Honi soit qui mal y pense: Two Quotes
What separates the atemporal pleiad of creators of texts from the general run of writers acclaimed by critics and applauded by the public at large, is the fact they perceive what the latter reckon buzzes with life to be either worked out or dead. The innovative author insensitive to the applause and reproaches of his contemporaries, knows he is surrounded by colleagues who are dead—whatever fuss these people make accumulating honours and prizes and aspiring, in the manner of some second-rate academics, to the glory of immortality.Juan Goytisolo, “To Read or to Re-Read”
Geniuses have a rough time of it, because geniuses are not all equal. First come your run-of-the-mill and middling geniuses, that is, of the third order, whose minds are unable to go much beyond the horizon of their times. They are often recognized and even come into money and fame. The geniuses of the second order are already too difficult for their contemporaries and therefore fare worse. Nonetheless, recognition awaits the geniuses of the second order, in the form of a triumph beyond the grave. In addition, there exist, for there must exist, geniuses of the highest category. The intermediate types are discovered by either the succeeding generation or by some later one; the geniuses of the first order are never known—not by anyone, not in life, not after death. For they are creators of truths so unprecedented, purveyors of proposals so revolutionary, that not a soul is capable of making head or tail of them. Therefore, permanent obscurity constitutes the normal lot of the Geniuses of the Highest Class.Stanislaw Lem, “Odysseus of Ithaca”
Both of these quotes dance around the word “crank,” though I do think of it as appealing to a particularly American self-consciousness. But Bruce Murray points out about Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Think he’s zealous crank!” (Frighteningly, “kilohertz can shake sun” is also appropriate.)
More about these matters soon….
Kobo Abe
Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night also reminds me of Kobo Abe, particularly his insane works of the 70’s, The Box Man and Secret Rendezvous. As long as we’re drawing cross-continental comparisons, William Burroughs is there too, but Burroughs more surrealist, later work is pedantic and decadent in a too-familiar way. These two books of Abe’s aren’t familiar. They don’t seem like successes, and it’s not easy to say that they succeed on their own terms, because they don’t appear to have their own terms. Calling them pretentious is besides the point, since the books don’t have a pretense towards anything in particular. Psychological and and political intimations turn out to be complete blinds; what mostly flows out of the books is deep, total sickness. Apart from Inter Ice Age 4, an early work which gets mired in the tropes of science fiction, most of Abe’s translated books do have a purity about them.
I discovered Abe through The Woman in the Dunes. At the time I was a huge Camus adherent, and the summary of a man trapped in a sand pit with a woman who has lived there for years, makes it sound similar to any number of existentialist works of fiction. It’s not. Attempts to draw a metaphor do not work, since the book remains focused on the constraining of the man with a fundamentally unresponsive woman, and his very real interaction with the sadistic villagers keeping him there. The slow madness that overcomes him stems from the particular (and odd) circumstances rather than any speculative human condition. Far from existential, the story has more in common with Nabokov, especially the finely-ground fantasies Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, though it’s far more realistic than either. Teshigahara’s film of the book also seems to misunderstand it (though it has an amazing, crackling score by Toru Takemitsu), adoping long shots of dunes that don’t fit with the relative lack of desperation on the man’s part.
By the 70’s, Abe had headed away from anything close to realism. The Box Man revolves around a series of men who walk around with boxes on their heads, with doppelgangers and fakes, disconnected memories and self-consciously pompous meanderings on the integrity of being a box man. Michaela Grey offers an excellent description of the book, but I disagree with her tying it to Derrida: Abe remained focused on personal identity and integrity and was never concerned with purely textual matters. But the book is nuttier than what comes out in the article, since Abe never builds up any credibility in the narrative. The only strand that rings true is one about the noetic nature of being a box man, an affirmation that can’t be obtained externally. This in turn implies that any individual section of the book is dubious, since in total they are the ramblings of one or more men whose ability to place themselves in the world is falling apart. Apart from the surreal surface, here is where there is the most commonality with Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, in its resolute lack of commitment to any particular reality.
Secret Rendezvous is more narratively coherent, but only furthers the idea that individual plot points, characters, and settings are losing all intrinsic meaning short of inciting a vague, sickly psychosexual aura. The narrator’s wife is abducted one morning by an ambulance, and he journeys through the labyrinthine hospital attempting to find her. There is a nice twist on Kafka, when the frustrated narrator is allowed full access to the hospital’s surveillance tapes, only to find that there are so, so many hours of tape that he’ll never be able to derive anything from them. Again, the mental state of the man is subordinate to the organic disease around him that he seems oddly distant from. When, at the end, he ends up leading an entourage including a girl whose bones are dissolving, the enviroment mirrors the girl by not remaining firm enough to grasp. The parallel to Kafka is most appropriate here, but the “characters” are as indeterminate as the landscape. Where Kafka dealt with amorphous persecution, Abe simply pulls the rug out from everything he touches.
There is, at the heart of these books, very little interest in character or psychology, despite the trappings that appear. The next book he wrote, The Ark Sakura, is far less disorienting, but the main character, a paranoid survivalist, spends the last third of the book with his leg caught in an industrial toilet and the other characters are one-dimensional. The book is essentialy a Stevenson-like adventure story, and the abrupt end pushes the unreality of what’s gone before, as he finally emerges from his cave into the light:
Beyond the transparent people lay a transparent town. Was I transparent, then, too? I held a hand up to my face—and through it saw buildings.The situations Abe deals in do not raise epistemological or existential questions; they are deranged treatments of metaphysics. The question is whether the shifting realities and, in The Box Man, pseudo-philosophical ramblings amount to something that is prior to experience and organized thought. With Donoso, I believe it is. With Abe, they seem detached from thought altogether: some sort of objectification of humans. The perversions in his books often come off as heartless, but Abe may be pushing for metaphysical heartlessness.
"Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon," Robert Ashley
The piece is ten minutes long. Over some distorted, inconspicuous bells and static, Cynthia Liddell details the story of a rape from the victim’s point of view in mostly (but not totally) descriptive terms. Ashley describes his aims as follows:
My instructions [to friends] were simple: just describe a sequence of events, without any moral or psychological interpretation of those events, but include your sensory perceptual role in the events.Ashley found all submissions unsatisfactory and subjective, and he wrote this one himself. He says:
The recording of this particular “description” got a lot of attention. Curiously, compared to some of the stories I heard, it has always seemed rather tame to me…It is the description that disturbs.Well, no. Ashley certainly puts together an unsettling piece of music, but not for the reasons Ashley believes. The writing is unremarkable, but because of the subject matter, it’s memorable. Most people don’t want to read or hear ten minutes of this sort of thing:
His mouth was very wet. I remember he tried to touch his tongue as far down in my throat as he could reach. It choked me. I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t breathe.These are the same tactics used by horror writers: the intrusion of foreign forces, the narrator’s lack of control, the chance of rescue continually growing more distant. Ashley pulls a few tricks to extend the effect, which is to make the “description” entirely passive on the woman’s part. He even cheats at one point by having her say, “I felt hollow.”
