BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY

Author: Helen Fielding
Year: 1998 (1996)
Publisher: Egmont Richter AB
Language: Swedish (translator Carla Wiberg)

Within the rich treasure trove of Polish cinema, there exists one movie* that has reached cult status in Poland yet is little known beyond its borders, owing most probably to the language barrier. Its hapless hero is a gentleman of forty-nine, a scholar of linguistics whose exquisite sensitivity would, in our present age of classifications, doubtless be catalogued under the autism spectrum. Change is to him unbearable, grammar a battlefield he is prepared to die on, interaction with others an infernal struggle, and the world as a whole a chaotic performance to which he seems to have tragically misplaced the script.

The Polish public, whose sense of humour I flatter myself to understand, has seen fit to classify this movie as a comedy, and indeed it was under that cheerful pretext that I was persuaded to watch it some years ago. To me, however, it was a dark manifestation of a deeply troubled person’s hysterical attempts to stay afloat in a social environment that he perceives as intrusive, incomprehensible, and intolerably cruel. Where others discovered wit, I saw only torment. The protagonist’s suffering was so absolute, so relentless, that it banished comedy much like thunderclouds banish the sun.

My encounter with Helen Fielding’s widely acclaimed novel “Bridget Jones dagbok” (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) summoned a very similar sensation. Although, according to the book cover, Nick Hornby touted it as the product of “a comedy genius,” and Salman Rushdie assured us it was of such brilliance that “even men will laugh”, I found myself reading not with amusement but with a lump of lead lodged in the pit of my being.

This novel follows the form of the private diary of Bridget Jones, a single, professional woman in her thirties, navigating the perils of her London existence. She struggles with extremely low self-esteem, unhealthy body ideals, elevated consumption of nicotine and alcohol, and a destructive attitude to relationships with her family, but first and foremost, with men. The diary itself is sometimes confessional, sometimes incoherent, mostly emotional. She writes when drunk, she scribbles when under stress, and occasionally her notes are inexplicably absent altogether.

Bridget’s angst bleeds through every page, and even the misunderstandings, antics, and pitfalls, that most promise comic relief are blackened by Bridget’s palpable misery and obvious need for urgent help. One begins to wonder, not about Bridget, who is after all a fictional character, but about the curious cruelty of those who find amusement in her despair. To laugh at such anguish, however prettily disguised as comedy, seems less a tribute to wit than an indictment of empathy. As for me, the laughs were few and far between.

As a piece of literature, “Bridget Jones dagbok” also has some notable shortcomings. Born as a newspaper serial in The Independent before assuming the costume of a novel in 1996, it still bears the marks of its episodic parentage. One suspects that Bridget herself was created to critique the hysterical hunt for social conformity that many women in London seem to experience. Bridget is pressured to desperately chase careers, collect lovers, and amass party invitations, all the while betraying her own natural lazy self. This critique, if indeed it was at all intended, might have gleamed with sharper irony, had Fielding bestowed upon Bridget some genuine passion incompatible in its absurdity or even nobility with society’s demands.

And so, all things considered, the novel is not particularly well-written. The diary form, though not in itself problematic, demands a rigour of execution that Fielding too often falls short of. In the hands of a master, such intimacy can strike with devastating force as titles such as “The Color Purple” (see my review of April 2020) or “Doctor Glas” (see my review of August 2023) testify to, but here the illusion falters. Whether from the remnants of its serial inception, the imperfections of translation, or the author’s ineptitude, the pact with the reader is repeatedly broken. A drunk woman may well stumble in speech, but she does not misspell her diary to mimic her slurred diction. Long conversational meanderings are rarely transcribed in full, in particular if the writer is trying to make a completely unrelated point. And when the dinner collapses into the drain, and one is scrambling to rescue whatever can still be salvaged, one does not pause mid-calamity to jot it down.

I understand that these inconsistencies were committed in the name of comedy, yet they betray the cruel truth that the epistolary novel is a treacherous form, mastered by few and mishandled by many. Indeed, I hazard the heresy that this is one of those rare occasions when the movie, at least in the sense of a comedy, eclipses the book.

 

 * ”Dzień świra” from 2002, directed by Marek Koterski.

