On Baudelaire and modernity and ambivalence

In the June 8, 2009, issue of The Nation, Joshua Clover has a review (full review is for subscribers only, which I am not) of a new translation by Keith Waldrop of Baudelaire's collection of prose poems, Paris Spleen. In his review, Clover discusses the "contradiction that charges" the collection:

The individual is endlessly threatened by the gravity of the social whorl, by the maw of the masses and the tinsel seductions of the marketplace. And yet he is an individual only insofar as he is part of this new configuration, the very grounds for this new sort of person. He has no being beyond it.

Exploring this further, he writes:

For all his hate, it is the mass of people, each more unfortunate that the last, to whom he keeps returning. In "Solitude," perhaps the book's most paradoxical poem, he seems to renounce any rapprochement with the crowd. "The unfortunate inability to be alone," he bemoans, and "practically all our mishaps come from not staying in our room"--summoning the exhausted wisdom of La Bruyère and Pascal. By the end he has in his sights "all the fools searching for happiness in movement and in a prostitution I would call fraternalistic, if I wanted to speak in my century's uppity tone."

These last two words are an unconventional translation to "belle langue"... The common phrasing has long been "the beautiful language of my century"[...]. Waldrop's willingness to alienate the language, to make it dance again, cannot help but be striking to any reader of Baudelaire. It now suggests something of the poet's contempt for the honeyed talk of the bourgeoisie and its new cadre of captive intellectuals, and Waldrop gets this exactly right.

What slips away in this rendering, however, is the extent to which Baudelaire did wish to speak the beautiful language of his century, to wrest it from the salon and the Académie. Again and again he goes looking for it; the secret he knows is that it is to be found exactly "in movement and in a prostitution." The passage is the stroll of the flâneur, that jaundiced inspector of modernity, walking through the market but imagining himself not quite of it: the private citizen invented by public existence. This is the daily or nightly course for which Paris Spleen's lyrical movements and undulations find form.

It occurs to me that, if Clover appeared more often in The Nation, I might be persuaded to re-subscribe. (Of course, I'd be vastly more likely to re-subscribe if the quality of that rag's political analysis in any way resembled Clover's own, as known by me through his jane dark guise; see, for example, such recent entries on The New York Times and Tiananmen Square, on world-system hegemons, on the economic downturn and race, and so on.) Anyway, Clover's review reinforces my desire to read Baudelaire. I'm thinking of picking up The Flowers of Evil, along with Paris Spleen, as well as Benjamin's Baudelaire writings, handily published together now as The Writer of Modern Life (also mentioned in the review). Presumably the latter collection includes the relevant Benjamin I've already read, which reading put Baudelaire on my personal map in the first place.

I am intrigued by Clover's analysis, in the passages quoted above, of the different translations of the two words "belle langue" and, by implication, Baudelaire's conflicted relationship with modernity. I go back and forth on translation, worrying about choosing the best when multiple versions exist, worrying about getting the real experience, lamenting my monolingualism, and so on. Of late, my tendency is to not worry about it too much. The translation is simply that, and we do the best we can, and something of the original shines through. Here, though, I'm again struck by my loss. For it seems clear that what Baudelaire is saying is to be found at the intersection of the two versions (since, again, I am not likely to read him in the original).

We encounter few authors with zero preconceptions. With Baudelaire, my conception is of him as Benjamin's writer of modernity. One senses a writer struggling to give voice to the modern, to witness it, to see it as fully as possible. Perhaps, in the context of the problems of modernity, I have overplayed in my mind the extent to which he celebrates the modern, a celebration which might strike me as suspect. But, of course, as noted, I've not yet read him and my conception is, in fact, based on very little. So, given my ongoing concerns here, it will be seen that, as a reader, I am ripe for an interpretation of Baudelaire that highlights his "contempt for the honeyed talk of the bourgeoisie and its new cadre of captive intellectuals". Not so fast, Clover says. This contempt is "exactly right", but it misses something. It misses the love.

And I'm off and running, considering my own ambivalence about modernity, critiques of technological society, complaints about distraction. I am all too aware that, though I rail against the modern world, I am nonetheless of it, and that, in some respects, modernity enables my own opposition to it (for instance, I have a blog; I have a Twitter account, God help me). I'm reminded of problems I have had with Marshall Berman's conception of modernism, in which modern art is needed to allow us to become more suitably modern, to engage with the changes of modernity (for another take on Berman, see Aaron Bady's excellent post from last September on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, in which Aaron asks questions about who gets left out of that conception, whose work is needed to make modernity function). My preference has been to think of literary modernism less as the obsessive drive to "make it new" (which does indeed seem to always require that we be rushing ahead, like modern life, always rushing, always impatient, demanding we adapt, keep up, be up for the next challenge) than as an awareness that certain forms are now suspect, suspect because of what's been learned, or perhaps exposed, in this drive forward. It is not that modernism should help make us, readers, modernists, that is to say, adapted to modernity, in all its complexity, but instead that modernism reflects that, in the move towards modernity, old verities have themselves been rendered suspect, verities on which certain narrative forms relied. The distinction is perhaps fine; I can see that it's possible we can include both sorts in a broader umbrella of modernism (a dialectic?). Not in a desire for inclusiveness but to embody an ambivalence. And yet it seems to me that the version I prefer is a necessary corrective to the more widely held version, that it's more suited to our current predicament.

Ambivalence! Literary ambivalence is nothing in the face of ambivalence about modernity itself. If Baudelaire explored, with excitement and repulsion, the condition of modern life (how convincingly I say that: you'd think I'd read his work), what do we have to say after 150 years more of development, of decay, of deepening adaptation? Now we have no excuse but to know that, not only does our way of life depend on the current privations of millions caught living in the wrong part of the world (how unfortunate to live in a country with vast reserves of oil), but that that way of life is also built on centuries of murder and destruction. Knowing this, but also knowing how unprepared we are for that way of life to disappear, though knowing that disappear it must. Liking the comforts of modern, technologically-enabled life, indeed loving aspects of it, but knowing that the idea that all could share in such comforts has always been a pipedream (though, surely, hating the job needed to maintain it, hating especially the pointlessly long commute, hating the noise, hating the idiocy, hating the polity). The globe simply can't support it--and anyway, the resources have to be extracted from somebody, the labor has to be done somewhere, the waste has to go somewhere. There is no getting around the fact that people continue to die for it. Not so they can share in it, but so we can laze about in it, continuing to not do what needs doing, voting instead for "change" that is no kind of change at all.

Revisiting the Big Dalkey Get

As is traditional around here, I move from the deadly serious to the irretrievably trivial. . .

When this blog was but a month old, I posted a list of the 55 Dalkey Archive books I'd acquired a couple years previously when a friend and I took advantage of their big sale (100 books for $500). I thought it would be amusing to take another look at this list in the context of my change in focus, shifts in my reading life, and so on. At the time of the original post, I'd read 23 of the 55 books; as of today, I've read 31. But I've also discarded some of them, others are on the edge of removal, and even of those that are relatively safe, a few remain that I wish I hadn't picked.

Here is the list, with those I've read in bold and the discards crossed out:

1. Chapel Road, Louis Paul Boon
2. Rigadoon, Céline
3. Some Instructions to my Wife, Stanley Crawford
4. Storytown, Susan Daitch
5. Island People, Coleman Dowell
6. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
7. Phosphor in Dreamland, Rikki Ducornet
8. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, Stanley Elkin
9. George Mills, Stanley Elkin
10. The Rabbi of Lud, Stanley Elkin
11. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Stanley Elkin
12. Mrs. Ted Bliss, Stanley Elkin
13. Foreign Parts, Janice Galloway
14. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
15. Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo
16. Blindness, Henry Green
17. Concluding, Henry Green
18. Nothing, Henry Green
19. Doting, Henry Green
20. Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green
21. The Questionnaire, Jirí Grusa
22. Flotsam & Jetsasm, Aidan Higgins
23. Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
24. Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley
25. A Minor Apocalypse, Tadeusz Konwicki
26. The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus
27. Reader's Block, David Markson
28. AVA, Carole Maso
29. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso
30. Cigarettes, Harry Mathews
31. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
32. 20 Lines a Day, Harry Mathews
33. The Human Country, Harry Mathews
34. The Case of the Perservering Maltese, Harry Mathews
35. Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
36. Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Odile, Raymond Queneau
39. Collected Novellas, vol. 1, Arno Schmidt
40. Nobodaddy's Children, Arno Schmidt
41. Two Novels, Arno Schmidt
42. Is this what other women feel, too?, Jill Akers Seese
43. The Sky Changes, Gilbert Sorrentino
44. Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
45. Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
46. Pack of Lies, Gilbert Sorrentino
47. Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino
48. Under the Shadow, Gilbert Sorrentino
49. Something Said, Gilbert Sorrentino
50. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
51. Annihilation, Piotr Szewc
52. Monstrous Possibility, Curtis White
53. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. one, Marguerite Young
54. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. two, Marguerite Young
55. Marguerite Young, Our Darling, Miriam Fuchs, ed.