Ashley’s words are part of an American literary tradition whose most famous exponent is John Updike, where vernacular and obviousness act as a pipeline to truth. The danger is that such concerns can be used indifferently simply to play on common experience and evoke bathos. It is the fate of someone who, in Robert Musil’s terms, “had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.”
The words are, however, considerably more effective in the recording. The story is unpleasant, but the urge to stop reading isn’t as strong as the urge, when listening to Liddell, to get up and turn the thing off. It’s Liddell more than the description. It is her hesitant, vulnerable, nearly blank voice that is chilling. It invests the piece with all the emotion that Ashley claims to have removed from the text. It is not the voice of detachment; it is the voice of dissociation and vulnerability. It is the voice of a victim, of someone in a psychological state so fragile and private that you feel uncomfortable listening to her. Ashley has dealt with the notion of societally unacceptable speech in other works, and it’s hard to believe he’s not aware that it’s the voice rather than the words that has the dominant effect here. When there is a gasp towards the end, it gives away the game: Liddell has been pulling you along emotionally by the nose. The relation of facts, opinions, emotions, or anything in this style of speaking would sound dissociated and creepy.
If it sounds like I have a problem with “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon”...I do. I find it cheap. Liddell is not subtle, but she is effective, and she is at such odds with Ashley’s stated intention that it drags it down to the level of shock. A good chunk of the history of music (not just pop music) is singers giving weight to uninspired texts. “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” is notable for the failure of its atypical literary pretenses and the arrogance in its manipulation.
Case Histories, Alexander Kluge
The style of this book of stories is conspicuous, consisting of interrogatories, short passages under descriptive headers, and lists: lists of debts, of personality traits, of neuroses. The use of this sort of style as a way towards detachment goes back to Tristram Shandy, where it’s ironic, and you can see it in the flat descriptions of the contents of drawers in Dashiell Hammett. But Kluge’s use of it is most similar to the penultimate chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. In Joyce, it served partly as a pathos-generating device, racking up details that etched Bloom and Stephen in momentary bliss and eventual sadness. Kluge uses it in a historical sense, using an inappropriately objective voice to create dissociation and dissonance between the material and the narration.
The forced (and, like in Joyce, there are intimations of its dishonesty and bias) neutrality turns it into the voice of history more than of fiction; damning moral judgments come out in its generalizations, but seem detached from any moral judgment of the person discussed. They are mostly apolitical; many are ineffective. So the historical treatment of people who are mostly incidental is jarring. When it’s deployed against the Eichmann-like Rudolf Boulanger, who helped “measure” the brains of Jewish scientists during the war and now lives freely in Cologne, the effect is numbing. Hannah Arendt made it seem as though the war criminals she treated were mindful administrators; Kluge goes further by giving him doubts and stumbling blocks absurdly inappropriate for the historical context.
Most of the stories are subtler. The prodigal Mandorf lives an uneasy existence on Crete under German occupation and wants to “let his personality unfold,” but can’t. After some of the local residents are executed by the Germans during an evacuation, Mandorf tries to save some of the others, but fails. In the process, under the title “An appalling discovery,” he realizes “he was indifferent to everything that had happened or was happening…Mandorf’s personality lay unfolded: it contained nothing.” He is one of the more moral of Kluge’s characters, but he is unable to cope with his impotence, and his better side is relegated to footnotes. The objective narration breaks more explicitly:
Mandorf the expert Actually Mandorf was not an expert in anything.Kluge is very respectful of the ambiguity between Mandorf’s inherent drive towards action, which he can never fulfill, and the horrible circumstances that drive him into resignation and isolation. Mandorf is doomed in his small way, but the extent of the exacerbating impact of what happens on Crete is unknowable, Kluge implies. Mandorf himself does become numb and regrets not gaining his professorship in 1939 more than anything afterwards, but the historical facts paint him as a nearly sympathetic person, even if this is, as Kluge indicates, totally, completely irrelevant to his emotional state.
Mandorf is much more respectable than Eberhard Schincke, an intellectual and researcher who turns vehemently anti-Nazi after several years of embracing it. But his reversal only stems from a cold day sitting on a horse in the reserves, which he spins into an argument against it. His academic nature and “aversion to topicality” lead him to reject Nazism on abstruse and meaningless ideological grounds, and his career is ruined not out of any real resistance but only a deep narcissism.
It’s difficult to work arbitrariness deep into the determining factors of stories’ characters, especially without some bias informing the direction. For Celine, it was contempt that underpinned his random horrors; for Christina Stead, it was an architectural drive to classify a certain personality type’s behavior across any situation.
But Kluge is remarkably equivocal, and the lack of a definitive orientation is often in danger of deflating the collection. These figures would not stand up to novel-length treatment; even over a dozen pages each one becomes dreary, because they are either rote and predictable or subject to drastic, unpredictable changes in direction. The style saves it, because Kluge manages to produce a different result in each story by contrasting the flat, historical reportage with brief implications of how the characters see themselves. Sometimes the result is irony, sometimes horror, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes disgust. That he produces so much without varying the style at all is the core achievement of the collection.
Richard Rorty: You were asking me what the definition of irony was...
onegoodmove gives us a dose of Richard Rorty (thanks to wood s lot once more):
[In my utopia:] High culture will no longer be thought of as the place where the aim of the society as a whole is debated and decided, and where it is a matter of social concern which sort of intellectual is ruling the roost. Nor will there be much concern about the gap that yawns between popular culture, the culture of people who have never felt the need for redemption, and the high culture of the intellectuals: the people who are always wanting to be something more or different than they presently are. In utopia, the religious or philosophical need to live up to the non-human, and the need of the literary intellectuals to explore the present limits of the human imagination will be viewed as matters of taste. They will be viewed by non-intellectuals in the same relaxed, tolerant and uncomprehending way that we presently regard our neighbor’s obsession with birdwatching, or macrame, or collecting hubcaps, or discovering the secrets of the Great Pyramid.My response is the following series of topics for entries/essays that I will never get around to writing:
(1) Rorty embraces a populism that would render him (but also all his fellow academics) fully irrelevant, the same populism that Dwight Macdonald repellently but honestly scoffed at half a century ago in “Masscult and Midcult.”
