Disintegration of the Illusion

I've been meaning to write something about this long-coming economic crisis we find ourselves in, but things have moved too quickly for your slow-writing, time-crunched blogger. But I like what k-punk says here:

"What we're seeing is not the collapse of capitalism, but the disintegration of the illusion that capitalism is about the untrammeled free market."

Yeah.

And, regarding the $700 billion figure, this quote was priceless:

"It’s not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

See also, among many other worthy items, the following: Michael Hudson at CounterPunch (on the insanity of the giveaway plan), Richard Estes at American Leftist, Naomi Klein at The Nation (article is from July, about "Obama's Chicago Boys"; link via Matt Christie), Cassiodorus' Daily Kos diary suggesting "Maybe we can call it 'late late capitalism' now?". . . . so many others, too numerous to collate or summarize, etc. . .

Meanwhile, Lenin reminds us not to forget about recent American strikes in Pakistan, expanding the illegal, immoral, ineffective, total bullshit war of terror.

Noted: Thomas Bernhard

From "The Cellar: An Escape", in Gathering Evidence, Bernhard's remarkable memoir collection (translation by David McLintock; italics all in the original):

Truth, it seems to me, is known only to the person who is affected by it; and if he chooses to communicate it to others, he automatically becomes a liar. Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are communicated. The aspiration for truth, like every other aspiration, is the quickest way to arrive at falsehoods and falsifications with regard to any state of affairs. And to write about a period of one's life, no matter how remote or how recent, no matter how long or how short, means accumulating hundreds and thousands and millions of falsehoods and falsifications, all of which are familiar to the writer describing the period as truths and nothing but truths. His memory adheres precisely to the events and their precise chronology, but what emerges is something quite different from what things were really like. The description makes something clear which accords with the describer's aspiration for truth but not with the truth itself, for truth is quite impossible to communicate. We describe an object and believe that we have described it truthfully and faithfully, only to discover that it is not the truth. We make a state of affairs clear, yet it is never the state of affairs we wished to make clear but always a different one. We are bound to say that we have never communicated anything that was the truth, yet throughout our lives we have never stopped trying to communicate the truth. We wish to tell the truth but fail to do so. We describe something truthfully, but our description is something other than the truth. We ought to be able to see existence as the state of affairs we wish to describe, but however hard we try we can never see this state of affairs through our description. Knowing this to be so, we ought to have given up wishing to write the truth long ago and so given up writing altogether. Since it is not possible to communicate and hence to communicate the truth, we have contented ourselves with wishing to write and describe the truth, as well as to tell the truth, even though we know that the truth can never be told. The truth which we know is, from the point of view of logic, a lie, and this lie, since we cannot circumvent it, is the truth. What is described here is the truth, and yet at the same time it is not the truth, because it cannot be. In all the years we have spent reading, we have never encountered a single truth, even if again and again what we have read has been factual. Again and again it was lies in the form of truth and truth in the form of lies, etc. What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. For a long time reason has forbidden me to tell and write the truth, because that only means telling and writing a lie; but writing is a vital necessity for me, and this is the reason why I write, even if everything I write is bound to be nothing but lies which are conveyed through me as truth. Of course we may demand truth, but if we are honest with ourselves we know that there is no such thing as truth. What is described here is the truth, and at the same time it is not, for the simple reason that truth is only a pious wish on our part.

David Foster Wallace: RIP

I was greatly saddened to learn of the death of David Foster Wallace. I don't have a whole lot to add to the body of tributes and remembrances building up across the Internet (most of which seem to be collected at The Literary Saloon; also see Brandon Soderberg's post here--just as Brandon wonders absurdly about Wallace's dogs, I keep thinking about the deliberation of those final terrible moments), except to say that, for me, Wallace the writer was not about tricks or gimmicks. Nor did I see him as a "post-modernist" writer, in the sense usually meant, but rather as a writer with concerns very much like those of the Modernists, grappling with the post-modern world, with the problems of communication and isolation. I enjoyed the novel Infinite Jest. I generally enjoyed his non-fiction, though I consider it to be relatively minor in comparison with his fiction (and where some of his stylistic tics most often threatened to overwhelm his great voice). But I believe that it is in his shorter fiction, particularly in the collections Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (e.g., "The Depressed Person") and Oblivion (e.g., "Good Old Neon" and much of "Mr. Squishy"), that Wallace most showed that he was for real. He was painfully aware that the choices made by writers in the past were not, and could not be, available to him. A great vein of sadness runs through his work, not the sort that could predict or explain what happened, but the sort that revealed a writer able to see and to understand. He was writer with a lot of heart. He will be missed.

Technological Fundamentalism

Robert Jensen, in CounterPunch:

[I]t may well turn out that the gravest threat to a just and sustainable human presence on the planet is technological fundamentalism -- the notion that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. . . .

[. . .]

Those who raise questions about this fundamentalism are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

One expression of this view is the "precautionary principle," which argues that instead of asking sceptics to prove that a new product or process might be harmful, advocates of the proposed new action should have to prove it is safe. . . .

[. . .]

This idea is not new. An early challenge to greed-fueled technological fundamentalism came from the Luddites, artisans who resisted the factory system in early 19th century Britain not because they were afraid of machines but because they anticipated the negative effects of a dangerous and dehumanizing system on their communities. The contemporary use of "Luddite" as a synonym for "someone with an irrational fear of anything new" indicates how a fearful culture regards this kind of thoughtful critique. The lesson we should learn from the early Industrial Revolution is that the Luddites were correct -- by overvaluing machines we can easily undervalue people and the non-human living world.

