The haiku is not for me

This n+1 essay, about Roberto Bolaño and his reception by American readers and critics, includes this passage (italics in original):

American critics and regular readers alike usually don't care for sweeping literary-historical arguments. And yet in recent years we have been celebrating Sebald and Bolaño as if we really do believe in some big metanarrative about the novel—one that proclaims that, even post postmodernism, the form remains in crisis. Sure, Sebald and Bolaño deal with fascism, and both died at the height of their powers. More decisive is that neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can't be a really important novelist anymore unless you can't really write novels.

In a post responding to this essay, Scott Esposito addresses this passage thus:

Of course, when the unsigned editorialist says "can't really write novels," he/she is referring to novels in the 19th century (and maybe early 20th century) sense. Sebald's and Bolano's works are certainly novels, just not in the sense that some critics would like novels to only be viewed as."

I've wondered why we insist on having the word "novel" encompass so much. Why must it be asserted that the books written by Sebald and Bolaño "are certainly" novels? Are they? What is a novel? A novel is, presumably, everything, the genre-less genre, as I've said previously. Those critics, such as perhaps James Wood, who appear to be seeking to "limit" the novel, must then emerge as the enemy. (Though even for Wood, the novel is so flexible as to be just about anything, so long as it is "real".)

I was recently reading through the archives at zunguzungu, the excellent blog written by Aaron Bady that has too late come to my attention, and I came across this post from March, about a talk given at Berkeley by Franco Moretti. Moretti made the "provocative point that the high aesthetic novel is more of an epiphenomena of a mass commodity culture than the transcendence of it", and the "major question . . . was why the Chinese novel didn't develop like the novel did in Europe" . . . there are all sorts of obvious historical factors Moretti addresses: capitalism, imperialism, China's pre-industrial development, and so on. For Bady, these sorts of questions normally bother him, because "Why shouldn't [the Chinese novel] be different?" The question for him is "why the Chinese novel even gets called a novel in the first place, why a term of art derived from the French word for 'new' under a very historically contingent set of circumstances, in Europe, would be considered appropriate (to anyone) for reference to the classic long fictive prose narratives in China." He goes on (italics his):

the intractable problem at its roots, which is whether a novel is a novel because of historical or formal characteristics. One narrative of the rise of the novel points to the historical circumstances, the social factors that produce a particular kind of textual object and invest it with particular meanings and significance. Another narrative derives it from a structural form: the novel is a fictional narrative which is long and written in prose. That these "objective" features are historically defined (what it means to be fictional, for example, requires a secular consciousness) needs to be suppressed, as does the fact that giving history a legible form requires treating unreliably contingent objective forms as if they really were objective. But while history and form define each other, and are really separable, neither do the narratives collapse into each other. Is Robinson Crusoe a novel because that's what it was called at a certain point in history, or because it achieved some essentially novelistic form? If the former, a historical paradigm, then there can be no Chinese novel at all, just something that looks superficially similar from a distance. Yet if its the latter, a formalist definition, then how can a Chinese novel be Chinese?

I remember I used to think it was strange that there were Japanese novels. In part, I'm sure this had something to do with the logographic form of writing: I had a hard time imagining such works reading as novels. (Are Japanese prose works even written logographically?) I generally dismissed this puzzlement as my own problem, but the question nagged at me on occasion, though usually it remained just out of focus. Anyway, pondering the Japanese novel, I would think about those forms we're taught in grade school that belong to this or that national culture. We would write imitations for class assigments--haiku being the example that comes most readily to mind. But clearly haiku is not a form truly available to the writer writing in English. Later I would think of older European forms--the sonnet, say--and think to myself that the sonnet is not available to the contemporary writer. I could set out to compose a sonnet, yes, but it would be at best pastiche; however well done, however beautiful (or, more likely, ugly), it would stand awkwardly in relation to literary history, imitative, inappropriate, suspect, wrong. Its form is not for me, just as I understood intuitively that the haiku is not for me.

I was never really sure what precisely to think about my problem with the Japanese novel, but Bady's post zeroes in on some of what was troubling me. What is a novel? It seems to me that it's become defined down as simply "prose narrative of a certain length". Gabriel Josipovici has argued that the narrative mode of the 19th century novel became so dominant (not least because of England's--and to lesser extent France's--role as imperial power, I would add), that we expect it to hold true for very different sorts of narratives. The Bible, for example, we approach as if it should yield the same sorts of effects as would a George Eliot novel. When it does not yield these effects, we find it wanting, incomprehensible; or, we read effects into it that are not there, and could not be, an approach with numerous interpretative and affective pitfalls of its own. Why should the effects be similar? Why should we read a Japanese prose narrative as if it followed the same rules, created the same effects, as a Dickens novel? Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

Literature is not Innocent

Following up on my post from last week, responding to Zadie Smith's essay in the New York Review of Books, "Two Path for the Novel": Why might the narrative modes of what Smith calls "lyrical Realism" not be justified? Not because they are old, or even necessarily because someone else has used them. I think there are a few reasons. Here I will discuss just one of them. They are not justified, not least because, to quote a character from Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, "Literature isn't innocent."

Literature is not innocent. What does this mean? Zadie Smith refers to "the Anglophone novel", a term that obviously covers a lot of area, given the extent of the British Empire and the widespread influence of both British and American cultural products. I think this is a clue. For Smith, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland represents the path of "lyrical Realism" (a term, Anthony Cummins suggests, possibly meant to specifically counter James Wood's famous denunciations of so-called "hysterical realism"); Mark Thwaite's favored term is "Establishment Literary Fiction". I'd like to revive for a moment the term "bourgeois novel". If we remember that the bourgeois novel was in cultural ascendance during the heyday of the British Empire, I think we can get closer to having a handle on it.

Let me revisit a portion of the passage from Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism that I have already excerpted. Said writes:

. . . the almost oppressive force of Marlow's narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

Yet neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz, Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of the Nellie, and Conrad. By that I mean that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else's experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aesthetically but also mentally unassailable.

While empire is pursued and maintained abroad, daily life in the metropolitan center continues in its shadow. Narrative papers over everything; everything is rendered comprehensible through narrative. The novel presents a world that makes sense, passing over certain details in silence, while other details make it abundantly clear how much the narrated world depends on the activities of empire, as Said shows, for example, with Sir Thomas Bertram's lengthy absences, attending to the far off Antiguan plantation, in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Said is far from reductively political; he neither condemns nor dismisses the classic European novels. On the contrary, he treasures them as great works of art. But he is arguing that the peace and prosperity of the English countryside in Austen's novel are not possible without the unseen violence of slavery, and that this fact is present in the novel, though obscured by most readings. And the same is true of the narrative form of the bourgeois novel in general (whether it be the Bildungsoman or imperial adventure or travel narrative or fictional biography, etc; thanks to Edmond Caldwell for the link). I think this basic point is indisputable.

In a post addressing Lionel Shriver's idiotic harangue against writers not using quotation marks, Dan Green reminds us that:

"Literature" of course is itself a concept that develops during the 19th century and after as an umbrella term that attempts to gather "poetry" together again with its now renegade forms, fiction and drama, precisely in order to make them available to the newly literate middle class as "good for" such readers. However, even this dilution of literary value--by which literature becomes valuable not in and for itself but as a tool of education and emergent nationalism--assumed that the appreciation of works of literature was something to aspire to, that "great books" required an elevation of taste and skill, although "common readers" could indeed reach this higher level.We now appear to have reached the point where literature can be relevant only if it turns itself into just another "inviting" mass entertainment.

