Letters

Francis FitzGibbon sees Lord Leveson’s proposals to limit trial by jury as a means of dealing with the ‘ever growing backlog of cases in the Crown Court’ (LRB, 11 September). But why are the delays so much worse than ever before? We hear a lot of talk about barristers quitting or switching fields, about the selling off of court buildings and the fact that there aren’t enough judges. There’s talk too about the effect of the pandemic and the barristers’ strike. Yet at the same time we know there are more people in prison than ever before, and that has nothing to do with strikes or pandemics or crumbling buildings. It’s because we are prosecuting and locking up more people than ever.

In the last few years multiple new offences have been created. These include arriving at a port to request asylum without having a visa, which has resulted in a huge number of prosecutions in Kent. They include walking slowly in the road, which has led to overwhelming numbers appearing in Southwark Crown Court. ‘Locking on’ as part of a protest is now an offence too. In theory, the authorities are meant to be slow to criminalise acts of expression. In practice, if something is done as part of a protest, it is now harder to persuade the prosecution to drop the case and they are more likely to prosecute (based on my experience and things prosecutors have said to me). Now that people causing damage to property can be defined as terrorists, and hundreds of people are being arrested seemingly weekly for holding signs, the situation can only get worse.

Here’s a proposal based on principle and expediency: repeal the new protest and immigration offences (and maybe the old ones too); repeal terrorism legislation (conspiracy to murder works just fine); and decriminalise drugs. And stop prosecuting children, especially for things like picking up and using someone else’s Oyster card, possessing cannabis, or calling people names – all things I have dealt with as a barrister in the Youth Court.

Francis FitzGibbon gives a good history of reports by senior judges recommending the restriction of jury trial from Lord Roskill in 1986 onward. The latest proposals from Lord Leveson have a long history. ‘One wonders,’ FitzGibbon writes, ‘why the governments that commissioned these reports … have not made it happen.’ And why nothing has moved either concerning the related old chestnut of creating a single court system. The reason might be the defects inherent in the proposals. But we might also consider – as FitzGibbon does not – whether the bitter opposition of the General Council of the Bar in general, or the Criminal Bar Association in particular (of which he is a distinguished former chair), might also have played a part.

Professional advantage in turf wars with solicitor advocates has restricted a sensible analysis of what cases might be suitably tried by professional judges. I have changed my mind over the decades and would now argue that complex serious fraud cases present specific challenges that justify professional judgment. With lay juries there is just too much temptation for advocates to muddy the waters with complexities where, as FitzGibbon points out, the essential issue is the simple one of dishonesty.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s piece on ‘dobbers in’, state-sponsored and informal, didn’t mention the spectacular bocche di leone, the stone letterboxes installed by the doges of Venice from 1618 which invited ‘secret denunciations against anyone who will conceal favours and services or will collude to hide the true revenue from them’ (LRB, 25 September). Eventually citizens were invited to denounce anybody for anything, including dropping rubbish. The consequence might be a trip across the Bridge of Sighs, from the interrogation rooms of the Doge’s Palace to the prison on the other side of the Rio del Palazzo.

David Russell writes of Erik Satie that ‘on one of the rare occasions he was paid a decent fee, he spent it on several identical corduroy suits’ (Letters, 11 September). Twelve, according to a radio documentary about Satie I heard many years ago. Satie lived alone in a one-room apartment to which no one was ever invited. When he died it was finally entered, to reveal a miserable room with a bed; a table covered with rubbish; a broken piano, its pedals fastened with string, behind which there were two manuscripts, supposedly lost on a bus years before, as well as scraps of paper covered with sketches, ballet designs and eccentric inscriptions; and a wardrobe containing a dozen identical corduroy suits (colour not specified), none of which, it appeared, had ever been worn.

Barbara Newman, writing about Boccaccio, notes that ‘in modern Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means “lascivious”’ (LRB, 14 August). She might have added that in the UK, ‘Chaucerian’ means about the same, though with a scatological edge. Meanwhile here in Japan the Decameron has a special following because slang for ‘big’ is deca and for ‘penis’ is mara, while ron means ‘a treatise’.