With 31 books read and four discarded, that leaves 20 books. Why did I get rid of the four? Well, the real question is, why did I pick two Aldous Huxley books?!? I've never read anything by Huxley, including Brave New World. At the time of the purchase, I was smack in the middle of what I have been calling my "days of despair", but the period wasn't always despairing. I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature, of what I thought I wanted to read. (I'm not saying I don't now believe in diversity, but my approach is markedly different.) I also had--still have--a tendency to read the less famous book(s) by an author first. This has paid off handsomely in many cases, but it has its pitfalls. One of which is making you not want to read the more famous book at all. Anyway, this is partly what happened with Huxley. I figured I'd read Brave New World at some point, and, hey, Point Counter Point was also on that Modern Library list, so... It is in this spirit that I'd acquired a used (Dalkey) copy of the latter, and included the other two Huxleys as part of my selection in the big purchase. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my previous passes at the first page of Brave New World. In retrospect, I realize that I found the prose unreadable at worst, uninteresting at best. It turns out the same is true of these other Huxleys. Nothing interesting about the prose at all. Off they go. (I'm sure I could elaborate some more, but these are books I've not read and will not read, right?)

I'm not surprised I included the Ben Marcus volume in my pick, but after several attempts at reading this book, I decided that I simply couldn't. I couldn't make sense of it at all, nor did I relish the work needed to unpack its mysteries. Away!

As for Céline, here is another case where I should have read the more famous book(s) first before acquiring any others. I've kept my copy of Journey to the End of Night (a New Directions book, of course), so I may yet read it, even though my early passes at it have not kept my interest. And Rigadoon, and all the other Céline books I've looked at, is much the same. The style looks irritating. I know writers I admire have sworn by Céline, but I just don't care. (I still think that Death on the Installment Plan is a first-rate title, however.) Sold!

Ok, that accounts for the four discards; what about the remaining 20? One book in particular is on the chopping block: Joseph McElroy's Women and Men. Read my earlier Dalkey post for remarks about McElroy and this book. Here, I'll just say that this mammoth novel survives only because I hope to read some of the sections explicitly mentioned by Garth Risk Halberg in his year-end post (and comment) at The Millions. If those sections don't work for me, it's gone.

Others: Unexpectedly, I've been unable to make it through William H. Gass' (incredibly short) Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Gass is one of my favorite writers, but this book is rather too cute (Gass plays here with fonts and type sizes and the shapes of words and I don't think it's nearly as interesting as he does). I've tried several times to read Goytisolo's Quarantine. This novel is also short, but the writing strikes me as vague and unfruitfully obscure. I'll give it another pass, but if I can't make it through, it'll have to go. I wish I hadn't selected Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!, if only because I don't think I care enough about the shittiness of newspaper reviews, or even the review reception of Gaddis' The Recognitions, more than 50 years on. I still expect to read one of the Dowell books and the Aidan Higgins (a collection I began but never finished for no good reason). Carole Maso's AVA is in the current TBR pile. She's always a keeper, but she requires slowness and attention I don't always have to give (plus, I wanted to have read some Beckett before reading it, which I now have). I'm sort of out of my Nicholas Mosley phase, so The Hesperides Tree has languished and isn't likely to be read anytime soon. The lone remaining unread Stanley Elkin book on my shelves, the three novellas making up Van Gogh's Room at Arles, will get read. Elkin's another favorite, but I just haven't been in an Elkin place in the last couple of years. Same with Sorrentino. I was mildly disappointed in his Mulligan Stew (still a very funny book), and that may have put me off reading Pack of Lies and Blue Pastoral. But also I simply wasn't there. I sort of wish I hadn't included the Curtis White (non-fiction) book, but it's slim enough and probably not without interest, so I imagine I will read it. Arno Schmidt...it was the over-the-moon enthusiasm of The Complete Review that moved Schmidt onto my radar. I'd had some good success with Complete Review recommendations up till then, but since then I've become aware that my tastes are very different, so I wonder if the Schmidt selections (three of them! how insane am I?) were a mistake. I've thought about trying one or more of them a few times, but the layout of the words on the page is odd enough to have distracted me. I wasn't up for it. Two of these books are hardcovers and thus very expensive, so if I decide to sell, who knows, I may do OK on them. But I still hope to give them a decent chance. (Meanwhile, I've seen very few references to Schmidt anywhere outside The Complete Review. I'm not sure if that tells me much of anything.)

That leaves Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Marguerite Young's two-volume Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (plus the small critical volume about Young and her book; I probably didn't need this book either). I leave these for the end because of their length, their perceived difficulty, and the fact that both writers were women. We think of men as being the writers of difficult literature, do we not? I certainly do, I have to admit. One clear exception is Gertrude Stein, who is famously difficult, in particular The Making of Americans. Marguerite Young's enormous novel doesn't appear to be difficult to read, at the level of the sentence or paragraph, but it does appear to be hugely ambitious. With either book, I will need to psyche myself up for a serious attempt at a reading that does justice to the material.

Interestingly, when I took part in this big purchase, I was madly in love with the Dalkey Archive. To me, it was the ideal press: attractive books, excellent mission, and a massive stable of interesting books by underappreciated authors. My opinion has shifted. It still is all those things, and I still think it's an exemplary publisher. But its considerable focus on the self-consciously experimental or post-modern, however one chooses to define those terms, is, let's say, not quite in line with what I want from literature anymore, what I think is valuable or interesting about it. But of course that's what this blog is about, when it's about literature, so I won't expand on the point here.

Thoughts on Abortion

A few months ago, on my way through the train station as part of my evening commute, I was forced to wade through a throng of young people carrying posters and plackards and wearing similarly sloganed t-shirts. It quickly became clear that they had descended on Washington for yet another anti-choice rally. I quietly moved through the crowd, contemptuously rolling my eyes as I walked to my train.

The next morning, waiting for the bus, I asked my bus-riding friend, a middle-aged white woman, where she'd been the previous day. She enthusiastically announced that she'd been at the rally in DC. I immediately clamped up: the last thing I like arguing about is abortion. And I admit that I felt a little embarrassed, as I remembered my contempt from the previous evening. Our other regular companion, a male scientist from Bulgaria who loves to argue, immediately started engaging her in a debate, as I looked on in dismay, sure that things were going to become unpleasant. How was it possible she was anti-choice, he wanted to know. And indeed, she had decided to come right out with it, because usually she is quiet about it. Apparently she is the only person she knows who is not pro-choice. I listened to them talk, continuing to feel uncomfortable, when suddenly the conversation made a turn that allowed me to enter into it easily, quietly. The question of the moment was, what should be the legal consequences of abortion? This had always been a question that had troubled me, so I said something. I've long sensed that very few people actually want to have women sent to prison for having an abortion. My friend admitted that this was a problem, that it was an issue that too few anti-abortion people thought about. She maintained that being anti-abortion is not about punishment.

I have another friend, this one of long-standing, basically liberal with leftwing tendencies, but who has always prided himself on being pro-life, it being important to him that he have this one "conservative" position (presumably so he can't be pigeonholed). But for him, the matter is both emotional (he was adopted) and abstract, in that he has never had any intention of campaigning against abortion, nor does he attack his friends' views on abortion. I've always argued that this means that, his personal feelings on abortion notwithstanding, he is effectively pro-choice.

Now, there is a difference between my two friends. Both consider themselves anti-abortion, but one goes to organized anti-choice rallies, the other does not. And yet it seems that neither of them believes women should be punished for having an abortion. Indeed, for years I have suspected that very few people who claim to be opposed to abortion actually think through the implications of their opposition. They'd tell you it should be illegal, but what does illegal mean? Illegal means against the law, which means that it is punishable under the law. In what way should it be punished? Of course I've already gone well past the point where most have long since stopped pursuing the question. My suspicion was confirmed when I watched this video of an anti-abortion protest, in which protesters were asked, "what do you think should happen to women who have abortions" (video originally seen several years ago, via Bitch Ph.D.). Basically, the answer was either "I don't know, I haven't thought of it" ("that's not my department, you should ask so-and-so") or that it "was between them and God".

My friend maintains that being anti-abortion is not about punishment, and the responses given in the video suggest that, for most, she is right. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Because, of course, there are those who do believe punishment is in order, the punishment of doctors in particular. These are the people who really drive the movement against abortion, the lunatics who blow up clinics, who harass women, who kill abortion providers, such as the asshole who recently killed Dr. George Tiller. These are the true believers; these are the people who can and will be pushed over the edge by irresponsible political rhetoric, the kind we get from the American Right every day.

One such rhetorical gambit is the idea that "abortion is murder"--worse, it's the murder of babies. This gambit has great emotional power and has both proven effective in swelling the ranks of the anti-abortion and led directly to violence against abortion providers. The day after Tiller's assassination, M. LeBlanc posted an excellent entry at Bitch PhD on this very topic. It's well worth reading. (The idea was also explored by Adam Kotsko at both The Weblog and An und für sich; in both posts, and comments, Adam highlights the utter moral insanity of the formulation.)

