, whether such notions are taken up by ourselves or imposed on us by theirs. From governments using passports and censuses to label their subjects, to everyday comments like ‘everyone knows that women/students/Chinese (or whoever) do/are such-and-such’, the use and abuse of identity labels is the product of the many cultural, political and social influences impacting on those who create or respond to them. The emergence of the term ‘nigger’ as a denigrating label for the descendants of enslaved people of African origin, and its appropriation by those descendants as a form of
self assertion in the 1960s is a well known story of contested identity in recent times which can be compared to older narratives of contests over being “Christian”, or “Roman”, or a “gentleman”, or – to take a currently debated identity – “British”.

Ending on the personal note on which I began, I would say that it matters a lot to me to be reflective and self-aware when using the language and assumptions of ‘identity’ in regards either to myself or to other people. I am very conscious of the complex and fluctuating elements in play as we engage in ‘identity’ talk, and of the delicate interplay of personal subjectivity with shared and inherited culture. And I would like to leave readers of this piece with a thought–provoking quotation from the social and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whom I much admire :

“Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet
the narratives of history, of a culture.”

Dr. Joanna de Groot is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York

To be British, I feel, is to be uniformly sceptical of all things which are labelled British, from the Union Jack to the National Anthem. Yet we are (ironically) united in this scepticism of getting excited about national symbols or taking patriotism too seriously.
We are democratic, hold the right of free speech and suchlike. We would have it no other way, but we’re not going to get excited about it. I mean, really, we’re British for crikes sake.
Yet this refusal to proudly label ourselves British, far from being a lack of identity, is an enormously strong, if ambiguous one. Yes, ‘we’ are a group of diverse individuals and personalities. But individuals are invariably part of groups and this particular group–Britain–, like all groups, has some broad and distinct characteristics: cynicism and quiet pride. For example we aren’t proud of our imperial past but we damn well aren’t going to let anyone claim that our empire wasn’t the biggest and the strongest.
Overall, we aren’t too proud of Britain but we are proud of being British. And whilst Britain might not be too great we’ll fight to the death (over a pint) any country that has the impudence to say they’re better than us.

James Macdougald, Literature Editor

eden of hills lochs dales downs ditches rills round-eyed ladies pressing stamps trimming hedges verges lawns layered soil and sunday after sunday of churchyards and choice cuts unbuttoned unbelted supine on sofas taking papers post-prandials snacks chores and (curiously but yes) fêtes borrowed language borrowed mealtimes borrowed spires on loan from chartres or rouen then rievaulx then coventry (no great exspence) for great britten before how many per cell benothingtween gerontius or -on or since but the possum came pondhopping but not that one w. h. or denies it but he went the other way with g. b. and we’ve not forgotten not monarchs not meat pies parochials provincials publicans bigots and sewerrats and splashy tissuey vomity but assuredly continental duvets like she with the m in her name and everything battered and everyone battered and benjamin fleabitten to a fine pulp to endeavour to write poetree in the language of commonpersons from manningtree or aintree to catch the three-thirty still rather that than watch the lemons roll me to an early impecunious grave beneath a halfmeasure of tapale still flowing in spite of the oppositions that and other anhydrous dry roasted provisions scratchings pickledeggs and allsorts thick treacly spirituous or thin draughts meekbubbling furmities tewkesbury mustards and squashy peas potages hotpots and rarebits and bearbaits and borstals and barstools and beerstalls and readysalted readycheesed and readyonioned and ruddyeverythinged and ninetynines the spirit quavers and semiquavers and demisemis and hemidemisemis our hemi your semi this demi

Kellie Mills, Music Editor

I am here to ‘argue’ that it is I, Kellie Mills, who is ‘Britishness’ complete. On paper, I have it all; a newly-developed liking for tea, Grandparents that own a wool-shop down sunny South, a father that does the daily commute into the City, a family that have always lived in Great Britain, and an upper lip that is stiffer than one of my Father’s crisp white shirts.

Yet despite all this, there is really nothing distinguishing me from anyone else. In today’s society can we really talk of ‘Britishness’ without being rather tongue-in-cheek? To be honest, I do not think that tea is that great, I only drink it to stop being bored on an idle Wednesday at work. The classic Monty Python only produces raised eyebrows and a slight smirk. I do not own a pony, and, despite being a music student, my one great musical love is The Killers. In fact, I quite dislike Vaughan Williams, and Elgar really is not my cup of tea. In my opinion, today’s multicultural society leaves everyone in a bit of a cultural mess. But, ultimately, I find that one rather enjoys this.

Peter Hagen, Arts Editor

What is Britishness?
or
Imagined Diversions of a Construction Worker Employed on the Site of a Slowly Emerging Olympic Stadium

And did those feet in extra time
Abandon England’s losing game?
And will the holy Limb of Becks,
Disappoint us all the same?

And did the council tax divine
Increase again our annual bills?
And did our jurisprudence thrive
Between the legs of Heather Mills?

Bring me my pack of Turkish Gold,
Bring me my vindaloo, entire!
Bring me my beer: O gut unfold!
Bring me my haemorrhoids of fire.

I will not cease from gastric fight,
Nor shall The Sun sleep in my hand
Till we have built this Stadium…

Anywhere but bloody Paris.

Viran Pandya, Deputy Music Editor

Britishness, like any other form of cultural identity, is always in flux, shifting and changing to suit the needs of those that choose to be identified. Although it is meaningful to those who choose to identify themselves through this way, Britishness is essentially an imagined category. It is impossible to define the cultural identity of a people simply by the fact that they live in the same geographical location. Each individual has a multitude of ways that they can define themselves, each with differences concerning wealth, gender, religion, and political beliefs, to name but a few. I can not help but believe that the current emphasis on Britishness is a way to remedy the social complications that multiculturalism presents. There is the fear that Britain is no longer white, or that it is under siege by foreigners destabilizing the fictional existence of a prior homogeny of British life. If Britishness is equated with whiteness, then I simply have no time for it; it may have no time for me either. I fear that categories of identity are consistently understood as given facts. Nevertheless, as long as people do not decide to see Britishness as an authoritative form of identification which includes and excludes, rather than as a socially and culturally constructed and imagined entity with no real legitimacy, I (probably) won’t complain.

Jenny Hill, Deputy Arts Editor

Having grown up in a household where the ‘Match of the Day’ theme tune has the same effect as the Call to Prayer, my perception of “Britishness” is inevitably football centric. For those of you who aren’t fans, I am sure my definition will be considered blasphemous, but as far as I’m concerned the potent combination of bacon sandwiches, beer and bilious police horses on a freezing Saturday in November is quintessentially British. My definition of “Britishness” is waning in today’s society largely due to the powers that be at Sky and Setanta, who are slowly killing the traditional Saturday 3pm kick off. Yet despite this, and the increased awareness of the metatarsal (my Dad claims they didn’t have them in his day), it is just part of the changing face of ‘Britishness’. Like the departure of the ‘the special one’, it is something to moan about in a way that only the British can, over a half-time cup of tea of course.

Nicola Fairhead, Secretary

Until about two years ago ‘Britishness’, for me, was easy enough to define. Having spent most of my life in the States and Canada, it was left to my extremely English parents to represent ‘the motherland’ for me and my highly Americanised sisters. This generally came down to the following: incessant tea drinking, Monty Python DVDs, saying ‘pardon’ instead of ‘what, and somehow incorporating the fact that you are British into every conversation – even with the slightest of acquaintances. Now, as a third year English student at York, that narrow definition has expanded to include an obsessive passion for football, an incessant compulsion to layer clothes, as well as a crazed devotion to a number of quiz shows, and obviously devising any excuse to relocate a meeting to the local pub.

“The name Bergman, more than any other, personifies the progress of film from entertainment of the masses to one of the most refined art forms of the 20th century.” Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde

Bergman proved that the cinema as an art form could be the equal of literature, music and painting. Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival remarked that “[h]e was a director of the human condition, of the misery of man, of feminine mystery… the last of the greats because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature.” A Bergman film is more than entertainment. Although, this is not to say that Bergman’s films were not entertaining. They were so much so in fact that a small feud broke out amongst some of the most distinguished American film critics following Bergman’s passing. In a New York Times Op-Ed Jonathan Rosenbaum attacks Bergman because he had what Carl Thedor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, “the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits”. This led Roger Ebert in his defense of Bergman to ask; “[i]n what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way?” Even the mainstream media took a stance with Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly commenting:

I also don’t know how anyone could think that a movie like Persona, with its naked acting and mind-warp structure, or Scenes From a Marriage, which so captures the music of relationships that I could it watch forever, is lacking in eternal secrets. What’s truly notable about Rosenbaum’s dismissal, however, is the battle line he’s really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum’s heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.