It is not just the concept of Literature that develops in the 19th century, but the idea of Culture itself, its chief virtue being as "a tool of . . . emergent nationalism". I'm not so sure that this represented a "dilution of literary value", as Dan puts it, but he's of course right to note that this is when literature begins to appeal to a larger class of literate people, a class that needed to be incorporated into the dominant work of the day--which is not to say that writers set out to serve this function. But, as resistant to the idea of "learning" from literature as some of us might be, it can't be denied that one of the chief cultural functions of the novel was to normalize the reality and activities of Empire, nor that cultural artifacts contribute to what we "know" about the world, whether or not we are consciously aware of the specific contributions themselves. In his book, Said repeatedly stresses that it is "too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or American culture . . . prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire." However, it would be "historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies--whether in narrative, political theory, or pictorial technique--that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assure the West's readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire." And the novel does this work not just with its "content" but also through its formal properties, which of course can never be easily separated.

The fictional container that is the descendant of the bourgeois novel today can at times appear rather different than the Victorian novel of the 19th century. But just as capitalism has no trouble co-opting rebellion or counter-culture, or even eventually insurrection, for its own systemic ends, the novel sucks in everything around it. The novel purports to be the genre-less genre: it can and does contain anything. It has absorbed the techniques of the modernists, smoothing them out, transforming them into mere items in the writer's toolbox, as if those techniques had not been arrived at as a result of highly personal responses to what those writers perceived as an artistic crisis.

Returning to the question of innocence, focusing on the United States for a moment. One common theme in American history is the strange notion of American "innocence". It remains astonishing that, in a country founded on genocide and slavery, Americans have been able to appear innocent, if only to themselves. And yet the idea persists. The United States, and Americans generally, have good intentions, the story goes, and just don't understand--or even know about--all the damage that is caused by American so-called bumbling on the world stage. Not only do we act innocent of the crimes that maintain our standard of living, we innocently consume cultural artifacts as if there were no question at all that we have the absolute right to be entertained, and that our entertainment is untainted by the violence of the American enforcement of the global capitalist system, that our consumption of entertainment is innocent. But our pleasures do not exist in a vacuum. That pretty, well-written, journalistic novel has a pedigree, a pedigree of cultural work in service of Empire, the ongoing consequences of which we may choose to ignore as we read yet another iteration, but that choice is itself the function of this process and an enormous privilege.

Public Vice

I have to admit that there have always been apparently basic things about economics that have been incomprehensible to me. One example of this can be exemplified by an image that has, for me, been symbolic of the Great Depression as a whole: piles of apples, with prices set ridiculously low, yet going to waste, rotting, because still no one can afford them. Deflation, of course (link via American Leftist).

A few weeks ago, Paul Krugman, every Liberal's favorite economist, wrote about the decline in American consumption, the "long-feared capitulation of American consumers". In doing so, he touches on another example of what I'm talking about. He provides some numbers showing this decline in consumption and reminds us that this is unusual, since Americans "almost never cut spending". Americans, of course, have been without any manufacturing base for some time and have thus long since been relegated to the role of the world's consumers. Krugman doesn't say anything about this. He does, however, try to explain why the "timing of the new sobriety is deeply unfortunate". He writes:

. . .one of the high points of the semester, if you’re a teacher of introductory macroeconomics, comes when you explain how individual virtue can be public vice, how attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off. The point is that if consumers cut their spending, and nothing else takes the place of that spending, the economy will slide into a recession, reducing everyone’s income.In fact, consumers’ income may actually fall more than their spending, so that their attempt to save more backfires — a possibility known as the paradox of thrift.

Here, Krugman helps me to better understand what my problem has been. We are continually told that, collectively, we do not save enough--Americans' savings rate is effectively zero--while at the same time we are constantly told to consume more, that consumption will save us. Krugman's paragraph essentially makes it plain that the economic system does not serve people, rather people serve the system. Not that this was news to me.

My problem with the phenomenon of the rotting apples was that, in my youth and ignorance, I did not understand why the price of the apples mattered; I didn't understand why they couldn't simply be given to people. And yet, I felt that there must be some obscure reason, and I had no doubt it would be a good one and that if I studied economics I would grasp it. The fact, however, is that there is no good reason. But we've so internalized the idea that capitalism is the natural order of things that we simply accept the notion that food can and will go to waste alongside masses of people starving to death.

Krugman's article points to another element of capitalism that is deeply troubling. Any system in which "individual virtue can be public vice", in the manner in which he is discussing, is simply and profoundly wrong.

Since what I'm suggesting with the example of the apples sounds dangerously like communism, allow me to close with a quote from an article by David Graeber (link via From Despair to Where?--apologies to Stuart for quoting much of the same passage!):

Consider here the term "communism." Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply "doesn't work." Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs"—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says "hand me the wrench," the other doesn’t say, "and what do I get for it?"(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that's why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It's only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism.

(This passage is strikingly similar to that found in a pamphlet I read a few years back--called, I think, "What is Anarchism?". The simple idea was that anarchism is what we do everyday in order to get things done. I found this to be a remarkably liberating idea. Meanwhile, the other day I rejected a comment from a brave anonymous soul, which read as follows: "Please leave the Western world. We have no room for socialists. We like our people independent of mind and carefully guarding and accumulating property." No doubt.)

Not everything can be bought off

Towards the end of Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said discusses the different oppositions, intellectual and otherwise, to the systemic evils of capitalism and imperialism, employing along the way the work of Immanuel Wallerstein:

. . . the exilic, the marginal, subjective, migratory energies of modern life, which the liberationist struggles have deployed when these energies are too toughly resilient to disappear, have also emerged in what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "anti-systemic movements." Remember that the main feature of imperialist expansion historically was accumulation, a process that accelerated during the twentieth century. Wallerstein's argument is that at bottom capital accumulation is irrational; its additive, acquisitive gains continue unchecked even though its costs--in maintaining the process, in paying for wars to protect it, in "buying off" and co-opting "intermediate cadres," in living in an atmosphere of permanent crisis--are exorbitant, not worth the gains. Thus, Wallerstein says, "the very superstructure [of state power and the national cultures that support the idea of state power] that was put in place to maximize the free flow of the factors of production in the world-economy is the nursery of national movements that mobilize against the inequalities inherent in the world system." Those people compelled by the system to play subordinate or imprisoning roles within it emerge as conscious antagonists, disrupting it, proposing claims, advancing arguments that dispute the totalitarian compulsions of the world market. Not everything can be bought off. (p.334-5)

Forcing into Existence

"Of the canonical Latin Americans of the 20th century--Vallejo, Neruda, Borges, Paz, Lezama--Paz is probably the weakest poet, the one who is most willful in forcing poems into existence that don't really need to exist." - Jonathan Mayhew (italics mine)

Failure called Joy

". . . I saw that our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy." - Amadeo Salvatierra, in Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (p. 379)

Two paths for the novel?

In her recent essay in The New York Review of Books, "Two Paths for the Novel", Zadie Smith says some important things about fiction, things that are rarely discussed in mainstream venues such as the NYRB. In the essay, Smith discusses two books that have been widely praised: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (unread by me) and Tom McCarthy's Remainder (my review here). For Smith, with these two novels "a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel." She writes: "The two novels are antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other":

A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.

It may be too-perfect, but Netherland is also formally aware of the problems with "lyrical Realism" and its effects, effects it wishes to traffic in anyway. Smith spends some time showing how the book does this, how class and formal anxieties are packed into the book's narrative, both its content and its mode. Smith again: "It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill." Thus one path. McCarthy's Remainder represents for Smith, then, the other path, the refusal of Netherland, the refusal to traffic in the effects of "lyrical Realism".