Divergent Pictures

From To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson, writing on the Paris Commune:

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history--and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing--that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people--the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand--in that one week of the suppression of the Commune than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years.

This divergent picture of history gets more pronounced all the time, and it seems to me that here in the United States we have at least three. The difference between a certain leftwing view of American history and that held by liberals or progressives--who, for example, all too often cling to the notion of the United States as well-intentioned actor on the world stage and fail to grasp the implications of the Progressive Era--is huge.

And yet the liberal view is accuracy itself when compared to the lunatic version of history carried around by the American Right.

When it comes turns out not to be what they meant

The Voyou Désœuvré post I linked to last time featured this passage, quoted from William Morris' "A Dream of John Ball":

But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

I like this quote a lot. The context for Voyou, again, was seeing the 1950s as embodying the radical dreams of the 1930s, only as banality. To revisit these words from Voyou:

What's so interesting about the 1950s is that many of the things that appear so radical in the 1930s—technological progress, social democracy, modernist design—reappear in the 1950s as banal.

"Technological progress" sticks out for me as the most problematic, as a radical idea, of the three listed items. (Indeed, "progress" itself strikes me as increasingly problematic, but I need to take some time to work out my thoughts on the matter.) In retrospect, it hardly seems surprising that technological progress would be used against workers. It has always been thus, though in both the liberal and radical traditions, it appears too often to be seen as a definite good (technology will free us, no doubt, instead of the opposite). But from where we sit now, the idea of technological progress, particularly as married to the idea of never-ending growth, seems especially foolish and destructive. Once we might have been able to imagine the lessening of the burden of work through the use of technology, but this has not come to pass, and with capitalism cannot come to pass. (Topic for future consideration: the Luddites were right.) Instead we get distractions, bought off with shiny iPods and cellphones and home entertainment systems.

(Incidentally, the Morris quote reminds me that we happen to have E.P. Thompson's study of Morris on our bookshelves; this quote moves it a little more in focus for me as something I'd like to read.)

Useful reference points

Catching up on my blog reading, I came across this fascinating post from July, over at Voyou Désœuvré, in part explaining the recent fixation over there on the 1950s, which Voyou posits as having been the decade in which, in a certain way, "the dreams of the 1930s came to pass":

. . . the 1930s were also [like the 1950s] a time of inspiring aesthetic and political movements: but perhaps too inspiring. The inter-war years had a level of radicalism I find difficult to imagine, and so it seems to me that any left-wing enthusiasm for the 30s runs a real risk of being nostalgic in a paralyzing way. What's so interesting about the 1950s is that many of the things that appear so radical in the 1930s—technological progress, social democracy, modernist design—reappear in the 1950s as banal.

It seems to me that any past period of radical activity leaves us open to unhelpful and unproductive nostalgia. I know that when I read about vital movements of the past, I can feel the tug myself. When reading radical history, I am aware that I am rooting for a side, as if I were reading a story that might have a different ending than it actually has. The radicalism of the past seems full of possibilities, possibilities foreclosed, cut off, leaving us in the apparent hopelessness of the present. This is a problem I need to overcome, I know, though I doubt it is unique. In any event, I like what Voyou says about why the 1950s in particular appeals:

Because perhaps we are still living in the 50s, in two senses. We live with an image of the future and a concept of futurity that was developed in the 50s; but we are also experiencing a sort of repetition-as-farce of the 50s. If the 50s were the period in which the dreams of the 1930s were, in their way, achieved, are the early years of the 21st century not the period in which the long neoliberal dream has finally achieved its full triumph? A rather parodic triumph, to be sure, as the market economy begins to fail even by its own curious standards. In which case, the 50s can be a useful reference point, a period of both stasis and creation dialectically dependent on one another, and a reminder that the time of the end of history is not the end times.

I try to look to earlier moments as such reference points, as evidence that alternatives are indeed possible, but also in order to hold off my own tendency towards catastrophic thinking. Anyway, as with much else, I hope to return to some of these themes when time permits. . .

Solving the Problems

In the course of writing my last post, I was reminded of an interview with Philip Roth that appeared in the Guardian four years ago, in which Roth said the following:

My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing. Some people do crossword puzzles to satisfy their need to keep the mind engaged. For me, the absolutely demanding mental test is the desire to get the work right. The crude cliché is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books. Not at all. What he's doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book - which is, How do you write about this? The engagement is with the problem that the book raises, not with the problems you borrow from living. Those aren't solved, they are forgotten in the gigantic problem of finding a way of writing about them.

Successful Solutions

As has been reported various places, Rosalind Belben has won the James Tait Memorial Prize for her novel Our Horses in Egypt. I've only recently heard of Belben, in the form of effusive praise from, first, Gabriel Josipovici and Mark Thwaite, both at Ready Steady Book in the last year (for example, both cited Our Horses in Egypt in RSB's end-of-year symposium), and now Steve Mitchelmore. Steve suggests that recognition for Belben is long overdue, noting that praise appears to have been slow in coming Belben's way because she has been labeled "an experimental writer". He refers to a review by Laura Brandon of two earlier Belben novels (Dreaming of Dead People and Is Beauty Good, two books that have immediately joined Our Horses in Egypt at the head of my to-find list), in which Brandon calls Belben "an explorer". I haven't read Belben yet, but I agree with Steve in principle, that "exploratory writer" is a much more useful, and less deliberately alienating, term than is "experimental writer". To my mind, the word "experimental" carries a whiff of the sterile and is typically only used to separate certain books from readers, to indicate their position outside the natural order of things. "Exploratory", by comparison, is warmer, more inviting.