Ruby Hamilton gives an excellent survey of David Lynch’s career and its contradictions (LRB, 11 September). I once asked my parents and parents-in-law what they had thought of Twin Peaks at the time of its original broadcast. Both couples said they’d tried it out but quickly given up. In one case because it was too scary, too weird. In the other, it was because they could see nothing to differentiate it from any other sensationalist, sentimental American soap opera. The difference put me in mind of an anecdote in the musicologist Barry Kernfeld’s book What to Listen for in Jazz (1995). Kernfeld reports being asked by some students to suggest a jazz album for discussion at a symposium on the relationship between noise and music. He put forward John Coltrane’s Ascension, a particularly raucous example of large-group improvisation. On relistening, however, he realised this was a poor choice: it was far too musical to raise any real questions about the noise/music boundary. A few days later he saw the students again and was told they’d rejected the Coltrane because it was self-evidently nothing but noise. There is, I think, a lesson here about how to understand what is so distinctively discombobulating about the ‘Lynchian’. Divergence of response is hard to investigate when we can’t even agree how to classify what we’re responding to.

Mike Jay traces the genealogy of the modern figure of the shaman, but omits some antecedents (LRB, 11 September). As early as the 1820s, European and American Protestant missionaries in East Asia were already using the word ‘shamanism’ polemically, applying it to what they called ‘primitive Buddhism’ and grouping it with Lamaism among the ‘systems of delusion’. This early usage reveals how quickly the term became bound to theological critique.

Jay is correct in noting that Mircea Eliade, the English translation of whose book Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (1951) was so influential in the 1960s, never visited Siberia or observed a shamanic ritual. But that is only half the story. Eliade’s work rested heavily on earlier ethnographers, among them Uno Harva, the Finnish historian of religions, who conducted fieldwork among the Evenk and Ket in the 1910s. His findings supplied Eliade with many of the structural motifs – the flight of the soul, the ecstatic journey – that Eliade later theorised.

Jay credits Nicolaas Witsen of Amsterdam with the ‘first published’ account of shamanism, supposedly based on his travels in Siberia in the 1660s. In fact, that was when Witsen travelled to Moscow, where he was a junior member of a Dutch diplomatic mission. He never visited Siberia. His impressive Noord en Oost Tartarye (1705) incorporated extensive material from international correspondents. One source in particular deserves mention: Ysbrand Ides, a German merchant of Dutch descent who was resident in Moscow. Peter the Great appointed him head of a diplomatic mission to China between 1692 and 1695. A fellow German, Adam Brand, served as secretary on the overland voyage through Siberia. Brand’s short travelogue, Beschreibung der Chinesischen Reise, was published in Hamburg in 1698; Ides published his own more elaborate narrative, Dreyjaerige Reyse naar China, in Amsterdam in 1704, with Witsen’s assistance. From Ides’s description – and perhaps also from a sketch – came the copper engraving of the Tungus shaman that Witsen included in his 1705 volume. It is this description and image, rather than any direct observation by Witsen, that helped crystallise the European conception of the shaman.

A final note on nomenclature: the people of the north-west Amazon long referred to in older sources as Jívaro should properly be identified by their own name, Shuar.

The 1990s were not, contra William Davies, when ‘the major ideological conflicts of the 20th century were dissipating’, or ‘when the right began to lose its mind’ (LRB, 25 September). Instead, with the collapse of communism, traditions came back into the open which, for generations after the Second World War, were practised privately, drunkenly, away from tender academic ears: the celebration of ‘natural’ inequality; chauvinisms of nation, race and sex; cults of violence and conquest. The right never lost its mind. It is simply that, for a time, it preferred not to speak it.

Although Seamus Perry is surely not wrong to draw attention to the ben trovato tendencies of Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, the compelling intimacy between Joyce’s fiction and his life remains its undiminished triumph (LRB, 11 September). When I first read it as a student of English at University College Dublin in 1979, some twenty years after it first appeared, the orthodoxies of French theory (notably the Derridean notion that ‘there is nothing outside the text’) were in full play. But the person who gave me my copy of Ellmann inscribed it: ‘From a friend, who tempts you to sin with biography for a time.’

I would like to congratulate Kasia Boddy on her piece about Dorothy Parker and to thank her for writing that Parker ‘homes in’ on authors’ stylistic mannerisms and not that she ‘hones in’, a misusage that makes hardly any sense (LRB, 11 September).

‘LRB 45s’, as advertised in the 11 September issue, is a fine concept. I suppose I am not the only one reminded of ‘What’s My Melodic Line?’, a contest on Peter Schickele’s radio station WOOF at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople; the grand prize was the complete works of Antonio Vivaldi recorded on ‘convenient 45 rpm records’, which would be sent to the winner one per week ‘over the next 35 years’.