"At last I understand Kafka"

Since the beginning of this blog, I've been ostentatiously listing on the sidebar the books I've read in the current year, which I then convert into a mammoth end of year round-up of sorts. I don't really know why I do this, other than I enjoy lists and like keeping track of my reading. Regardless, there is a tension even in such a simple exercise as this. If I've read a book, do I claim to have read it well? Or to have understood it? Some weeks ago, I added Blanchot's Friendship to the list; given my admitted struggles with Blanchot's writing, how did I do with this particular book? I confess that I was unable to get much of anything out of some of the essays, whereas others I found myself able to read and profit from. I don't pretend to have a full grasp of all of Blanchot's major themes, but the best of the essays are remarkably supple and subtle pieces that I hope to return to again and again.

This reminds me of a passage from William H. Gass' marvelous introduction to William Gaddis' imposing novel, The Recognitions. It is one of the great introductions, and I've read it several times. Here is Gass:

No great book is explicable, and I shall not attempt to explain this one. An explanation—indeed, any explanation—would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers, convenient summaries, quiz questions, annotations, arrows, highlight lines, lists of its references, the numbers of its sources, echoes, and influences, an outline of its designs—useful as sometimes such helps are—nevertheless very seriously mislead. Guidebooks are useful, but only to what is past. Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. "Okay, I get it," we say, dusting our hands, "and that takes care of that." "At last I understand Kafka" is a foolish and conceited remark.

(Keeping with the theme of this post, yes, I have "read" the novel, too, some ten years ago, though I was under no illusion at the time that I was equal to the task; a second reading, in the context of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Gaddis Drinking Club group blog, was aborted about halfway through (and my only two posts at the blog weren't even about the reading itself but about introductory material). Ours was not the only well-intentioned but short-lived group blog devoted to reading The Recognitions; there was also Reading Gaddis from last year, and no doubt there are others. The book seems to inspire such projects. Lately the gang at An und für sich have themselves embarked on what looks like a fruitful group reading, which isn't too surprising given that blog's particular focus on theology and philosophy; the relevant posts are collected here.)

Gass on Philosophy

Here, by the way, is an extended excerpt from the Believer interview with William H. Gass, on the pleasures of reading philosophy, which I quoted briefly from in my last post (italics in original):

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It also leads, in some cases, to writing which is exceptionally interesting. I’m thinking, say, of somebody who’s very technical in a way, like [German philosopher Gottlob] Frege. And he’s writing on the foundations of arithmetic. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

So there’s that part of it. But the world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it’s—-like Aristotle’s Physics—-an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling. You can learn so much from a book like that about the way a mind might work and should work. I remember reading it for the first time, and it was just extraordinary. When Aristotle is wrong because science has outstripped him, he is so sane given what he has in front of him to work with, that you think, Well. You leave somebody like Plato, whose mind is breathtaking, and you go to Aristotle, who has a very completely different kind of thing, and hasn’t got the style or the panache. And yet, oh, boy, some of the performances are devastatingly wonderful. Same thing with someone like Kant, or Spinoza. And of course one of my favorites, Hobbes. He writes some of the best prose ever. And it isn’t that when one’s appreciating this, you’re just throwing out the aim that they were trying to achieve—to get at the truth. The fact is that even if it isn’t the truth, it’s worth the journey.

One of my favorites is Plotinus, and, you know, I think he’s nuts. [Both laugh] But it’s always gorgeous, and the language is just spectacular. And the same is true of the Tractatus [Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein]. The German is exquisite. So what you’re dealing with is a certain quality of mind. I think it is important to realize when you’re studying philosophy that what you’re getting is not simply that they got it right. What they got right was the going after it and showing you how it works, and imagining this and that. Usually, doing what Emerson suggested: capturing the world as it might seem from one point of view. That tells you a whole lot about that point of view.

Again on Nietzsche and youthful reading

I've been reading Nietzsche's On the Geneology of Morals and thinking more about youthful reading. Previously, I quoted Graham Harman on Nietzsche thus:

Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable, but just think of how your brain is on fire after reading Nietzsche. There aren’t many philosophers who can do that.

At the time, I was interested chiefly in the "juvenile pastime" part of the remark, now I can see better how one's brain could be "on fire after reading Nietzsche", particularly a young person's brain. I can easily see how a young reader of philosophy could be quite enamored of Nietzsche. So confident! So assured! So provocative! So in love with exclamation points!

Interestingly, at least in the parts of Geneology I've read so far, Nietzsche's account of the origins of certain things is almost certainly wrong, and yet seductive. (Note: I opted to read On the Geneology of Morals after reading Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea--Dennett provides several passages from Nietzsche and suggests that Hobbes and Nietzsche are something like the first "sociobiologists", in that they were trying to explain the beginnings of things in terms of natural history, as opposed to resorting to God as an explanation. Dennett observes that, though Nietzsche may not have read Darwin directly, he was certainly familiar with and interested in the theories of evolution, which interest is reflected in his work. I hope to have something more specific to say about Nietzsche and Dennett and the origins of things, especially in the context of Chris Knight's work, in a later post. Dennett, by the way, is another writer who is overly fond of the exclamation point.) And yet Nietzsche remains a pleasure to read. It is enjoyable following his reasoning, registering objections along the way. I recall William H. Gass' love of reading philosophy--he often echoes a point made several times by Harman at his blog, that the thing about reading philosophy is not necessarily whether the philosopher was right, that they do not become worthless once science has shown them to be wrong on this or that topic; or, as Gass says here in an interview with the Believer, "The fact is that even if it isn’t the truth, it’s worth the journey." (Update: I've provided a substantially longer excerpt on this theme from this interview, here.)