One of the reason’s for this issue of the Zahir’s ultimate theme of Identity is a seminar I worked at in Sweden on the topic “What is the West?”. As I arrived on the same flight as some of the British contingent I had as my first task, and good fortune, to take four of the Brits with me on the two hour taxi ride to Avesta, where the seminar was held. The four were Professor Roger Scruton, the philosopher, Edward Lucas, The Economists Eastern Europe and Russia editor, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins and John Kelly, publisher of Prospect Magazine. Roger Scruton remarked, and everyone agreed, that a lot of what people in Britain know about Sweden, at least in his generation, was the image provided by Ingmar Bergman. Did I recognise myself in this image? I did not quite know what to respond at first. Did I? I guess I did I said, in a way, yes. The sort of somber individuality, the often quietness, the sparseness, the intimate dinners and the free spirit of people, without the need to talk too much about it. All of that I recognise. But Bergman’s Sweden is still one in which modernity is steadily growing, not knowing where to end up. It is still the clash between traditional values and those of modernity. To watch Bergman’s films is in many ways to watch modern society from the viewpoint of traditionalism. Even though we are said to have choices, to ideally do what we want with our lives, people may feel that their life lack a meaning, a focus. The suggestion has been that it is preciesly because of such choices, of the individual separated from her traditions to ‘choose’ her moral starting point that underlies such feelings. Bergman often looked at the human condition, at faith, interpersonal relations and this percieved lack of meaning from the viewpoint of such traditions that are said to give life such meaning; religion. But his films are also, I dare say, like a living monument to one of the most modern countries in the world. Allow me to adopt a lighter tone for a moment.

After Smiles of a Summer Night (1957), Bergman has said, no one told him what films he could or could not do anymore. Where else could a director get carte blanche to make films like The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1958), Persona (1966), The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960) or Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963)? “Oh, you want to make a film about a knight playing chess with death to postpone his life, and then everyone dies in the end? OK, go ahead!” Or how about one in which one character is silent almost the entire movie to the point where the other character’s identity so blend with the first that the film, the actual reel, breaks down and then recommences with the parts shifted? Sure. Or how about one in which someone’s daughter simply gets raped and killed, the rapists take refuge at her father’s house, who finds out and swiftly kills them all? Or my personal favourite; how about a film set in a northern Swedish church. One of the parishioners asks the minister for advice. He’s worried about a nuclear holocaust. The minister, beset with his own doubts, irritably asks what he can do about it? How does he know that there’s even a God? The parishioner commits suicide, the minister takes out his frustration on his mistress, whom he then forces to accompany him to a sermon in a nearby village, where she is the only partaker. The End. —Absolutely, No Problem! That sounds like a humdinger.. Nevertheless, Bergman got his carte blanche, and the rest is history. But even though Bergman’s themes seems to resonate almost universally, I don’t believe that they could have been made almost anywhere else. It was precisely the contrast between the old and the traditional, and the post-war shedding in Sweden of almost everything traditional that, at least in part, prompted this response. I believe this is a real strength, and almost certainly one of the reasons for his universal acclaim, especially in this day and age when increasingly countries try to find their identity in an ever more globalised world; when traditions, values and modes of life interlace and clash.

Bergman’s achievement is difficult to measure. Like all great art, I believe, it doesn’t really need interpretation. Although it might require understanding. Bergman’s oeuvre, the sheer size of it, was an achievement in itself. He managed 54 feature length films, most of which he both wrote, directed and often edited himself. This of course in addition to all the theatre he directed. He was nominated for nine individual Oscars, but picked up ‘only’ the Thalberg Memorial Award in 1971 for his lifetime achievement. This before Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers or Fanny and Alexander had been made. Cries and Whispers won a grand slam with the New York’s Critics Circle in 1978, the inofficial or ‘alternative’ Oscar if you will. It presented the Oscar jury with a dilemma. Sweden already had a film represented in the category Best Foreign Film; Jan Troell’s The Emigrants. Cries and whispers was therefore nominated as Best Film, an unusual honour, but did not win. Sven Nyqvist’s cinematography is here near perfect. Every frame is a painting, every image an icon. The colours change with the characters and mood of course, but red flows through the film and encloses the viewer in what Bergman thought of as the membrane of the soul. The New York Times writes in its review; “it will reduce anything else you are likely to see this season to a small cinder.” Bergman’s collaborators incidentally would require, and deserve, whole articles themselves. I will therefore in passing merely mention the two great cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. Their style is immediately recognisable, but only when compared of course. Bergman’s early successes came with Fischer, who uses light to produce sharp contrasts; like the later paintings of Caravaggio. Sven Nykvist, who became the true master of light, is instead firmly within the Dutch and Flemish traditions, to continue the analogy; a glowing Rembrandt or a starker Vermeer . Some years after Cries and Whispers, in 1983, the film that would end Bergman’s cinematic career (voluntarily retiring to the theatre), Fanny and Alexander, was released. It spans almost every theme he explored, and Nykvist’s camera captures everything from the warm lush colours of the home of Isak Jacobi to the bleak world of the bishop, in which every trace of loving life seems to be seared from the screen. At the Academy Awards, it was nominated in eight categories, picking up four Oscars, and Bergman’s third for Best Foreign Film. Out of 72 individual nominations for his films in major film festivals or national film awards, he picked up 58. In 1999 he was awarded the “Palm of Palms” at Cannes. All testament to his ability to entertain as much as, or perhaps even more, than to his artistic achievement.

However, for me two achievements stand out especially. One is that remarkable 18 month period between the summer of 1956 and the end of 1957 when he made Smiles of a Summer Night (his first major award; Best Poetic Humour at Cannes), The Seventh Seal (the Jury Prize at Cannes, Golden Palm nominee) and Wild Strawberrys (the Jury Prize at Cannes, Golden Palm nominee) in rapid succession. All masterpieces in their own right. The last tells the story of an old Professor travelling by car from Stockholm to Lund to pick up a jubilee doctorate. His daughter-in-law accompany him and through her contemplation of her failed marriage with his son he looks back at his life; of how it ended up, what he could have changed, what he would have wanted to change. When I read Michael Wood’s piece in the London Review of Books, I immediately recognised myself. “Wild Strawberries, …, a film for which I felt admiration but no affection, absolutely bowled me over this time. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), a distinguished doctor aged 76, travels to Lund to receive an honorary degree and relives his life as he does so. The film mixes dreams and memories and the present moment, and the beauty of the thing is that every instance is morally ambiguous, an accusation of lifelong selfishness which is also half an exoneration, since Isak, from his youth, seems to have been kept out of the lives of others just as much as he has carefully kept others out.” The second (in that stretch in the 50’s), The Seventh Seal, hardly needs an introduction. It has become an icon of modern cinema, or art-house cinema, not least because of the less than subtle subject of death and Max von Sydow’s knight Antonius Block challenging him to a game of chess in the futile hope of postponement. And the first, Smiles of a Summer Night, might well be, alongside Fanny and Alexander, the best film to start with if you are one of those many, many people I’ve met who find Bergman ‘difficult’, ‘gloomy’ or downright ‘boring’. It is not difficult to understand these sentiments, because Bergman’s films are not there to give pleasure. At least not as what we are taught these days to think of something as pleasurable; they are not ‘entertainment’. A pause from life. They are a part of life, they expand on life. They afford new perspectives, and they let us reflect on issues we might not have known we had. Like all great works of art they resonate within us and stirs feelings both difficult and pleasurable. The ancients thought this a great question; how come we derive a special sort of pleasure from tragedy? It’s become known as the Aristotelian Principle. Hume called them ‘higher’ pleasures.

I have one personal, if remote, tie to Bergman. It is my relation to the late director Victor Sjöström, who starred as Isak Borg in Wild Strawberrys (he was my great-great uncle!). Sjöström was something of a mentor to Bergman, and one of his first great film experiences. Said Bergman; “It must have been 1933. I’d already been to the cinema a lot, but The Phantom Carriage [Körkarlen, 1921] was the first really big cinematic experience. Even now I can’t really make out what is was that captured me so utterly. […] The Phantom Carriage is still one of my great film experiences. I see it in my cinema every summer.” But in another interview his influence becomes even more pronounced, he admired “[Victor Sjöström’s] incorruptible demand for truth, his incorruptible observation of reality. His way of never for a moment making things easy for himself, or simplifying or skipping things or cheating or succumbing to mere brilliance.”

One cannot help but thinking that Bergman had prepared his whole life to die. Quite like the Plato of Phaedon teaches us that any true philosopher must; a philosopher’s task is to, in as high a degree as possible, remove his soul from the body. ‘Pleasure’, Eudaimonia, is achieved when body and soul are in balance, and that requires the body to abstain from material pleasures. Bergman’s first real confrontation with death was The Seventh Seal, after which, he has said, he was no longer afraid to die. In Cries and Whispers he looks at it from another angle. The minister presiding over Agnes’ dead body, teared up, asks:

If it be that you gathered our suffering in your poor body and have borne it with you through death. If it be that you meet God there in that other land. If it be that He turns His face towards you. If it be that you will know the language of Our Lord. If it be that you can speak to the Lord, if it be so: then pray for us. Agnes, dear child, listen to what I tell you now. Pray for us who are left on this dark and dirty earth beneath and empty and cruel sky. Lay your burden of suffering at the Lord’s feet and ask Him to pardon us. Ask Him to set us free at last, from our anxiety, our weariness and our profound doubt. Ask Him for a meaning to our lives. Agnes, you have suffered so inconceivably and so long, you must surely be worthy to plead our case.