Steve's post brought to mind the final piece in The Mirror of Criticism (1983), in which Josipovici writes about this very issue. He notes that reviews of his novels Migrations and The Air We Breathe were mixed, but that positive or negative, he was seen as an "experimental writer", much to his surprise. In these novels, Josipovici was, the reviewers had it, "deliberately [trying] to make things difficult for the reader", and perhaps had, in one reviewer's phrase, "a lingering but still severe case of the Robbe-Grillet syndrome." He summarizes the assumptions shared by the reviewers of these two novels thus:

. . .there are writers and there are experimental writers; the 'experimental' is a sub-branch of fiction, rather like teenage romances or science fiction perhaps, but differing from them in being specifically highbrow, and, like other highbrow activities, such as abstract painting and classical music, it is totally unconnected with the real world; however, we should tolerate this for the health of art (and to show how tolerant we are).

It seems to me that the situation is much the same now, only such reviewers are more hostile toward what they see as "experimental" and less inclined to think it should be "tolerated". In this view, fiction is commodity and it is entertainment. As such, it should be generally accessible. There rarely seems to be any sense that fiction might be writing that finds its form, in which the writer finds the form necessary to say what needs to be said, as fiction. No: writers are storytellers peddling entertainment, nothing more, depositing amusing or diverting "story content" into pre-existing fictional containers. Any other sort of writing is deemed presumptuous or pretentious, or perhaps unduly infected by bad influences. As capitalism is the air we breathe, so that it seems to us natural, allowing us to imagine "no alternative", fiction naturally belongs in the form of the 19th century novel, with perhaps various Modernists' techniques thrown into the mix to spice things up (innovative techniques being all that the Modernists, in this view, were about).

Josipovici again:

The interesting question is why a reviewer should speak quite naturally of 'a lingering but still severe case of the Robbe-Grillet syndrome' but never, in the case of most novels being produced today, of 'a severe case of the Charlotte Brontë or the George Eliot syndrome'? Why is there this presumption that the novel as written by these two writers is somehow natural, while that written by Robbe-Grillet [. . .] is fabricated-with-intent-to-be-clever, or even with-intent-to-deceive-and-confuse?

Noting that these particular two novels of his had seemed, to him, far from distancing and coldly "experimental", the most personal of his novels up to that time. For him, writing these novels, as with his others, was about finding the right way to write, about solving certain problems, unique to each novel. Here is where he locates the difference:

. . . the distinction is not between 'experimental' and 'non-experimental' art, but between successful and unsuccessful solutions to problems. I suppose there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as an unsuccessful solution. If the artist is aware of something that needs a solution, he will find it. Looking at the history of art one sees that for most of the time artists aren't even aware that there is a problem. And the difference is really between the writer who, whether by instinct or by thought, 'gets it right', and the one who imagines he is writing what he feels, what he wants, but who is really only reproducing someone else's way of feeling. All talk of plagiarism pales before this much deeper and more prevalent kind of unacknowledged borrowing, which is the mode of working of nine artists out of ten.

One might add that, when the artist is aware of the problem, writing is necessarily exploratory.

Incidentally, to bring it back round to Belben just a little bit before closing, at the end of this essay, Josipovici compares books to friends. We can't justify them, and we don't ask "what do they mean?" But we return to them again and again, and to each for different reasons. In this light, he takes note of three then-recent novels that he regards as masterpieces: Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (which was then as yet untranslated into English), and Belben's Dreaming of Dead People, mentioned above (which, though "well received" upon release, "somehow has failed to establish itself as the major work it undoubtedly is"). Malamud's novel sits on my shelf, awaiting my attention, Perec's has long been on my list (though I keep deferring acquiring it until I've read other books first), and now Belben's is there too. With these three novels in mind reminding him that writers do indeed find their way, Josipovici closes with these words:

My advice to anyone who asks about 'experimental' writing today would be: forget about labels and go out and buy these three books. Reviewers may be influential, but in the end it's the writers who count. And the good writers will go on producing the books they have to regardless of the reviewers.

Welcoming Mirah

I am in love: This past Saturday morning, August 9, 2008, at 9:28 AM, Aimée gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Mirah. Aimée was amazing and strong, and both she and Mirah are in excellent health. We are spending our time getting to know this new little person and beginning to figure her out, so let's just say that things will be a little slow here for a while.

In the meantime, take a look at a couple of pictures (that's yours truly in the second one):

The very notion of wholeness

Of Kafka's story fragment "The Watchman", mentioned in the last post, Gabriel Josipovici also writes: "It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness." What does he mean?

In a short discussion over at Jacob Russell's blog, I echoed something I wrote in an earlier post. I said: "My sense of Modernism, before reading Josipovici, was that it was simply this moment in time in which new techniques expanded (or advanced) the modes available to writers. Since reading Josipovici, most references I see to Modernism appear to be based on the same conception." Jacob replied that "[n]ew techniques were more than a reaction to old techniques: they were reactions to modes of perception, to ways of conceptualizing the world" and that it seems that Josipovici is less "concerned with techniques in themselves, [than] with the broader agenda they were meant to serve". I've been a little uneasy diving into discussions about literary Modernism, primarily because my reading in the critical literature has been so shallow, outside of Josipovici. And yet, his work has struck such a chord with me, that I feel compelled to step into the fray, with him as my primary guide.