But back to youthful reading. As noted before, Dostoevsky is another writer often said to be for the young. One grows out of Dostoevsky, is the sneer. I don't know about that, but I think I know what is meant by this sort of comment, at least when it's not a form of condescension (as, for example, I don't believe Graham Harman was being in any way condescending in his remarks about Nietzsche). In the final section of his great memoir, Gathering Evidence, Thomas Bernhard recalls his first encounter with Dostoevsky's Demons. He calls it "elemental". Some of us have approached that book and found it decidedly not elemental, for us. But Bernhard was 19 years old, I believe, when he read Demons. For him, at that age, no doubt it indeed was elemental. And what mattered for him later in life, in his own writing, was not what Dostoevksy might have had to say for him or to him in his 30s or 40s or 50s, but what it meant to read Demons when he was 19. Perhaps, if he had not read Demons, or any other Dostoevsky, until his mid-30s--perhaps it would have meant little to him. But that experience, that encounter, that elemental reading at the age of 19--he owed a certain kind of loyalty to that. Indeed, though at the age of 39 I've so far tried and failed to make my way into Demons, I nevertheless remember fondly my experience, at 24, reading The Brothers Karamazov. Yes, I was proud of myself for plowing through such a dense book, but also I was invigorated by the experience, wanted to talk about it, was on fire, in a sense, with the ideas. For some, this very aspect of Dostoevsky is what renders him aesthetically suspect. I used to agree, but now I'm not so sure. (Anyway, resolute atheist that I was and am, I hardly thought it was anything like a conservative religious tract, as others have argued.) After that you'd think I'd have consumed more Dostoevsky at that still relatively young age, but I did not. And by the time I got around to reading Notes from Underground, at 36, even this lean novella felt flabby to me.

The point is that these youthful readings are important, not to be dismissed or sneered at, or disowned. They form part of our worldview and our aesthetic, even if we move beyond or away from them. With some authors, if we miss out on appropriate youthful readings, then perhaps we miss out on them altogether, or maybe they simply cannot mean as much to us as they otherwise might have.

Smoothness of Surface

Earlier this year I read Middlemarch, and I was thoroughly entertained by it. But I wrote about feeling "pulled along by the plot" and not liking that feeling and having to slow myself down to savor what I did like about the novel. Last year, I read both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre--both of which are also very entertaining novels, but which leave me with little to say, little to ponder. The copy of Wuthering Heights we have is a Bedford Books Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism edition, nearly half of which is devoted to five critical studies of the novel--Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Deconstruction, Marxist, and Cultural--along with brief histories of each type of criticism, as well as a short history of the critical response to the novel. My plan was to read each essay and then perhaps write about what I found there. I didn't make it very far. The Pyschoanalytic essay ("The Absent Mother in Wuthering Heights" by Philip K. Wion) was so tedious that I had to quit it only a couple of pages in. Then other books actually managed to keep my attention, and that was that. Thus did my good intentions die.

The thing is, I am curious about these forms of criticism. I know that it's a commonplace for academic criticism to be taken to task for reading literature for anything other than its literary/aesthetic qualities (this is certainly one of Dan Green's common themes at The Reading Experience). I also know that my sympathies, though I have no personal acquaintance with any critical method as yet, are with those making this assessment--or, rather, my sympathies lie in favor of the idea that this is not conducive to the study of literature as art, however justified the practice might be for other purposes. Even so, I'd like to know what these critical methods are actually like; so I thought, anyway. But I don't have all the time in the world, and a quick survey of these essays (even just a glance at the descriptions of each type, though the Deconstruction piece may be an exception) tells me that they don't take the kind of approach that I think I want or need.

Just a few weeks ago, I read Emma. I liked it a little less than the other Jane Austen novels I've read, but, still, I enjoyed it. But the pleasure is chiefly in reading about what happens, isn't it? Right now I'm in the middle of The Portrait of a Lady, and the same is essentially true. I am learning about Isabel Archer and watching her develop and gain experience in the world. Our narrator, indeed, routinely refers to her as "our heroine" and the book is given to be a biographical work of some kind. Don't get me wrong: I am far from immune to the pleasure to be had in Henry James' sentences. There are quotable passages; things are very well observed, very well put. The same is certainly true of George Eliot and Jane Austen and, to a lesser extent, the Brontës. But this doesn't seem to be what critics want to talk about. With The Portrait of a Lady, I skim Geoffrey Moore's introduction and James' own preface, and everything seems to be about Isabel and the events in the novel and those potentially corresponding events in James' own life. I look in the back of the book, under the Further Reading heading, and I see references to and brief descriptions of twenty critical works about The Portrait of a Lady, nearly all of which seem exclusively concerned with the same material.