Here it is despair over injustices—who dies, and how—, despair over having to live here on this ‘dark and dirty earth beneath and empty and cruel sky’, and the hope for reconciliation in death. However, in a recent interview on Swedish television the tone was different. Ever since Ingrid died, he had been curious about death and had often wanted to die. But from his words and his way of uttering them, one got the feeling that he was grateful, more than anything else. Indeed, it could have been the end of Cries and Whispers, where Anna is reading from Agnes’ journal:

Wednesday the third of September. The tang of autumn fills the clear still air but it’s mild and fine. My sisters, Karin and Maria have come to see me. It’s wonderful to be together again like in the old days, and I am feeling much better. We were even able to go for a little walk together. Such an event for me, especially since i haven’t been out of doors for so long. Suddenly we began to laugh and run toward the old swing that we hadn’t seen since we were children. We sat in it like three good little sisters and Anna pushed us, slowly and gently. All my aches and pains were gone. The people I am most fond of in the entire world were with me. I could hear their chatting around me. I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.

Testament to the power, insight and nuance of Bergman’s philosophy.

Bergman on Godard: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin/Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring.”
- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman on Antonioni
“Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.”
- The Magic Lantern ”

He’s done two masterpieces, you don’t have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I’ve seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that’s mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.”
- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman on Fellini
”We were supposed to collaborate once, and along with Kurosawa make one love story each for a movie produced by Dino de Laurentiis. I flew down to Rome with my script and spent a lot of time with Fellini while we waited for Kurosawa, who finally couldn’t leave Japan because of his health, so the project went belly-up. Fellini was about to finish Satyricon. I spent a lot of time in the studio and saw him work. I loved him both as a director and as a person, and I still watch his movies, like La Strada and that childhood rememberance - what’s that called again?
The interviewer has also seen the movie several times, but just now the title slips his mind. Bergman laughs delightedly. Bergman: Great that you’re also a bit senile! That pleases me. (Later the same day, several hours after the interview, the phone rings. It’s Bergman. ‘AMARCORD!’ he shouts.)”

- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman om Kurosawa
”Now I want to make it plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It’s touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. At that time my admiration for the Japanese cinema was at its height. I was almost a samurai myself!”
- Ingmar Bergman in Bergman on Bergman, 1970

Bergman on Sjöström

“It must have been 1933. I’d already been to the cinema a lot, but The Phantom Carriage was the first really big cinematic experience. Even now I can’t really make out what is was that captured me so utterly.”
[…]
“The Phantom Carriage is still one of my great film experiences. I see it in my cinema every summer.”
- 20th Century (Ed. Gunnar Bergdahl, Göteborg Film Festival, 2000)

“Have you seen Ingeborg Holm? It’s one of the most remarkable films ever made - 1913!”
“Above all Ingeborg Holm, as I’ve said, and The Phantom Carriage, but also The Executioner, The Outlaw and His Wife, too, a marvellously well-narrated film.”
[…]
“His incorruptible demand for truth, his incorruptible observation of reality. His way of never for a moment making things easy for himself, or simplifying or skipping things or cheating or succumbing to mere brilliance.”
“[T]ime has left Stiller’s films behind much more than it has Victor’s. Ingeborg Holm is still true and gripping; remarkably modern. If run at its proper speed, which is 16 frames a second, it is photographic and scenically quite perfect.”

- Ingmar Bergman in Bergman on Bergman

Bergman on Tarkovsky
”When film is not a document, it is a dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should be explained anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media.”

”Late one evening in 1971, Bergman and his friend and director Kjell Grede by pure coincidence stumbled upon a copy of Andrei Rublov in a screening room at Svensk Filmindustri. They saw it without any subtitles. He ranks it to be one of his most startling and unforgettable movie experiences ever.”

- Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern

Bergman on Welles
”For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of - is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable. Aghed: How about The Magnificent Ambersons? Bergman: Nah. Also terribly boring. And I’ve never liked Welles as an actor, because he’s not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that’s when he’s croaks. In my eyes he’s an infinitely overrated filmmaker.”

- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Woody Allen: “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Guardian, Peter Bradshaw

“The great, gaunt magus of European arthouse cinema, Ingmar Bergman, who has died at the age of 89, finally declared that even he found his own films too depressing to watch. But his passing doesn’t leave us any more cheerful. On the contrary: there’s a horrible sense that the world has lost the last film-maker willing or capable of explicitly taking on the big themes: the nature of God and the nature of humanity.

Guardian, Obituary

[A]n undisputed colossus of world art cinema. From the 1940s into the 21st century, he directed more than 60 films, wrote even more and created some, like The Seventh Seal (1956-57), Wild Strawberries (1957) and the autobiographically inspired Fanny and Alexander (1982), that were stunningly successful. He astonished people with his willingness to recognise cruelty, death and, above all, the torment of doubt.

Guardian, Leader

Bergman belonged to an era which took the cinema seriously as an art form, and which thought it was the obligation of the cinema to tell difficult stories and to address troubling issues. … Bergman’s career is a reminder that artists are not judged solely by their technique or their ability to shock but by their inner moral honesty and by their inspiration. Bergman understood that the deepest questions about life and death, youth and age, selfishness and kindness, can be answered as well in a single room or on a windswept island as they can in the hubbub of a city. Like Mozart, whom he revered, he knew how to say profound things with great simplicity. Bergman was pessimistic in many ways, but his films have an inner light of humanity that stands as a reprimand to too many of his successors.

NYT, Woody Allen

Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.
And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”

Geoffrey McNab, The Independent
In some quarters, there will be relief at Bergman’s passing. The Swedes, who sometimes gave the impression of being embarrassed by this monumental figure in their midst, will be able to honour him without reservation. The old spats - the battle with the tax authorities that led him to live in exile, the debates about his stifling effect on younger film-makers - will be forgotten. He will take his place in the list of their major cultural figures, at least the equal of his beloved Strindberg.
His achievements are indeed remarkable - more than 50 films, over 120 major theatre productions, the radio plays, the TV dramas and the books. In sheer volume and consistent quality, it is hard to think of anyone who matches him.

Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde, France:

”It’s no secret: the passing of Ingmar Bergman marks the disappearance of an era within film making. His magnificent work get it’s validity through the constant dialog between the European culture and the high thoughts he had about his art. The name Bergman, more than any other, personifies the progress of film from entertainment of the masses to one of the most refined art forms of the 20th century.”

The play commenced. The audience are expected to be more interactive than usual, not after the example of a cringing pantomime, but inasmuch as we were standing for the entire first half, following the action around the Barn, being pushed, prodded, shuffled and rearranged according to whim of the white-faced, white-gloved cast. By manipulating the audience in this way – effectively employing us as prop-walls – the cast were able to create the impression of a completely new location with every scene-change. This arrangement complemented the dramatic style of The Trial, the nature of which is to disorient. In the second half we were seated, but I in particular underwent no lesser degree of molestation from often-unoccupied members of the cast (all but one of whom served as plain-clothed factota in multiple roles), being treated at one point to a shoulder massage, and spending much of the time peering over the shoulder of a pretty, bestockinged actress who repeatedly mistook my knee for a chair.

James Duckworth gave an exquisite performance as Josef Kay, the starchy nine-to-five banker, replete with all the accessories of that type: he wore a well-tailored but uninspiring three-piece suit, as well as a sober manner and fixed countenance. He also exhibited a somewhat repressed sexuality, manifested in the infrequent references to Elsa, his girlfriend-occasional, and in sudden and uncharacteristic bursts of philandering which were preceded, on every occasion, by an apparent lack of interest in the woman in question and followed by expressions of mild embarrassment.

Kay’s predicament was unsettling, both for him and for the audience. Unspecified charges are levelled at him by people who are conspicuously not police, in circumstances that are utterly mysterious. The drama draws its energy from that very modernist dislocation. The protagonist is just like us: he does not know what he is accused of, and neither do we; but we, like Kay, get the distinct impression that everyone else on stage knows what we do not. All the mime-faced humourists and all the characters they represent are comfortable with the internal logic of the play; only Kay is left in ignorance.
The most obvious interpretation involves religion. Born into sin, a person is guilty from the outset and, since one is prone to lapse even after being acquitted, may certainly be tried twice for the same crime. This pivotal theme is introduced subtly, and comparisons, if wished for, could be drawn between Kay and mankind, between Kay’s menacing lawyer and a priest (both jealously entrap their clients by persuading them that they have a problem that needs professional help) and, most clearly, between a legal trial and a divine judgment.