Some have cluelessly read the piece as a "critique of Realism", which it is not. Others, such as the newly resurrected Rake, reduce the essay to merely another salvo in the "Realism v. Not-Realism debate". (And, though he is generally on the not-Realism "side" of this tiresome battle, the Rake is able to say he couldn't quite get on the Remainder bandwagon because its narrator is unpleasant, its repetition tiresome, its sentences not pretty enough. Thus, in my view, affirming the values represented by "lyrical Realism".) In a sense, Smith encourages this sort of reading of her essay by positioning the two novels in one of two "paths" the novel might take or have taken. In fact, this is my main quibble with what is an otherwise excellent, much-needed essay. For there is only one path, the well-worn one. The other so-called path is in fact an "anti-path". Just as there are no models, there is no path for the real writer.

Let's look at what Mark Thwaite has to say about this well-worn path, in a post addressing some of the responses to Smith's essay:

The Victorian novel with a few Jamesian knobs on (lyrical Realism, [Establishment Literary Fiction], call it what you will) is not the only path the novel can take. Its dominance means that each year a flood of Booker-ready novels in the sclerotic genre of literary fiction are declared masterpieces. Some of them are near-perfect embodiments of the genre which their near word-perfect amanuenses have bodied forth, but that perfection pushes them far away from literature itself.

A few Jamesian knobs, perhaps even some techniques devised originally by the Modernists, for we are not complete reactionaries, certainly not. And some may fetishize these Modernist techniques, or writers, to the point that others can comment that, "[t]here was something about Modernism that seems to have hypnotized people who liked it into thinking that there never had been anything else ever." Except that in this view the Modernists are reduced to innovators, ground-breakers--and one may simply "like" or "dislike" them--for it all comes down to entertainment, does it not? Indeed, all narrative is rolled in as part of "the novel", with occasional deviations from the accepted norm effectively reinforcing the view of what the novel really is. It is simply taken for granted that writers, as Gabriel Josipovici puts it, "are now free to plunder from all traditions, selecting what we want and dismissing the rest." But, without worshiping them as Gods (for how much would that miss the point?), what the Modernists were concerned with cannot be just swept aside, cannot be truly absorbed into the main stream of literary history. For it seems to me that the forgotten, ignored (or possibly just not understood?) meaning of Modernism is writing as an event, art as an event, where writing in the old, accepted, "conventional" ways are simply not suitable, not justified. This is language echoing what McCarthy himself has had to say on the matter: "Modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond." Whereas for most, Modernism was a moment in time, its "advances" duly absorbed into the body of the novel in the name of progress, what if we look at it, instead, as this event, an event that is ongoing, "eternal, interminable", in Steve Mitchelmore's words? (I've taken Steve's words from this highly suggestive post from last year, in which he names Dante as one of the top European Modernists. What might it mean to include Dante in such a grouping? What if we thought about literature in these terms? The implications of this are staggering.)

The question as to why there might be something wrong, suspect, unjustifiable about the "traditional" novel is a topic for a forthcoming post.

Noted: Edward Said

From Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow's adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad's way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890s the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. [...] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow's narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

Yet neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz, Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of the Nellie, and Conrad. By that I mean that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else's experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aesthetically but also mentally unassailable. (pp. 23-24; italics in original)

Noted: Gabriel Josipovici

Leafing through Gabriel Josipovici's novel Moo Pak for the purposes of wrapping up my brief notes on that novel, I happened upon this passage, late in the book, which I remember, but which in the wake of some of the anthropological stuff I've been reading jumped out at me even more:

The whole history of language and of human culture, he said, is to be found in the decision to renounce the immediate pleasure for the long-term benefit. Aaaaah to Ma-Ma, as Roman Jakobson has so well described it. The task of art, on the other hand, he said, is to find a way of returning to the Aaaah! but in such a way that it can be grasped by others, that it enters the sphere of the social. Is it a coincidence do you think, he said, that both Jakobson and Chomsky are Jews? That Chomsky's first published work was on the Hebrew language? I am of course not suggesting that Hebrew was the original language or is closer to the origins of language than any other language, just as I am not suggesting that Jews were the first at anything whatsoever. I am only wondering out loud, as others must have wondered, though no-one has, to my knowledge, put such ideas into print, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, he said, the power of Chomsky's work has perhaps retarded rather than advanced our understanding of the origins of human language. For, like so many thinkers before him, but now in full awareness of what he is doing, Chomsky has found the means of cutting man off from his past and so from all other animals. There is a fierce rationality about Chomsky, he said, which more than one commentator, taking up hints in his own writing, has compared to that of Descartes. I myself, he said, prefer to see it as a Jewish trait, like the burning intellectual intensity of a Spinoza or a Wittgenstein. But if he is to be compared to Wittgenstein, he said, it has to be to the young Wittgenstein, for though Wittgenstein lost none of his intensity as he grew older he came to see that our confusions and failures are at least as important as our triumphs and successes and as much in need of explanation. Confusion for Descartes, on the other hand, he said, is something to be eliminated, much as Luther and Calvin wished to eliminate sin. But I am with the later Wittgenstein in this, Jack said, that I believe we eliminate sin and confusion at the cost of eliminating our humanity. On the other hand, he said, we should obviously not make a fetish of failure and confusion.

In Brief: William Golding's The Spire

Brief notes on William Golding's novel, The Spire:

Father Jocelin has had an exciting vision. He has ordered an enormous spire be built, to the glory of God, on the site of the old church. Jocelin insists on it, over the objections of the building foreman, who says it can't be done--the foundation will not hold--and other church figures, who say it shouldn't be. We are limited to Jocelin's perspective, what he hears or understands, however dimly, is related in the third person. Strange happenings just beyond his knowing are hinted at, via his uncertain sense of them. It eventually emerges that Jocelin may be mad. It matters not that he is told that the foundation will not--cannot--hold if the spire is built. God will provide. Various calamities ensue as a result of his devotion to his vision.

With Pincher Martin last year, this is the second William Golding novel I've read. I've found them both surprisingly slow reads. It's not that the individual sentences are difficult, but somehow the prose, as with Handke, resists me. I am unable to get into a flow. Though perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps "getting into a flow" all too often allows me to float on the surface of narrative, without attending to what I'm reading. Perhaps this is what "smoothness of surface" is all about. Anyway, Golding's writing is knotty. At various times I have had difficulty even determining what precisely is being narrated. This was a bigger problem for me with Pincher Martin, with its more limited setting and sensory space (open sea, rock, air, brutal conditions), but here, too, the same single-minded devotion to a point of view--all is narrated as seen or understood by Father Jocelin's limited perspective--makes one yearn--I weakly admit--for an authoritative voice. Just as Jocelin is devoted to his vision, Golding is devoted to his. He does not waver. Except that, in both novels, we are unexpectedly graced, in the end, with a voice that knows.

In Brief: Two by Josipovici

Brief notes on Gabriel Josipovici's mid-90s novels, Now and Moo Pak:

Now is entirely in dialogue; not halting, half-sentences a la Gaddis, but discrete moments. Family situations, battles. As in any family, there are conversations about this or that character's future, conversations dwelling on the past, characters expressing anxiety about their own futures, and so on. A very quick read, perhaps too quick. This is one of those books where the title serves as an organizing principle, forcing the reader--or perhaps allowing the reader--to make sense of the narrative. It seems somehow appropriate that I read a novel called Now the day before Mirah was born.