(2) Rorty by his own admission takes John Dewey as a model. But is his worship of Dewey based on what Dewey thought or what he was: influential. Ideologically, Rorty should be aligned with the less sophisticated, inchoate thinker Randolph Bourne, who in all his pacifist dogmatism looks better in retrospect on World War I than Dewey. Bourne said:
Professor Dewey has become impatient at the merely good and merely conscientious objectors to war who do not attach their conscience and intelligence to forces moving in another direction. But in wartime there are literally no valid forces moving in another direction. War determines its own end,—victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization to that end…A good many people still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war. The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this was an illusion.Bourne, “A War Diary”
(3) A few years back, Rorty wrote Achieving Our Country, a hundred-page book conspicuously architected for mass consumption. George Will insulted it in Time. The Wall Street Journal liked it for its trashing of dissociative leftist academia. The book flopped.
(4) Rorty presents himself as the mediator between disparate schools of philosophy, but he has avoided steps towards organizing a consensus to the point of being ostracized.
(5) Rorty’s epistemology is a rather non-pragmatic, pluralistic approach to coexistence of contradictory mindsets. Far from Dewey and farther from Peirce, it bears some resemblance to the ethical studies of Alastair MacIntyre, which are tied up in the establishment of a pluralistic set of good lifestyles that eliminate the need for ethical rules. In Rorty’s version as well as MacIntyre’s, the pluralism is a Burkean conservative notion, because it prescribes behavior rather than ethics.
(6) His eliminative materialistic mind/body stance is similar to those of Paul Feyerabend and Daniel Dennett, even though he has nearly nothing else in common with them. He shares their strategy of wanting to end up in a certain place and moving the logical leaps around to make it appear as though he’s gotten there. The problem is that his examples yield idealism as easily as they do materialism.
The Obscene Bird of Night, Jose Donoso
For a long time before I read it, I referred to the book as That Obscene Bird of Night. I was conflating it with Luis Bunuel’s movie, That Obscure Object of Desire, which I’ve never seen. The only thing I know about the movie is that it stars Fernando Rey as a dirty old man stand in for Bunuel, and has two actresses randomly interchanged as the titular object. I inferred from the use of “that” a dismissive or disgusted familiarity, and it wouldn’t be inappropriate in Donoso’s book, which treats the bird as an creative (and anti-creative) force bringing oblivion.
Bird is extremely disorienting, and the lack of analyses that describe the organization of the book in any detail suggest that it may not actually make sense. Large portions of a book feature a single narrator drifting through a succession of personae: Humberto (a writer and aristocrat’s secretary), Mudito (a deaf, dumb infantile caretaker who frequently loses and regains his senses and limbs), an old nun (a sexless disguise of Mudito), and an unborn fetus. But Donoso is fairly clear about the transitions, and it’s not difficult to figure out when one is taking place or who is speaking at a given time. What complicates matters is that multiple characters seem to be responsible for single actions (like pregnancies), and plot points are continually ignored or rewritten. Here the book is reminiscent of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, where memories brought characters back from the dead to offer a cubist view on the history of a town. But since Donoso is writing about the annihilation of memory through imagination, the combination of intermixed characters and resolutely inconsistent plotlines leads to total chaos that dwarfs Rulfo.
As best as I can figure, there are two main story arcs in the book. In the first and most prominent, Humberto/Mudito lives out a bizarre existence in a huge Casa with six nuns and sometimes some orphans, one of which, Iris, is used by Humberto/Mudito in a plot to create an heir for the Casa’s owner, the senator Don Jeronimo Azcoitia, that he will then control. Iris is conflated with Ines, Jeronimo’s barren wife, and Humberto/Mudito meshes with the possibly impotent Azcoitia to impregnate Iris/Ines. Iris is pregnant for most of the book while Humberto/Mudito carries transforms into Iris’s doll, a seventh old nun, and eventually her fetus, who the nuns believe will be a virgin birth. The baby is born and is perfect, and is about to perform a miracle, when the other story intercedes.
It’s not made clear for much of the book, but the other story, about the birth of Jeronimo and Ines’s son, takes place seventeen years prior to the main arc. The son, named Boy, is a horrendous mutant, and Jeronimo charges Humberto, who is his secretary and is the only other person who knows about Boy, with maintaining a house filled with deformed freaks that will take care of Boy, so that he will have no idea of his deviation from reality. Seventeen years later, Boy finally meets his father, who then dies amongst the freaks, and asks his one-eyed doctor to have all memory of his father and his brief exposure to outside reality surgically removed from his brain, and this triggers the collapse of the other plot. The nuns leave the Casa, and only Mudito remains, sewn up inside a sack, from which he cannot escape no matter how much he chews through it, until the sack is taken by a witchlike woman and burned with paper and rags on a fire under a bridge.
There’s more, way more, but this seems to be the basic structure of the book. The Boy story is, with some exceptions, far clearer than the Mudito story, and my takes is that the Mudito story is an insane fantasy of Humberto’s constructed as a rewriting of the past. Its creation is spurred by the death of Jeronimo, which severs Boy’s lineage from reality, as well as Humberto’s. Donoso plays up Humberto’s “authorship” of Boy’s reality to a great extent; Boy becomes fictive and Humberto becomes his father. Consequently, the rewriting in the Mudito parts of the book makes Humberto a double for Jeronimo: they switch genitals and wives even as Mudito loses his senses and body, which is equated with Humberto losing all conception of reality, as he becomes the keeper of knowledge of the Casa who can never leave. Humberto’s authority waxes and wanes as he drifts into his Mudito persona, who signifies the senseless, sexless writer totally detached from reality. His is simultaneously master of his hermetic Casa and subjugated slave to those around him. As he erases causality, linearity, and individuality of phenomena, he is able to kill Jeronimo through pure negation of all but momentary imagination.
There’s also a class element: Jeronimo is the prestigious aristocratic stateman, Humberto the insecure, plebeian writer who becomes his servant. There is some allusion to the idea that Humberto is acting as a rebellious servant of Jeronimo, mediating reality in a Hegelian fashion for Jeronimo, who, as the aristocrat, is insulated from it. This aspect is overrun by the general chaos of the novel, but it does indicate that Donoso does know what he’s doing and is not simply spitting words on to paper.
On page 211, Humberto has a moment of clarity:
All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won’t exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines’s honey complexion, Brigida’s death, Iris Mateluna’s hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza’s father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa’s La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce’s prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up.The events referenced in the first half all fall into the second, realistic story, and the rest of it is a very accurate description of the Mudito storyline, as he is tormented by the witch figure here taking the form of Ines’s nursemaid Peta Ponce. This passage presents a more reductionistic framework: Humberto as author enveloping his created reality, even as its inspiration drives him to lose his identity and bodily and mental integrity.