I'm posting this nearly two weeks after the event, because--apart from being frankly too slow to respond quickly even were I inclined--it's never a bad time to make it clear what you stand for. As BitchPhD says in another recent post, it isn't enough that the truth is available, somewhere: people need to hear it again and again, from all sorts of different sources. People need to hear about the experiences of women (many of which are provided in the comments to that post; and here is one woman's account of her own abortion). People need to be able to counter the lies and misinformation with actual facts about, for example, late-term abortion (also). As an avowedly feminist man, the very least I can do is stand and blog in solidarity.

I admit that I don't keep up with the feminist blogs as much as I once did, or would like, so Bitch PhD remains my primary portal for other links and stories. The post linked to in the beginning of the preceding paragraph, along with Bitch's own typically trenchant commentary, contains numerous links to articles and factsheets and blogs, as does this one and this one. But I also want to point to two older posts that helped me clear away some of my own baggage about abortion. I've always been pro-choice, but I'd have to say that I was fairly glib about it. Later, though I argued that, as with so many other areas of public discourse in recent decades, the right has been all too successful in changing the terms of the debate--being able to call themselves "pro-life" is only the start of it--I nevertheless found myself succumbing to some of the slippery rhetoric resulting from this shift (for example, the idea that abortion is "always" an agonizing decision for the woman; it's not). Anyway, the first of these posts is from 2004 and is an excellent piece on how her own attitude towards abortion shifted when she herself became pregnant with her son. The second is from 2005 and simply asks Do you trust women? The latter post in particular is very valuable. Indeed, in light of this question and her exploration of it, it seems to me that the label "pro-choice" itself is ultimately counterproductive. Perhaps the right to choose sounds too much like the language of consumerism. Really, at minimum, we believe, first, that women are people, and, second, that women are capable of making their own decisions.

In Brief: Two more by Josipovici

Contre-Jour: A triptych for Pierre Bonnard: Novel from 1987. My least favorite of Josipovici's works, though certainly not without interest. I knew nothing of Pierre Bonnard, still don't really. This isn't a biographical novel. For one thing, here the painter has a daughter, or at least seems to, whereas in real life he did not. As elsewhere, repetition is key. Whereas in, for example, the sublime Everything Passes the repetition of phrases has a musical quality and the effect is quite moving, here I grew annoyed. There is some interesting stuff about the artist's devotion to his work, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else--perhaps this is why the fictional daughter is introduced, as a sort of spectral presence, the daughter that could never have been, and who even here in the fiction is ignored, marginalized, outside of her parents' marriage, outside of her mother's devotion to her father, outside of the father's art. By the end she appears to not exist at all.

In the Fertile Land: Short stories, also from the 1980s. Some of the stories here are not terribly memorable, but there are a few worth mentioning. I especially enjoyed the 100-page novella "Distances" and the stories "He", "Steps", "The Bitter End", "A Changeable Report", the title story... there are echoes across his work, artists working, repetitions, a man at a window, grief, mourning... some are very short, merely a page or two; some are all dialogue, attributed or otherwise. The collection is worth picking up (and unlike much of Josipovici's pre-90s work, inexpensive used copies can be found), particularly with half the book given over to "Distances".

Speaking of Everything Passes, here is a nice appreciation at booktwo.org, a site new to me (link courtesy Steve Mitchelmore, via Twitter).

For convenience, here are links to my previous writing on Josipovici's fiction:
In a Hotel Garden
Goldberg: Variations, review and follow-up
Moo Pak and Now, in brief

Of course, I've blogged much more extensively about Josipovici's crucial criticism; for that, as always, click on the label. . .

In Brief: Five novels from the shelves

We've been trying to weed out books, clear out shelving space, etc., so I've been taking a look at books we've had for years and, well, reading them (I know, I know, this utter lunacy, and possibly dangerously irresponsible: Isn't there a book industry to support? An economy to repair? Ha!). This is how I ended up finally reading Olive Moore's excellent Spleen (which I blogged about previously). Here are five more, none of which I loved.

Passing by Nella Larsen
This has sat on my shelves for well over a decade, since my mother gave me all of the books she'd acquired in the course of getting her continuing ed. Master's degree. For years I'd filed it with my non-fiction books, assuming that it was a study about the phenomenon of African-Americans passing as white in the early 20th century. I later realized my mistake and dutifully filed it with the fiction, but still it sat. Fiction it may be, but I feared that it might be only of interest for what it was about and that its actual literary merit was slight. I was prompted to read the book by Andrew Seal's enthusiastic post on it earlier this year. And. . . and I wish I could share Andrew's enthusiasm. More than once he refers to the novel's subtlety, but I didn't find it terribly subtle. The melodrama is heavy, the events are predictable, and the "passing" isn't really explored or much depicted, but rather asserted. If the novel weren't extremely short, I doubt I would have been able to plow my through to the end.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (in the translation by Robert Bly)
This one doesn't really fit the category, I suppose, since I'd had it on my bedside pile for a while. I include it nevertheless, since I don't expect to be saying much else about it. Again, I expected to like it more than I did. You see a lot about Hamsun influencing various Modernists; some, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, calling him the "father of modern literature", primarily for his focus on the pyschological; and so on. Be that as it may, my experience reading Hunger felt akin to my experience reading Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. As with that novella, I wasn't nearly as engaged by the voice as I'd hoped to be. I sort of wanted him to shut up.

Sula by Toni Morrison
Back in the old days, in the days of despair, I read and more or less enjoyed several Toni Morrison novels. I accepted her without question as a literary giant and would have been surprised to learn that there were serious readers who disliked her fiction. My favorite was Song of Solomon. I liked Beloved but was confused by its glittering reputation (I didn't understand why it was, it seemed, universally hailed as her best, and as a masterpiece). I even liked the knottier and much-maligned Paradise. In the time between that novel and her next work, my reading interests had changed dramatically and I stopped paying attention to her. In the meantime, it appears to me, that silly New York Times best-novel-of-the-last-25-years thing notwithstanding, that Morrison's star has rather fallen. It seems fashionable to attack her writing. My instinct is to come to her defense, based on past enjoyment (I liked, for example, what Andrew Seal said, somewhere at his blog, about the importance of the oral tradition for Morrison's writing; I'd link to his remarks if I could find the exact post). In this context, I thought it would be interesting to read her again. In the event, Sula is a vivid tale centering on two childhood friends, one who grows up to marry and lead a conventional, socially approved life, the other (Sula) who leaves town, only to return years later as a free spirit, and is a misunderstood, disruptive force in the town. In a sense, she acts as an organizing principle for the town, with her disruption, her wrongness, her "evil", as the other characters have it, prompting more responsible behaviors in the rest of the town. I'm not usually one to call for novels to be longer than they are or to fill in details, but a bit more would have been nice here.

My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore
I don't know anything about this writer. The novel is another entry in the aloof-father/over-emotional-and-possibly-a-little-crazy-mother genre. Chapters alternating between third-person account of the past, on a plantation in Hawaii, mostly through the vantage point of the daughter Lily, and a first-person, present-day narration by Lily herself. Descriptions of Hawaii. Thematic backdrop: Adultery; imperialism; the war. A major character is Japanese, friend and companion to Lily, born to a woman already dead from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, taken by the white American doctor on the scene, who happens to be said aloof father. Well-written, fairly conventional, compelling enough to read to the end, not otherwise terribly memorable. The novel comes with a blurb from John Hawkes, of all people (perhaps Moore was a student of his?), which I admit helped pique my interest in reading the book.

Homo Faber by Max Frisch (translated by Michael Bullock)
First-person account (a "report") by Faber, who is an engineer of some kind (I've already forgotten; I remember he refers a number of times to turbines), a self-described technocrat, scornful of all manner of mystery or religion or the like, hyper-rationalist, given to expounding thus on the nature of truth, etc. Yet his account is rife with unlikely coincidences, as if he were subject to a certain fate beyond his control. Stranded in Mexico after an emergency plane landing, with the brother of his best-friend from 20 years earlier, who he learns had married his then-lover, who had been pregnant by Faber; later he cancels at the last minute flight plans to Europe from New York, taking a ship instead, where he just happens to run into a young woman who he doesn't yet know is his daughter, tragedy ensues, etc. Inessential.

Sitting in another box

Tom McCarthy recently reviewed for The New York Times a novel by Clancy Martin called How to Sell. He says some good things about the book and tells us that, ultimately, he enjoyed it. But there is, he suggests, a problem. Not so much with the book itself as with what we're being asked to accept it as (via, for example, glowing blurbs from the likes of Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Franzen attesting to the novel's greatness and originality):

we’re being asked to buy into the notion that lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship constitute great, “classic” literature. I’m not so sure. To bastardize the Latin, emptors need to sober up and exercise a little caveating over that one. I suspect that real, high-karat literature, with its complexity and ambiguity, its general slipperiness, is sitting in another box, one opening to a dimension that “How to Sell” doesn’t breach (and, to both its and its author’s credit, doesn’t itself actually claim to) — or, to use a fittingly ur-geological metaphor, that it’s lying buried in a rock-seam that this book walks comfortably over the top of but leaves unmined.