I enjoyed Moo Pak more, after these initial readings at least. Constructed like a Bernhard novel--a single, book-length paragraph, with a narrator recounting the many remarks made by another, the other's concerns being the central focus of the book. Like a Bernhard novel, but lighter, not so relentless, not quite so despairing, though not without despair, or melancholy. Here, the remarks are made over the course of many walks the two characters share and they are stitched together to almost seem like one continuous monologue, with brief interruptions indicating shifting setting, some making it clear that multiple conversations are involved.

The speaker, Jack Toledano, the voice we hear in this would-be monologue, is very similar in some respects, though by no means identical, to Josipovici himself--certain biographical details and literary concerns--so that it often feels like Josipovici speaking to us, as if we were his walking companions. Kafka, Pascal, Wittgenstein, the English, life as an exile, Sterne, Shakespeare, and numerous other topics and literary figures are discussed, but most of all Jonathan Swift, who is in a sense the novel's presiding spirit. The title refers to Moor Park, where Swift lived and worked for many years; Toledano is reportedly working on a mammoth, 800-page history of Moor Park (one of several details, it seems to me, clearly differentiating him from Josipovici; I have a hard time imagining Josipovici writing either a history or an 800-page book). On the book cover, Frank Kermode blurbs the novel as "wisdom literature". I think the phrase is apt.

In Brief: Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Brief notes on Peter Handke's early novel, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (translated by Michael Roloff):

I've always liked the title of this book. It's suggested to me the excitement of a tension-filled moment. I've recalled those few times when I played goalie. At the ready. Alert. Alive. I wondered what a book with such a title would be like, and it remains suggestive. Certainly, I didn't imagine a novel about a soccer game! Indeed not. But we do have a former goalie, more or less wandering about, it seems aimlessly. Suddenly, he kills a woman. Why? Who knows? Least of all him. His struggle seems to be with being alive in the world, feeling authentic.

I've mentioned problems I've had with reading Handke in the past. Here, too, there is resistance. His fairly simple sentences seem unsteady; I have trouble moving from one to the other, though eventually I read on. I've read with interest Edmond Caldwell's two posts describing what he calls "the Handke Effekt". I haven't read either of the novels under discussion in those posts, but his observations seems relevant to my experience. Perhaps I hold on to expectations of a different kind of narrative, one that Handke refuses to offer, refuses because it is unjustified.

Not nearly as good as Across, it seems to me, but a worthy read.

Novel Thoughts

While I've read a number of novels since In Search of Lost Time, I probably won't get around to writing much about them. But that doesn't mean I don't have anything to say about any of them, however brief or truncated. Here are notes on some of them; other novels have their own posts.

Molloy, Malone Dies, & The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett:
Gabriel Josipovici has written in a few places about how, as a young man feeling urgently the need to write, he felt overwhelmed by the examples set by such writers as Tolstoy, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot. Their works seemed complete, hermetically sealed, sure of themselves. It was writers like Proust and T.S. Eliot who helped show him the way out of his problem, with their inclusion of, awareness of, failure in their work. Beckett, too, of course. "Fail better", and so on. I've felt a twinge of recognition in reading Josipovici's words. As I've said here before, my problem was even more acute: I refused to even acknowledge the need to speak. There were however times when words would occur to me, formal ideas perhaps, and I'd immediately discount them as invalid. Which brings me to Beckett's prose trilogy. I actually read these before finishing Proust. Where I'd previously said that I didn't want to read any other fiction till I'd finished In Search of Lost Time, I found myself bogged down, unable to get started with the fifth volume, The Captive. With none of my available non-fiction doing it for me either, I opted for Beckett. It was just what I needed: I quickly read Molloy and Malone Dies, though The Unnamable was somewhat slower going, as might be expected. I feel a great affinity with his writing, in a way that's hard to describe, so I won't try to cram it in here. But there's something familiar here, a recognition. I'll be reading a lot of Beckett in the coming years.

Bartleby & Co. and Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (both translated by Jonathan Dunne): It's uncanny: here is a writer seemingly addressing the very things I've been thinking about, perhaps without my always knowing it, though certainly the correspondence with what have been ongoing concerns here is obvious. Lars is right, of course, there are no models. But it was nice, semi-inspiring even, to come across such assemblages of writers confronting these similar types of problems. Writers of No; refusals; the sickness of literature, literature as sickness. I must, however, admit that my attention flagged while reading both, and the second was in particular a slog for me to finish. Almost as if he'd made his point, and I grew increasingly weary of the elaboration (though no doubt he needed to see his conception through, and can I blame him?).

To the Lighthouse and Orlando by Virginia Woolf:
Ten months into the year, and I've only read two books written by women? Wow. Woolf was long one of those writers, like Joyce, who represented for my imagination "difficulty" in literary Modernism. This, of course, was without reading a word of her writing. Mrs Dalloway changed that slightly, some years ago. These even more so. They were a great pleasure to read, particularly To the Lighthouse. In both, I especially enjoyed the short passages describing the artist's vision and process, one of which I excerpted elsewhere. Other than The Waves, which is already on my to-read list, what else of Woolf's fiction should I read? All of it?

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee:
I'm with Waggish and Steve on this one. Actually, in this case, I suspect I will have more to say about it. For now let me just say that I'm amazed that readers still insist on assuming that the "opinions" in this book are necessarily held by J.M. Coetzee himself, and that their content have much to do with the success or failure of the book.

The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld (translated by Jeffrey Green):
This is the first Appelfeld novel I've read that takes place after the Holocaust. I'm sorry to report that I have very little to say about it at this time.

Allow to see

Some months back, I wrote here about my own memories, awakened physically it seemed to me. At the end of the piece, I appended a passage from Proust. In a comment to that post, Lloyd Mintern argued that the truth value of my own writing was, in sense, negated, or at least undermined, by my inclusion of Proust's writing. I had to conclude that he was right: as writing of its own, as writing qua writing, it works better without the Proust passage, the addition of which feels like a strange appeal to authority, as if Proust could authorize my own memory, as if he were proof that the memory weren't bogus. I recall that even at the time, it felt tacked on, and the transition awkward, at best.

Why did I include it? I considered possible explanations: I was showing my work; or, I had had a larger piece in mind, in which Proust played a key part, which I never got around to finishing, but like the novelist who doesn't want to waste all that precious research, I felt the need to leave it all in. These reasons are part of it. But more than that, I was making a claim, I think. My experience was not a subset of Proust's, but in a very real sense, I was able to take note of it, to think about it, in part through having the experience of reading Proust. And, in a way, through this taking note, I was able to in fact have the experience at all. Instead of a fleeting, forgotten moment, it becomes a memory, something I take the trouble to record, which recording allows me to perhaps pursue the line of thought further, to facilitate further experiences, further memories. Isn't this in part what the experience of literature is for? One of literature's uses, so to speak? To allow us to see?

This experience, once written, what becomes of it? Does it escape me? Is it too literary? Does it, by existing, misrepresent the experience as I experienced it? In a sense the piece was an attempt to bring the personal to the fore, in the context of, or under the influence of, my reading. But is it mine anymore? I can tell you that I still have the memory of the experience of having the memory come to me--but in the telling, does it become something else? Does it become other than fact? Not false, but a truth separate from fact? A literary truth?

It's name is socialism

Jodi Dean:

McCain's biggest mistake, then, seems to be his demonstration that he would do anything to be elected. Anything at all. It's like his enjoyment is on display and it is shameful. We are ashamed at having to confront our enjoyment of the excesses of feeling, consumption, violence, and negligence which we've indulged over the last eight years. I wonder if this is a turning point, where we might grow up a little bit, where we might put aside our cravings for gratification and stimulation, for so much more of everything that everything becomes shit, an excess that stains and covers us.