There’s a power to the book that holds steady for much of it, something stronger than Cortazar and Cabrera Infante, who were both willing to work with the grotesque but maintain a steely hold over their characters and environment. As far as a dissection of the part of the creative process before pen gets put to paper, its assault is far more resonant than Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, where the dominant emotion is amusement mixed with pathos. Donoso doesn’t have much of either; mostly, there is inchoate, solipsistic horror.
Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas
S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S
One common translation is “Arepo the sower holds the wheels at work,” but if there does exist one authoritative meaning, it’s been buried among many dubious others.
1. Webern
The square above is inscribed on Webern’s gravestone. Webern had some peculiar obsession with it, since by this dissertation, he dropped it in lectures, and the structure of his Concerto, op. 24 is apparently derived from it. The only definite characteristic I know of is the (multi-dimensional) symmetry, but this quote from a letter cryptically elaborates on what he was after:
You ask about the shape: at the center [of the song] are the the words “Because he fell silent on the cross, we must go after him, in all seriousness of bitterness, our breath follows him.” What went before is now repeated backwards. Repeated. All shapes are similar and none are the same; thus, the chorus points to the secret law, to a holy riddle…. But the fact that it was just these words that constitute the center of the musical shape came about of its own accord— indeed it could not have been otherwise.The words to the song are Hildegard Jone’s. The translation I have gives the lines as “Because it [the Word] fell silent on the Cross we must follow it,” and the subtext is the equation of God and Word. The Jewish Webern was probably less interested in the Biblical implications than in the notion of the center, and of having a piece lead in and out of a central, exalted point rather than having a differentiated start and end. I.e., from the center flows its surroundings, which do not form a circle, but a multiplicity of paths to the center.
2. Osman Lins
Osman Lins constructed the entirety of his book Avalovara around this square, with each letter representing a different concurrent plotline, environment, and/or lover. The book was then structured by superimposing a spiral on the square, which makes a full rotation fourteen times before converging on the middle ‘N’. The path from outside to center is equated with an explicitly Christian movement from perception to immanence, dialogue to unity, and impurity to purity. The book ends with a the narrator, who is possibly insane (it’s a rather abstruse book), being elevated to the Garden of Eden with his quasi-divine lover and turning his back on what is evidently Augustine’s City of Man.
Translator Gregory Rabassa provides a helpful essay on Avalovara. Lins is explicit about seeing the word square as a circular entity, abandoning the linear reading as far as I can tell. But it’s certainly a weighted circle, and the spiral causes its traversal along neither line, and nor any path given by the reflection of the letters per se. The geometry of the book does not work; not in two dimensions, anyway.
3. Rome Andrew Hughey gives a history of the acrostic. Its main “hidden” feature is that it can be rearranged to form two “PATERNOSTER”‘s with an overlapped ‘N’, leaving out two ‘A’‘s and ‘O’‘s, which, in a fiddly and lexicographically weird stretch, could be read as alpha and omega. (This page gives a far more unbelievable anagram.) It was first discovered in the Pompeii ruins, but has since been found from Britain to Egypt, maybe further. The “secret Christian handshake” interpretation seems reasonable, but pagan and Roman interpretations exist, and it’s more than possible that the meaning has evolved over the millenium in which the square was used. This classics-list page gives the rough outlines of what’s known and what’s not.
What’s interesting, though, is that the alpha/omega Pater Noster interpretation undercuts the square’s own design, giving a differentiated beginning and end (without, but especially with, the ‘A’‘s and ‘O’‘s) and the center loses all meaning except as a stopover from beginning to end, which is all part of the undifferentiated “PATERNOSTER.” This a very convenient allegory for the evolution from gnosticism to orthodoxy and the ensuing death of esoteric gnostic traditions. It also leaves the symmetry and multiple paths open to non-Christian interpretation for those who don’t take the anagram approach. The word square is lost with the anagram, which removes the entire apparent rationale for the set of letters. Whichever way you go, relating the two versions is self-defeating.
Addendum
The scholar Malcolm Stewart offers a more informed analysis of the origins and usage of the word square:
“... fiddly and lexicographically weird” – the Alpha/Omega interpretation? No. Latin had no equivalent for omega and “o” was often used. This came forward into medieval church latin from which we still have a carol with a verse:I find his case compelling, but there is part of me that still holds out hope for a generative usage of the square in the style of Giordano Bruno. The acrostic explanation does not hold enough of the square’s symmetry to be fully attractive. Consequently, I’m more drawn to Lins and Webern’s symbolic usage of the square.“O and A and A and O cum cantibus in choro let the merry organ go benedicamus Domino, benedicamus Domino.”
Pater Noster was not a phrase exclusive to Christian usage, it was a known term. Sometimes used of Jupiter, sometimes even of the Emperor. But it almost certainly is Christian taken together with the A and O. And almost certainly was an acrostic to reveal/hide christian affiliation. The fish sign took two people to make – you made a curved line casually on the ground with a toe, if the other person didn’t add the other curve you kept mum. This too I think was a recognition signal of the kind that could be displayed fairly securely.
One can contrive all sorts of other possibilities. For instance if you decode the square according to current numerology you find all vertica and horizontal lines add to 19 = 1 (by casting out the 9. 19 itself has a sacred numerical pedigree in the ancient world owing to the metonic cycle). However that can’t apply becuase Latin didn’t have some of the letters that lead to the numeration involved so the sums can’t be like that. Contrivances …
The Pater Noster AO solution is elegant, uses without any spare leftover parts, three Christian elements. The Phrase, the Cross and the AO. It’s conclusive … though we all like to think that something further may be hidden ….
An ad hominem indication of what the square encodes is simply to ask people who’ve come across it and solved it for themselves what the found in it. I’m one of the many who have done this (years before the existence of the omniscient www.) It’s always the Pater Noster reading.
Graphic Scores: Cornelius Cardew and Barry Guy
The Block Museum has a nice intro to the Voynich Manuscript of music, Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise.
My favorite version that I’ve heard, if it actually is a version, is AMM’s The Inexhaustible Document (that would be Treatise), which spends over an hour on “Page 9.”
For somewhat less cryptic graphic scores, take a look at Barry Guy’s stunning work.
Hans Burgener/Richard Teitelbaum/Günter Müller/Carlos Zingaro, 11 Ways to Proceed
This is one of my favorite albums of free-improv-with-electronics. Richard Cochrane’s excellent review gives a good description of what makes it soar above so much else around, though I’m not sure if it’s quite so seamlessly holistic as he makes out. Take a look at the instrumentation:
Hans Burgener: acoustic and electric violin Richard Teitelbaum: Kurzweil K2000, Powerbook w/ Max Günter Müller: electronics, selected drums Carlos Zingaro: acoustic violin pitch-to-MIDI w/ Powerbook G3Teitelbaum and Zingaro aren’t playing undifferentiated electronics, and the signatures of their particular tools are evident. In contrast to Burgener, who has a scratchy, abrasive tone, Zingaro plays fairly smoothly, with some traditionally romantic flourishes, and his electronic modifications are usually loops and echoes rather than anything that would create pure noise. Teitelbaum is playing a synthesizer, and he comes from a background (modern electronic composition) where their sound—blunt, artificial, sometimes ugly, but usually tonal—was made overt. Neither Zingaro nor Teitelbaum normally permit themselves to be subsumed in a group (they’ve worked together on very obtrusive projects), but here they both seem muted, even though their playing is no less assertive.