A religious reading can be inferred cleanly from the legal motifs, but the allusions became more blunt towards the end of the second half, the language more biblical. As always, clumsy symbolism gives little satisfaction. The magnificence of this production rested on seamless, sometimes hilarious and relentlessly inventive performances by the entire cast without exception, and on the mood of psychological disturbance created by the technical control of lighting (sometimes eerie, sometimes stark, always changing) and sound (circular piano music and apocalyptic voiceovers). Roland Barthes, in his account of the trial of Dominici, a farmer sentenced by the French courts for allegedly murdering trespassers, best explains the dramatic tension of The Trial: ‘Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there was also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants only to hear the language it lends us.’

In 1993 my family left Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, in order to begin a new life in a then obscure desert state called Dubai. With its smattering of expensive hotels and exclusive golf and sailing clubs, Dubai had ideas of grandeur which seemed laughable, stretching as they did beyond the miles of empty desert which used to surround my primary school. My father had taken a job as a Risk Consultant for a company contracted to Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC). Back then, oil was Dubai’s primary source of national income. There were many Western companies only too happy to cash in on the relative inexperience of the Royal Family in business matters, as the United Arab Emirates only became a unified nation, rather than a colonial outpost, in 1971.

At the age of five, I was sent to one of the two British primary schools that existed at the time. Requirements included a full British or Commonwealth passport, so my classmates of around 15 children consisted of row upon row of white, blonde, blue-eyed, middle-class offspring of the upper tiers of international consultancy and accounting firms. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone lived in one of three neighbourhoods: Jumeirah, Umm Suqeim or Jebel Ali. We learnt the British curriculum. We celebrated Christmas with a decorated tree and a turkey. On the weekends we went to the Emirates golf club, the one all the other Brits went to, and had tennis lessons while our parents played on the intensively irrigated and perfectly green fairways.

There were a couple of notable exceptions to the Commonwealth rule in my primary school. There were two princesses from the Maktoum family, Dubai’s Royal Family, in my year: Fatima and Mariam. Fatima once told me she had a zoo in her house. I told her she was a liar and that it was “not very nice” to lie. The truth is, the poor girl did have a zoo in her house. When I visited Dubai a couple of years ago, we drove past twin skyscrapers with an ‘M’ on top of both the beautiful steel and glass structures. My companion pointed them out to me, “Mariam Towers. Remember her? They were a present for her 16th birthday.”
There was always an inevitable feel of a completely alien culture to Dubai, which the expats indulged and despaired of in equal measure. No bacon sandwiches in your hotel for breakfast, for example; the call to prayer from loudspeakers across the city five times a day, every day; no consumption of food or drink in public whatsoever for the entire month of Ramadan. Christmas came every year, but however many baubles you put up, you could escape the fact that it was 25C outside (those chilly winter months) and that snow is about as likely as a decent cup of tea.

However, the standard of living is so high that most people are understandably eager to set aside minor annoyances and get on with living like royalty. In Dubai, you will pay no taxes. It rained three times in the eight years I lived there. The beaches are stunning, and driving over cliff-like sand dunes in a 4×4 is simultaneously the most terrifying and exhilarating memory of my experience in the desert. For my parents, it was about parties, parties, parties. If you’ve got a housemaid at home, why not go out four or five nights a week? Galas, horse races, rugby matches, hotel openings; Dubai’s social scene has grown out of the need for networking. It is capitalism in its most naked form.

That same naked capitalism is also very apparent in Dubai in the form of the rigidly controlled class system, the dark underbelly of the seemingly miraculous way in which skyscrapers shoot up in two months. If you get up at around 6 a.m. in Dubai, when the sun swells over the horizon from Sharjah and cars begin to pile up on the Al Wasl road, you will see hundreds of trucks, half covered by tarpaulin, with 20 pairs of eyes staring at you from two benches in the back section of the vehicle, wrapped in ragged scarves and tattered makeshift uniforms. These are the workers who have built Dubai from scratch, whose pitiful wages have caused controversy in a country where five star hotels are the norm, where everyone is so pathetically ostentatious about their money. My mother would frequently hear knocks at the door and open it to find a thin, desperate-looking man saying “water, water” over and over. We would always oblige. Being thirsty in the midday heat while toiling away on a yet another luxury apartment complex, forbidden to take regular breaks, was the reality of life for these men. The Indian subcontinent provides most of the labour for Dubai’s construction projects, and similar patterns of nationality apply to every sector of work. The people who work in retail are Filipino, the Europeans are in charge of the finance/consultancy sector and the Americans deal with most of the natural resources, buying up oil and getting involved in commercial shipping.

I was lucky to attend a secondary school, Dubai College (DC), which was run on a more international basis than my primary school. In my year there were French, Dutch, Iranian, Lebanese, Serbian, Pakistani, South African, Japanese and Malaysian pupils. This cosmopolitan mix was in great contrast to my school in Britain, where the five or so girls from ethnic minorities were pulled out of classes every year to go on the front of the admissions brochure. Racism was simply unheard of. It is difficult to be racist if there are equal amounts of people from all around the world in your class, and I have never been in such a culturally rich and tolerant environment since.

We were taught compulsory Arabic from the age of nine, and by the time I was thirteen I could have sung the call to prayer to you, which we recited in front of the class. In this country, that would be massively controversial, but you always felt like a guest rather than a citizen in Dubai. That could have been something to do with the extremely strict visa system, the fact that until 2002 you couldn’t buy property unless you were an Arab national, and the lack of any civil liberties whatsoever. The latter point sounds very sinister, but because Dubai is not ruled by a tyrant, the results, at least for us, were amusing more than anything. The English language newspaper in Dubai, the relentlessly cheery Gulf News, only ever had one story on the front page: whoever Sheikh Mohammed had had a lunch and a ‘state meeting’ with the day previously. There would be a picture of his Highness and his guest shaking hands, and the ‘story’ underneath would be mostly taken up by their full names and title, for example the last ruler was always cited as Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai. We all just called him Sheikh Mo. Furthermore, because Dubai is a liberal Muslim country, magazines like FHM were still for sale, but all the topless photos were scribbled out, by hand, in permanent marker before they hit the shelves. Equally, films containing sex or sexual references were cut, so no car scene in Titanic, which was rated a G (general, British equivalent of U) in Dubai. This half-hearted acceptance of Western values brought the British people I knew closer together, forever reminding you of how different a certain situation would be at home.

The enduring memory of my time in Dubai, especially of fellow Britons, is generally how happy everyone was. The look of the faces of most people was one of slightly delirious disbelief at their massive good luck. When people talked of home, it was usually negative. Most spent their summers in Britain, and that was when you realised you were spoilt. I remember my sister making an offhand comment: “Look how small the houses are,” as we touched down in Manchester one July, and my mother going ballistic, ranting about how we had been ruined by people pandering to us all the time, and how snobby we all were. I think she was paranoid, and I feel incredibly lucky to have lived with such a massive array of people at so young an age.

It is a fairly random mix of genes, so I guess we descendants of potato-munchers and coca-chewers don’t have a particularly large presence in the world of journalism, or the world at that*. Still, I was asked to write a piece about how being mixed race, more specifically half-Bolivian, affects my sense of identity, so it is with great honour that I undertake this task on behalf of all my oddly-parented race.

When people ask me what it’s like having parents from two different cultures, the first thing that springs to mind (and something I am really grateful for), is that it has given me a whole different outlook on life, in comparison to that of my English or Bolivian friends. I have been effectively brought up with an extra set of cultural outlooks and values, not to mention an extra language (which, I believe, means you interpret the world differently). Now, a Spanish-speaking Bolivian probably has a different world-view than an English-speaking Brit, but growing up with two different life views allows you to see through the benefits and flaws of each one, and I think this makes me more open-minded and more naturally inclined to relativism. After all, both your parents’ cultures can’t be right when they disagree on issues, so such contrasts force you to look more critically at both those world-views, and at yourself.

So I never had a strong sense as a child that the English way of life that I grew up with was the ‘natural’ way, meaning that although I felt close to my parents’ countries and to England, I also didn’t feel like I was tied down to, or defined by, any one nation. In fact, the idea of nations seemed a bit ridiculous. This has given me a rather odd point of view; obviously I lived in English society, so I felt involved in it, yet I also felt detached from it, because I saw myself as belonging to more than just England. In other words, I had an outsider’s perspective on England, but also felt like, and indeed was, an insider.

Still, the ‘outsider’s perspective’ usually came from a more Bolivian-flavoured angle, simply because, even though Northern Ireland has its own unique culture, it is ultimately a part of British culture; the very thing I had been taking a detached look at. So, although I was immersed in, and a part of, English culture, my irritations with it stemmed mostly from a Bolivian perspective, as well as a sense that I wasn’t really completely part of English culture. I would sometimes moan to my English friends about my gripes with “English people,” whilst not including myself amongst these English people I criticised. (In retrospect, not a good way to win friends and influence people.)