McCain has actually named this maturity. He has meant to slur it and the Democrats are too afraid, at least right now, to claim it as their own. He's named this maturity that is the other of the barbarism of his campaign and of the last eight years.

It's name is socialism.

Anthropology of Money

The following passages are a small portion from a fascinating article titled "Notes towards an anthropology of money" by Keith Hart (I don't remember where I found the link, though no doubt it had something to do with Stuart at From Despair to Where?):

Traders are unusual people (Hicks 1969). They own things they neither made nor will use, but still claim the right to the value of their sale. They are willing to give up their goods in return for payment; and their customers then have the right to do what they like with them. This is so commonplace in our world that we think of it as eternal. It is in fact quite rare within the range of known human societies. What gives buyer and seller confidence that they each have exclusive rights to dispose of the commodity? The power of state law reinforces their contract and usually supports the money involved. They may operate as isolated individuals only because of the huge social apparatus backing their exchange.

If trading with money is a special institution, how else have people circulated objects between themselves? In barter two parties exchange goods taken to be equivalent; the timing and the quantities must be right; both sides must have the right to dispose of their goods without involving others; there is a risk of conflict in haggling. How much simpler to persuade you to give up your goods in return for money that you can hold for purchases from others in different times and places. But it is not convincing that such a complicated arrangement as barter would prevail before people thought of inventing money.

Barter is often found where markets using money prices are ineffective, usually because of a shortage of liquidity. [...]

I have been struck by the tenacity with which ordinary people cling to the barter origin myth of money. Can this merely be an example of Keynes' (1936: 383) famous claim that our ideas are nothing more than the echoes of a defunct economists theory? A Sudanese friend once asserted that the original economic system of his country was barter between villages; and then, when pushed, he admitted that these villages had been involved with merchant networks and money for thousands of years. It would be more plausible to locate the origins of exchange in the gift, as Mauss (1990 [1925]) suggested. But this would give priority to a personalised conception of money, seeing markets as a form of symbolic human activity rather than as the circulation of dissociated objects between isolated individuals. The general appeal of the barter origin myth is that it leaves the notion of the private property complex undisturbed.

[...]

The contributors to Parry and Bloch (1990) share the view that indigenous societies around the world take modern money in their stride, turning it to their own social purposes rather than being subject to its impersonal logic. The underlying theory is familiar from Durkheim (1965 [1912]). There are two circuits of social life: one, the everyday, is short-term, individuated and materialistic; the other, the social, is long-term, collective and idealised, even spiritual. Market transactions fall into the first category and all societies seek to subordinate them to the conditions of their own reproduction, which is the realm of the second category. For some reason, which they do not investigate, money has acquired in Western economies a social force all of its own, whereas the rest of the world retains the ability to keep it in its place.

[...]

Where does the social pressure come from to make markets impersonal? Weber (1981 [1927]) had one answer: rational calculation of profit in enterprises depends on the capitalist’s ability to control product and factor markets, especially that for labour. But human work is not an object separable from the person performing it, so people must be taught to submit to the impersonal disciplines of the workplace. The war to impose this submission has never been completely won (see Parry infra). So, just as money is intrinsic to the home economy, personality remains intrinsic to the workplace, which means that the cultural effort required to keep the two spheres separate, if only at the conceptual level, is huge.

Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control. Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside. Commodities are goods because we consume them in person, but we find it difficult to embrace money, the means of their exchange, as good because it belongs to a sphere that is indifferent to morality and, in some sense, stays there. The good life, instead of uniting work and home, is restricted to what takes place in the latter.

This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between themselves as subjects and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. Today money is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful. If Durkheim (1965 [1912]) said we worship society and call it God, then money is the God of capitalist society.

Scattered thoughts on the election

I've spent months deferring writing anything about Barack Obama and the presidential campaigns. I've been short of time, yes, but the truth is that it would be all too easy to write a long post detailing all the problems with Barack Obama and why I'm wary of the excitement others have for him and why I don't think he offers what this country needs at this time (which, frankly, is drastic change, decades late, in the form of some kind of bottom-up non-capitalist socialism or communism; see, incidentally, this mostly excellent video lecture explaining the economic crisis, from Professor Richard Wolff of Amherst, in which he proposes just that. Link via the new blog Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008 (thanks to Infinite Thought for pointing to this blog), video first seen at Lenin's Tomb).

But, sadly, it's pretty clear that Obama is just about the best that the two-party system can plausibly come up with for a Presidential nomination. He's a vastly better candidate than either Gore or Kerry were (which is not to say that he is substantially different from them). And people are genuinely excited about him, which is something. Excitement is not something to be dismissed lightly, though, again, I'm wary that people expect things of him that he's not prepared to even attempt to deliver. (I remember being excited about Bill Clinton, it saddens me to admit.) Regardless, it remains mind-boggling that, for example, anyone could view any of the debates between Obama and McCain and conclude that McCain is worth supporting or voting for.

(By the way, the morning after the final debate, I was making just this observation to one of my bus-riding companions--that I have numerous problems with Obama, but find McCain repellent in every way, utterly and always devoid of integrity, incoherent, and so on, and inconceivable that anyone could have watched the debate and decided that McCain was their man--when another rider interrupted and wanted to know what I didn't like about Obama. I started off with his odious foreign policy, that he's a serious hawk whose version of "leaving Iraq" doesn't look much like leaving, etc . . .I didn't get very far, because he interrupted again and asked if I thought the United States should just pull its troops out of Iraq. Yes, in fact, I said. No, he countered, and said further that the United States must stay in Iraq because the major conflict in the world today is between the Christian world and the Muslim world and the U.S. is needed to stop terrorism and has been spreading democracy in the region, witness this or that election, etc. etc., blah blah blah . . . I didn't know what to say. I could have had a conversation with someone arguing that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq, as wrong as they'd be, but I wasn't expecting this kind of argument--I didn't know that normal people spouted reductive versions of Samuel Huntington's stupid, racist, discredited "clash of civilizations" thesis. What can you say to that? I can talk to people with whom I disagree, but some positions are so wrong that I often simply don't know where to begin and I either say nothing or try to say too much in too short a period of time, which only contributes to the trivialization of discourse. Is it my job, on a ten-minute bus-ride, to hold court on recent geo-political history? It is not. I held my own as best I could, but have to admit that I did indeed sputter incoherence at least once.)

(Regarding that last debate, I will say that I learned one good thing from McCain. It was news to me that Joe Biden had voted against the first Gulf War. Good for him! For McCain this was just one time among many when Biden was wrong about foreign policy, it being naturally one of the few times he was actually right.)

Anyway, though Obama is the best the two parties can come up with, he remains a center-right figure of limited vision. But he nevertheless pays lip service to worthy values, and it is these values that matter to his supporters. And it is this, along with the ongoing lunacy of the Republican Party, that makes his candidacy worth supporting. Steven Shaviro made an excellent argument along these lines in two posts from September. In the first one, he writes:

no matter how hypocritical the Democrats are [...] — nonetheless, the fact that they pay lip service to human rights, human dignity, and freedom from unnecessary suffering makes them morally superior to the Republicans, who are so crassly cynical that they overtly and positively revel in the prospects of torture, bigotry, destroying the environment for quick corporate profits, and enriching the already-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons [...]. As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression.