Müller seems to be the one holding it together. He provides a bed of noise and low rumbles that couch the extremes of the others’ playing and gives a logic from one sound to the next, so that Burgener can become a lead voice, sometimes paired with Zingaro. Burgener doesn’t overplay his hand, though, and takes time to work through his ideas; he never overpowers the electronic backdrop, and sits out for periods of sometimes spacy sound. He’s also an amazing player just by himself, and a match for Zingaro. The sound isn’t one of egoless unity so much as careful cancellation, and it’s a rare achievement. Müller has played a similar role, low-key but crucially integrative, on many of his other recordings, particularly those of Poire_Z, but this is, to me, his finest feat.
Kiwi Days
Snarkout takes me back to my days as a teenager when I paged through the Ajax catalog trying to divine from the descriptions which records I would actually like. Tim Adams enthusiastically wrote the descriptions, before he burning himself out a few years later, as the text got shorter and the catalog got larger and less selective. Bits of the catalog endure here, and I still recognize some of the descriptions ten years later. I discovered that I didn’t care for most indie music coming out of America, and I fixated quickly on what I did like: New Zealand, and the Flying Nun and Xpressway labels. The Chills, the Verlaines, Jay Clarkson, the Terminals, Sneaky Feelings, DoubleHappys, the Jefferies brothers, Alastair Galbraith. New names continued to show up in the catalog, and I’d order most of them.
I came in late. Most of the best groups were already gone, Xpressway was almost dead, and Flying Nun had gone commercial. But it didn’t matter. The records were still around, and they could have come from Mars for all I knew. Most of these people never set foot in America. No one I knew liked them, and I didn’t hang out with a music crowd anyway. There were only these records from people on the other side of the world, who, from what little evidence existed, were stuck in about the most remote first-world country there was (Dunedin and Christchurch, the fulcrums of the “scene” there, were on the rural South Island), and didn’t seem terribly happy about it. Sneaky Feelings’s “P.I.T. Song” sounded as close to emotional hell as I’d ever heard in music, but there was nothing around me to join with it.
Very little of it sounds different to me today than it did then. Even though I spend money on the latest Otomo Yoshihide disc today, the part of my brain that appreciated the Kiwi music of the 80’s and 90’s seems to have been preserved along with the music, unaging. There has been nothing I’ve encountered in the last ten years to change my attitude towards it. I wasn’t consciously seeking out music without any cultural referents back then, but I stumbled on it, and it’s very nearly the only music from then I still listen to. Ajax eventually became Three Beads of Sweat and reissues Mountain Goats rarities, among other things. But the Terminals (or 3/5 of them) had a new album out a few years ago, and I bought it, and listened to it, and it was exactly the same as it was then.
Slavoj Zizek in Ha'aretz: I'm living in a coo-coo clock!
Noam Yuran of a Ha’aretz gamely interviews Slavoj Zizek on the occasion of his visit to Israel. I planned to stay away from theorists like him, but I’ll bite when he steps out to speak to the reading public of a leftist Israeli newspaper. Arguably, being published by Alexander Cockburn’s Verso also counts as more of a political gambit than an academic one, but one look at The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology will convince you otherwise.
As background, Boynton’s Lingua Franca article on Zizek is here, which partly misrepresents him as a wackier version of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, but offers Zizek’s great account of his botched psychoanalysis:
In addition to being Zizek’s teacher, adviser, and sponsor, Jacques-Alain Miller became his analyst as well. While familiarity between analyst and analysand is discouraged by Freudians, it was not unusual for Lacanians to socialize with their patients…Lacan’s sessions ended the moment he sensed the patient had uttered an important word or phrase—a break that might occur in fifteen minutes or less. Miller had fine-tuned the logic of therapy to the point that few sessions lasted more than ten minutes…As the head of the main Lacanian publishing house, Miller was in a position to turn Zizek’s doctoral dissertation into a book. So, when not presenting his fabricated dreams and fantasies, Zizek would transform his sessions into de facto academic seminars to impress Miller with his keen intellect. Although Zizek successfully defended his dissertation in front of Miller, he learned after the defense that Miller did not intend to publish his thesis in book form.
But how does he speak to the public? Yuran says:
Zizek’s prose style has a rebellious and highly compelling side that brushes up against the most critical intellectual trends of our day like cultural studies, contemporary feminism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism.
When filtered down for the common man, here’s what it sounds like:
What fascinates me about disaster films is how circumstances of vast catastrophe suddenly bring about social cooperation. Even racial tensions vanish. It’s important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together – Jews, Arabs, blacks. Disaster films might be the only optimistic social genre that remains today, and that’s a sad reflection of our desperate state.I think what’s going on today in the name of a war on terrorism shows that liberal democracy is not the transparent, simple political system is it often understood to be.
We should summon our courage and ask the fundamental question – `what is democracy today?’ What are we really deciding? You in Israel, perhaps you are lucky in that on some level you still have a real choice to make. Perhaps a more radical version of a solution for the Palestinian problem would have meaning.
The sad result of this collapse is that we have returned to the concept of history as fate. Globalization is fate. You join it, or you’re out of the game. In any event, there’s no way to influence it.
I’m not saying that there are answers – I’m just saying there will be huge problems. And then maybe we’ll find the answers. Or we won’t.
There’s not much to say about the quotes; I don’t like them. My point is that Zizek, being a mischievous sort of person, is celebratory of the fact that his self-involvement has led to considerable personal success, but when presented with a popular platform, he can’t say anything. I don’t mean that he doesn’t try to make points; I mean that he concertedly avoids saying anything even remotely germane to Israel (the third quote above and his comments on Nazism not excepted). This sets him a far ways off from Edward Said and Stanley Aronowitz, theorists with more readable soapboxes. His mention of American disaster movies in an Israeli newspaper is absurd, but he doesn’t seem to be able to help himself.
So Zizek relegates himself, happily it seems, to the status of entertaining clown. His most popular analogues seem to be Charlie Kaufman (for building fluffy Escher castles in the sky) and Dave Eggers (for shameless shamefulness). But since he gives the game away so baldly, maybe that’s his intent.
(Dated tangent: do you think Nader supporter Alan Sokal voted for Aronowitz? All signs point to yes!)