An exception to this tendency is an essay by William H. Gass, "The High Brutality of Good Intentions". The essay originally appeared in 1958 and is collected in his Fiction and the Figures of Life. It so happens that it was this essay by Gass, along with another one in the same collection called "In the Cage", that inspired me a few months ago to get a copy of The Portrait of a Lady and finally read one of the long James novels (I'd previously read the very short works Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller). In "In the Cage", Gass reviews the biography Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895-1901, by Leon Edel, whose "method is so narrowly 'psychological' that the actual psychology of his subject frequently escapes him":

Sibling rivalries, castration complexes, homosexual tendencies, oedipal longings: these are common, we may suppose, to many men, none of whom possesses the style and the mind of this master; they tell us too little, and even in one life make our explanations increasingly monotonous and empty; since what is any life, from this point of view, but a repeating pattern of family relations, one where every war is the first war refought? so that the answers to our whys have a persistent dull sameness. . .

When, after all, the only reason for a biography of Henry James is the existence of his voluminous writing. He famously didn't do much of anything else: "He merely wrote his novels like the useless man he was, and what is striking about these if not their quality, their extraordinary refinement, their personality, their style?" Gass discusses character and plot and theme, too, but he is not like other critics. Gass, of course, is nothing if not a great stylist himself, and as a critic he is primarily interested in teasing out the workings of a writer's style--how does he do the things he does? In the "High Brutality" essay, he is at pains to show how the character manipulations of the story are a manifestation of James' style:

It is not simply in the organization of character, dialogue, and action that Henry James reveals The Moral Passion, nor is it reflected further only in his treatment of surroundings but it represents itself and its ideal in the increasing scrupulosity of the style: precision of definition, respect for nuance, tone, the multiplying presence of enveloping metaphors, the winding around the tender center of ritual lines, like the approach of the devout and worshipful to the altar, these circumlocutions at once protecting the subject and slowing the advance so that the mere utility of the core is despaired of and it is valued solely in the contemplative sight.

Critics too often want to reduce fiction, cut it down to size, manage it. Gass, at least, is a corrective. He is always alive to a writer's style--alive to the mastery of a Henry James, alive to how his peculiar style achieves its effect on the reader. And he reminds us, should we need reminding (and all too often we do, don't we?), that novels are not merely repositories of story. There is no "story" hiding there without James' style, and the same holds for Eliot, Austen, Dickens, and anyone else. When we enjoy these novels, a big part of the enjoyment is the language itself.

And yet. And yet my tendency with these novels, still, is to want to pick up the pace, read quickly, to find out what happens, to allow myself to be pulled along by the machinations of the plot, and to identify with and like or dislike characters.

I've been reading a lot of Gabriel Josipovici lately--specifically his books On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion and The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. In these wonderful books, Josipovici taps into something that feels right to me, but which I've only recently realized needed articulating. Of course, all of the novels I've mentioned are Anglo-American and hail from the 19th century, when the novel was in its "classic" phase. In On Trust Josipovici describes the situation as follows:

The characteristic of the classic novel is the smoothness of its surface. Since it seems to exist 'out there', free of any maker, it offers no purchase for criticism. As a result, commentators on novels have tended to speak in the very terms the novels themselves have presented them with--essentially, character and plot.

The "maker" of these novels is not invisible to all readers--witness Gass on James, or Nabokov's discussion of structure in Austen's Mansfield Park, in his Lectures on Literature--but the problem remains. They proceed as if they had every right in the world to exist, as if the coherence of the world contained within them was not open to question. Josipovici, instead, explains the idea of the craft tradition, and how the loss of that tradition leaves writers adrift. In his introduction to On Trust, he provides an example of the dilemma by giving us five versions of a brief dialogue. Then he asks:

. . . if I can write a tiny fragment of dialogue in so many different ways, how am I going to decide which is the right way? If each decision depends on how I feel on the day I'm writing, or how I imagine novels ought to be written, or, which amounts to the same thing, on which books I've read, then what happened to my need to speak? For that was something intensely personal and urgent, something which seemed to have nothing to do with books and to be too deeply rooted to be dependent on daily fluctuations of mood.

Josipovici believes that we must be "deeply suspicious of any claims to be representing tradition", but also strongly disagrees with the post-modern idea "that we are now free to plunder from all traditions, selecting what we want and dismissing the rest." Of course, a great many books are published each year, in a wide variety of modes, so writers do not seem to feel adrift by this loss of tradition, or even notice it, seem "untroubled by doubt". Is this a problem? We are constantly being told, especially in the blog world, that there is significant body of "high quality" fiction published each year (which is increasingly impossible to keep up with). Is this really true? Is there something false about the preponderance of these books? How much of even the best and most highly regarded literary fiction simply amounts to "entertainment"?

Josipovici locates a lineage of writers which recognizes these problems, thus running counter to the assumptions of the classic novel (assumptions that seem ever more dominant today). The Modernists, for example, took issue with the classic novel and the sense its writers conveyed that the world could be portrayed in its totality, as it is ("realistically"), and that this was a worthy goal for art. But the lessons of the Modernists seem to have been lost or ignored or misunderstood by most writers.