SOKRATES

Author: Louis-André Dorion
Year: 2006 (2005)
Publisher: Alhambras Pocketencyklopedi
Language: Swedish (translator Jan Stolpe)

It was one of those golden late Friday afternoons in spring, when the very air seems to dictate idleness, that my supervisor and I were walking hurriedly through the corridors of the Department of Social Anthropology at Free School Lane hoping to not be late for the weekly senior seminar. We arrived just in time to spare ourselves the indignity of bursting in on the introductory remarks of the usually highly regarded external guest and mumbling our apologies while trying to hunt down some empty seats, which would invariably be located in the very centre of the room. As I was still catching my breath after the brisk walk, my supervisor leaned over to me and said “Listen carefully to this man. I don’t agree with a word he says, but given the assumptions he makes, his conclusions are absolutely brilliant.”

Now, almost two decades later, his words come back to me as I read Louis-André Dorion’s short but useful introduction to one of the ancient world’s most famous thinkers: Socrates.

In a famous event in Socrates’ life, a friend of his asks the Oracle of Delphi who the wisest man in Greece is. The Oracle, with that mischievous cruelty peculiar to divinities, indicates Socrates. On hearing this, Socrates, knowing very well that men parading their wisdom usually possess little more than gilded ignorance, concludes that the single thing that makes his wisdom superior to theirs is that he is aware of his lack thereof. “I know that I know nothing”*. Armed with this paradox, he sets off to enlighten his fellow Athenians by convincing them that they, too, know very little.

His foremost instrument was the dialogue, famously reproduced (and undoubtedly embellished) by his student Plato, and he is generally credited with establishing the most inconvenient of arts: critical thinking. This process of dialectic reasoning, whereby questions and answers in concert lead to the truth, demands above all else, definitions; for if words are not universalised they remain woefully parochial, and no philosophy can thrive in a provincial setting. This type of truth-seeking by dialogue is known as “elenchus” or simply The Socratic Method. A century later, Aristotle distilled this principle down to his famous syllogism** “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”

The ability to disentangle opinion from reason was in essence the whole of Socrates’ mission. And the lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn from the guest lecturer at Cambridge. Socrates is sometimes thought of as a midwife, possibly inspired by his mother’s profession, who helps to deliver other men’s logical conclusions that they may not have been able to reach without him, but which had dwelled unrecognised inside of them all the time. By this analogy, Socrates would never place his own thoughts in the heads of others, but merely help them clarify their own. This would be consistent with three important points Socrates is claimed to have made about himself:

1.      His famous declaration that he knows nothing. If you have no thoughts of your own, you have nothing to put inside someone else’s head;

2.      His insistence that he never tutored or lectured anyone. If you know nothing, you will be hard pressed to deposit any knowledge into someone else’s mind;

3.      His claim that his activity was commanded by the gods. Since the Oracle had proclaimed him the wisest of all men, it is implied that keeping this wisdom to oneself would be inconsistent with the will of the gods.

Dorion makes the interesting observation that Socrates seems to have played both midwife and prosecutor depending on the level of vanity in his victim. The modest man he offered gentle assistance, coaxing from him thoughts he scarcely suspected himself capable of possessing. To the self-satisfied loudmouth he administered a more invigorating treatment puncturing his inflated ego with surgical precision. Curiously, the tender midwife-inspired Socrates does not appear until comparatively late in Plato’s writing, which leads Dorion to the conclusion that the Athenians during Socrates’ lifetime may not have perceived him quite as noble and benevolent as the idealised image that posterity has created of him might suggest.  

Few writers could be more qualified than Louis-André Dorion to write an introduction to Socrates. He is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Montreal specialising in Socrates’ dialectic refutation and the Socratic writings of Xenofon, second only to Plato in recording Socrates’ life and deeds. Normally pocket-sized introductions to ideas or celebrities offer little more than the most conventional and uninspired basics. Yet Dorion being the enthusiast incapable of mediocrity, cannot help putting some well-needed meat on the bones, turning this modestly dimensioned volume into something as refreshingly surprising as a digest that actually requires digesting.  