To return to this question of wholeness, I want to talk a little about Josipovici's take on James Joyce. Joyce, it seems to me, is for many people the quintessential Modernist. This is how I had viewed him in the past, and it was because of this view that I saw the Modernists as a whole as a particularly difficult group of writers. I was thus surprised and intrigued when I noticed, well over a year ago by now, a comment from Steve Mitchelmore (I don't remember whether it appeared at This Space or in comments elsewhere) to the effect that Ulysses was less the greatest 20th century novel (its customary panel-selected position) than the last great 19th century novel. If I looked at the idea long enough, I could almost feel as if I understood what he meant, though I'd yet to read Ulysses (and, in fact, have still not read it). Steve made a similar comment at least one other time, specifically referencing Josipovici. When I'd read Josipovici's On Trust, I had a better idea what might be meant by this idea, but he doesn't spend any time on Joyce in that book.

Recently, I asked Steve if there was an essay in which Josipovici writes specifically about Joyce. He referred me to an older collection, The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982. I promptly found the book for cheap online. The piece in question is titled, ironically enough, "The Last Great Book". In retrospect, it's a good thing that I wasn't hoping for a lengthy essay or interested in the book only for this piece. The review is only a few pages long and doesn't say a whole lot more than what Steve had already said (happily, the rest of reviews in the book are well worth reading). But there are some choice lines worth attending to. One of the books under discussion is Hugh Kenner's fine study, Joyce's Voices--which Josipovici calls "criticism of a very high order":

Nevertheless, a doubt remains. Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the complete work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kafka and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

[. . .] there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

Whereas we seem most often to be concerned with new techniques established by the Modernists writers, especially if we buy into progress, into advancement of the arts, here the techniques themselves are of less concern. I realize that this is one of the reasons why Ulysses has seemed so forbidding. Perhaps I get on better with the more exploratory, less domineering fiction of Proust, Beckett, Kafka, and now Woolf.

If we return to Kafka's fragment, we see ourselves, we overrun it, return to it. "It opens a space and lives in it, a space which we too can enter and in which we too can live. . ." So writes Josipovici, again in his introduction to the Collected Stories (itself collected, as "Kafka's Children", in The Singer on the Shore), in language recalling his remarkable essays about the Bible, including The Book of God itself. In the 19th century novel, the novelist takes over from God, controlling his or her created world, without doubting the justification for this move.

In the short piece on Joyce, Josipovici is reviewing what are, in effect, "reader's guides" to Joyce's writing. Such guides abound, of course, and point to another factor keeping Ulysses at arm's length for me. As Josipovici puts it, Joyce's "works cry out for explication, footnoting and the exercise of those crossword puzzle skills at which the academic mind excels." This, he suggests, is indicative of a weakness in Joyce's art. With Joyce acting as God, academics serve as the priests and Talmudists explaining and interpreting his every word. With this in mind, the first sentence of Josipovici's review is hilariously apt: "If Joyce had not existed the professors would have had to invent him."

The watchman said nothing

In the comments to my recent post about Kafka's story "First Sorrow", there was a brief discussion about what it is about Kafka's stories that makes them on the one hand so interesting and alive, and on the other so slippery, even easily forgotten. Lloyd Mintern wrote the following:

Perhaps the reason Kafka's stories are so susceptible to being forgotten, that they slip away in whole, is that they are so familiar. They seem on the one hand like little artistic gems, but at the bottom they are utterly plain and life-like. For instance this trapeze artist story I think is entirely based on that last sentence; it works from the ending, and he arranges it thus, in order to get to that one observation, the question. I would conjecture that Kafka wrote it after staring at a furrow line in someone's face (or his own). Applying the question of how a worry line in a face comes to be stamped there, asking for its history so to speak, needs just a context to explore; the exotic (and comical) trapeze artist will do in this case. The length is expandable, like all parables, internally; and the content is so true to life one can . . . live with it, and thus forget it for a time, until, coming back, one is shocked that someone else got it so closely.

Many of Kafka's stories are like mini-parables. I'm suddenly reminded of something Ezra Pound wrote in connection with Confucius, in his Guide to Kulchur (which I previously mentioned here, and which I haven't read more than five pages from since that post):

Said Szetsun, or rather so says his translator: "The sayings of the great sages are ordinary." This I take to mean that there is nothing superfluous or excessive in them. When one knows enough one can find wisdom in the Four Classics. When one does not know enough one's eye passes over the page without seeing it.

Many of Kafka's stories now, for me, emerge as much more than they were when I first approached them.

In the introduction to the edition he edited of Kafka's Collected Stories, Gabriel Josipovici quotes the entirety of the super-short story fragment "The Watchman":

I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: 'I ran through here while you were looking the other way.' The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. 'I suppose I really oughtn't to have done it,' I said. The watchman still said nothing. 'Does your silence indicate permission to pass?'

This is the kind of piece that, if encountered in the pages of a collection, on its own, in the midst of other similarly short pieces, there's a good chance I'd have read it and moved on, without it having made any impact. Though perhaps I'd have been puzzled and returned to it. Why is this piece here? Josipovici writes: ". . .this is a piece of writing which demands to be read at least twice; indeed, as so often in Kafka, the narrative mimics the way we are forced to read it." This is precisely so. I read it, fly by it in fact, but I'm stopped short. What was that? I must return to it.