In the present circumstances, this means that Obama’s rhetoric of hope, no matter how vapid and empty it may actually be, still matters. Anyone who thinks that Obama will actually change things is in for severe disappointment if he wins. It’s pretty clear that Obama will do no more than restore Clintonian neoliberalism, in place of the revanchist militarism and rampant looting and pillaging that characterizes the current Bush-Cheney regime (and that McCain, for all his promises of “change”, will do nothing to alter). In other words, Obama may well rescue us somewhat from the nightmare of the last eight years, but only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante, with its foreign bombings and domestic “rationalizations” of the economy, that we rightly objected to in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that Obama, Biden, and company pay lip service to humane values that they will not actually uphold is in itself a cause for hope, for maintaining a “hope we can believe in,” or (to quote a past Presidential candidate whom it is now taboo to mention) for “keep[ing] hope alive.”

We should vote for Obama because

we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes.

Shaviro's second post is a discussion of the idea of evil, in the wake of the discussions that took place in the comments at his blog, and also in response to two posts by Jodi Dean and subsequent discussions at her blog.

(For the record, I voted for Ralph Nader in each of the last two presidential elections. I have no trouble with either vote, nor do I have a problem with people voting for Nader again this time, or for that matter for Cynthia McKinney. I've considered writing a lengthy defense of both those votes and of Nader himself and his candidacies, in part because it keeps coming up: Liberals keep dragging Nader and Nader-voters through the mud; each time something awful happens, be it a terrible Supreme Court decision or a certain military action, you can still see blog comments blaming Nader for it. An argument that Nader and those who voted for him are somehow responsible for the Bush presidency is not one that can be fruitfully defended if one is interested in the facts. I intended to explain why, at interminable length, and also why I still believe the 2000 vote in particular was the right thing to do at the time, but I don't have the heart for such an endeavor anymore--or possibly I'm just tired of being accused of "not getting it", or worse, of being a racist by tiresome, over-indulged commenters at other people's blogs.)

(Before concluding, let me offer yet another parenthetical and say that there have been some things I've liked about Obama. I was very impressed by this speech about religion, for example. I was less impressed by the much-ballyhooed speech on race, though he did say many important things worth saying in it, dragged down as it was by the awful boilterplate about Israel and fact-challenged distancing from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On the latter, I'd meant to point to a few analyses I found of value way back in March, but I got bogged down and distracted. Here are two: Tim Wise, in CounterPunch, typically excellent on Obama, Wright, and "the Unacceptability of Truth" to white America; and I Hear a New World's brilliant post linking Wright's oratory to African American popular music, including linking the now-infamous "God damn America" phrase to Nina Simone's classic "Mississippi Goddamn".)

On Saturday, we attended another Iraq Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier event, at 2640, followed by a not well-attended anti-war march. One of the panel members at the event was Michael Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who's written articles appearing at TomDispatch, Z, Asia Times, and others, and has written a book titled War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (which I'm currently reading; it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good). Towards the end of the Q&A session, the panel was asked whether there was any glimmer of hope with the upcoming election; that is, would there be any substantive change in policy, in terms of the continuation of the war and occupation? Schwartz replied that the only glimmer of hope he could discern was that the economic crisis would get so bad that the United States could literally not afford to keep troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, whether combat or occupation, and be forced to withdraw. I think it's fairly clear that he's correct. Now, Obama is invested in the American imperial project--he merely believes he can manage it better--and he is a proponent of neo-liberalism (with figures like Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker as close advisers, why would we think anything different?), and so on. But the truth is that, with Obama, under such circumstances one can at least imagine him being able to modify his policies and move toward more genuinely populist positions, however difficult they might be to implement. One can imagine no such thing with John McCain.

The Letter

Very early in Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles, before we encounter the Prince or any of the other grotesque character portraits, the narrator mentions a letter he had recently sent to his father. He describes it:

. . .I had tried to sketch the uneasy relationship among us three, between him and me and between him and my sister and between me and my sister. . . [...]

In the letter I had tried to define certain things about our relationship by citing seemingly simple but to me extremely important details. In the writing I had taken the greatest pains not to offend my father. Nor to offend anybody. From my years of observation I found it fairly easy to sketch a picture of us that could be considered truthful from all three sides. My letter had been composed very calmly; I did not allow myself to show any excitement, although I did not evade the central matters that concerned me [. . .] I had long wanted to write such a letter and had started on it repeatedly, but had each time been overcome by doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting. It had always been impossible for me to write to him. Each time I would immediately become aware of the awkwardness of suddenly expressing in black and white things that for years had only been private thoughts, speculations. Then too I was checked by a reluctance to bring up possibly long-forgotten matters as essential evidence for my view of us. For I would have had to proceed with sincerity and therefore ruthlessness, and yet show consideration for all concerned. That, too, made such a letter impossible for such a long time.

This letter sounds to me like an excellent description of Kafka's famous letter to his own father. Unlike the letter sent by this narrator, Kafka's letter was apparently never received or read by his father, because, I believe, of his mother's intervention. One can see why she would have stopped it from being read. While in many respects it is a model of understanding and fairness, there is no sense that Kafka's father, if he in any way resembled the portrait that emerges from the letter, could have read the letter as anything other than an affront. And this is not necessarily to take Kafka's "side" against his father, whatever that might mean at this juncture far removed from the situation. But the letter, more than any real attempt to explain anything to his father, really reads like a performance, just as any piece of writing is a performance. Kafka performs a version of himself for the purposes of his letter. And perhaps he was being as scrupulously honest as it was possible for him to be. Even so, the letter remains a performance, a writing, something to which a real-life figure, it seems to me, could find all but impossible to respond to. Bernhard's narrator speaks of "doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting", and he's right, is he not? There comes a time, in some relationships, when such an accounting is quite beside the point--too late to do anyone any good--and in others, if the gulf in communication is enough to precipitate this kind of letter, then what good could it do anyway, however well intended, other than as a way of performing one's own confession, one's own account, one's own perspective?

Notes on Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles

In Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles, the narrator is a student, home from school, accompanying his father, a doctor, on his rounds. Unlike most of the other Bernhard novels I've read, in which the narrator is in a sense a conduit through which another character's sensibility is conveyed, in all its contradictions, with occasional stretches of the narrator's own outlook, itself often enough dominated in some way by the other, the first part of this novel is devoted to encounters with multiple characters. Here, the narrator and his father visit numerous patients, suffering from some malady or other, and we get commentary of sorts from the narrator, as well as his father, along the way. Some of these encounters are very brief, others are many pages in length. The husband of a woman killed by a drunk in their inn. An elderly woman on her deathbed. A businessman talking at length about the relative qualifications of applicants for a job he has posted. And so on. Each character, visited as part of the rounds, or otherwise encountered on the way, walks onto the page, alive for a moment, before exiting. We encounter them, as the narrator does, as individuals, however damaged. In the narrator's comments and his father's, we get the sense that these people are doomed: doomed by their environment, by their parents, teachers, institutional context. These people are grotesques, the gargoyles of the title, twisted into ugliness.

For an example of this sort of commentary, the narrator and his father stop to eat at one point. As they leave:

We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.

Earlier, speaking of a man whose death he'd witnessed, his father reports that he'd seen on his face "a man's accusation against a world that refused to understand him". Later the narrator, speaking of a Turk who'd left home to work in the gorge described in the novel, and who is made fun of and has only a kind of slavery to look forward to if he stays, thinks to himself:

How destitute the Turk's life at home must have been for him to end up in this gorge in Central Europe, I thought. The gorge is a cruel betrayal of him.