I say I compared English culture to Bolivian culture; but of course what I didn’t realise then is that that wasn’t actually the case, as I had never lived in Bolivia. Despite my Mum bringing me up to have a strong affinity with her Bolivian culture, I was contrasting the England I knew with the Bolivia I thought I knew. I feel such a strong link to family, culture and language in Bolivia that to me it has always seemed like home. Yet, because I never actually had to deal with the day-to-day problems and gripes of living there (such as you get anywhere), I had – and still sometimes have - an idealised view of it. In a way, I suppose this idealised Bolivia became a representation of how I would like a culture (and I guess therefore English culture) to be. It’s as if I had nostalgia for a home I’d never lived in or left behind; no matter what life was like in England, it was comforting for me to imagine that everything would be peachy in Bolivia, if I was there. So in that sense, Bolivia actually felt more like home than England, simply because there was that element of semi-utopian hope about it. And even though I’m more than aware now that that’s nonsense, I still like to let my rational side switch off occasionally, and to indulge in wistful thinking about Bolivia.

Of course, the Bolivian part of me is only half my heritage. I also feel like Northern Ireland is a home-from-home, yet the sense of being ‘part’ of Ulster, and the rose-tinted view of it, is a lot weaker than my feelings about Bolivia, mainly due to the degree of difference between the respective cultures. Not only is Bolivia culturally and geographically removed enough that I could create an idealised image of it, but on a slightly childish level, I like the feeling of being different from your average English person. It is like having an instant personality quirk, without having to bother with the effort of actually cultivating a quirky personality. Ultimately, being a mix of disparate countries is something that I enjoy, rather than being something that makes me question who, or what, I am.

I am glad I am half-Bolivian, but I don’t let it define me. For my mum, an ex-pat with no real links to her home in England, being Bolivian is vital to her sense of well-being. For me however, it is different. For example, when I discovered that one of my ancestors was a previous President of Bolivia, I was very proud. But, on discovering that we were politically radically opposed, it didn’t shake my sense of self or of Bolvia - I simply dropped that part of my Bolivianess with the same ease I had picked it up earlier.

So, my backgrounds are something that I enjoy, and that I can use to give myself a sense of closeness to certain things when it suits me, but they are not something that I let define me. I just like the sense of having a different outlook and also of being a bit different. When I found out I was part Jewish recently, for instance, I felt like a kid at Christmas/Hanukkah, not because I was re-evaluating what that meant for me in terms of my identity, but simply because I found it, well, cool. If I could I’d collect ethnicities like there was no tomorrow.

In fact, bizarrely enough, it is other people who seem to want my cultural background to shape my sense of self. My mum wishes I would dedicate myself to Bolivia and is adamant I’m practically a Boliviano, which in turn leads my dad to stubbornly maintain I am, and always will be, ‘white’. (My sister agrees with him, but reckons I “just need a good scrubbin’ ” to be properly white.) Though they’d never admit it, it is as if not having their son define himself as their own ethnicity worries them on some level. But that’s a topic for a whole other article…and so the spread of Ulstro-Bolivian journalism begins…

* Even our civil rights group, The Mildly Tan Panthers, doesn’t have any members except me.

“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.
“Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

When Equal Opportunities or Census forms ask a question about ‘Gender’ but offer answers about ‘Sex’, they are guilty of converging the two terms and jeopardising one’s freedom to express their identity. It suggests that those belonging to the ‘Sex’ category of ‘Male’ must necessarily act in accordance with the social expectations associated with the ‘Gender’ category of ‘Masculine’. Of course, the same problem applies to the usual equation of ‘Female’ and ‘Feminine.’ These questionnaires enforce the pervasiveness of gender characteristics, allowing sexual inequality to remain embedded in our society. With this in mind, can anyone really blame YUSU for the recent fiasco concerning the pink and blue bags offered at Freshers’ Fair?
Moving on to a second way of identifying oneself on Consensus forms: the categories of ‘Ethnic Groups’. On a recent application form I filled out, the categories were adapted from the 2001 Census, and I was asked to select ONE category only. Each category also had respective sub-categories. Allow me to go through them for you.

WHITE *British *Irish *Other
MIXED * White and Black Caribbean *White and Black African
*White and Asian *Any other Mixed background
ASIAN OR ASIAN BRITISH *Indian *Pakistani *Bangladeshi *Any other Asian background
BLACK OR BLACK BRITISH *Caribbean *African
*Any other Black background
CHINESE OR OTHER ETHNIC GROUP *Chinese
*Any other ethnic group
*No Answer

It is probably most useful to firstly define the term ‘ethnic group’. An Encyclopaedia Britannica article describes it as:
‘a social group or category of the population that, in a larger society, is set apart and bound together by common ties of race, language, nationality, or culture’.
The categories offered seek to place people in boxes where their position in society can be easily understood. This must surely be their only use. Are these categories still useful today? Have they ever been truly useful in describing a person’s identity? Well, to answer the second question first, yes they have. When looking back to the bygone ‘glorious’ days of the British Empire, ethnic categorization was a necessary instrument in securing the superiority of white Brits over the colonized people in Africa and India. Indeed, ethnicity and race are two terms that are often used interchangeably, and for that reason, I shall provide a definition of ‘Race’ from the website of the Understanding Race Organization:

The term is used to refer to groupings of people according to common origin or background and associated with perceived biological markers. Among humans there are no races except the human race. […] Ideas about race are culturally and socially transmitted and form the basis of racism, racial classification and often complex racial identities.

By adding cultural dimensions to ethnicity, the British Empire was able to perpetuate the myth that Britain was everything that these ethnic groups were not. In contemporary literature about colonized people, Indians and Africans were often portrayed as stupid, slothful, savage, and unhygienic. By contrast, Britons were intelligent, diligent, and civilized. An ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy was created; Englishness was played off against ‘Other-ness’. The establishment of this myth formed the backbone of the logic of imperialism; one, that white Brits had the right to rule over other inferior races, (an idea informed by the logic of Social Darwinism); and two, that white Brits had a duty to care for these inferior races supposedly in possession of minds no more developed than that of a white British child. Ignoring the illegitimate nature of these generalizations, and the fact that they also glossed over internal divisions such as class, I suppose we could say that the category of ‘Ethnic Groups’ has been useful in the past, though whether its usage was praiseworthy or not is a matter for another article.

To answer the first question, it really must depend on how people identify themselves. Do people describe themselves by their ethnic group? Possibly. It is quite feasible that some people feel comfortable in an easily understood category, and, at the same time, feel a sense of belonging with other members who identify themselves in the same way. The idea of nationality is also bound up with this. However, if you concur with the views of Benedict Anderson as set out in Imagined Communities, you will regard the nation as a culturally and socially constructed entity, rather than a fixed body.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
Yet again, we see that the categories of ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Nationality’, and ‘Race’ are all far too simplistic, despite the fact that we take them for granted as being legitimate sources of identity. What happens when these ideas are complicated? What happens when one person belongs to more than one ethnic group? Looking back to the example of the British Empire, children with white fathers and colonized mothers were often discarded by society. By straddling both sides of the colonial divide, children of mixed heritage presented a difficulty to the dichotomy of the superior colonizer and inferior colonized. By blurring this boundary, such children demonstrated that representations of ethnic groups were simplistic and socially constructed, not natural and given.

How then, do people of mixed heritage describe themselves? I have no authority to suggest anything other than my own personal experiences, and this is what I humbly offer to you. My mother would ethnically be classified as Chinese. However, she was born and raised in Malaysia. My father would ethnically be classified as Indian, although he was brought up in Kenya, and eventually became a British citizen. I was born and raised in England. In my life, the categories of ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Race’ and ‘Nationality’ all seem to contradict each other when I try to identify myself using these terms. My passport states my nationality as British. I suppose I am ethnically Indian-Chinese, Indianese or, my personal favourite, Chindian. I often must neglect my traces to Malaysia and Kenya. On consensus forms, the categories offered do not allow me to be placed in a box, as I am such an extreme case. No, wait, I’m wrong. There is the category of Mixed Other, which groups all the anomalies together. Simply put, that is how this category makes me feel. An anomaly, a social error, an ‘Other’ with all the connotations that existed during the age of Empire. It is for this reason that I do not identify myself using these terms. I do not really identify myself as anything; the categories that are used in society do not allow me to, and this is my point.

The terms and categories used in social discourse are often simplistic, and their legitimacy is taken for granted. Because of this, I must resign myself to ticking the boxes of ‘Mixed Other’, or ‘No Answer’. Either way, neither describes who I am.

This article is about Hamlet and The Lion King. The coordinating conjunction ‘and’ sits rather uncomfortably between these two titles—the former is one of Shakespeare’s greatest, if not the greatest, plays, while the latter is the well-known Disney classic that most of us grew up watching. Perhaps I should even render my ‘and’ obsolete, for I am going to argue that The Lion King is Hamlet.