I think, to combine Lloyd's observation with Gabriel Josipovici's, we have a writer who writes in a style that is so plain, so familiar, that it seems to invite us to ignore it, while also insisting on being re-read. (I know that when I was reading Kafka in the midst of the exuberant, noisier writers I was reading, all that Amis and Self and Rushdie, and even the great Nabokov, he somehow seemed not to fit, and I had trouble with his stories. Though the claustrophobia of the novels was somehow easier to retain.) For example, though it's hard to forget Gregor Samsa's condition in "The Metamorphosis", many of the details of that story slip right past, in the plainness of the style. Looking for one thing, I instead get another.

Notes on Human Smoke

What is the meaning of World War II? What does it mean to you? Is it proof that evil exists? That some enemies are simply intractable? That intervention is sometimes necessary? Was it a war of liberation? Does it stand in as an example, or perhaps the example, of the "just" or "good" war? If so, does it matter how the war was fought? Do the political aims of the Allies matter? Should we be in any way concerned with the ways in which these political aims determined the nature of the war, or its length? Does the unquestionably horrible nature of the Nazi regime render all such questions moot? Some of them? Was total war the only way to defeat Hitler's war machine? Did the Allies have any way of knowing either way? What was the role of big business in the build-up, on all sides? How much of a monster was Churchill anyway? What did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? What US actions led to the attack? Does the nature of the Japanese regime justify all subsequent actions taken against Japan?

These are just some of the questions that come to mind when I think about World War II. I'm pondering them today in connection with Nicholson Baker's book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. I'm presenting them, not to answer them, or even address most of them, but because I think they are particularly salient to this book, which I think has been aggressively, if not intentionally, misunderstood by much of the major review press. Certainly the questions, as posed, are somewhat loaded. I have a point of view. Baker has one, though it seems clear to me that his point of view is not quite the one assumed by some of these reviewers. For example, I don't think it's at all obvious that Human Smoke argues the pacifist case against the war, even if it could be said that Baker himself is a pacifist and that he is sympathetic to the argument.

It's often said that war is politics by other means. This is a truism, but only true, really, in the sense of politics as the place of disagreement between and among ruling elites. But what are the main features of war? This is not a trick question. The answer is death, terror, destruction. Destruction, primarily, of ordinary people and their communities, ordinary people who have no say in any of the decisions leading to war. (I am thinking of war undertaken by states, against other states, or against the people of other states, which is usually the case. Revolution or insurrection from below are different, though obviously not without death, terror, or destruction.)

In this context, then, what is Human Smoke? As you've no doubt heard by now, it is an assemblage of hundreds of short items, dating from 1914 till December 1941 (with one outlier, from 1892), some as short as a line or two, some as long as two pages, describing, moment by moment it seems, the inexorable movement towards total war. Some samples, chosen not quite at random:

Franklin Roosevelt, now a lawyer in New York City, noticed that Jews made up one-third of the freshman class at Harvard. He talked the problem over with Henry Morgenthau, SR., and he went to the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which he was a member. "It was decided," Roosevelt later explained, "that over a period of years the number of Jews should be reduced one or two per cent a year until it was down to 15%." It was about 1922. (p. 9)

Goebbels stood at a swastika-bedecked rostrum on the Unter den Linden, a wide, tree-lined street in Berlin running past the University and the State Opera House. He said: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended." He threw a book into a fire.

"It was like burning something alive," Lilian Mowrer said. "Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnation of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed." Lion Feuchtwanger's books, which had already been banned from stores, went into the flames, as did books by Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Zionviev, Heine, Emil Ludwig,, Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. Bertha von Suttner's pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms was condemned as "un-German" and burned. All Quiet on the Western Front got the most booing. Stefan Zweig's books were nailed to a pillory as well as burned. Pacifism masked a "seeping poison," one speaker said. It was May 10, 1933.

Goebbels said: "Brightened by these flames our vow shall be: the Reich and the Nation and our Führer: Adolf Hitler, Heil! Heil!" (pp. 37-38)

Major James Doolittle, the American flying ace, was in China demonstrating airplanes for Curtiss-Wright. It was summer 1933. Doolittle did stunts for the mayor of Shanghai and a crowd of seventy-five thousand in his Curtiss Hawk, and afterward the Nanking government ordered thirty-six Hawks, the company's biggest order that year. "We sold 24 Hawks to the Turkish Government last fall," said T. P. Wright, Curtiss-Wright's president, "and several are in service in South America." (p. 41)

H.C. Engelbrecht, author of Merchants of Death, a bestseller about arms dealers, spoke at a conference of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. "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."

It was April 14, 1934. (pp. 48-49)

There were more than 120,000 visa applications awaiting action the American consulate in Vienna. It was March 1939. (p.116)

Lockheed stopped selling airplanes to Japan, at the request of Secretary State Cordell Hull. Lockheed employees remained in Japan, however, assembling and testing the airplanes that were arriving in fulfillment of previous orders. It was May 1939. (p.124)

Churchill flew to Paris to talk with the French generals. It was May 31, 1940. Narvik was the first matter they took up--it had been retaken and held, at some cost, by the Allies. It must now be abandoned immediately, said Churchill. They also discussed what to do about Italy, if Italy were foolish enough to enter the war. "I proposed that we should strike by air-bombing at the northwestern industrial triangle enclosed by the three cities of Milan, Turin, and Genoa," Churchill said. "Many Italians were opposed to war, and all should be made to realise its severity."