This kind of thing is fairly common in the first part of the novel, then halfway through they visit the Prince Saurau, with whom we stay for the rest of the novel. Here we are in more familiar Bernhard territory. This is early Bernhard, and I'm tempted to say that the second half of the novel is the writer perhaps settling into his form. As with later novels, such as The Loser and Old Masters, we again have blocks of text devoted to the rantings of someone other than the narrator, through the narrator's memory of the event (I note here that in this recent post, I miswrote on this score when I said that it is Bernhard's narrators who rail against the absurdity of life, though surely they do some of that, too; they are not merely the delivery system for another's opinions) . Here, the narrator’s father explicitly tells the narrator that the Prince is "mad", a definitive assessment not normally given by a character in a Bernhard novel (so my memory tells me anyway; I should keep that in mind as I re-read his books). Thomas Bernhard's novels can be relentless, exhausting reads. Here, the exhaustion factor is mitigated by the inclusion of the earlier encounters before the Prince. The attraction, again, is the voice, the cerebral pulse, of the Prince, similar but not identical to that of characters in Bernhard's other works.

Though an enjoyable read--it's always a pleasure to read Bernhard, exhaustion notwithstanding--Gargoyles feels minor in comparison to, for example, the two novels mentioned above, to say nothing of two I haven't read yet: Correction, which is so often touted as his masterpiece, or Extinction, claimed as a favorite by at least one reader.

Excess of Faith

Responding to k-punk's response to Barbara Ehrenreich's piece on "How positive thinking wrecked the economy", Mark Thwaite writes:

A considered and detailed debunking of the term "confidence" really needs to take place. That the global economy is in such tatters because of a lack of "confidence", a lack of faith in other words, is astonishing proof of the validity of Marx's theory of reification, but beyond that it shows that a profound irrationality sits at the heart of the global social system. A social system that claims it can never be bettered or changed or destroyed is, it clearly turns out, based almost entirely on our faith in it! The astonishing amount of energy -- and money -- being mobilised by governments, politicians and journalists to try to keep us keeping the faith shows clearly that it is time for us all to dream again of better worlds.

I would say, rather, that the economy is in tatters not because of a lack of faith, but because of an excess of faith, a misplaced faith in capitalism. This faith isn't limited to those traders who, in fits of panic or elation, cause the stock market to bounce up and down in such dramatic ways as we've seen so much of in the last two weeks. This faith is just as much in evidence in those of us who invest in the market in our own, perhaps small, ways. We have "confidence" that the market will recover, sure, but we have, ironically, ultimate faith in the rationality of capitalism. We're sold a bill of goods about freedom, about the naturalness of the capitalist economy (economic Darwinism, you know: competition is only natural, etc.), and we buy into it wholesale. How many of us who would call ourselves resolutely anti-capitalist nevertheless have bought into the chimera of the 401(k)? We can all retire rich, is that it? All of us? We'll all draw out at the height of the market? How do we think it's possible? How did we ever think there was ever going to be enough money to cover us all in our dotage, with the fantasy of compound interest? This is misplaced faith, potentially far more damaging than what most religions cook up.

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

. . .because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through
it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. The
mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology.
But who would trust a can wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by
adults to be the purpose of education?

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

Is there anyone who has not once been stunned, emerging from the Métro into the open air, to step into brilliant sunlight? And yet the sun shone a few minutes earlier, when he went down, just as brightly. So quickly has he forgotten the weather of the upper world. And as quickly the world in its turn will forget him. For who can say more of his own existence than that it has passed through the lives of two or three others as gently and closely as the weather?

Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers "enter, fleeing." The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of nonparticipating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter "fleeing" takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of onlooking strangers. (pp. 90-91)

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

A descriptive analysis of bank notes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equaled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naïvely than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbersm, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units, are a world of their own: ornamenting the façade of hell. (p. 87)

Noted: Roland Barthes

Two from The Pleasure of the Text:

. . . any completed utterance runs the risk of being ideological. (p.50)

And:

Everyone can testify that the pleasure of the text is not certain: nothing says that this same text will please us a second time; it is a friable pleasure, split by mood, habit, circumstance, a precarious pleasure (obtained by a silent prayer addressed to the Desire for ease, and which that Desire can revoke); whence the impossibility of speaking about this text from the point of view of positive science (its jurisdiction is that of critical science: pleasure is a critical principle). (p. 52)

Mirah at two months

Mirah was two months old yesterday; here she is this past Sunday, trying to figure it all out, entranced by the leaves and sun and sky (that's me holding her, lying back on a picnic bench):

Stan Goff: open letter to Christian soldiers

A few weeks late on this one. Stan Goff's "Open Letter to Christian US Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan". I have written on numerous occasions here about my softening attitude towards religion over the years--I think the Left makes a big mistake in demonizing the religious, in identifying religion only with its most frightening manifestations--in part because it's not going away, but also because I think it can be argued, convincingly, that religion is what made us human in the first place (again, see for example, Chris Knight's article here: ". . . only a creature that has become immersed in a world of shared fantasy - in a sense only a religious creature - can have language").

In any event, though I am not prepared to take the personal step he has taken (conversion to Christianity), I admire Stan Goff's courage and commitment, and he remains an astute observer of the current situation and an invaluable asset in the ongoing battle for freedom. Here is a very tiny excerpt:

America is now Rome. You are Rome’s army of occupation. To the Roman soldier, when Jesus passed down the dusty byways of his occupied land, he appeared no more or less than a random Iraqi or Afghan appears to you.

What do you look like to them?

[...]

You will hear people say that this burnt out veteran has no authority to speak as a Christian on these matters. And I am burnt out; and I did come to Christianity late in life. But I am not making any of this up. Honest and fearless Christian theologians of the ecumenical, prophetic, and evangelical churches have spoken out against war, and in exactly the terms presented here. I bring nothing original to this plea for obedience to the God of the Nazarene.

I write to you as one who has shared your experience, not that of the clergy or the Academy. I have known your position, trapped between the regrets and guilt of the past and the anxieties of the future, plodding against the current of Holy Spirit to clutch at the "esteem" of your militarized nation, "proving" yourselves again and again to your peers who define masculinity and human value by the ability to risk one’s own safety to dominate or destroy others.

That is who I was before I was baptized into who and whose I am, and that is why I can tell you that the risk you must take is the risk not to dominate. It is the risk of losing the esteem of those who "know not what they do."

The whole thing is well worth reading.

Poverty Poverty Knock

Lyrics to "Poverty Poverty Knock", as recorded by Chumbawamba on English Rebel Songs 1381-1984, currently on heavy rotation hereabouts:

'Poverty poverty knock,' my loom is a saying all day
Poverty poverty knock, gaffer's too skinny to pay
Poverty poverty knock, keeping one eye on the clock
I know I can guttle when I hear my shuttle go, 'poverty poverty
knock'

Up every morning at five,
I wonder that we keep alive
Tired and yawning in the cold morning
It's back to the dreary old drive.

(Repeat chorus)

Oh dear we're going to be late
Gaffer is stood at the gate
We're out of pockets, our wages they'll dock it
We'll have to buy grub on the slate

(Repeat chorus)

And when our wages they'll bring,
we're often short of a string
While we are fighting with gaffer for snatching
We know to his breast he will cling

(Repeat chorus)

Sometimes a shuttle flies out and gives some poor woman a clout
There she lies bleeding but nobody's heeding
Oh who's going to carry her out?

(Repeat chorus)

Oh dear, my poor head it sings
I should have woven three strings
My threads are breaking and my back is aching
Oh dear, I wish I had wings

Poverty poverty knock
Poverty poverty knock
Poverty poverty knock

In a Nutshell

From The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century, by Samir Amin (translation by James Membrez):

Capitalism has reached a stage in its development where its victim (its opponent) is no longer formed exclusively by the proletariat, whose labor it exploits, but by humanity as whole, whose survival it threatens. [...] In two areas, liberal capitalism (and doubtless capitalism, period) is already an obsolete system: in its relations with the peasantry (half of humanity) and in the waste of the planet's natural resources that its continual deployment entails.