Their plots are essentially the same. An evil uncle kills his brother in order to usurp the throne, while the central protagonist wanders around not quite knowing how to react to this. The only minor difference is that one is a tragedy and the other is not. (I’m sure you can work out which is which.) We can also draw obvious parallels between the main characters: quite simply, Simba is Hamlet; Scar is Claudius; Sarabi is Gertrude; Mufasa is the ghost of Hamlet’s father; and Timon and Pumbaa are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The point of greatest likeness between the film and the play is the apparition of the dead father—Mufasa and the Ghost respectively. This visitation serves the same function in both, that is, to prompt the lazy sons into action. In The Lion King, the apparition is preceded with the following conversation between Rafiki and Simba—

Simba: You knew my father?
Rafiki: Correction, I know your father.

Here, the wise monkey corrects not only Simba but also the Bard himself, for in Hamlet, the scholar Horatio introduces himself to Hamlet with the assurance that ‘I knew your father’ (I.ii.210). This line gives both of them sufficient authority to announce that they have seen the ghost, and substantiates their identification of the ghost as the protagonist’s father. But Horatio is less confident than Rafiki. A few lines earlier Horatio claimed uncertainly: ‘I think I saw him yesternight’ (I.ii.187). He recognises a similitude between the ghost and the dead King, but he is unwilling to assert that the old Hamlet still exists.

Another instance of the animation directly referencing the play is found in Disney’s use of the collocation: ‘Long live the king’. This statement, found in the third line of Hamlet, where it acts as a kind of code or password for Barnardo to join the watch. In a play in which the king does not live out his full life, this statement is somewhat ironic. Disney, moreover, heightens the irony of this line by having the usurping and murderous Scar say these words as he throws Mufasa down to his death.

The ghosts of the respective fathers return at night in order to compel their sons into action, and both leave at dawn. Notably, neither specifically incites their sons to murder but rather leave the precise course of action up to their sons. However, they do use the same words to achieve this. The dead Hamlet commands Hamlet with the words ‘Remember me’ (I.v.91), while this verb is the final reverberating word Mufasa utters to Simba: ‘Remember’. Mufasa voices his thoughts more clearly as he tells the scarred Simba: ‘Remember who you are. You are my son and the one true king.’ The repeated imperative of ‘remember’ causes Simba and Hamlet to commemorate their fathers, as well as to recollect their duty as heir. By this time, Simba has gotten his procrastinating days out of the way so he is able to plan and take decisive and successful action. Hamlet, on the other hand, procrastinates before he decides and acts on his father’s instructions.

Simba’s procrastination in The Lion King reaps more results than the feeble attempts Hamlet makes. The meerkat-warthog duo Timon and Pumbaa provides the light relief and distraction that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fail to provide for Hamlet. Drafted in by the King and Queen, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are supposed to keep an eye on Hamlet to prevent him from going mad. When this fails, Hamlet is sent away to England in their custody. In The Lion King, Timon and Pumbaa first encounter Simba alone, desolate and forlorn. But they teach him their motto ‘Hakuna matata’ and accompany Simba on holiday.

Further evidence for the association between the comic pairings of Timon and Pumbaa and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be found if we briefly consider Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. This is a play set in the wings of a performance of Hamlet, thus achieving the layered effect of a play within a play. Not to be outdone by either Shakespeare or Stoppard, Disney released The Lion King 1½ in 2004. This version retells the original story of The Lion King from the perspective of Timon and Pumbaa, and so we get the same effect of a film taking place just off-screen to the main film. What The Lion King is to Hamlet, The Lion King 1 ½ is to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

You should by now have been persuaded by irrefutable evidence that Hamlet and The Lion King are a little more than kin. Now the burning question is was this intentional on Disney’s part? On wikipediaing The Lion King we find that the filmmakers themselves admit that Hamlet was a source of inspiration. To quote wikipedia: ‘Christopher Vogler, in his book The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers, described Disney’s request that he suggest how to improve the plot of The Lion King by incorporating ideas from Hamlet.’ More than simply throwing Hamlet into the lion’s den by incorporating ideas, The Lion King references Hamlet.

One cannot really say that The Lion King is based on Hamlet. It just is Hamlet. It is a retelling of Hamlet in a different medium, a translation of the play from the stage to the screen. It is a kind of young person’s guide to Hamlet, albeit one in which the central protagonist is able to live happily ever after at the end. Ultimately in both, order is reasserted and the Circle of Life resumes.

It is understandable then that some people have kicked up a great fuss about the seemingly increasing blurriness between English and British identities. A quick search on Google will effortlessly reveal that, not unjustifiably, many people are fervently blogging away to offer strongly worded opinions on this subject. There is a coherent argument that English identity has been lost and forgotten, and is being eroded as we speak. Debate on this is current and furious. A website named ‘Britology Watch’ angrily bemoans the government’s talk of Britishness. “Why can’t Gordon Brown say ‘England’?” it demands. Labour has “no policies for England” it exclaims. This, admittedly, is a fairly extreme example of opinion on this subject, but it represents the fears of a wider basis of people. The 1st November 2007 episode of Question Time on the BBC saw an audience member ask whether there should be English-only voting in parliament for English-only matters. Others believe a separate parliament for England, along the lines of the Scottish Parliament, is the only acceptable solution to prevent non-English MPs from eroding English identity by voting on matters which the English MPs cannot vote on for the other UK member-countries. This can be exemplified by the divisive issue of tuition fees. For instance, Scottish nationals need not pay tuition fees. English nationals are obliged to pay the whopping amount which many of us will spend years paying back. Some Scottish MPs at the time used their power to vote in Westminster in favour of the fees whilst equally voting against them in Scotland, understandably causing some bitterness. This issue though, is a political one. The ‘Englishness’, which is supposedly being eroded by such government, is fairly unrelated.

Nothing is certain, it is said, but death and taxes. However, a fear of identity erosion harks back (at the very least) to the barbarian migrations, which occurred well over a millennium ago. Identity change, and trepidation of it, is a near-certainty in society. The dread that ‘Englishness’ is being corrupted and corroded has existed for quite some time. In 1701, Daniel Defoe wrote A True Born Englishman, in which he eloquently and satirically demonstrated that many feared this process was occurring. That was three hundred and six years ago. Incidentally, he supported the Act of Union, which united England and Scotland in 1707. Despite this, ‘Englishness’ clearly plays a strong role in the identities of many people in the 21st century, and still exists as a concept. It has a large and highly vocal group of defendants which suggests that the existence of its identity is safe, even if the issue of self-government of the United Kingdom’s member countries is complicated.

Linda Colley, a prominent historian and writer on the subject of imperialism and British identity, makes a splendidly insightful contribution to this debate. “Any coherent definition of Englishness was swept into a wider sense of Britishness with the union with Scotland… Englishness is a new concept: a word that has only recently been invented. For any people to pin down their identity as though it is a captive butterfly is simply wrong: people are able to have more than one identity and the fact we’re returning to try to limit ourselves to one identity is a sign of growing insecurity and uncertainty”. This uncertainty, she believes, is caused by the political issues arising from EU influence and devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In this light, here is my opinion. Sometimes I carry the identity of a proud Suffolk man, pleased to bear the colours of his hometown of Ipswich. Sometimes I carry that of an Englishman, keen to assert the differences we have historically had with those who share our island, and equally keen to assert an English right to govern itself as a country, independently of Scotland and Wales. Sometimes I’m British, and enjoy the shared cultural history that England enjoys with its neighbours. On a greater scale, I’m European, and proud of the incredible diversity which is crammed into such a small part of the Earth, and greater still, I’m human, which should always be, but often is not, a uniting factor.

Identity is fluid, changing, flexible, and related inextricably to the context in which it is deployed. Back to Question Time on 1st November 2007, on which David Lammy stated that “we all accept that there are multiple identities that people can and must have”. Clearly, we don’t “all” accept, but maybe it is a good idea to acknowledge the logic in his and Colley’s arguments. To confuse the intricate political situation in the United Kingdom with a grave fear of declining ‘English’ identity is, to me, a very simplistic way of viewing things.

I say subject: what I really mean is harder to define than even that slippery word. I guess the issue at stake here is not specifically the revival of a small branch of the philosophical discipline so much as the more general need for us all, philosopher, literary critic, musicologist, all those in the theory industry, to ‘face-up’ to matters of being and non-being, death and eternity, heaven or its non-existence and other such ‘big’ questions. Because on these topics, in reality, there is a tendency to run with the narrative of post-modernity a little too far. Thus, it is routine to think that we have come through the universals of enlightenment, the metas of modernity, and arrived at the micros of post-modernity; and here we stay. This is logical, historical, reasonable, and utterly, utterly wrong. The consequences of this reasoning are deadly. If it means that no-one talks of evil, life, morality and love anymore (and something about these words seems repulsive to the modern, sensitive historian with a carefully thought-out research portfolio centring on the 1832 reform act), then we run the danger of denying the exploration of meaning, an exploration many see as a basic yearning, simply because we fear an institutional inability to find answers for all but the most miniscule of questions.