McCarthy's being a little coy here with his "I'm not so sure"; in fact, he's pretty sure that "lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship" are not what constitute great literature, as readers familiar with McCarthy will understand. He is of course right, but we're not supposed to think so, are we? A book like this is perfectly entertaining, but that's not enough, is it? It doesn't seem to be enough either for the book's proponents--they want to claim it as something more--or for those of us actually wanting something more. As Mark Thwaite says in his recent post on the topic, by all means, like what you like, no one's stopping you. (By the way, it's nice to see Mark back to blogging at strength, and with longer entries to boot!) The blurbs for this book and others, so often straining for comparison with established literary classics, along with the proliferation of literary prizes and much elses besides, reveal a pervasive anxiety about literature. We want to be entertained, at all times it seems, but we also want to be able to feel as though we're engaging with greatness. No, the things we like must also be recognized as canonical, or possibly counter-canonical, but as art.

But then there is also the pressure to feel that art, literature in this case, should be entertaining. So we have pressure from, say, genre partisans that literature be entertaining, broadly speaking, and an opposite pressure, that entertainment be defined as literature.

With several recent entries decrying entertainment, readers might be forgiven for thinking I don't like to have fun. After all, we need entertainment, do we not? Of course we do. But do we need so much of it? Does it need to constantly be available, constantly at our fingertips? Does it need to constantly be produced at such an alarming rate? And is it too much to maintain that art and entertainment, both necessary, are not the same? Do I go too far if I suggest that our culture of entertainment makes it harder and harder for us to recognize, let alone fruitfully engage with, the real thing? I don't think so. And the hectic, tiring lives we lead--do they not also make it increasingly likely that we'll opt for entertainment? And that we'll be less and less receptive to art?

Pastoral Thinking

At Sponge!, Lee Rourke writes about the great meditation on walking in Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, a marvelous bit of writing I neglected to mention in my long post on the novel (which Lee graciously links to):

When walking, he argues (and to paraphrase) we are in ‘possession of time’: each footfall counts its passing. We can choose to stop, to turn, to slow down at our own pace, to meander and wend, to backtrack and shortcut; within this act of possession things are infinitely freer. Whereas on a train, plane, or in a car, time has captured us, we are at its mercy, carried by it with no control, it dictates our decision to be free; we are not free in this sense.

Apologies to Lee for quoting the entirety of his post (but it's very short and my own paraphrastic powers are at an extremely low ebb these days), but I wanted to highlight the freedom associated with this "possession of time". We are so rarely truly in possession of our time, with jobs and commutes and so on. Even when we do have time to ourselves, it is bounded by those demands on our time over which we have little real control. This domination by speed, by time, this unfreedom, affects our very thinking. Some will argue, and do, that this is fine and dandy, a newer, quicker thinking has come into being. I might have made this argument at one point, but these days I find it wanting.

By coincidence, last night I was reading in Kafka's Diaries and came across an entry on Goethe's diaries (would that in Goethe's diaries he were writing about yet another's diaries, but it was not to be). Kafka remarks that Goethe's observations while traveling are different than they would have been in Kafka's day

because made from a mail-coach, and with the slow changes of the region, develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by one who does not know those parts of the country. A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking sets in. (translation by Joseph Kresh)

I want this, this calm, this quiet, this slowness, space to think, time to work things out. Down with speed!

Lost in Translation

Towards the end of his short essay titled "Translating" (found in Friendship), Maurice Blanchot writes the following:

The example of Hölderlin illustrates the risk that is run, in the end, by the man fascinated by the power of translating: the translations of Antigone and Oedipus were nearly his last works at the outbreak of madness. These works are exceptionally studied, restrained, and intentional, conducted with inflexible firmness with the intent not of transposing the Greek text into German, nor of reconveying the German language to its Greek sources, but of unifying the two powers--the one representing the vicissitudes of the West, the other those of the Orient--in the simplicity of a pure and total language. The result is almost frightful. It is as if one were discovering between the two languages an understanding so profound, a harmony so fundamental, that it substitutes itself for meaning, or succeeds in turning the hiatus that lies open between the two languages into the origin of a new meaning.

At the beginning of the essay, Blanchot mentions the notion of the pure, originary language towards which, it was believed, translation must work. But, "In fact translation is not at all intended to make the difference [between languages] disappear--it is, on the contrary, the play of this difference..."

Translation is always controversial--should it be literal? should it be a work of its own? how much leeway does the translator have? what is a literal translation anyway? English is the only language I have. I am completely dependent on translations for much of what I want to read. As such, I have considerable anxiety on the subject, though it ebbs and flos. My purpose in quoting the passage from Blanchot at the beginning of this post is to highlight the sort of experience that is completely lost to me, to perhaps shine a light on this loss. Obviously I know neither German nor ancient Greek, so both sides of this transaction, this translation are necessarily beyond me.

Let me back up a bit and try to explain what I'm getting at, for I can see I've already written myself away from the original spark. Even if I had the ancient Greek, say, Hölderlin's translation into German would be irrelevant to me. That is, approaching Antigone, I am either going to read it in the original, if possible (which, for me, it is not), or in one (or more) of the many English translations. Hölderlin's work here is not available to me, it cannot, itself, be translated into English. There are third-hand translations, of course, so don't misunderstand. It's not that Hölderlin's translation could not, in theory, be the basis for a subsequent translation into a third language, possibly English. I mean that Hölderlin's achievement, which for Blanchot is "almost frightful", is necessarily lost to me unless I am a native speaker of German, or, possibly, a particular scholar or enthusiast of Hölderlin. The frightfulness is lost, is it not?

I was merely struck, while reading Blanchot's essay, by this unavailability. It wasn't an anxious moment, as when I worry about which translation to read, or when I'm all too aware that I have not yet read this or that work relevant to a discussion. I can alleviate the latter anxiety by reading the work in question. But I cannot gain access to the sort of experience necessary for me to appreciate Hölderlin's translations. This is not a problem. It is an acknowledgment. Not everything is translatable, including other translations, a reminder that not every work of art, not every piece of literature, can be experienced by everybody.

Men proving themselves to other men is as dangerous as it gets

At Insurgent American, Stan Goff has posted the text of a talk he gave in April at Wake Forest University on militarism, patriarchy, capitalism, and pornography. This is vitally important stuff, required reading in my opinion. Here is but a small portion of it:

Here is the Don’t List for men. Do not dominate. Do not humiliate. Do not retaliate.

That’s a hard don’t list for men, when the culture tells us incessantly and forcefully that to be a man means to dominate, to humiliate, and to retaliate. These are equated with strength; and they are counterposed to all things quote-feminine-unquote. This male norm of masculinity-as-conquest is ruthlessly policed in male culture, which is also a hotbox of probative escalation.

I could ask everyone in this room if you fear unknown men to raise your hand. You see I’m raising mine. Men proving themselves to other men can be the most terrifying thing you’ll ever see. I say that as a military veteran who worked in eight conflict areas, in Vietnam, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Men proving themselves to other men is as dangerous as it gets. There are people right here in this room who would be alarmed by the sudden sound of multiple male voices laughing nearby, because that sound can be so pregnant with mischief. Males are bonding. Escalations are possible.

This is male culture that idealizes the conquest of women, the conquest of colonies, and the conquest of nature. It is probative conquest, too; and it requires trophies for the other men to whom you are proving yourself, and as proof of masculinity to display for women.

A bit more on Sonic Youth

Of course, even as I was writing, numerous arguments contra k-punk's attacks on Sonic Youth came to mind (several of which are better articulated here and here). I could have gone on and on, but I soon realized it wasn't Sonic Youth that was the issue. I am suspicious of the narrative of progress, in art as much as in society generally, so there's no particular need to worry about innovation, as such. Though the question of the need for a work to exist is something else entirely.

But now for a little defense of Sonic Youth of my own. In the context of commercial music under capitalism, with its institutional disdain for the things people care about, for families and communities, with co-optation ongoing and inevitable--given this context, isn't much of what Sonic Youth does exactly the kind of thing we need? For one thing, of course, they actually play music. They are not just spectators, as so many of us are (myself especially). And they are a cohesive unit and a family. They pay due respect to a certain tradition, one that matters to them, and are generous with younger musicians and artists. Isn't the Left supposed to value such common efforts and communal activity? Isn't expecting "culture" to somehow transcend itself and deliver the future a bit much to ask of it, on its own? Though I maintain, contrary to the dismissals of the recent discussion, that the band has been on a remarkable late career run, it's nevertheless true that it can easily be charged that the world does not need another Sonic Youth record. But, frankly, we don't need any more records of any kind. But the world does need music. If recording music became a technological impossibility (as it seems to me it eventually will, optimist that I am), I feel confident that Sonic Youth would find some way to make a worthy racket and continue to enable others to do the same. I say good for them.