The Flames, Olaf Stapledon
The Flames (1947) was Stapledon’s last major work of fiction before he died in 1950. After having narrowed his scope from the huge cosmic histories of Last and First Men (history of humanity) and Star Maker (history of the universe, Dante-esque cameo by God at the end) to the earthbound Odd John (super-man) and Sirius (super-dog), The Flames reads like an attempt to stuff them all into a 50-page novella. It’s supremely confused, but the evident moroseness of an author who, in the face of a second world war, has decided that his imagination will not help, gives The Flames an immediacy that you never see in other top-flight fantasists like Borges.
It is written in Stapledon’s trademark stiff prose, which places it stylistically closer to H.G. Wells than to any contemporaneous science fiction originating from the United States’ pulps, and if Stapledon had read any of them, it doesn’t show. Even though Stapledon had rejected Wells for being too cynical, The Flames has a sludgy melancholy that allows joy only in the most ironic way.
The story consists of three segments, each of which undercuts the last. In the first, the sensitive narrator talks to a “flame” in a burning stone who tells of life on the sun and subsequent exile when the planets were formed, with a polite dispassion not so far from that of Hal Clement. Despite some ill-fitting foreshadowing, the revelations in the second part that the flames are hellbent on manipulating humanity to help them thrive and pursue their spiritual aims, through mind control if necessary. To this end the flame reveals that he and his comrades caused the narrator’s wife to commit suicide, so the narrator could devote himself fully to his studies and establish contact with the flames. This is all vaguely silly and melodramatic, and trivializes the first section. I don’t know if Stapledon read Charles Fort, but he treads on similar territory here, and with no better luck than Fort or Eric Frank Russell in The Sinister Barrier.
But in the third segment, Stapledon plays down the mind-control aspect and the particulars of the flames’ existence to focus on their religious history, which is a rewrite of the tail end of Star Maker: advanced beings, including the flames, join into a single cosmic mind that then searches the total vision of reality. This time, though, the revelation of the total indifference of the Maker (who, while not quite absent, is not as personified as it is in Star Maker) is catastrophic and the cosmic mind collapses. Star Maker ended with a little homily on the significance of humanity’s efforts; “The Flames” ends with the flames deciding that a Loving God is such a great idea that He must exist, and stupidly start the whole process up again, killing the narrator in the process for questioning them.
All this comes as a shock after the first two parts, which had alluded to the flames’ abstract spirituality but had only used it as a differentiating point between their minds and human emotional experience. Stapledon suddenly seems possessed by a need to rewrite his previous optimism from fifteen years before. The only hint of this comes late in the first segment, where, after receiving a noetic emotional experience from the flames (a great idea that Stapledon abandons), the narrator thinks he’s seen God, and the flame responds, in what sounds like a rebuke from Stapledon to his younger self:
Just because you have had an exciting and clarifying experience you persuade yourself that you must have had a revelation of the heart of the universe.It’s tempting to see the later inversion as indicative of narrative unity, but it just doesn’t make sense. The entire cosmic mind comes out of nowhere, and Stapledon is so driven to drive it to cosmic despair that he converts the flames into religious devotees. As with most everything Stapledon wrote, there’s enough high-minded ideas flying off to distract from the incoherence, but the main message is one of repudiation of his earlier self, a rejection of human aspiration, and an embrace of Wellsian darkness. But Stapledon doesn’t have Wells’ detachment, and “The Flames” is ultimately more miserable than anything Wells wrote. Stapledon’s self-flagellation over believing in his own imagination’s “exciting and clarifying experiences” is evidently an overreaction, but it marks him as a brave, if defeated, man, and an antecedent of an entirely different tradition of science fiction.
Whiteness Theory
Claudio Puebla delivers a very extensive examination of Whiteness. Much of the site is intensely technical, but some of his broader observations bear quoting.
Definition The “ideal white” is defined by a perfect reflection value for all wavelengths of light: “No losses means that the reflectance values are 1 for the whole wavelength range (or 100%); this defines the ideal white, a body rarely encountered in nature.”
Components As described on the Theory page, the “whiteness” of a shade is determined by three elements: base white, shaded white, and fluorescent white. Though observers cannot distinguish the elements in a shade, differences in any of the three elements will result in colors not matching under some lighting conditions (“metamerism”). Two colors gauged at the same level of “whiteness” may be metameric along any of three axes.
Utility White’s lightness makes it extremely useful where visibility and contrast are important. Puebla states that this has led to “the use of color mixing techniques as a means to increase the perceived whiteness is quite widespread in the industrial areas of paper, textiles, detergents and plastic.”
Aesthetics On the Assessment page, he describes how mixing varies amongst cultures:
Considering now the personal taste for certain whiteness it can be said that this varies with cultural background of the observer as well with the final application of the white object.As such people with a cultural background of the Far East prefer a reddish white, Europeans prefer a neutral white, while in Latin America shaded bluish whites are preferred. On the other hand neutral bluish whites are preferred for objects suggesting freshness (like bottles for mineral water) but a reddish white are favored for white underwear garments.
Bill Dixon, Vade Mecum
The archive doesn’t seem to work right, but if you scroll down to the 12-10-02 entry of Melting Object, and you’ll see him salute trumpeter Bill Dixon. Dixon’s a great and underexposed figure, coming out of the 60’s avant-garde jazz movement and following his own path from thereon out.
I believe it has something to do with his melding of a very respectful classicism (he cites Webern especially along with the rest of the serialists) with an interest in pure timbre outside of the realm of explicit “notes.” His embrace of Austrian trumpet abuser Franz Hautzinger speaks to how open he’s been to abandoning structures of notes for pure sound. You can even hear it on his early (1964, I think, and it sounds like nothing else of the period), and rather unavailable Intents and Purposes, where his playing is far more linear, literally, than it became, but the relation of it to the bed of musicians beneath him shifts drastically and often.
But more specifically, just take the two Vade Mecum cd’s, from the early 90’s. Dixon works with two bassists, Barry Guy and William Parker, who come out of two drastically different backgrounds (English free improv and American free jazz—okay, if you like records like these, they seem drastically different). Parker plays with tonal and rhythmic ideas fairly often, while Guy is much more inclined towards extended techniques, more traditional “classical” playing, and noisy outbursts. The relationship seems to progress as the recording goes along (I’m with MO; the second disc is better), but my favorite moments are when Guy and Parker play at complete odds with one another, but Dixon bridges them. It’s beyond my ability to articulate without imprecise metaphor, but Dixon provides a well around which both Parker and Guy’s orbits can be independently sustained without crossing.