Please don’t read this as a thinly-veiled attempt to argue the case for religion. I am, in fact, not averse to doing so, but not here. I will not even mention Richard Dawkins. I will, however, more than mention his recent interlocutor (LRB Oct 2006), Terry Eagleton, author of the acclaimed 70s bestseller Literary Theory, not for his views on our national atheist’s work but rather for his timely (from my point of view) turn towards the metaphysical in works such as After Theory (2003) and The Meaning of Life (2007). Eagleton, like me, senses a vacuity present in much theoretical writing:

Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.

On top of this, Eagleton similarly berates ‘the western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day’. Put together, these two quotes take their place in an impassioned series of polemics arguing that, not only do some critics fail to face up to such higher realities as fear, deities and joy etc, but also that they fail to look outside their highly privileged western existence. Exactly who is being criticised here? It would seem to be most readily applicable to myopic, post-Derridean litcrit writers who use reading the text ‘against the grain’ as an excuse to exercise their unfulfilled libidos on Marlowe. Such problems as poverty and deprivation, exploitive capitalism and oppressive Marxism, water shortages and civil wars, are left out of a cultural theory that feels that, given its roots, can never escape the western canon, and must, therefore, continue searching for elements of pre-Heideggerrean Dasein in Hegel. Post-colonial studies, feminism and Foucault are all massive exceptions to this idea that post-modernity ignores the more ‘worldly’ aspects of society. Indeed, political discourse can hardly be said to ignore inequality and the two-thirds world, but the point still stands: ‘literary theory’ takes for granted air-conditioned faculties and a full stomach on which to ‘de-centre’ Proust, whilst virtually all other ‘theory’, at least acknowledging the non-west, joins it in refusing to acknowledge that there is anything outside this existence and its human population on which to dwell. Talk of meaning or meaninglessness is even less palatable than talk of Darfur. And thus it seems unfashionable and strangely irrelevant to let a conversation on culture stray into the metaphysical realm, to be influenced by belief, to ask what being is, whether purity of heart is attainable, what part morality plays in sex, why we feel happy when we love and are loved, what happens when we die, and how it comes to be that this event happens for a Zambian on average fourty-four years before it does for somebody from Japan. Goodness, how ‘unscholarly’ it would be if we let a seminar on the sociology of religious belief stray into a discussion of whether there actually is a God; a supervision on narrative in Molière disintegrate into talk of the possibility of predestination, a key speech on medieval plagues [not plaques?] descend into the revelation that the speaker’s son has leukaemia and that he is scared to death about what tomorrow may bring. These topics may be necessarily infused with subjectivity, but they are hardly best served by being avoided.

What is needed to counter this? I am sure it will be unpopular, but we may need to consider the possibility that metaphysics – the science of truth married to the art of meaning – can play a real part of academic and intellectual life. This is where Eagleton’s approach to scholarship and intellectual discourse is applicable and, perhaps, indispensable. Always seeking to coax his fellow academics down from the ivory tower, Eagleton argues for wanton depravities and ideologically unsound metaphysical principles such as value, objectivity, virtue and fidelity. He acknowledges, like many post-modernists, the futility of ‘detached study’ in the humanities, but instead of retreating from life, he seeks to bring it right into the centre of modern thought. Eagleton also seems, outrageously, to believe in absolute truth, of the theologian’s kind rather than the physicist’s. This curious synthesis is clear when he simultaneously states

‘nothing of world-shaking significance is at stake here. There is nothing loudly authoritarian in progress…those who believe in absolute truth may well be the kind of people who are pathologically cautious about accepting anything as true unless it seems plainly undeniable. They may stumble through life in a haze of scepticism and a miasma of doubt. It is just that when they do, perhaps once every decade or so, come grudgingly to accept a proposition as true, they recognise that its opposite cannot also be true, and that its being true for them means its being true of everyone else as well’

and

‘to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope shouldn’t get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.’

The result of metaphysical discussion in the humanities would not necessarily lead to Evangelical takeovers of our campuses, nor Sharia law in place of University statute, or even mandatory Kabbalist approaches to text. Rather, to use Eagleton’s word, it would lead to a rather delightful sense of roughness in the arts, the idea that, though life is fragile and temporary, and even though many may live precariously close to non-life (so that we may live a little further from it), there may be something outside ourselves, something transcendent. Some actions are better than others; life may not be the end; evil should be avoided; all of these beliefs are suddenly legitimatised. Though nothing can be fully understood and no one can be complete, faith, in its variety of forms, can be contemplated.

Unfortunately for the anti-dogmatist, this will involve engaging with the one discipline that entertains the possibilities of ‘answers’ rather than ‘questions’. For some this may be beyond the pale; for others it may bring an overdue sense of relief. Chesterton remarked as far back as 1908 that ‘we have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on he wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers’. One hundred years of doubt later, could the tiring business of sneering at those who believe in angels perhaps be replaced with the angelic itself?

Music played in public for the public allows for a range of social activities. In the club scene, regardless of the fact that different clubs cater to different tastes, the social functions remain the same no matter the musical genre. People come together to enjoy themselves and express themselves by listening to music (the shy ones), by dancing to music (the not-so-shy ones), by courting potential partners (the cheeky ones), or by doing all three at once. Nevertheless, without music being played in clubs, how many ways are there for us to express ourselves so intimately and uninhibitedly in public ? Unfortunately, not many.

Moving on to consider the next part of our music tour: concerts. Concerts often have an audience already familiar with the band’s music. Similarly, many music festivals are orientated to a particular group of music lovers, and the best festivals have tents that cater to almost all popular musical genres. Nevertheless, what gigs and festivals have in common is the way they unite people. They provide opportunities for people with similar tastes in music to come together, interact, engage and socialise with one another . The audience shares a collective sense of appreciation shown first by their attendance, then augmented by their participation in singing along and/or dancing to the music.

Of course, the successful staging of live music is as important as the music itself. In some cases, music is not the most interesting part of the show. Through the musicians’ showmanship, pyrotechnics, lightshows and more, music can be relegated to second place although never consigned to the background. These extra special techniques not only entertain the audience, but also create an atmosphere in which the audience’s attention is fully focused on the performers. Nevertheless, live performances that seek to break down the barriers between audience and performer are always the most interesting. The fact that the performer and the audience are in close physical proximity already blurs the usual divide between them. This divide is further broken down by the intimacy of the gig. There have been times, however, when this divide has been notably demolished. Nowhere has this been more explicitly demonstrated than in the punk subculture and other musical genres informed by it.

In the late 1970s, punk music burst out in London. With the Sex Pistols and The Clash forming the vanguard for this music-based movement, punk demonstrated the different ways that music can alter social interactions. Whether by the violence that erupted from moshpits within the audience, sometimes overflowing onto the stage, or through the torrential rain of phlegm which was fired both at and from the stage, the sacred divide between performer and audience was smashed apart. Furthermore, punk also showed that the audience could become the performer; both Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious were originally members of the audience until their participation in the punk subculture encouraged them to become members of bands themselves— Siouxsie Sioux with her Banshees, and Sid Vicious with the greatest punk band of them all, the Pistols.

Music has often been a form of response to the state of society at the time. The violence and nonconformity of punk was a result of the hopelessness that the participants felt at a time when the economy was in a sharp state of decline and the future seemed to hold nothing for the young. Music was thus short, abrasive and brutal, symbolizing the way youths saw their lives. Likewise, punk concerts were often scenes of sickness, vulgarity and sex, everything about life that the establishment did not want talked about. Nevertheless, punk was not the first or last subculture to be informed by and based around a musical genre.

From the Teddy Boys, to the Mods and the Rockers, to the Hippies and the Skinheads, there have been many cases where musical predilections have combined with fashion to create entirely new ways of living. Cultural codes are formed and adhered to, demonstrating that music has a part to play even in social formations. Clothes, for example, provide a valuable source of cultural identification. In musical genres both pre- and post-punk, certain fashions have been specifically identified with certain musical genres. Whether it is the cultural capital of safety pins and leather of the punk movement symbolising the bondage and constraints placed on youths by society, or the Italian tailor-made suits worn by working-class Mods to symbolize their social aspirations, music forms the basis for decoding these cultural codes. By enabling a collective identity to exist, music allows members feeling out-of-place in society to find a niche and solace in the fact that there are other people who share their tastes and experiences.

Though my examples have gone as far back as the 1950s, the fact remains that the way people dress is often reflective of their musical tastes. It is a generalisation, and as they say, generalisations are often false (including this one). Before you get lost in a spiral of philosophical self-doubt, let me make the point that there are still people who are called, and call themselves Emos, indie kids who listen to a certain genre of music and dress accordingly. Hip-hop music has cultivated a fashion culture so pervasive it is almost impossible to locate a single defining feature.

Nevertheless, the point remains that music is always more than just music.
It is multi-dimensional, taking on different forms depending on when it is played and for whom. It is integral to youth culture, helping young people cultivate a sense of identity and find solace in the knowledge that there are other like-minded individuals out there. Music is clearly more than simply the soundtrack to our lives.