Nonsense & Irritation

I have conceded that stupid readers exist. Indeed, yes. So, alas, obtuse misreadings abound. (Frustrating as it may be, I can take some solace that, in this case, in being so idiotically misread, I am at least in good company.)

For what it's worth, I am not a pacifist. And there is massive difference, as I mentioned explicitly in the linked post and elsewhere, between violent revolution or insurrection on the one hand, and state terror on the other. Thus, to categorize the mass volunteer effort to fight for the losing cause in the Spanish Civil War along with those cynical State operations known in the liberal press as "humanitarian interventions" is to make an error of grotesque proportions. A person capable of making such a comparison is clearly not worth taking seriously or responding to any further.

"fuck indie especially for saying fuck you to its own history of saying fuck you"

What gets left unsaid in my last post is that what I'm really weary of, indeed increasingly suspicious of, is the culture of entertainment (what Fox Mulder, who I cite without irony, once called "the military-industrial-entertainment complex"), the culture of consumption of entertainment, the culture of the well-made, and the accumulated mass of history, the always available entertainment options, past and present, and so on. All of it. Of course, I am deeply implicated in this, even as I feebly resist.

Which brings me back to music and my conflicted attitude towards it. A recent multi-blog discussion about Sonic Youth has helped to illuminate some of my own concerns but also hit rather close to home. For, I might as well state right upfront, Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands. And in light of the discussion, I think this fact may well be symptomatic of something previously difficult for me to articulate.

The discussion was set off by Mark "k-punk" Fisher's review in The Wire of an apparently (necessarily?) awful Neu! tribute album. In decrying rock vampirism, k-punk wrote this:

Sonic Youth, Primal Scream and Oasis all played their part in making this kind of retro-necro acceptable. As the most ostensibly credible of the bunch, Sonic Youth should arguably bear the most blame (indeed, if one were to locate the point at which rock modernism lapsed into curatorial postmodern pastiche, you could do worse than cite something like Bad Moon Rising.)

This unleashed a batch of responses and responses to responses, as more or less follows:

1. ZoneStyxTravelcard takes up k-punk's apparent throwaway line, and defends Sonic Youth from the charge.
2. k-punk replies and expands.
3. Simon Reynolds chimes in.
4. Zone replies, re-defends Sonic Youth.
5. Marcello Carlin chimes in.
6. and k-punk responds again.

If you're interested, it's worth reading through each of the parts of the exchange; for my purposes, I'm going to summarise k-punk's general argument, with some choice quotations, before moving on to my own remarks.

For k-punk, Sonic Youth "represent the embourgeoisiement of the rock avant-garde, its disconnection from overreaching, intemperance, intolerance and antagonism." That is, contrary to the stringency of the post-punk and No Wave bands and their "scorched earth intolerance for the past" (whereby the Sixties were identified as "the problem"), Sonic Youth are a rapprochement with the past, curators of that past and the pasts of other, more marginal figures, while their own formal innovations have long ago ceased, as they continually combine and re-combine different elements of their aesthetic, ossifying along the way into the grand-old statesmen of so-called experimental rock, consolidating an alternative to the mainstream, which is to say, another mainstream (as he puts it, "the idea there is a mainstream which repudiates Sonic Youth is the fundamental (rockist) fantasy which feeds their allure" and "SY's precise function for Restoration culture is to be a hypervisible simulation of an alternative within the mainstream"). They are primarily "men (and women) of good taste":

but there's a massive difference between being a person of good taste and being a great artist. As Nietzsche rightly argued, a certain kind of stupidity is necessary for all greatness, a preconditon for which is a deliberate narrowing of perspective, a refusal of 'well-roundedness'.

And finally:

Curating can have an important function to play, but with SY there has been a conflation of art and curatorialism - the alibi for their music's increasingly poverty at a textural and textual level is the way it supposedly makes a wider audience aware of marginal material. Sonic Youth are 'art' in all the worst senses (they possess a certain insitutional prestige, a certain standing and position, a cetain set of meta-rationales for what they do); but they are not art in the sense that there is a compelling reason for them to exist - there is no more at stake here than just another cool leisure product with all the right credentials.

When I read the first k-punk post on Sonic Youth and saw the phrase "person of good taste", along with the Nietzsche reference, I had just begun reading Agamben's The Man Without Content, specifically the chapter on the historical emergence of the "man of taste". I was thinking of the essay in terms of the literary, my own former attempts to become a reader of good taste, who was open-minded above all, and yet capable of making the needed discernments of quality. But then as the Sonic Youth conversation continued I realized that my experience with music is perhaps a better prism through which to view the problem.

It seems to me that one's taste for or against a given thing can obscure its import. If you think Sonic Youth is and always was boring, then what k-punk says may appeal to you immediately. If you think otherwise, then his remarks may seem ridiculous. After all, we're constantly told, everything comes down to taste, and we're all entitled to our opinion. But here, perhaps, I occupy a different position. Since I like Sonic Youth's music and, in fact, have even enjoyed their recent records very much, I'm sympathetic to Zone's attempts to defend them (even if Zone is only really defending the great 80s records). And yet k-punk's arguments strike me as unassailably correct. How to account for it?

I've blogged in the past about my history with music, how I was into classic rock in the 1980s, against the popular music of the day (and altogether ignorant of the underground). As such, my very taste in music is inherently curatorial, based as it was on the limited playlists of classic rock radio and the continued reverence of Rolling Stone magazine. My time was spent with music already substantially removed from the source, already canonical, already curated. (It's perhaps worth confessing that my own insecurities may have pushed me to opt for something about which judgment already seemed secure: I wasn't going out on a limb liking Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan, even if not everyone did.) By the time I first got to what had been underground rock, it had already been effectively co-opted. In fact, I could and, without realizing it, did approach it as another classic rock. The first Sonic Youth record I bought was the major-label debut, Goo. While Nirvana opened up a lot for me, what they really represented culturally was a last gasp of that underground and the fuller entrenchification of its sound for the canon. (The other popular "grunge" bands--Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains--were easy to adapt to since they were fairly explicitly classic rock in sound.)

This experience is very different from that described by k-punk or Simon Reynolds of their formative years. They were blessed, or possibly cursed, to have come of age right in the middle of the post-punk period, when it seemed to them as if pop music could continually change itself as well as the world.

But returning to Sonic Youth for a moment. Though they emerged out of the No Wave period, possibly the Finnegans Wake of rock (not analagous to its elaboration, obviously, but to its extremity), it's not difficult to agree with k-punk that they're really a pulling back from the extreme, a retrenchment, a classic rockification of punk & post-punk. When they've tried to branch out in recent years, within the brand (as opposed to in their solo outings), the broader fanbase rebelled; consider the much-maligned NY Ghosts & Flowers: a slight alteration of the formula, incorporation of some of the things learned from hanging out with the improvising community, with jazz players, but widely panned (famously by Pitchfork: "pretty much the worst thing ever"), their live shows in support of the album booed by fans no doubt wanting more of Daydream Nation, or worse, Dirty. Their albums subsequent to NY Ghosts & Flowers--Murray Street, Sonic Nurse, "Rather Ripped"--just as widely hailed as "returns to form". Interestingly, the first two of these struck me as decent compromises, and are among my favorite SY records, but then I revel in the sound as sound. And yet it's hard to argue that they are essentially a classic rock band, fundamentally careerists making a sound that happens to be pleasurable to me. One could be more charitable and say that they are, like folk or jazz musicians, an aging band working within an established idiom, one semi-established by themselves, bringing the noise the way they know how.

And. . . and I realize anew that a big reason why I basically quit blogging about music is because my thoughts on it are so hopelessly diffuse and meandering and equivocal. In the interest of finishing up this post, I will spare you the lengthy mini-essay on the curatorial politics of my iPod playlists (no kidding) and come to some closing thoughts, which won't touch on Sonic Youth at all. (Also for another post, some thoughts about our roles as spectators, which again would tie in with the Agamben. . . )

On the one hand, I think there is no reason why musicians should have to stop making the kind of music they like making, no reason why they should be expected to either quit or to adapt to newer styles. In this sense, I cherish the tradition, the folk tradition, communal music, and how it has played out in rock, etc. On the other hand, I want to defend and hold to the idea of music as art, which is of consequence when it needs to exist, when there is something at stake for the musician. But then we're talking about commercial music in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction, right? That is, could it ever have been otherwise, given the realities of capitalist production? Let me quote something from Simon Reynolds, which according to the excellent blog (new to me) Airport Through the Trees, appeared in the year-end issue of The Wire:

As young musicians develop in a climate where the musical past is accessible and available to an inundating degree, you encounter artists whose work is a constellation of exquisite taste, a latticework of reference points and sources that span the decades and the oceans but never quite manages to invent a reason for itself to exist.

And I ask, again, was anything else ever likely or even really possible? The vital music that was being made during previous periods when it seemed as if popular music meant something more--the 60s, the post-punk period, the emergence of rap in the 1980s--were fairly easily co-opted, adapted to. Now, with the proliferation of available product, the constant availability (competition) of the past, the easy portability of music, even those artists making something new and interesting get quickly absorbed into the maw of entertainment. Even the best, most necessary art, whatever it may be, becomes something merely to plug into to pass our dwindling leisure time, more consumption of more product. . . and the seemingly unassimilable merely becomes part of stable, alternative mainstreams fostering underground careerism, threatening nothing.