And that's enough for this already quite long entry. I'll be spending more time discussing Josipovici and his books in future posts.

Becoming Human

Last year I read Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Chris Knight's fascinating book that persuasively argues, as the book jacket puts it, that human culture "was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women". It was via this interview at Ready Steady Book that I was introduced to Knight and subsequently sought out his work (I posted about this interview before, specifically focusing on what Knight says in it about Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins). I'm glad I did: Blood Relations has become probably the best, most exciting science book I've read. I didn't write about it at the time because I didn't want to misrepresent it. He covers a lot of territory, and an overly simplistic summary seemed all too likely. But I am moved to bring it up today through an unexpected convergence in my mind of a couple of other books I'm reading.

First, a brief overview of the theory detailed in Blood Relations. The basic idea is that the emergence of human culture is rooted in gender solidarity. Women, as individuals, needed to be able to take care of their offspring and also to induce men into providing food and protection, who would otherwise instead simply try to spread their seed all over the place by having sex with as many women as possible, leaving the individual women to fend for themselves. To ensure that men could not go elsewhere for sex, women needed to band together to ensure that none of them was available at certain times. This was effected through a general sex-strike, through which women collectively said "No!" to men. This, in turn, was effected through menstrual synchronization--if all women in the group were menstruating at more or less the same time, men could not simply move on to another member of the group if "his" partner was refusing him. Several chapters are devoted to a lengthy investigation into the ethnographic record, revealing that the many stories and taboos found in countless variations in 'primitive' cultures throughout the world, share several key similarities and indeed make a lot more sense when understood in the context of this theory. Blood taboos--the equation of menstrual blood with blood from killed meat. Sex taboos--against incest, against sex during a woman's period. Taboos against men eating the meat of animals they themselves have killed (and the widespread reports of guilt when they do). The use of red ochre in initiation rites and in art. Origin stories, hunting rituals, cooking rituals.

Knight was inspired by findings in sociobiology and feminist anthropology, and comes out of an avowedly Marxist background. With its apparent emphasis on genes competing for survival, some political critics from the left have read The Selfish Gene, Dawkins' classic book on evolutionary theory, as reactionary. As I said in my earlier post, I see no reason to read the book in this way. Nor does Knight. In the RSB interview mentioned earlier, he said: "It was precisely selfish gene theory which exploded the earlier idea that natural selection pitted 'race' against 'race'. The left's response to this scientific revolution was embarrassingly ignorant and self-destructive," even if Dawkins himself tends not to be interested in "theories which investigate the sexual, social and foraging strategies of evolving humans." Knight quotes Dawkins: "We, alone on earth, [...] can rebel against the tryanny of the selfish replicators."

In a brief discussion of Dawkins' theory of memes (introduced in The Selfish Gene), Knight argues that: "Politics must be centre stage in any discussion of 'memes'. This is because a condition of memic immortality is at least a relative absence of political conflict." The egalitarian society that must have been the result of the "human revolution" (enabling us to "transcend the level of determinism which is represented by competition between genes") was the precondition necessary for this memic immortality--the transmission and perpetuation of culture--to be possible.

Now, to the books that have brought this back up for me. For a variety of reasons, I've been brushing up on the Enlightenment (one reason: to continue my goal to, as Casey put it with respect to himself, "make up for the neglect I have suffered at the hands of public education"). As part of this, I'm reading Peter Gay's intellectual history, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation/The Rise of Modern Paganism (published in 1966). The thinkers of the Enlightenment, of course, saw reason and science, skepticism and criticism as the ways forward, out of the darkness of superstition and religion, toward freedom in all spheres of human life. Early in his book, Gay describes the differences between two basic mentalities with which people confront their world--the mythopoeic and the critical. Mythical thinking

is not necessarily primitive, monotonous, purely superstitious, or prelogical [...] . Mythical thinking is true thinking; it reduces the world to order, but its categories are unsettled, alive. They shift under the potent pressure of immediate experience or become rigid under the equally overwhelming weight of tradition. [. . .]

Mythical thinking is a collective term describing a wide variety of mental operations. It can be observed in all its purity among primitive peoples, while it was overlaid among advanced ancient civilizations by touches of rationality, beauty of expression, and complexity of institutions. Yet mythical thinking seems to crumble at the edges first; its basic logical operations remain intact long after civilizations have acquired large rational sectors. [. . .] In the mythmaking mind, state and universe, king and god, man and nature, stood for and melted into each other. Ancient man did not think that his king resembled divinity: he was divine, the true son and accredited representative of a god. Ritual did not recall a miraculous event, it was that event. The warrior who fashioned a little statue of an enemy and then pierced it with a dagger was not merely uttering a ceremonial wish to harm the enemy: the doll was the enemy, and the damage to the doll was identical with the damage done in combat--indeed, in a sense hard for the scientific mind to grasp, it was that combat. Since empirical verification was severely restricted to certain practical operations, the efficacy of the ceremony could not be rendered questionable by continued good health of the enemy. Proof and disproof are categories in a matrix of thought alien to the mythopoeic mind. (Gay; 89-90)

Whereas critical thinking relies on those very qualities that are absent in mythical thinking.