Bombing was, to Churchill, a form of pedagogy--a way of enlightening city dwellers as to the hellishness of remote battlefields by killing them. The French were not keen on it, however; they wanted to avoid reprisals. . . (p. 191)

(As I was flipping through the book, looking for passages to include here, I felt some pressure to give sufficiently diverse examples, to show the range of material covered in the book, the different voices heard from, and the various types of sources drawn from, and to do so in a manner that could convey the weight of each to the whole--and yet, to attempt to do so with any degree of accuracy is to write the book again.)

Before I read Human Smoke, I was under the impression that it indeed presents and defends the pacifist case against American involvement in WWII. Various reviewers seem to have responded to it as if this were the case; for example, there was Adam Kirsch's extremely stupid review in The New York Sun, Louis Menand's perfunctory review in The New Yorker, and William Grimes' simple-minded review in The New York Times (I've only just seen the Times review; link via Nigel Beale). To be fair to these reviewers, Baker’s final words in his Afterword seem to support this reading:

I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, free Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.

Kirsch asserts that the book is "dangerous"; Menand is a little more sympathetic to some of the themes he sees Baker as raising, but is at pains to point out the imperfect nature of the Allied states, and the fact of Appeasement and other attempts to bargain with Hitler; Grimes seems concerned primarily with Baker's tone, and what he perceives as a lack of a sense of proportion. All three see Human Smoke as manipulative and Baker himself as naïve and simplistic. They and others seem worried that readers won't understand the issues involved in the years leading to the war, in the unlikely event that this is the only book they ever read about the war.

Helpfully, Sam Anderson has just the right response to this kind of argument, in his review in New York Magazine (link via Mark Thwaite at Ready Steady Book):

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. As in all of Baker's work, the strength of Human Smoke comes from the defamiliarizing charge it brings to a familiar subject. Its unorthodox form allows it to capture, with brutal efficiency, the daily texture of the war--the suffering, the confusion on the ground, the strike among Viennese mail carriers from the stress of delivering too many death letters. Baker doesn’t hide his omissions or his anecdotes' lack of context--in fact, each vignette is surrounded by generous white space, so the lacunae are a constant visible presence in the book. It's the kind of project that encourages, rather than closes off, further reading. Its texture is deeply convincing, and a much stronger message of peace than mere argument could ever muster.

I think this is exactly right. World War II comes to us packaged as a certain kind of narrative, and by showing us elements that we see far too little of, Human Smoke makes that narrative look just a little different. And given the ways in which that standard narrative has been used to justify all manner of hero-worship and demonization, along with post-WWII policies and atrocities, it's worth considering how that narrative has been shaped and how a different approach to the available material might tell us something else we need to know.

About the pacifists, Baker writes: "They failed, but they were right". What does he mean? What does Baker think the pacifists were right about? Does he simply mean that the pacifists were right to oppose the war? Or were they right about war? They seem to be the only ones who are able to understand that war is destruction (except for those like Churchill, who rather seems to think that destruction is just grand). What does Baker mean by "the end of civilization" in his subtitle? He doesn't answer either question, but I think some possibilities present themselves. For example, was it necessary to resort to "total war" against civilians in order to defeat the Nazis? There is nothing in the book to suggest that the Nazi leaders were anything other than despicable. But there is a lot in the book suggesting that the Allied leaders were less concerned with the human toll of the war than with political maneuvering and glory. Human Smoke, more than anything, with its diversity of detail, drives home the truth that war is never fought for or on behalf of general populations. They are fought for elite political reasons. People have to be persuaded to fight, trained to hate. This is as true of ordinary 1930s Germans--who we'd often prefer to view as having been, as a population, atavistically anti-Semitic--as it is of anyone else. Human Smoke reminds us that our putative leaders do not have our interests at heart.

I've said that I don't think Human Smoke is or is intended to be a coherent argument against the war, that Nicholson Baker does not make the pacifist case, however sympathetic to it he may actually be. And yet, to borrow Sam Anderson's wording, I do believe the book is a powerful "message of peace". What is the difference? The difference is in what can we learn from history, and why we are reading it. Are we reading history merely to know what happened? Because it's an interesting, possibly moving set of stories? What is the point of that? Where does it stop? Instead, can we learn anything about ourselves, and our politics, by looking at, in this case, what was being said and done in the years prior to the worst war in human history? I think we can, though we often seem determined not to do so. By attending to the words, over the period of decades, of serious, committed pacifists; by noticing the indifference of political leaders to the possibilities or realities of human suffering--whether in the form of Jewish refugees, or the victims of bombing campaigns; by finally understanding the implications of the amoral dictates of capitalism ("If you can pay, you can buy"), perhaps then we can see how we are manipulated into each new military adventure. And we can ask ourselves what purposes, and whose interests, are served by the maintenance of the myth of "the good war".

Preliminary notes on reading Dante

I'm reading The Inferno, in the translation by Robert & Jean Hollander. In recent months, when short of time but wanting to read something, I've read the opening verses several times. Not intending to read the whole, but getting a taste, to see what it was like. I read:

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh--
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

To my delight, I found I could read it, that I knew, finally, that I really wanted to. Where formerly I'd considered Dante as one of those writers I'd read, if I ever got around to it, only out of some misplaced sense of duty--one ought to read Dante, at least The Inferno--now I knew that I wanted to experience the work for itself.