And just because I have no better way to do it, to finish up here's another recent post from Airport Through the Trees:

I miss punk. Not the sound of punk, nothing of the aesthetics, but more the power of it, if that makes any sense. Do you understand how tedious it is, tracking the boring and slow aesthetic evolutions of complacent genres? I love music but I want something more visceral. I can't stand the idea of another "unique voice" in composition, or jazz, or whatever. The weight of the whole history of music, etc. I think Johnny Rotten probably liked Pink Floyd on the day he wrote "I Hate" on one of their shirts. But he knew it was time to throw accepted wisdom and chin-scratching connoisseurship out the window for the benefit of something more. That is how I feel. I love Reich, but fuck Reich. I love David S. Ware, but fuck him too (though I hope he recovers from his illness). And fuck techno and house and fuck indie especially for saying fuck you to its own history of saying fuck you.

Yes, I say, yes, but more than that, I just want to say "fuck entertainment". (And that last line speaks to the co-optation of the Left, does it not? Yet more food for thought. . . )

Awesome Fatigue

Not too long ago I read this piece by David Foster Wallace about the movie Terminator 2 (link courtesy this interview at The House Next Door with Glenn Kenny, about his editing relationship with DFW). Wallace calls the movie "an appalling betrayal" of the original Terminator, and blames it for effectively inaugurating the era of what he calls "Special Effects Porn"; that is, movies featuring "half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes -- scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff -- strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative". One can date this period differently, but it seems to me that he's right to lament it.

And it's hard to argue with his specific criticisms of Terminator 2 itself, even as I recall that my own considered evalution of the movie, back when it was first released, amounted to variations of "that was awesome", no doubt all the while convincing myself of its wit and intelligence. In recent years, though I don't wish to disavow my earlier enjoyment of such entertainment, I've grown increasingly weary of movies that can only be said to be awesome or to suck. I eagerly await the day when this weariness means that I actually avoid said movies altogether, rather than merely being bored or alienated by them. This personal trend began with, I think, the insipid Gladiator and its battle scenes, which I hated but overlooked in the interest of being generally entertained. Then there were the three Lord of the Rings bloatfests; by the third installment (Best Picture, naturally), I had completely lost interest, and yet there I was, watching it with everybody else. Last year's example, The Dark Knight, was a mess, and in many ways a betrayal of the character, to the extent that I am still able to fret about how characters like Batman can be betrayed (like, isn't Batman supposed to be brilliant? In The Dark Knight he is stupid to the point of distraction), and I remember feeling oppressed by the movie, its lighting and frenetic pace and general incoherence. And yet it was kind of awesome, I had to admit. Which isn't anything like the same thing as "great" or "smart" or "complex" or whatever other kind of praise it received. I'm tired of "kind of awesome". I'm even tired of "completely awesome". Call it awesome fatigue.

Meanwhile, we recently watched the cult classic Withnail & I, and though I didn't think it was quite as great as its devoted fans seem to think it is, I nevertheless did think it was quite funny and took pleasure in watching real people move in real space. More of this please.

Broad Space

A friendly blog links to a page at another blog, a blog called ladypoverty; you click and a voice speaks. You read posts surrounding the linked entry. You like what you see, you like it a lot. Hey, you say, who is this?!? You look at the archives links and discover it's been around twice as long as your own sad little blog, addressing many of the same issues, in a voice lighter than air. You check back at the friendly blog, and there it sits on his blogroll, you wonder how long it's been there; it's under "new toys", but still. Where have I been? And yet there are so many blogs, so many voices worth listening to, who can keep up? You go back to this new-to-you blog and keep reading, there is so much there. There is this:

Freedom of movement happens alongside people, not apart from them. This requires obligating ourselves toward their concerns, educating ourselves about shared interests (which presupposes that we understand our own), and conditioning ourselves not to respect the boundaries proposed by power, demarcated as "differences." This means aligning oneself with one's neighbor, not one's ruler -- even if your neighbor is your political or religious opposite, and your ruler holds your "values." There is no atheist or Church-goer, Republican or revolutionary, Arab or Jew who cannot be talked to merely on the basis of these distinctions. Do the creationists need to feed their families? Do their daughters need health care? Then there is a broad space in which to stand, and move, amongst them.

Yes, you think. This is very good. You'll be coming back.

Derrick Jensen on Gandhi and pacifism

In my post below on Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, I referred the reader interested in a fairly thorough denunciation of Gandhi's pacifism to volume two ("Resistance") of Derrick Jensen's Endgame. It turns out that much of this material is available online. You can read several excerpts from both volumes of Endgame here, with his writing on pacifism here, here, and here. One sample, towards the end of the third available excerpt:

This leads to the next line by Gandhi often tossed around by pacifists: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall—Think of it, ALWAYS.”

You know how there are some people whose work you’re supposed to respect because everyone else seems to? And you know how at least with some of these people your respect fades over time, slowly, with each new piece of information that you gain? And you know how sometimes you feel you must be crazy, or a bad person, or you must be missing something, because everyone keeps telling you how great this person is, and you just don’t get it? And you know how you keep fighting to maintain your respect for this person, but the information keeps coming in, until at long last you just can’t do it anymore? That’s how it was with me and Gandhi. I lost a lot of respect when I learned some of the comments I’ve mentioned here. I lost more when I learned that because he opposed Western medicine, he didn’t want his wife to take penicillin, even at risk to her life, because it would be administered with a hypodermic needle; yet this opposition did not extend to himself: he took quinine and was even operated on for appendicitis. I lost yet more when I learned that he was so judgmental of his sons that he disowned his son Harilal (who later became an alcoholic) because he disapproved of the woman Harilal chose to marry. When his other son, Manilal, loaned money to Harilal, Gandhi disowned him, too. When Manilal had an affair with a married woman, Gandhi went public and pushed for the woman to have her head shaved. I lost more respect when I learned of Gandhi’s body hatred (but with his fixation on purity, hatred of human (read animal) emotions, and death wish this shouldn’t have surprised me), and even more that he refused to have sex with his wife for the last thirty-eight years of their marriage (in fact he felt that people should have sex only three or four times in their lives). I lost even more when I found out how upset he was when he had a nocturnal emission. I lost even more when I found out that in order to test his commitment to celibacy, he had beautiful young women lie next to him naked through the night: evidently his wife—whom he described as looking like a “meek cow”— was no longer desirable enough be a solid test. All these destroyed more respect for Gandhi (although I do recognize it’s possible for someone to be a shitheel and still say good things, just as it’s possible for nice people to give really awful advice). But the final push was provided by this comment attributed to him: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall—Think of it, ALWAYS.” This is as dismissive as his treatment of his wife and sons. It’s as objectifying as his treatment of the young women he used as tests. It’s as false as his advice to Jews, Czechs, and Britons. The last 6,000 years have seen a juggernaut of destruction roll across the planet. Thousands of cultures have been eradicated. Species are disappearing by the hour. I do not know what planet he is describing, nor what history. Not ours. This statement—one of those rallying cries thrown out consistently by pacifists—is wrong. It is dismissive. It is literally and by definition insane, by which I mean not in touch with the real physical world.

Containing Autarky

As I was working on completing my second post on Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, I came across this highly relevant passage in David Harvey's The Limits to Capital:

The insatiable thirst of capitalism for fresh supplies of labour accounts for the vigour with which it has pursued primitive accumulation, destroying, transforming and absorbing pre-capitalist populations wherever it finds them. [...] The real troubles begin when capitalists, facing shortages of labour supply and as ever urged on by competition, induce unemployment through technological innovations which disturb the equilibrium between production and realization, between the productive forces and their accompanying social relations. The closing of the frontiers to primitive accumulation, through sheer exhaustion of possibilities, increasing resistance on the part of pre-capitalist populations, or monopolization by some dominant power, has, therefore, a tremendous significance for the long-run stability of capitalism. This was the sea-change that began to be felt increasingly as capitalism moved into the twentieth century. It was the sea-change that, far more than the rise of monopoly or finance forms of capitalism, played the crucial role in pushing capitalism deeper into the mire of global crises and led, inexorably, to the kinds of primitive accumulation and devaluation jointly wrought through inter-capitalist wars.