Knight's account of the origins of culture is not, he emphasizes late in Blood Relations, a brand-new scientific paradigm, but instead fits squarely in the Marxist tradition of anthropology. In light of that, it is important to note, he writes, that Marx and Engels saw their revolution as scientific and believed that politics should be subordinated to science, not the other way around (perhaps contrary to common conceptions of Marxists): "Their idea was not that science is inadequate, and that politics must replace it or be added to it. It was that science--when fearlessly true to itself--is intrinsically revolutionary, and that it must recognize no other politics than its own. (Knight; 520)" No doubt the leading figures of the Enlightenment would agree.

Knight offers a provocative conception of science, one that appeals to me a great deal. It was this that I was reminded of as I read about the claims of the Enlightenment and the distinctions noted above between critical and mythopoeic thinking. The Enlightenment looked back to and claimed as their own those ancients who, in their view, fought the good fight, on behalf of scientific knowledge, against superstition. They might have been able to look even further back, had they but known or been able to recognize (though, obviously, the eventual ability to recognize depends on the Enlightenment having come first). In Knight's theory, the act of women coming together in solidarity, engaging in eventually ritualized sex-strikes, thus creating culture--this was science. It was science because they were able to pull together--indeed, had to pull together--to solve a basic set of problems affecting their very survival: How can they care for human infants, who require much more intensive care than do other primates, and still get food to eat and get men involved (with sharing food, with protection) and avoid continuous rape? As part of his concluding thoughts, Knight writes:

Humans first became scientific--first learned to share their experiential and other findings so as to compare notes and subject them to collective scrutiny and evaluation--thanks to their discovery of what solidarity can mean. Their science, like ours, was essentially their consciousness of their own collective strength. This consciousness could become encoded in shared symbols [...] because understanding themselves could be widely shared. Basic power inequalities and political conflicts--had these existed--would have obstructed such sharing and therefore distorted the objectivity of science. Thanks to the manner in which the human revolution had been achieved, such inequalities and conflicts were not basic to the alliances within which culture evolved. The very earliest cultures therefore had no need for religious myths. Although there was plenty of room for magic--for an awareness of the world-changing potency of such activities as dance, poetry and song--religion was not needed because there was no one to mystify, no one to exploit, no one whose conceptual world needed standing on its head.

But religious myths did arise, inequalities did emerge, men took power. How? Why?

Mysticism and convoluted theologism emerged only when masculinist institutions began reasserting themselves as the first step in an immensely drawn-out process which was eventually to result in class society and so-called 'civilization'. Constructs of 'the feminine' became deified only in proportion as real women, in the flesh and blood, were deprived of their power. Goddesses, god and other miraculous powers could enrich themselves only in proportion as ordinary humans were impoverished--robbed of the magic in their own lives. Only in the course of this process was genuine science--or 'the ancient wisdom', if you prefer to call it that--progressively subjected to the distorting lenses of sectional interest, partisan special pleading and political ideology masquerading as science.

Only when social life had become irretrievably conflict-ridden was the community-wide sharing of understandings no longer possible. At this point, humanity's basic capital of accumulated knowledge became increasingly fragmented, pulled in opposite directions, fought over and--in part--monopolized by ruling elites. To the extent that shared symbols could be preserved at all, they now meant one thing to one section of society, quite another to the rest. This is the symbolic essence of all secret or esoteric cults. (Knight; 521-522)

In his detailed survey of the ethnographic record, Knight notes in several places that, built into many of the myths, into the systems of taboos and the origin stories, is the admission by men that the true power originally belonged to women and that the men took it from them and now must prevent women from taking part in it.

This question of how the initial act or series of acts might have been transformed into such elaborately ritualized behavior, brings me to the other book that brought Knight's work back to mind. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life by William H. Gass, specifically the essay titled "The Stylization of Desire". Gass begins wondering why philosophers have ignored the basic biological functions, "as if to come near the breathing, sweating, farting body were an unphilosophic act." Indeed, "We always ski on the higher slopes when we can. Countless works of rich abstraction have been written about perception. I know none on the subject of chewing." The hungry person may satisfy his or her hunger in any number of ways. The poor person does not stand on ceremony, but eats what is available, when it is available; "where the purely hungry man wished food, the mildly hungry man with choice considers vegetables and meats and fruits, considers soups and casseroles and stews, and in the object of each new desire may arrange all its probable representatives according to his preferences." Eventually, circumstances permitting, people not only don't eat just to satisfy immediate, pure hunger, but have developed specific styles of dining, ritualizing the act in service of several desires, several ultimate needs, at once. The ritual becomes as important as the need it fulfills, before finally being identified with the need itself:

The most important step in the stylization of desire, as in the stylization of anything whatever, is the amalgamation of a means with its end. This fastens the whole force of desire as firmly on the method as a leech on a leg. Success henceforth requires not only the enjoyment of the end but the use of one path to it. When I want bananas only if they are stick-struck; when I want money, power, and the love of women only because I'm the heavyweight champ; when I want my julep in a silver cup; it's clear that I've proposed a new goal for myself, a goal which possesses more than the character of an object of lust, pride, or hunger, but an additional character, a ritual one. My desire has become precise in its object and concrete in its method until the method and the object have merged. [. . .] The child often fails to distinguish means from ends in any situation, so that Christmas, for example, isn't Christmas without a tree or without a certain cake or a visit to grandmother. The child, who is forever a stylist, identifies the celebration with selected ways of celebrating, and the child may feel, as the primitive man was supposed to, that any kind of success can be guaranteed only by repeating, and by repeating exactly, everything that was done the first time. The aim is good luck and the method is magic, for the actual cause lies unknown in the welter of surrounding conditions. The result is the security that proceeds from repetition, so that if the feeling sought is lost or if the prize is not forthcoming, something in the total order of the acts was wrong--some gesture, some item of clothing, some fragment of the sacred initial occasion left out. (Gass; 197-198)

If Knight's version of the origins of culture is correct, then we can start to imagine how the initial collective refusal by women led to taboos and rituals, and eventually to the abstractions and complicated ceremonies associated with religion and civilization. Thus Gass (who I could quote from all day, he's such a joy to read):

The amalgamation of means and ends, because it makes for a new aim, clearly shifts the original desire still further from its natural base. The fact that the straight expression of desire is hindered, not by want of objects but by increasing scrupulosity concerning means, makes contemplation possible, and this contemplation discovers what the object is, beyond its mere utility. There is an accompanying rise in value as well as an altered attitude and a changed emotion. Standards, at the same time, make their appearance, for before the only measurements were speed, economy, and success. Now, in addition, there are all those added forms and ceremonies, and judgment frequently turns on them: this gesture has not been made, that rite has been ignored; this sauce employs poor brandy, that caress is crude. (Gass; 200)

Gass is talking chiefly about the refinements of civilization, of course, but it should not be difficult to see how the process he describes relates to the elaborations of rituals and the construction of complex taboos, the beginnings of which had been lost in the mists of time and must now be reconstructed.

Moving back to Chris Knight. His work is exciting to me, because it offers a scientific basis for believing that an egalitarian society need not be just utopian fantasies in the minds of leftists. The idea that egalitarianism--an egalitarianism in which women played the central role--formed the basis for the existence of our very culture, is inspiring. I link this explicitly with my readings into the origins of and opposition to capitalism, and the various revolutionary moments in human history. As does Knight. As noted earlier, he emphasizes that his theory falls within the tradition of Marxist anthropology. This is important: the working class's ability and need to act in solidarity parallels the original solidarity of women. The sex-strikes forced men to act on terms established by women, who effectively liberated sexuality from its basic reproductive function. Knight writes:

When sex is used not just reproductively but politically--as a way of negotiating one's way through a conflict-ridden political landscape, or as a way of acquiring privileges or food--then this results in selection pressures placing sex increasingly under cortical rather than hormonal control. (Knight; 532)

This may sound uncomfortably akin to prostitution, and Knight notes the evident paradox that "human morality was prepared by prostitution", but he reminds us of Marx's description of capitalism as "the prostitution of labour", and concludes:

Capitalism, as the most developed system of universal labour prostitution there as has ever been, is within this paradigm only a dialectical 'return', on a higher plane, to the competitive sexual systems and forms of dominance of pre-cultural humans and of the higher primates. It is this which makes the future revolution the same as the human one: in both epochs, in modern times as in the paleolithic, the struggle for humanity is directed against the same kind of thing. (Knight; 533)

In recent years, Noam Chomsky has often closed his speeches or writings by stating that the very survival of the species may depend on the ability of people to stop the United States and the capitalist class from pursuing their single-minded and destructive goals. Knight ends Blood Relations on a similar theme, but with an admixture of hope:

As we fight to become free, it is as if we were becoming human for the first time in our lives. But in this sense, because it concerns becoming human, the birth process we have got to win [. . .] has in the deepest sense been won already. None of us would be here had it not been. To understand this may be to understand, and thereby to make ourselves the instruments of, the real strength of our cause and the inevitability of our emancipation as women, as workers and as a species.

I recommend Blood Relations to anyone interested in evolutionary science and cultural anthropology, certainly, but also anyone looking for inspiration in the continual struggle for freedom.

On Writing and Not Writing

Many writers have written eloquently about why they write. For me, the more appropriate essay might be "Why I don’t write". In my life I've oscillated between two extremes of perception when it came to writing. On the one hand, writers have something to say and a burning desire to say it, and so they have to write, and, if the writer is sufficiently talented, art simply flows onto the page. On the other hand, writers work hard at the craft of writing, laboring sentence by sentence, page by page, burnishing the prose until it gives off its particular luster, unique to that writer. In the event, the truth appears to be some combination of the two poles. In the first instance, I haven't written, I've told myself, because I've felt that I have nothing to say and that I feel no burning need to write. In the second instance, I've had a hard time imagining myself doing the work.