The continuing accumulation of capital henceforth requires the destruction of peasant societies, which make up half of humanity, through the spread of a policy of "enclosures" on a world scale, without the system being able to employ the peasants, who have been chased from the countryside for industrial activities and profitable services. The size of the challenge posed by the increasingly rapid construction of a planet of shantytowns should not be underestimated.

It also leads to the rapid exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, the accelerated destruction of biodiversity and the exacerbation of the threats that strongly affect the ecological balances that are essential for the reproduction of life on Earth. Incontestable quantified data exist which demonstrate that capitalist civilization cannot continue its destructive expansion for long. Preserving the way of life of the United States alone would lead to pillaging all of the resources of the planet for its sole benefit. The energy crisis has already produced military aggression in the Middle East. "The American way of life is non negotiable," the president of this country reminds us. In other words, the extermination of the "redskins," who hinder U.S. expansion, will be continued.

Chris Knight in the Weekly Worker

From Despair to Where? points me to this great, fascinating, inspiring, timely article titled "Science, Religion, and language" in the Weekly Worker by our old friend Chris Knight (see my post about his important book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture). A few key passages follow.

On hunter-gathers and "primitive communism":

It is not just that hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, that they share and they do not have private property. The key thing for Marxists and communists is that there can be no communism without abundance - in fact without super-abundance. Scarcity of any kind leads to conflict, which itself leads to inequality.

I sometimes meet comrades who think that hunter-gatherers lived in poverty and scarcity. They are so, so wrong. That misconception was put right long ago - for example, by Marshall Sahlins in his brilliant book Stone Age economics. One chapter is about “the original affluent society”. The crucial point is that hunter-gatherers live in abundance. Yet too many comrades conceptualise everything through western ideology, leading them to conclude, for instance, that if people do not have televisions they must be living in poverty.

Some of the tribes we have been living with and studying have access to both worlds - they can go to the flesh pots and get a taste of western life. They tire of it and go back home. All I can say is that they have the world’s best diet, the most healthy possible nutrition and plenty of spare time to enjoy all the pleasures of life. The world’s wealthiest people spend a fortune to enjoy a week’s safari and hunting. But the Hazda of Tanzania and others like them have this all the year round and, once you live with them, you can understand why they have no desire at all to go down the road of so-called ‘development’, any more than in the distant past, our hunter-gatherer ancestors actively wanted to get involved in agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry and eventually class society.

So these people have an experience of real abundance.

On religion:

If you think religion is stupid, then, as a Marxist, you have a paradox, because you say that hunter-gatherers are communist and they are stupid. The paradox is resolved when you realise that, the more you practise your religion, every day of the week, the more you regard everything as sacred, the less it is religion. In a way, the more it is religion, the less it is religion.

So when Marxists talk about abolishing religion, we mean abolishing the illusory communism which religion is. But you cannot abolish the illusory communism without realising communism. The argument we put forward in the Radical Anthropology Group is that the human revolution - the process of becoming human, with the establishment of communism - involved the idea of the sanctity of things as an essential component. The ultimate idea of religion and the point about it which perhaps all of us could accept is simple: some things are sacred. For capitalism, nothing is sacred. Everything has a price.

And on language and religion:

Because language relates fundamentally to institutional facts, semantics is also concerned with institutional facts, not with brute facts. So that only a creature that has become immersed in a world of shared fantasy - in a sense only a religious creature - can have language. As we became human, as we turned the world upside down through revolution, that communist world was a world of fantasy in a sense, but shared fantasy. When fantasies are shared, when they are generalised in the power that they can give, then that is a very different thing from fiction, from lying or hallucination. Children learn language and the use of words fundamentally through fantasy. If a young child does not get into fantasy worlds, if it cannot get the idea of ‘let’s pretend’, then that is some cause for concern. Lack of pretend-play capacity is one of the diagnostic features of autism.

I will end with this - Jerome Lewis has shown in his study of the Mbendjele that religion is actually play. The point about this play is that, as with all children’s games, it is quite serious. When you are in the playground, the most important thing about a person you are fond of is that they let you play with them. Likewise, the rules of the various games that the forest people play are very important. They are sacred.

Play, ritual, collective work and religion are the same thing for the forest people that Jerome is studying. The point is that they play in a way that allows them to continue playing through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. When they play the same games as adults, that is religion. It does not matter what you call it. If you think religion is stupid, then that is fine. You can then call what the forest people do something else - maybe magic or whatever.

As if unity or completion were possible

Questioning the very notion of wholeness makes sense in the context of modern life, broadly speaking--its shallowness, its incompleteness, its wrongness. That is, the lives we lead are not whole, and so writing as if they are, as if unity or completion were possible under these conditions--What conditions? The conditions of modernity? The conditions of civilization?--writing "as if there is indeed someone else in the world who knows more" is false, unjustified, untrustworthy. . . Perhaps this questioning made sense before, too, but the illusions of wholeness, the centuries of tradition in the shadow of civilization, some within civilization, perhaps these obscured the picture, allowed the artist to justifiably seek unity. Or perhaps even then it wasn't truly justified, with this understanding only being made possible much later.

Authentic

Heidegger speaks of "the basic Greek experience of the Being of beings in the sense of presence" and how "Roman thought takes over the Greek words [corresponding to that experience] without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word". If the "rootlessness of Western thought begins" here, what might this mean? If the reference to the authentic experience is debased and misused down the centuries, the further we get from the source, what is the source? What does it mean? Is it because we're to understand the Greeks as the height of Western civilization, from which all else necessarily falls away? (Just as it is sometimes said that Plato "is" philosophy and the rest of philosophy merely a series of footnotes and marginalia?) No, it is perhaps because the Greeks are still within living memory of a time before civilization, before the conquest. Their concepts and experiences are still in touch with the authentic, the natural. Already, Plato is suspicious of this, suspicious of Homer, suspicious of living tradition. Consider the acknowledgement, the apologetics, in the Greeks, that civilization requires slavery, requires forceable extraction, requires this kind of violence. We resist this, but it's true. Each successive expansion forced, and forces, more and more people into a certain way of life, the maintenance of which has requried, and still requires, force and propaganda. Ultimately, we are starved of options, bereft of choices. But they knew what it was to be free, or at least knew people who knew what it was to be free.

I come out of a way of thinking in which I am conditioned to be wary of the authentic, or rather, appeals to authenticity. Perhaps we rightly mock the Authenticity Police--for example, in pop music (all those tired tropes of the authentic singer who writes his own autobiographical songs). And yet this is not quite the same thing. I notice a literature depicting a striving for the authentic, perhaps a signal characteristic of Modernism. Recall Tom McCarthy's Remainder. The narrator is obsessed with isolating those moments when he feels most alive, the truly authentic moments of existence. Of course, he's suffered a head wound and seems as if he may be insane. But what if we're the insane ones and he's finally become sane? He's finally able to see the inauthenticness of his life, our lives. In book after book, Thomas Bernhard's narrators rail against the absurdity of life. Bernhard himself is reported to have said, upon receiving a literary award, "Everything is absurd when one thinks of death." And, given that we die anyway, all of our striving, all of our expended effort, seems absurd. What's the point? But Bernhard's narrators rail most often against frauds, phonies, philistines, petty bourgeoisie, institutions--schools, hospitals, museums, the church, the state--all the accumulated, structured apparatus of civilization. What if they, these narrators, simply want to be left alone--not by themselves, literally, but free, free to live authentically in the world? What if they want to escape? Not necessarily from any society, but from the insanity of this society? What if they know they can't? What if they sense something that is unachievable because it's already been destroyed?