* The correct quote from Plato is actually “For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”
** Not to be confused with Hegelian dialectics

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2004 (2001)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English (translator Lucia Graves)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” is by any definition a wonderous and pleasant read. The writer takes the reader gently by the hand and carefully leads them into the world of intrigue, wonder, love, and friendship. But more than a novel, it is an elegant instrument in the disciplinary order of memory, literature, and identity. It is not simply a narrative about forgotten books and troubled writers, but a study of the circulation of power through language, bodies, and historical discourse. “The archive” as Michel Foucault would put it. Beneath its seductive aesthetics lies a matrix of panopticon and confession, wherein the subject is formed not through autonomy but through the interiorisation of surveillance and the repetition of fate as the narrative form.

The story is set in Barcelona shortly after the war as Francisco Franco’s falangist regime is still reeling from the post-war isolation and responding, as dictators do, with tightened control and brutal oppression. The protagonist Daniel Sempere follows his father to a place in Barcelona which even to the Barcelonians is mostly unknown: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel is encouraged to pick out a book and become its guardian. He picks “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax, a name of whom he had thitherto been completely oblivious. Or rather, it picks him. Daniel’s relationship with the book, and his relentless search for its elusive author, will come to define his fate.  

At the centre of Zafón’s novel is the relationship triangle between Daniel Sempere, Julian Carax, and Inspector Fumero within a closed system of power. The narrative traces Daniel’s gradual descent into the life of Carax, but it is not simply the tale of a reader discovering a writer. It is the slow process by which Daniel is made intelligible as a subject through pursuit, confession, and surveillance under the persistent gaze of Fumero, the novel’s repressive figure of formal authority and informal malice.

Carax’ role in the novel less that of a living being as that of a dossier to be reconstructed through fragments, testimonies, and deduction. His life is retrieved through the operations of the archive, and his identity is constituted through gossip, rumours, letters, and third-party accounts

I could not help but read this novel through the lens of Michel Foucault’s power analysis, particularly as outlined in his groundbreaking book “Discipline and Punish”. Foucault names the shift from act to document as a crucial feature of disciplinary power, and Carax is the prototype: not a man, but a readable subject whose every gesture is translated into signs of deviance or resistance. For a relentless oppressor, every liberal act will look like insubordination. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Daniel, in seeking to uncover Carax, gradually assumes his narrative coordinates, becoming an object of observation himself. First for the reader. Then for Inspector Fumero.

The sadistic Inspector Fumero functions as the visible face of disciplinary violence. He is not merely a villain, but the embodiment of sovereign and bureaucratic power entwined—a fusion of spectacle and surveillance. Like the Foucaultian executioner-turned-warden, Fumero is a relic of an older, bloodier regime of control who nevertheless adapts seamlessly to the more modern modes of tracking and silencing dissidence. His obsession with Carax and, by extension, with Daniel, is not driven by personal vendetta alone, but by the imperative to restore narrative closure, to erase anomaly, to close the gap between deviance and punishment.

In this respect, Fumero finds a soulmate in Victor Hugo’s Javert from “Les Misérables” (see review from September 2022), who puts all original thinking and feelings aside in favour of becoming a dispassionate tool in the service of the system. Unlike Javert however, who submitted completely to the system and equated his personal value with it, Fumero makes the system a tool for his own personal campaign of vengeance and hatred.

In this triangular structure, Daniel becomes the hinge on which the door between the past grievance that pits Julian Carax and Inspector Fumero against each other, and the final showdown in the post-war present swings. Through his pursuit of Carax, he does not merely learn a hidden history; he is inserted into a chain of substitution. His desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the mechanisms of control that produced Carax’s erasure. That Fumero begins to pursue Daniel with the same fervour once reserved for Carax is no accident. Penelope Aldaya and Beatriz Aguilar, the love interests of Julian Carax and Daniel Sempere respectively, embody the parallelism between the two men, separated by generations yet united by discursive and biographical repetition.

This is why the novel’s long expository chapters, usually delivered through rather verbose confessions, feel less like storytelling and more like processing. The characters recount their pasts not as memory but as evidence. Structured, ordered, and precise. These passages resemble info-dumps more than literary flow, and to me manifest the transition from personal fate to archive. Zafón's narrative, as Foucault predicts, for all its emotional resonance, cannot escape the form of the report or the disciplinary file.

“The Shadow of the Wind” can, or maybe even must, be read in light of these mechanisms.