Doing the work, that’s the rub, isn't it? In recent years, as I've become more and more immersed in literature, the problem has presented itself again, in a different form: the work needed now is how to become a better reader. Attend to the words on the page, follow up on allusions, write about what I read. These are what I know I need to do, what I want to do. But still, I perceive the kind of work that might be necessary to be a better reader, and by extension a writer at all, and I blanch at the effort required. All too often, I've been able to slide by with a minimum of effort. I have, indeed, tended to make something of a virtue of this. But writing, like life, is not easy. When I read what other people have written about this or that book that I've read, I overlook as insignificant those observations that I also made myself. William H. Gass, writing about Paul Valéry's prose pieces in his preface to his own Fiction and the Figures of Life, wrote that Valéry "dared to write on his subjects as if the world had been silent." Too often, I do quite the opposite. I don’t write because the world has emphatically not been silent. Many things have already been said about a great many things, so I discount my own thoughts as obvious or unoriginal, even when thinking or writing for myself. As if the obvious is not important; as if originality is to be valued above all else. As if the less obvious and more original ideas and writing magically appear unbidden without work.

I don't tend to make Resolutions, but one thing I want to do this year is be freer with what I write. I am continually astonished by writers and what they dare commit to words, to write down at all, let alone publish for others to see. When I say "dare", I'm not really talking about shocking or controversial content, although certainly I find myself amazed that Philip Roth, for example, writes about sex the way that he often has. Not because I'm a prude, but because often it's simply embarrassing. Perhaps not a great example. Here's another one: when I read fiction that plays with form, or where the writer has adopted an extreme form, I am often impressed with the commitment. I've started reading Thomas Bernhard's Correction and, once again, as in Bernhard's other works, there are the lengthy sentences, the huge blocks of words, the accretion of detail, the repetition.

And then there's the willingness to address time-honored subjects, "as if the world had been silent" or even in full acknowledgment of the distinct lack of silence. Last year, I read Walter Benjamin's memoir Berlin Childhood around 1900. At the end of the book, there is a brief piece called "The Moon", excised by Benjamin in the 1930s, but published anew with this latest edition. In "The Moon", he writes:

When the nightlight, flickering, then brought peace to my hand and me, it appeared that nothing more remained of the world than a single, stubborn question. It may be that this question nested in the folds of the door-curtain that shielded me from noise. It may be that it was nothing but a residue of many past nights. Or, finally, it may be that it was the other side of the feeling of strangeness which the moon had brought on. The question was: Why is there anything at all in the world, why the world? With amazement, I realized that nothing in it could compel me to think the world. Its nonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more problematic than its being, which seemed to wink at nonbeing. The moon had an easy time with this being.

I find this passage beautiful, but I'm struck by the commonality of the anxiety. Why the world? Not an original problem. Benjamin troubled himself to write it down, and wrote beautifully about it, yes, but it's the trouble to write it down that interests me here. In the past, I would have told myself that there was nothing especially interesting about the question, or about having had the question, and any thoughts I might have had surrounding it I would have consigned to oblivion, because I simply wouldn't commit the simple question to the written word, which meant, further, that I wasn't able to develop the line of thinking, that I was consigning all related thoughts similarly to oblivion, that I was therefore not developing my thinking. My modest goal for this year, then, is to allow myself to commit more thoughts to words, to write more. To overcome the amorphous fears preventing me writing. Seemingly simple, but a world away from my established non-practice.

The Country of the Word

William H. Gass in his essay, "Imaginary Borges and His Books", in Fiction and the Figures of Life:

...in the country of the word, Borges is well traveled, and has some of the habits of a seasoned, if not jaded, journeyor. What? see Mont Saint Michel again? that tourist trap? far better to sip a local wine in a small café, watch a vineyard comb its hillside. There are a thousand overlooked delights in every language, similarities and parallels to be remarked, and even the mightiest monuments have their neglected beauties, their unexplored crannies; then, too, it has been frequently observed that our childhood haunts, though possibly less spectacular, less perfect, than other, better advertised, places, can be the source of a fuller pleasure for us because out familiarity with them is deep and early and complete, because the place is ours; while for other regions we simply have a strange affinity--they do not threaten, like Dante or the Alps, to overwhelm us--and we somehow find our interests, our designs, reflected in them. Or is it we who function as the silvered glass? Idea for a frightening story.

Music of Prose

The Summer 2006 issue of Rain Taxi included a very positive review (not online) by Scott Esposito of William H. Gass' latest collection of essays, A Temple of Texts. After praising Gass' prose and infectious enthusiasm for great literature and for writing, Scott writes:

Each essay is packed with an astonishing array of ornately wrapped information, yet this dense prose means that Gass's essays commonly feel more like a series of switchbacks than a well-defined path. Gass's strength is for orchestrating sentences and paragraphs, not entire essays, and he sometimes gets so involved in minutia and arcane references that his essays grind to a halt. Take, for instance, when an insightful comparison of Gaddis's The Recognitions and JR is hijacked by an overly deep reading of a paragraph from the second page of The Recognitions:

I particularly like the double t's with which our pleasure begins, but perhaps you will prefer the ingenious use of the vowel i in the sentence with which it ends ("which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla's difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin"), or the play with d and c in the same section. But these are rich streets and should be dawdled down...

Such opaque readings do little to illuminate a work....