[...] Any regional alliance, if it is to continue the process of accumulation, must maintain access to reserves of labour as well as to those 'forces of nature' (such as key mineral resources) that are otherwise capable of monopolization. Few problems arise if reserves of both exist in the region wherein most local capital circulates. When internal frontiers close, capital has to look elsewhere or risk devaluation. The regional alliance feels the stress between capital embedded in place and capital that moves to create new and permanent centres of accumulation elsewhere. Conflict between different regional and national capitals over access to labour reserves and natural resources begin to be felt. The themes of internationalism and multinationalism run hard up against the desire for autarky as the means to preserve the position of some particular region in the face of internal contradictions and external pressures—autarky of the sort that prevailed in the 1930s, as Britain sealed in its Commonwealth trade and Japan expanded into Manchuria and mainland Asia, Germany into eastern Europe and Italy into Africa, pitting different regions against each other, each pursuing its own 'spatial fix'. Only the United States found it appropriate to pursue an 'open door' policy founded on internationalism and multilateral trading. In the end the war was fought to contain autarky and to open up the whole world to the potentialities of geographical expansion and unlimited uneven development. That solution, pursued single-mindedly under United State's hegemony after 1945, had the advantage of being super-imposed upon one of the most savage bouts of devaluation and destruction ever recorded in capitalism's violent history. And signal benefits accrued not simply from the immense destruction of capital, but also from the uneven geographical distribution of that destruction. The world was saved from the terrors of the great depression not by some glorious 'new deal' or the magic touch of Keynesian economics in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of global war.

And later, in examining the ongoing, ever-increasing military budgets, he concludes that the cycle of capital accumulation and devaluation suggests a

terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the levels of devaluation now required.

Bad Science Fiction

As long as my much-delayed follow-up post on Human Smoke is (here again is my original review, from last August), I was still unable to find appropriate space for the following, so I give it its own post.

Perhaps the most wide-ranging response to Human Smoke was the five-part roundtable discussion hosted last March by Ed Champion. As was true of many of the mainstream reviewers of the book, some of the participants were fixated on what they perceived as an attempt by Baker at an "objective", revisionist history arguing a fairly simple (read: simplistic, naive, or arguably dangerous) pacifist case against the war, and concomitant minimization of the evil of the Nazis. One exception to this was Dan Green (another was Ed himself), who suggested that the book is "mostly about 9/11 and the Iraq War"--the book's depiction of Churchill, for example, countering the ways in which his myth was employed by the neo-cons for their own end in the run-up to the attack on Iraq. I don't know if I'd go quite as far as "mostly", but I agree that there's no mistaking the book's several present-day applications. And I agree with Dan when he says:

while it’s important that his narrative be accurate–the people quoted actually said those things and the behavior described actually happened–it isn’t necessary that it be objective. Indeed, it wouldn’t be as good as it is (and I think it’s quite good) if it were. He wants his readers to remember his book the next time Churchill and Roosevelt are nominated for sainthood and the next time WWII is described unambiguously as the “good war.” To this extent, I think he will succeed admirably.

As noted, Dan's was just one contribution to the discussion. The whole of it is worth looking into. Yet even here, I found a disturbing tendency for some readers to immediately unwind elaborate alternative histories, which they somehow perceive as plausible given what they--mistakenly, in my view--characterize as Baker's argument. Eric Rosenfield, for example, writes the following (Eric's and Dan's contributions can both be found in part five of the roundtable):

Let’s imagine, for a moment the alternate history Baker envisions: Churchill never comes to power in Britain. Hitler marches into Poland and conquers it, and England does not declare war despite it’s mutual defense treaty. Let’s even buy that this leads Hitler to never invade France or Russia, despite his constant talk of a “Third Reich” to rival the former German Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He starts sending all the Jews in the Reich to Madagascar. Except the Jews, who have already had all their assets liquidated, can’t be allowed to create a powerful state there so they are carefully controlled, and Madagascar becomes something like a Jewish Indian reservation ala the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia. Jews start dropping like flies from malaria and other diseases they have no defenses against, while the delighted Germans refuse them proper medical treatment or insect nets and watch the Jewish population dwindle. Perhaps there are even some rebellions and a massacre or ten.Meanwhile, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco consolidate their power in Europe and create an oppressive, Fascist mainland that lasts for generations. Japan conquers China and completes their oppression and exploitation of the Chinese and Koreans. With these powers now entrenched the idea of toppling them through military or other means becomes less and less possible.

This is just bad science fiction. "Let's imagine, for a moment the alternate history Baker envisions"? There is nothing in Human Smoke that should make one think Nicholson Baker imagines anything like what Eric's fever dreams have given us here. But you see this kind of thing a lot. Another example, from around the time of the book's publication, was Nigel Beale's comment at the end of this post, in which he admits to not having read the book (and to anyway not much caring for Nicholson Baker's other books), and yet is able to approvingly cite reviews like William Grimes' in The New York Times. Nigel writes:

Baker contends that if the West hadn't used bombs, Hitler's support at home would have evapourated [sic]. While Baker's pacifist sentiments are admirable, based on what I've just heard, and the reviews I've read I think he's wrong. My sense is that if Chamberlain had stayed in power millions more Jews would have died and today we’d all be goosestepping to the beat of a racist conductor.

I highlight these remarks only because they are typical and all too common whenever the myth of the "good war" is questioned, as well as in debates about "humanitarian intervention" generally. The idea is that if something hadn't been done--if our leaders hadn't made certain no doubt unpleasant choices--we necessarily would find ourselves, now, still, sixty-plus years later, living in a world-wide fascist super-state. The evident faith in our leaders is touching, if not outright delusional, while the distrust of popular pressure, the apparent belief that people will simply roll over for occupying powers the world over--and never resist! for decades!--is simply depressing. And ahistorical. (Meanwhile, the entire political history leading up to the war is elided or at best reduced to explanations of the German roots of the Nazi regime and creeping European anti-Semitism.)

Returning to Human Smoke

In concluding my review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke last summer, I suggested that, among other things, the value of such a book is that it helps facilitate the asking of questions concerning the uses of history. We might, for example, "ask ourselves what purposes, and whose interests, are served by the maintenance of the myth of 'the good war'." People from across the political spectrum cleave to the myth of World War II as the good war, for several reasons. They want desperately to believe that the U.S. can and did and indeed does stand for good in the world. Convincing themselves that this is basically true, in a general sense (that is, though mistakes are made, or certain administrations are unfortunate, on balance the United States acts on behalf of "the good"), they want to leave "humanitarian intervention" available as an option. "We", the thinking goes, "should do something" to prevent or stop particular humanitarian disasters. Unacknowledged--obscured--is the fact that what "we" in fact end up "doing" invariably only makes things worse. Completely ignored is the history of Western activity leading to these more recent disasters in the first place. The myth of the good war keeps open the possibility, provides a model for people to point to: we did good there. That the war was not a war of liberation is evidently beside the point. In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker presented a wide variety of details and anecdotes, which help serve to cast doubt on the received wisdom about World War II as the Good War. As such, it elicited a number of high profile denunciations by reviewers apparently concerned with Baker's insufficient reverence for the Allied war effort. In addition, there were some interesting deviations from this general trend.

My earlier post was fairly long, but still I necessarily left quite a lot out and so immediately began a follow-up post intended to address other points, which post got derailed by personal events. But more recent reviews of the book and subsequent discussions (I'm thinking of John Self's positive review, including the related comment thread to that review, and Max Dunbar's generally negative review , which Steve Mitchelmore addressed here, Mark Thwaite entering the fray here, in the midst of which Dunbar produced two follow-up blog posts [1, 2]) have encouraged me to finish up the notes that would have followed my original review and to say a bit more. I will employ the form of numbered points I have favored of late (which may result in some repetition).

1. Many reviewers of Human Smoke, particularly those who have panned it, have written as if the book drops us in the middle of possibly 1938 or 1939, or even 1941, points at which, looking back, war certainly appears to have been unavoidable, given the ambitions of Nazi Germany. But the book's first quotation is from 1892, then it jumps to 1913, making its way piecemeal to the 1930s. It is true that the preponderance of detail is from the late 1930s through December 1941, but this reviewing move ignores much of the effect Baker achieves by beginning earlier. In addition, reviewers generally ignore the role of the United States in provoking the Japanese in the Pacific, throughout the 1930s. Only if we examine the kinds of actions which over time lead to war, for this war in particular, can we hope to avoid being dragged into future wars. It is my contention that, in Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker has made an important contribution to this end.

2. There is a general distrust of popular pressure--anxiety about democracy--which manifests itself in paternalistic distrust of readers. Readers are apparently very stupid, not to be trusted. This is the unvoiced theme running through many reviews of Human Smoke. A recent entry into this type of review is Dunbar's in 3:AM. He is exercised about the supposedly poor scholarship, or apparent lack of scholarship, on display in Human Smoke (echoing Anne Applebaum's review in this case) ; about Baker's allegedly manipulative juxtaposition of details and uncritical presentation of the views of certain pacifists; about the unexamined racism of the latter. . . He borrows from my review the passage from Sam Anderson's excellent review that I in turn had borrowed from Mark Thwaite. Here, again, is how this passage begins:

To dismiss Baker's project as a failed work based on the traditional criteria of history writing, however, is to misunderstand its actual purpose and power—and also to underestimate the good sense of the average reader. No one is likely to mistake Human Smoke for a comprehensive scholarly history of the war. It's an auto-didact's record of his own obsessive, subjective research. It devotes generous airtime to characters who tend to get excluded from popular history (secretaries, pacifist students, journalists), excavates great lost quotes ('What is the difference between throwing 500 babies into a fire and throwing fire from aeroplanes on 500 babies? There is none'), and powerfully questions canonical events based on carefully identified sources…

Dunbar concedes that Anderson makes a good point here, that Baker is not a historian, but complains that this sort of claim seems designed to protect Human Smoke from criticism. But this is not the important point being made here. The point is that certain reviews "underestimate the good sense of the average reader". It's not that there are no criticisms to be leveled at Nicholson Baker or Human Smoke, it's that so many of the negative reviews assume that readers cannot be trusted with it. To be sure, stupid readers exist, but are books to be judged only on the basis of how its poorest potential readers might read them? But then the real concern for such reviewers is that readers cannot be trusted to come to the correct conclusions.