Dixon records sparingly, and the lack of flash in his playing has probably cost him as much as his personality has. But his structural concerns are, as far as I know, very different from anyone else’s, and only recently are younger musicians seeming to pick them up. (Two albums that strike me are GratHoVox and Wing Vane, but who can say?)
Saul Alinsky: Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
The rather hermetic Wealth Bondage salutes relentless and tireless agitator Saul Alinsky. It’s always hard to take Alinsky’s writing at face value since his entire life strategy revolved around manipulating people into doing what he thought was in their best interest.
If you ask me, he was often fairly on the mark, but he was not one to waste time ingenuously explaining his agenda, unless it was going to further it. In Rules for Radicals, he seems much more interested in presenting his strategies for leading and guiding undirected masses of people than he is in explaining what particular direction he’s taking, or why. His tactics look great if, unlike me, you have an a priori political orientation, but in rejecting the concept of independent thought, he always depressed me.
Since he was determined to work with people’s existing preconceptions and value systems, which hardly cause them to act in their own best interests, the best that can be managed if two people deploy Alinsky’s tactics is a stalemate, or an arbitrary victory. And so the most recent huge of radicals remaining within people’s own experience is described in Josh Green’s “The Other War Room, as skillful a deployment of Alinsky’s tactics as any.
Nagarjuna, Wittgenstein, and Expediency
wood s lot’s mention of Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna remind me of what an attractive postmodern figure he is. The madhyamika tradition, of which he’s the chief exponent, is basically nihilistic, taking pairs of theses and antitheses and invalidating both to show the inadequacy of rational argument, and of any discourse whatsoever. Its functional similarity to Derrida’s attack on dialectic arguments is much analyzed. (Thanks to Ray at Bellona Times for the link.) Wittgenstein, with all his talk of that which we cannot express, is another popular reference.
I’ve never been fully convinced by the Wittgenstein comparison as far as grasping reality goes, since Wittgenstein, for at least large portions of his life, seemed to be pretty big on free-floating externals. His main concern was an realm of inexpressible “things” that was off-limits from the world of logical and linguistic discourse. It’s a dichotomy that he never broke down.
But the Buddhist concept of “expedient doctrine” has Wittgenstein written all over it. Nagarjuna firmly came down on the side of expedient work (e.g., his own writing) that, while properly nonsensical if you applied its own principles to itself, still assisted one in coming to true understanding. And, well, if you skip to the end of the Tractatus:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)This is an old point (though the site seems to have more in common with Ramon Lull than with Wittgenstein or Buddhism), and even though Wittgenstein is emphatically not trashing rational discourse, the expedient doctrine concept is there. But it’s undercut by the finality and austerity of the Tractatus.
It’s in Wittgenstein’s later work that the expedient doctrine concept feels most present, as he grapples his way through version after version of slowly shifting ideas about the private experiences that seemingly can’t be used as referents in public language. In the rougher notebooks, sentences trail off, thought experiments are proposed with no implied results, and non-sequiturs pop up just when he appears to be getting somewhere. Far more than Nagarjuna’s declarative style, it reads like expedient doctrine, for him as much as me.
(For the dialectical version, please see Chris and Joe’s Philosophical Steakhouse. If you prefer your philosophers to fly rather than struggling to crawl, see Levinas’s World of Wonders.)
Hume, Sympathy, and So On
UFO Breakfast’s discussion of Hume on sympathy made me pull out my old Oxford Press edition of the Treatise (its cover is a very striking and very antiquarian shade of brown). Deleuze describes how partiality in people’s sympathies makes a unified polity difficult. The two Deleuze quotes in this entry are on the mark on how sympathy is steered by culture, but there’s a point buried in there about how sympathy is generated that marks it as far more fundamental.
Hume’s theory of mind was one of raw sense data being apprehended and copied into the mind with no intermediation. When Hume mixes his perception theories with his conception of sympathy, he indicates that sympathy is a survival instinct, not so much egoistic as a necessary mechanism for coping in the world:
I own the mind to be insufficient, of itself, to its own entertainment, and that it naturally seeks after foreign objects, which may produce a lively sensation, and agitate the spirits. On the appearance of such an object it awakes, as it were, from a dream: The blood flows with a new tide: The heart is elevated : And the whole man acquires a vigour, which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments. (353)
Hume discusses how sympathies are extended over time for consistency’s sake, and how these trends underly family, custom. The regulation of sympathy is determined by the environment and pre-existing conditions, but the tendency is innate, or as close as Hume will come to that term. The application of sympathy is based on “resemblance and contiguity,” which give rise to family, friendship, etc.
When Hume talks about his most skeptical moments, when “I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and facility,” his solutions are all social: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends.” This is less of a moral or political issue than an existential one.
Though Hume sets sympathy in opposition to selfishness and egoism, it seems to exist more at the level of his theories of mind rather than those of culture: being necessitates external sympathy. Sympathy seems to exist below the level of self-interest.
Pierre Boulez and His Petard
The Pierre Boulez Project seeks Boulez albums to destroy. The Morton Feldman quotes are pretty great.
Boulez has inoculated himself by recording many prestige albums that people want hanging around on their listening shelves. (I bet no one who bought the 6-disc Boulez Conducts Webern box is willing to see it all go up in flames, or even break up the set.) My one request: the project won’t be complete without that meeting of iconoclasts, Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger.
(Thanks to ParisTransatlantic for the link.)
Social Darwinism Humor
Speaking of eugenics, here’s a bonus question from an old anthropology exam about William Graham Sumner, Yale’s finest advocate of social Darwinism:
William Graham Sumner’s nickname at Yale was:a. Eli b. Bulldog c. Billy d. Old Screw-the-Poor
Reduction Science Digging Itself a Hole
The latest fight in the sociobiology territories is over proto-sociobiologist Bill Hamilton, who personally held a fairly repellent set of views on eugenics, advocating aggressive pruning of the gene tree.
The Bill Hamilton affair is great fuel for the Gould/Lewontin vs. Dawkins/Wilson debate over most everything, but it throws a lot of noise into the argument, since there’s no necessary connection between Hamilton’s eugenicism and his presmuably more influential sociobiology work.
But I tend against the Dawkins/Wilson stance anyway, so here’s what struck me the most:
[Hamilton] decided in his 20s that genocide was partly a response to the spectacle of a competing tribe’s population growing. He believed that differential birth rates between groups would lead inevitably to massacres like those in Rwanda or Kosovo.
It’s not patently offensive like much of what surrounds it, but it’s more insidious. Sociobiology is often accused of fatalism, which people like Wilson deny, but if Hamilton believed that, it gives his adherents much license to treat savagery and genocide as unavoidable, and thus, something that it is futile to fight against. Napoleon Chagnon got at the same thing when he painted the yanomami (i.e., primitive society) as intrinsically violent.