I kept returning to those opening verses, without feeling the need, yet, to move forward in the narrative. Here was a voice, in time, with a story difficult to relate. "Midway in the journey of our life" - "the straight way was lost" - "I cannot really tell" - "so full of sleep": these were words pulling me in, making me want to read on, though for now I just wanted to stay here.

I read through the first canto. Then I read Robert Hollander's notes following. In verses 32 to 54 of this first canto, the poet encounters three beasts barring his way up the hill--a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. In the notes Hollander touches on the discussion surrounding the nature and source of these beasts. Are their sources biblical? Do they represent the mortal sins "lust, pride, and avarice"? Are they emblematic of something Virgil later refers to as "the three dispositions Heaven opposes, incontinence, malice, and mad brutishness"? Do they stand in for different elements of Dante's contemporary political concerns? I read these notes, and the old sense of unease creeps back in. What basis do I have for deciding? In fact, it's worse than that: when I read the verses, to me these beasts are simply beasts. Biblical or classical (or, certainly, political) allusions do not come to mind, because they are unavailable to me. So I worry, again, about reading in the right order, that perhaps now is not a good time to tackle Dante. I should wait till I've read, and no doubt sufficiently understood, Virgil, Ovid, the Bible. And where does it end? How far back does one go before one is justified in simply reading?

But back to the beasts: why can't they be just beasts? And what happened to that voice and my response to it? I return to Hollander's introduction, in which he makes note of the "enormous apparatus that has attached itself to" the poem. Centuries of commentary, line-by-line analysis, interpretive controversies, and so on. He discusses the problem of allegory, which is the problem tripping me up with the three beasts in the first canto. I'm not going to rehearse the points about allegory here, but he says enough to persuade me that allegory is not the key to The Inferno.

And yet, though some brief notes are helpful, each time I read one of these sorts of notes, somewhat longer notes about interpretive controversies and the like, I get distracted, I feel that anxiety, now faint, now stronger, making me doubt my current reading. But do I really think I'm expected to get it all with one reading? When I have thought about reading things in the proper order, reading this to enhance my ability to enhance that, am I not implicitly denying the possibility of re-reading? Doesn't this sort of anxiety return me to the realm of single readings, where I try to cram it all in, read everything? Doesn't seven centuries of controversy and commentary tell me that people have returned to this poem again and again? Do I really expect that line-by-line readings happen with initial readings? Can't these beasts then re-emerge simply as beasts?

Yes, it turns out, they can. I decide to read on, into the poem, beyond the first canto. And that voice is still there, drawing me in.

The First Furrows of Care

I've been thinking it's time to return to Kafka. It's been years since I read The Castle, more still since The Trial. Quite by accident, it seems, I've read "The Metamorphosis" more often than any other single piece of fiction, but again, not for many years. Some months ago, I bought the Collected Stories, in the handsome Everyman edition, edited by Gabriel Josipovici. I was in need of a new collection of the stories, if only because my other edition contains only those stories published in Kafka's lifetime (awkward blurb from Martin Amis, winning the war against cliché, so the rest of us can get on with our lives: "Acquire this necessary book"). Then, recently, I read Letter to His Father. I hope to say more about this remarkable document in another post, but for now, suffice it to say that I think I am beginning to see Kafka a little better.

Last night I dipped into the Collected Stories, looking for one of those extremely short fictions. I turned to "First Sorrow" and I read. And by the end, I was reminded of "Bartleby the Scrivener", Melville's story, which figures so prominently in Vila-Matas' intriguing Bartleby & Co. In that story, we have a man, a scrivener, who, no matter the question, "would prefer not to", confounding his boss, the narrator of the story. Some of us may "prefer not to" do any number of things life throws our way, but Bartleby is not kidding around. Ultimately, he "prefers not to" himself right to death. He (and Melville) follows his position to its logical conclusion.

"First Sorrow" is about a trapeze artist who, first, "had so arranged his life that, as long as he kept working in the same building, he never came down from his trapeze by night or day". He is a great artist, so the management puts up with it. He is able to have his needs attended to by relay system, and necessary, eccentric travel accommodations are made. Finally, however, he announces "that he must always in future have two trapezes for his performance instead of only one". No problem, says the manager. But the trapeze artist repeats his demand: "The very idea that it might happen at all seemed to make him shudder." The manager repeats his assurance, but the artist breaks down. And here is how the story ends:

Deeply distressed, the manager sprang to his feet and asked what was the matter, then getting no answer climbed up on the seat and caressed him, cheek to cheek, so that his own face was bedabbled by the trapeze artist's tears. Yet it took much questioning and soothing endearment until the trapeze artist sobbed: 'Only the one bar in my hands -- how can I go on living!' That made it somewhat easier for the manager to comfort him; he promised to wire from the very next station for a second trapeze to be installed in the first town on their circuit; reproached himself for having let the artist work so long on only one trapeze; and thanked and praised him warmly for having at last brought the mistake to his notice. And so he succeeded in reassuring the trapeze artist, little by little, and was able to go back to his corner. But he himself was far from reassured, with deep uneasiness he kept glancing secretly at the trapeze artist over the top of his book. Once such ideas began to torment him, would they ever quite leave him alone? Would they not rather increase in urgency? Would they not threaten his very existence? And indeed the manager believed he could see, during the apparently peaceful sleep which had succeeded the fit of tears, the first furrows of care engraving themselves upon the trapeze artist's smooth, childlike forehead. (Translation by Willa & Edwin Muir)