3. With respect to the pacifists, Baker is clearly sympathetic to these figures, but I still find it difficult to believe that readers can read his book and come to the conclusion that he really intends for it to be a coherent pacifist argument against the war, his much-quoted afterward notwithstanding. Dunbar (he is not alone) wants us to know that the pacifists were no saints, nor necessarily friends to the Jews, and that their words and actions are presented by Baker "uncritically"; in particular, Gandhi was a "committed racist" who, according to Orwell, suggested the Jews commit "collective suicide". The implication being that, for Nicholson Baker, Gandhi is a hero whose words should have been heeded. But let's look at how Gandhi and the pacifists are actually presented in the book. The pacifists have some important things to say, but they are also incredibly naïve at times, and there are numerous places where they do not come off well at all. And some of things Gandhi is quoted as saying are truly monstrous (some are not; for instance, he is exactly right about the proposed settlement of Jews in Palestine). One example:

"I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators." The discipline of nonviolence--ahimsa--worked most efficaciously in the face of terrible violence, Gandhi said: "Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime."

Another:

If Hitler and Mussolini chose to overrun England, he said, let them. “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your soul, nor your minds.”

If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

This method, Gandhi said, had had considerable success in India. (206)

On this latter point, Dunbar cites Orwell to the effect that Gandhi’s non-violence was more useful to power than threatening, particularly in the context of what was going on with the British empire at the time. It's a point worth remembering. But consider the advice Gandhi gives to the Jews and the British here; it amounts to "just lie down and take it". Not unlike the kind of advice women have been known to receive when threatened with the possibility of rape. (This comparison is not irrelevant. For a fairly thorough denunciation of Gandhi, his pacifism and misogyny included, see the second volume of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame. Jensen also reminds us more than once that the Jews who fought back--for example, in the Ghetto uprising--were much more likely to survive than those who did not. Note that violent resistance or insurrection is different than waging total war for political purposes.) The point is that the reader of Human Smoke encounters Gandhi's horrific or at best unhelpful statements in the same sort of context that the reader encounters those of Churchill. In my opinion, both men come off very badly. If one assumes that because Nicholson Baker is sympathetic to the pacifists that he necessarily endorses every comment they ever made, even the ones he presents to us, then one is not reading the book at hand. It is not a polemic, but a tapestry.

4. Let me turn now to the close of Dunbar's review, which was examined by Steve Mitchelmore in his post. Jumping off of a quote from Orwell regarding the aforementioned usefulness of Gandhi to the British, Dunbar says this:

Oppressors don’t fear pacifism. They fear aggression. Baker quotes a
demonstrator’s placard: ‘WAR MEANS FASCISM’. The truth is the exact reverse.

Steve cites a couple of examples to show that oppressors have at times indeed feared pacifism but is chiefly concerned with the "troubling" aspect of the book's reception, where "the issue of the Holocaust has been raised to address and, at the same, to obscure the reviewers' responsibility for more recent atrocities." That is, many reviewers were either supporters of the current war against Iraq and similar crimes against humanity, or at least seem anxious that "humanitarian intervention" remain on the table in the future. There follows, in Steve's post and the responses from Dunbar and Mark Thwaite, discussion about how contemporary attacks are legally equivalent, according to the Nuremberg Principle and the Geneva Conventions, to Nazi Germany's attacks on Poland and Russia, and so on. Steve and Mark handle this fairly well, and Dunbar essentially concedes the point. However, he elaborates on what he meant by reversing the phrase; he meant that "fascism means war":

As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, this is true in two senses. Fascism means war because it is inherently expansionist and imperialist and warlike. And fascism means war because taking up arms is almost always necessary for fascism’s defeat.

I leave his citation to Hitchens as a reference in my excerpt only because it's funny, as all such references to Hitchens end up being. But let's look at the content, the second sense first. Fascism means war because taking up arms is almost always necessary for its defeat. Ok. Sounds plausible, though fascism does not arise in isolation. Which leads back to the first sense in which fascism means war: it is inherently expansionist and imperialist and warlike. Again, this sounds uncontroversial, but what else can be described with those words? It's capitalism, is it not? (Yes, it always comes back to capitalism.) That is to say, fascism is a particular, regional response to crisis inherent in capitalism itself. It does not exist independently. And a given crisis can allow certain elements to exploit popular vulnerability. The Nazis were of course a deeply reactionary movement seeking and able to tap into resentments, the kinds of resentments that proliferate when a country is in the midst of economic upheaval. German capitalists and conservatives liked the anti-communism of the Nazis and mistakenly believed they could control their less savory attributes. The other Western powers welcomed the rise of fascism in both Germany and Italy. No doubt the casual anti-Semitism of the elites allowed them to overlook the more virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but more importantly from their perspective was, again, the strong anti-communism of the fascists. It was after all the Great Depression, with labor in much turmoil.

Meanwhile, business continues, including, crucially, the business of selling arms. In my review, I provided an array of passages from Human Smoke, intended to give the reader a sense of the variety of material included by Nicholson Baker. One passage focused on the words of one H.C. Engelbrecht, who had written a best-selling book about arms dealers called Merchants of Death. I chose this passage with care, since I sought to given an indication of how the normal workings of capitalism led to the war, as I am expanding on now. Here, again, is the bulk of that passage (the quotes date from 1934):

"Armament is an industry that knows no politics, friends, right or wrong--but
only customers," Engelbrecht said. "If you can pay, you can buy."

The French arms company Schneider had recently sold four hundred tanks to Hitler's Germany, Engelbrecht observed; the company disguised the sale by shipping the tanks via the Netherlands. The Germans had also ordered sixty airplanes from Vickers, the British maker of bombers."

In every war," said Engelbrecht, "the armament maker who sells internationally is arming a potential enemy of his own country--and that, practically, if not legally, is treason."

There are numerous anecdotes and details about the arms deals of the 1920s and 1930s in the book. And much else is known about the American and other Western corporations that continued to do business with the Nazis right up until war was declared, and in some cases after. The truth is that capital "knows no politics, friends, right or wrong". The further truth is that, effectively, the West manufactured its own enemy, arming it all the way, and then when it found that it could not be contained ("appeased"), war became a necessity, to the ruin of millions of people.

Those of us who are Anglo-American, because we have the rights we have, enjoy the privileges we enjoy, because we have nominal democratic forms at home and have sacred documents that espouse admirable ideals and goals, we like to imagine that governmental actions are undertaken in pursuit or defense of these ideals and goals. We like to imagine, and we apparently need to believe, that the United States truly is a generally benign actor on the world stage, and a defender of democracy. The fact is that in the 1930s capitalism was in deep trouble, and out of that trouble emerged the Nazis as a power. If it were just a matter of defeating the Nazis once they emerged, or even once war began, or if saving the Jews were of any concern for the elites, it would indeed be difficult to argue, but it was not, and the corresponding course of the war reflects the divergence of these goals (this is why motivations and outcomes both matter, and why outcomes need to be judged clearly). The war was not just about defeating the Nazis, and it certainly was not at all about saving or protecting the doomed Jewish population, which was anyway in a much worse position after the war began. It was ultimately about reconstituting the capitalist system, with the United States positioning itself to take over as that system's lead enforcer and guarantor, and in this the war was very successful indeed. Human Smoke does not and could not get into this, given the form the book takes, but it includes enough different kinds of material to allow one to better appreciate the climate which lead to what became total war, and it is in this way that the book makes an important contribution.

Update: the three posts immediately following this one are related; the first includes material I couldn't fit here, the second quotes a passage from David Harvey about capitalism and the war, the third provides links and an excerpt from Derrick Jensen on pacifism and Gandhi, which I made reference to above.

Noted: Maurice Blanchot

From the essay "Idle Speech", found in Friendship (translation Elizabeth Rottenberg):

In the end, once the work is finished, the one who has finished it finds himself expelled from it, thrown outside it, and thereafter incapable of finding access to it--no longer having, moreover, any desire to accede to it. It is only during the task of realization, when the power of reading is still completely internal to the work in progress, that the author--who still does not exist--can split himself off from himself into a reader yet to come, and can seek to confirm, through the indirect means of this hidden witness, what the movement of the words would be if grasped by another, who would still only be himself--that is, neither one nor the other, but only the truth of the splitting.