The actual phrase ‘Hüsker Dü’ means ‘Do You Remember?’ in Norwegian. Sadly I do not; the band broke up just after I was born. As I listen to Bob Mould’s molten guitars spilling beautifully from my cd player, I get the sense that you don’t have to remember. Because they created it, and lived it purely on their own terms, the music remains more alive and ten times fresher than anything around today.

The DIY approach to music wasn’t new, even then. The Stooges, Ramones, and punk in general left an epitaph that complex or commercial music was certainly not necessarily better. However, in the 1980s this ethos spread across the US, not just in terms confined to music; fanzines and independent labels sprung up everywhere too. The difference to punk was that punk tried to break the system; the new ‘hardcore’ crowd simply created their own system. From pockets all over the country came bands willing to work together. When one toured the West Coast, the Minutemen would give up their beds and food for you; when they came to Minneapolis, you returned the favour. It was all about spreading the music, turning the entire country into a local music scene. Actually listening to the music of these bands, it is as if the instruments are not there; the music is emanating from the very people themselves. Take Sonic Youth’s Teen Age Riot – it is almost as if you are watching them walk down the street, composing the song in their heads. Or listen to Mark Arm of Mudhoney squeal ‘touch me I’m sick’ over a sleazy gutter-guitar riff; you can see him as a social leper daring the toffee-nosed musical elite to descend to his glorious level. They might even like it.

There seemed to be a place for everyone: the college types (Hüsker Dü), the slackers (Dinosaur Jr), the nerdy (Steve Albini of Big Black) and the plain insane (Butthole Surfers). And yet all of these resonated with a very male tone, a search for a distinctly masculine identity. Only two women were really noted in the movement. One was Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth were in many ways the anomaly in the program, identifiable as the intelligentsia of the movement. The antithesis was Kathleen Lynch, whose claim to fame was dancing naked on stage for Butthole Surfers. It is important to note that the majority of the bands were wrapped within the music, rather than a sexist agenda; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr would lyrically express a desire to improve his spiritual connection with the opposite sex. Nevertheless, hardcore was primitive, brutal, instinctive. It was also full of people like Steve Albini, who liked to emphasise his difference from the majority by intentionally offending their idea of decency. All this added together to form a tumultuous but eerily melodic rage, distilled into three minute bursts. It was as if they had chained the American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman to a guitar and watched him play. Ferocious, but sharp, smooth and catchy.

Rebuking the ethic of the white yuppie exec brings us to another group of disaffected citizens – the black community. Here we find that, despite the vast differences in style and colour clash, the articulations found were not always distant from those of the underground. 1988 saw the split of Hüsker Dü. It also saw a riot of words spent over NWA’s Fuck Tha Police, a prosecution of police racism. NWA would later claim that because of this, Detroit police chased them off the stage at a gig. If anything, this should show the huge gulf between the separate disciplines of hip hop and underground. Many of the white hardcore kids were busy flouting every drug law in the book and being lauded for it; had they been black they would have been thrown into jail. It was exactly this kind of white hypocrisy that the more politically charged Public Enemy despised; their seminal release It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back dealt extensively with white society’s dismissal and simultaneously paradoxical suspicion and censorship of black culture. “Soul control/beat is the father of your rock ‘n’ roll” observes Chuck D on Bring The Noise, and with such maxims did the shared identity of black artists start to demand acceptance and space within the stratosphere. After all, at the same time that black culture was being downplayed, legendary coloured artists such as Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were becoming some of the first inductees of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame.

And yet there are spiritual connections. The independence – NWA only came into being through Eazy E forming his own label Ruthless Records, mirroring indie musicians such as Greg Ginn of Black Flag. The masculinity – again some, though by no means all, hip hop exhibited serious misogynist tendencies, and that which did not often retained a confrontational masculine edge. Most obviously, there were parallels in both communities’ quests to find an identity outside that which society prescribed to them, symbolizing a cross-cultural male anti-Reaganite reaction. Tragically, there would be parallels in the self-defeating downfalls as well; the underground would be swallowed into Nirvana’s success, and many in the black community would resent the way hip hop became stereotype parlance for what was “black”. But in the process, music was created which lives on like a paean to the revelation of identity, trophies of personal victory won the hard way. Music that breathes the lives, power and rebellion of its masters. If you don’t like what society says you are, don’t bitch – form a band.

Let’s take Clapton’s best known song “Layla”. For most of the Western world the mere utterance of the title and the opening chords of Clapton’s song awaken some deep feeling from within. What the majority would not realise, however, is that the title of the song was inspired by the Persian myth Layla and Majnun, written by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami. There is a certain tragedy that, whilst the song has become a cornerstone of Western popular culture, the influential myth remains lurking in the shadows of Eastern tradition. There is also an undeniable irony that the love song which is so closely associated with the West actually has its roots in Persia, partly now Iran, a source of much political controversy.

Both Clapton and Nizami’s Majnun were moved by love to compose beautiful words in the name of Layla, the latter’s inspiration originating in the Bedouin encampments of Arabia. For Nizami, Layla was a mythological character whose tribe kept her locked away and forced her into marriage when she fell in love with a man from an opposing tribe. For Clapton, however, she was the wife of Beatle George Harrison, Pattie Boyd. Describing the moment when he first saw Pattie at a Cream concert, he recalls being struck by how “unusually beautiful” she was. Similarly Layla is illustrated by Nizami as “a radiant beacon of beauty”.

The name “Layla” allowed Clapton to serenade his object of unrequited love without rousing the suspicion of his best friend and her husband. Clapton’s first line “What’ll you do when you get lonely?” was intended to make Pattie see that she must leave Harrison to be with him. The theme of unrequited love is ubiquitous with references in Petrarch, Shakespeare and even The Lord of the Rings. So why did Clapton choose this obscure Persian myth? Perhaps it was the belief that his lyrics would be accepted, not questioned. The myth which would come to make sense after his lust of Pattie was aired and the derivation of the song was uncovered whilst initially allowing him anonymity. Yet at the time the song was first released, the name was merely accepted in the same way that “Angie” (The Rolling Stones) and “Michelle” (The Beatles) were, as generic female objects of love.

The most authorative recent translation of Nizami’s Layla and Majnun is attributed to Dr. Colin Turner. The translation maintains the tone of the lyrical Persian poetry yet places great emphasis on the fact that Nizami’s words were very modern. Turner’s translation of the text using clichés which are in circulation today draws attention to this fact. For example the phrases “Nothing lasts forever” and “the first cut is always the deepest” are found in his work. This perhaps shows why Clapton identified with the text. Despite it being several centuries old, the words resonated with him in the 1960s and they fit perfectly into a pop song which went on to capture the heart of the nation.

What is particularly interesting about the translation is the blurb for Dr Turner’s book. It quotes, “ERIC CLAPTON was so affected by this tale that it inspired his most spiritually uplifting song, LAYLA”. The capitalisation of artist and track name demonstrate how the publishers have used the reference as a form of advertising. This blatant reference to Western pop culture to market this fairly specialised text demonstrates that, in our commercial world, celebrity endorsements are the most valued form of currency. “Layla” is made up of three four-line verses and is considered a modern masterpiece. Nizami’s epic poem written in a rich literary style is rendered largely unknown. It becomes evident therefore that Eastern tradition cannot be compared to Western pop culture because the former has an inflated value.

Nizami’s hyperbolic language and sensual imagery, therefore, stands in stark contrast to Clapton’s song whose beauty lies in its intoxicating simplicity. There is a definite sense that the song condenses and simplifies the message and the language of the myth. This could be seen as a symbol for the relationship between Western pop culture and Eastern tradition. We are given a simplified version and distracted by other elements, in Clapton’s case the memorable guitar riffs. However, after reading the myth of Layla and Majnun, whether because of the Clapton brand or not, we are consequently reminded of the full literary heritage of Persian literature every time the song is played. We can conclude that the song “Layla” gives the myth a renewed relevance in twenty first century society. In Clapton’s words, taken from “Layla” of course, “Let’s make the best of the situation” as surely the connection between the song and the myth can only lead more people to the original text and give greater significance to new translations such as that of Dr. Colin Turner.

Increasingly, however, musical taste is an excuse for prejudice, a means of dismissing whole centuries, genres, and styles of music. Contemporary art music, in particular, suffers from such prejudice. ‘All this modern rubbish’, ‘Schoenberg and that lot’ and ‘horrible noise’ are all wildly inaccurate accounts of contemporary ‘classical’ music, which speak of a widespread misunderstanding.

Notably, the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a composer who abandoned major and minor scales in favour of his own system, serialism, is nearing its centenary and, therefore, can no longer be considered modern music. The face of composition has changed radically in this time. There are whole new concerns, in terms of both style and subject matter, which are evident in the ever-evolving, contemporary compositional climate. This is not to say that Schoenberg can no longer appeal to this generation; on the contrary there is much we can still gain from him, just as there is still much to be gained from, for example, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. What we must understand is that each generation has its own music; disengagement with the music of our own time means missing out on a life-enriching source of musical experience.

Another criticism of contemporary music is that it can be considered to be