I must have read this story before--it's in the other collection, having been published during Kafka's lifetime as part of A Hunger Artist--I've read this story before, and yet I have absolutely no memory of it. It must not have made much of an impression on me. I'm a different reader now, and now I find this story astonishing. The manager can see what must happen, even if the trapeze artist is momentarily assuaged. The manager can see this, and he is troubled. He knows there is nothing he can do, nothing that can be done. The logic of the situation is such that the trapeze artist will never quite be free of this torment. And Kafka, of course, follows the needs of his fiction right to the end. Just as, in "Bartleby", where it might be more "realistic" for the man to give on certain things--I might prefer not to go to work, or prefer to silently protest against the absurdity of life, but odds are I'm going to break down and eat when I get hungry enough--instead, Melville follows the idea through. Here, Kafka does the same, only more so, and with more economy. He has only to have the manager consider the logic of the situation--"would they not threaten his very existence?"--and notice the trapeze artist's furrowed brow and know that he has not imagined it, for the fable to be complete.

On what basis do we choose?

In my junior year of high school, I took a course called Research Seminar, in which we were supposed to learn how to do research and write papers. The class was intended to prepare us for college (it did not). Pretty basic stuff: we researched topics, wrote papers of varying lengths, culminating in a fairly large research project and paper. (It was in the context of the last that I was later accused of plagiarism. A long story, not worth going into, except to note here that it contributed to my deepening sense of the arbitrariness of power.) We took class trips to the research library at the nearby University of Delaware. I remember thinking to myself, as I observed college students working in the library, looking things up, doing research, that I would never have the personal resources needed to put in that kind of effort.

Early in the semester we were assigned a relatively simple task. The teacher had a collection of articles, I think, or print items of some kind. We were to select any one of these items and write about it. I don't remember much more about the task. What I do remember is that I couldn't do it. I sat there, and I watched the other students make their selections. I watched them begin writing. And I sat and sat, sorting and re-sorting the collection, getting nowhere. Did I not understand the task? It was fairly straightforward, so it's not that, not quite. Here's what it was, I've only recently realized: I didn't know on what basis we were to make our choice. How were we to decide? How did the others know? What was I missing? How would I find out?

Reminder: Read Josipovici

Why is Gabriel Josipovici not simply the most famous critic working today? Why are so many of his books out of print? How can it be that On Trust is out of print? How can The Book of God be out of print? Did no one read them? Everyone should read them. Everyone should read them.

I have to think people don't like what he has to say. Is that it? Is it that simple? To me, these books are crucial. They speak to me on an elemental level, about life and modernity and literature. And they are beautifully written.

I'll have more to say about why I think Josipovici's work is so necessary--and why it speaks to me so personally. But for now, just praise. And a reminder: the more recent collection of essays, The Singer on the Shore, is equally fantastic. You should go out of your way to read it. Read it.

[Update: it appears that both On Trust and The Book of God are still in print, at least according to this page at the Yale University Press. I'm not entirely sure why I thought they were not, except that no new editions appeared available when I was looking into buying them. In any event, being university press books, they are of course insanely expensive, if bought new. It would be nice to see his books in more affordable editions. You should still read them.]

Bloggers of the No

Apropos of this post, Aimée asked me about this "bloggers of the No" business. I replied that the novel I'd just finished, Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co., is all about writers who refuse to write, writers who have stopped writing, and so on. "If they've stopped writing, how are they still writers?" Ha! I paused before saying something vague to the effect that it had to do with the Blanchot and Heidegger I'd been reading. Ugh. Forgive me for the glibness of this answer. I was tired and fading fast and unsure how much to say before falling asleep. Which is not to say that the Blanchot and Heidegger is not related. But the point I would have tried to get across, were I more awake and able to find the words, is that it's all related, all that I've been writing about here. But this is somehow still unacceptable.

My next post was a passage from Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady. Lloyd Mintern commented that the book has been "as much an influence on [his] personal history, as when [he] first read Alain Robbe-Grillet". I feel I know what he means. Though my reading of Montano's Malady was far from ideal. It took me three (very) sleepy weeks--a long time for a short book--so it was choppier than I would have liked. Even so, I found much to like in the book, as in Bartleby & Co. But more than anything, they made me think of my own problems writing--my own refusals. I feel an urge to write about this, along with a strong reluctance to do so. A voice tells me that I shouldn't write about this, shouldn't blog about it, shouldn't give in to the solipsistic impulse. (I know, it's a blog.) I've gotten away from writing whatever it is I was writing, in favor of writing about myself in terms of the books I'm reading. Or so it seems. Maybe it's just my imagination. I think it's that writing about this enables me to write about other things--existence, politics even. It's that, reading what I've been reading, the Vila-Matas books mentioned above and, of course, Proust and Beckett, I recognize possibilities. I recognize myself, in some sense.

Sometimes it seems easier to just stop--it comes so slowly, and I'm so often so tired. But I still feel that need to get something across, to myself if no one else.

Noted: Virginia Woolf

From To the Lighthouse:

Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmoreland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said "Pretty--pretty," an odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up across the bay among the sandhills.

[. . .] Begun long ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmoreland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.

Noted: Virginia Woolf

From To the Lighthouse:

The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr. Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, transparent. Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.