When I read this passage, a couple objections jumped immediately to mind. For one thing, this piece on The Recognitions is not an "essay" per se, but originally appeared as an introduction (my personal favorite introduction, in fact), as did many of the offerings in this new book. He is not making an argument about The Recognitions, as one might find in an essay (that is, he is not trying to "illuminate [the] work"), so much as, by way of introducing it, suggesting that the reader has various pleasures in store. In this case, the reader who attends to the language (who listens to the music, as Gass likes to put it), has much to look forward to in Gaddis. And, I thought that Gass, by bringing the reader's attention to not just specific sentences or words, but even letters, is doing what he usually does, which is concerning himself primarily with language, and that to complain about this in Gass is to largely have missed what Gass is about. Indeed, Scott immediately admits that

perhaps it is unfair to criticize Gass for being obsessed with details; as his essays make clear, when reading he prefers the rich side streets to the quick boulevards, so it makes perfect sense that his criticism would reflect this. From his first essay collection onward, Gass's attention has been most focused not on the structure of a novel but on the use of language: its creativity, its elegance, and above all its physical sound.

I draw attention to this, not to pick on Scott, but to talk a little about Gass and his particular criticism. More than most critics, it seems, Gass wants us to pay attention to the language. More than that, he wants us to think about how the language forms the rest of what we think we "see" or understand while reading fiction.

Lately I've been reading Gass' early collection, Fiction and the Figures of Life. At any given time he may be talking about character or the nature of fiction, but always Gass is focusing on the language. In "The Concept of Character in Fiction" he bemoans the fact that so often "characters are clearly conceived as living outside language". Then he proceeds to walk us through the ways in which character emerges through the specific word choices the writer makes. First, he plays with the common idea that we "visualize" while we read, before finding it wanting:

The proportion of words which we can visualize is small, but quite apart from that, another barrier to the belief that vivid imagining is the secret of a character's power is the fact that when we watch the picture which a writer's words have directed us to make, we miss their meaning, for their point is never the picture. It also takes concentration, visualization does--takes slowing down; and this alone is enough to rule it out of novels, which are never waiting, always flowing on.

Gass shows us how characters only consist of what the writer gives them. This seems like an utter banality, but it's not. We might be told that a character is tall or fat or bald or whatever, and we might automatically visualize to some extent what that means, we fill in the blanks. But our blank-filling, here, is wrong. Our visualization of the character ends up endowing the character with more than what the writer has given it. If I have an idea of what a stock fat guy looks like, and all I'm told by way of physical attributes is that Mr. X is fat, enter stock image. This only gets in the way. So, Gass would have us attend to the words, consider the choices, consider how they sound, and how their sound is why they were chosen just as much if not more than their supposed meaning. And how this sound, this music, helps create whatever meaning comes through.

Later in this essay, Gass quotes from Henry James' story "The Birthplace":

Their friend, Mr. Grant-Jackson, a highly preponderant pushy person, great in discussion and arrangement, abrupt in overture, unexpected if not perverse in attitude, and almost equally acclaimed and objected to in the wide midland region to which he had taught, as the phrase was, the size of his foot...

Says Gass: "Mr. Grant-Jackson is a preponderant pushy person because he's made by p's". This might seem at first blush to simply be Gass trying to be clever or showy, but it's not. He says this because it matters that James has used this alliteration. It matters that "preponderant", "pushy", and "person" all begin with the letter p. He finishes this sentence thus: "and the rhythm and phrasing of James's writing here perfectly presents him to us." Characters come to us through language--which is to say, they are made up of the specific word choices made by the writer and the specific sounds those words make. And of course the same is true of everything else in a work of fiction.

When Gass singles out particular repeated sounds in The Recognitions, he asks the reader to consider such detail while reading. This is one of the many reasons I appreciate his criticism (another is the sheer joy it is to read).

Reading Rilke

Certainly not to be confused with the William H. Gass book of the same name.

No, I'm referring to my reading selection for the wedding, from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

It is ...good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person... it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

Alas, I must admit that I selected this passage out of one those wedding readings books. I have read neither the Rilke nor the Gass. Gass is, however, one of my favorite writers and certainly my favorite critic (admittedly the latter honor is largely by default, since I've not read much real criticism and have read three of Gass' books of essays).

Related: an excellent post over at CultureSpace on Gass' new collection of essays, A Temple of Texts:

...the distinctions that most interest me in this wide-ranging, opulent book are the ones Gass draws in the opening essay about the importance of literary classics. Having picked up A Temple of Texts not long after I brought home The Idiot, I began to think not only about the reasons we read Dostoevsky, but how we think about classics in the first place. I have long become bored with the tired, old arguments about the literary canon, about which books and authors are deemed essential. "Classics," Gass writes, "are by popular accord quite old and therefore out of date; while by the resentful they are representatives only of the errors of their age, their lines sewn always on the bias, their authors willing tools of power and privilege....

Gass...beautifully and cogently elucidates why classics matter.

I'm looking forward to reading this book. I'm also interested in Reading Rilke; I had been wary of it, mainly because I've never read Rilke's poetry, and, for that matter, am not a good reader of poetry. But, the book's subtitle, Reflections on the Problems of Translation, clinches it for me. I'm fascinated by translation questions, particularly as worked through by a writer the caliber of Gass.