This point has been made by many, many anti-sociobiologists over the years, but many of them go on to accuse the sociobiologists of racism, sexism, and complicity in all sorts of bestial acts. I don’t know that it’s quite true. It’s one thing to advocate indifference to genocide, and another to advocate a point of view that lends support to indifference to genocide. I’ve known too many people who wore the “hopeless cause” badge as a matter of pride.
But the claim of inevitability makes it very tempting to shred Hamilton, Chagnon, and whoever else for lending support to views that they may not have had. This constitutes the noise in the argument. Most of them wouldn’t say if they did.
Fortunately, claims of inevitability of well near anything have never stood up very well. For a less loaded example, take a look at Dawkins’s imitation of E.M. Cioran:
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.River Out of Eden, p. 133
It’s not morally damnable, but it’s hardly scientific. Whether or not Hamilton gave away the secret reprehensible agenda, sociobiology will survive his eugencist beliefs, which will be labeled incidental. The point of weakness remains their fatalism.
Death in Rome, Wolfgang Koeppen
There’s a huge drop-off in big novels of ideas in the Germanic areas post-World War II. Mann, Broch, Musil, Schnitzler, Doblin, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth all oriented themselves around fairly articulable ideologies, some more complex than others. Post-war, there are phantasmagorias like Gunter Grass’s and overwrought character studies like Boll’s, but very little that compares to something like The Magic Mountain. Even Doctor Faustus seems like it’s avoiding the issue.
Wolfgang Koeppen, at least in Death in Rome, sounds the death-knell for the old guard. The ideas are as good as Broch on an off-day, and are better than than Zweig. Koeppen just doesn’t spend as much time on his ideas. The three main characters—a larger-than-life evil Nazi bastard named Judejahn, his son Adolf, who is a priest-in-training, and his nephew, a modern composer—all only have one remotely validated emotion, which is disgust. After making a point about local politics, modern composition, the priesthood, schooling, or any other relevant topic, Koeppen immediately buries it under negative images and recriminations. Koeppen takes pains to paint the three’s only moments of virtue as ones of total inaction.
While they and their fellow Germans aren’t doing anything, for three-quarters of the book, Koeppen’s lyricism sustains a sublime, frozen-in-amber quality, as they all walk through historical Rome. Koeppen is expert at displaying the unmoored thoughts of the most morally culpable people imaginable, Judejahn for being a monster like something out of The Night Porter, and his scions for having anything to do with his legacy. It’s when something does happen that the book falls apart, since no plot can live up to the transcendent monstrousness that Koeppen deals in.
The ideas, very negative ones, do come through, but are dispatched far more quickly than usual, since the characters are so terminal. That isn’t to say that tje ideas are so different than what went before. Like Broch circa The Sleepwalkers, Death in Rome has a vaguely conservative bent. Aside from the characters, its hatred is directed to Nietzsche and Hegel, who removed simple morality/religion/ethics and replaced it with high-minded, poisonous ideas. But Broch had no problem writing a verbose treatise about the breakdown of decency. Koeppen seems to say that the rationalistic style of Broch, Mann, and the rest is an abscess spawned by amoral philosophers, and that it must be dispatched.
This makes Death in Rome intentionally self-defeating, its message being that the big rational style must go underground in German literature. And so it has. But it also suggests that there is still a continuity of content: the rational arguments live on in disguised and more chaotic form in Grass, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and many others. So instead of there being such a clean break of content, it’s more a change of style. Koeppen would never write something like this, from near the end of The Sleepwalkers:
Of course the question is not whether Hegel’s interpetation of history has been overthrown by the World War; that had been done already by the stars in their courses; for a reality that had grown autonomous through a development extending over four hundred years would have ceased in any circumstances to be capable of submitting any longer to a deductive system.The Sleepwalkers, Broch, pp. 559-560.
But Koeppen would agree with the main point, which is that theories of the end of history lead to amoral chaos.
If Koeppen is acknowledging that the change is in style rather than substance, he’s far more pessimistic and nihilistic than he appears. He is condemning any future German culture without knowing what it is. He anticipates and transcends many of Grass’s more particular arguments about German memory decades later.
Broken April, Ismail Kadare
Broken April is in large part a description of the brutal blood feud traditions of the Albanian highlands, based on a four-century old set of rules called the Kanun. The way Kadare describes it, with family members being obliged to avenge deaths, and the taxes on each killing to be paid to the regency, doesn’t come off as social realism, or a damning indictment of a capitalistic system of bloodletting. The system seems totally out of everyone’s control. The transcriber of the Kanun comes up with inventive solutions to corner cases. (If a man kills a woman who is carrying his male child, the male child belongs to the man’s family, so does the woman’s family now have to sacrifice one of their own?) But the transcriber doesn’t have any vested interest in events, and even the prince of the region is made an ignorant administrator, with his stressed assistant going crazy from doing the bookkeeping of all the violence and taxes on it.
The robotic processes that are set in place are close to Kafka, and specifically The Castle. In The Trial, there is a central administration, but its mysteriousness is mostly in its lack of activity for the bulk of the book; between the first scene and the last, no process takes place. The Castle has a constant parade of lives being ruined and Castle edicts being set down, all emanating from functionaries that owe their power to no seen people, just mysterious buildings (the Castle itself and the Herrenhof).
Kadare goes ahead and tours his castle itself, and all that’s inside is the perpetuation of traditions that the entire country is locked into; the source is long gone, and he isn’t rewriting the rules. Politically, Kadare thinks that it’s wrong to attribute acts in the name of the Kanun by blaming the people for being maniacs. He blames the Kanun, and its long-dead creators. This requires him to grant his characters less autononmy and moral dignity than they may deserve. They simply don’t have a choice, because the blood feuds are embedded in the culture. Broken April reads like The Castle without K. Even the visiting tourists walk away stunned without having actually done anything.
Kadare doesn’t always push the deterministic angle, but it dominates the book. The book is least successful when it tries to show cognitive dissonance experienced by the inhabitants as they carry out the brutality. It seems forced, and jarring. It’s at its best when the insane logic of the Kanun inexorably plays itself out like a force of nature, which makes disputes about its morality seem not only irrelevant, but nonsensical.
David Riesman called such societies “tradition-directed,” where mores are so dictated that the issue of individual character never comes up. Broken April, more or less, bears him out. There is nothing close to empathy between any of the natives. Riesman says that the intractable force of tradition abates when the society is made to be self-conscious by interacting with other traditions, which end the monopoly. Any nationalistic reassertion of the old culture becomes a choice rather than a dictum. If this is true, Kadare’s books should be relics of the pre-Communist era, fundamentally different from the re-emergence of the Kanun in the last ten years. I wouldn’t know. But why is it then that Kafka’s processes, so close to Kadare’s, are tagged as modern?