The Twofold Vibration, Raymond Federman
There is something niggling about this book. It is, as Ray Davis has described, one of those works which deals with a deep trauma through literary extravagance. You could even say that it is about dealing with deep trauma through such extravagance. The trauma is the Holocaust, and if the work is not as arbitrarily generated as Beckett’s Watt, it tries its best. And there is something niggling about the effort.
(“Niggling” might make a less pretentious and more value-neutral substitute for “uncanny.”)
It’s not the metafictional artifice, with its fourth wall eternally under construction. Federman introduces himself at the beginning and discusses how he came to arrive at the book, and how his two assistant narrators, Namredef and Moinous, are going to help him talk about this horny old Holocaust survivor writer who is about to be exiled to another planet on the eve of the millenium. (The book was published in 1982.) The old man, we’re told, was born in the same year as Federman’s father. Federman himself discusses the two narrators here.
It’s not the intentionally perfunctory science fiction trappings. Federman dispatches them early on and only returns to them obliquely, when he gets involved with the Jane Fonda stand-in “June Fanon,” clearly in her post-Barbarella phase. He drops Lem and Bradbury’s names, but is content to sling a few insults at generic science fiction: “most science-fiction tends lamentably towards unconvincing futuristic descriptions and explications of the impossible…with simplistic characters and melodramatic plots which animate elementary didacticism.” Most metafiction tends towards narcissistic tail-chasing, but let’s keep going.
June Fanon is one of many women the old man is involved with, and a fair amount of time is spent detailing his successes with wild abandon. But it’s all in the past since he’s about to be exiled as part of some mysterious exile program, which is not actually exile, Federman explains, but a dumping of society’s refuse into space. The process is never clearly explained, but it’s very definitely a Holocaust metaphor. The old man is a survivor, and the two fulcrums at work are his hesitation about what has happened in the past, and the haziness and blankness of his upcoming exile. As a contrast we’re offered specifics—his continued anger at Germany, culminating in him expectorating (and worse) on a bed of Deutschmarks, and his rabid activism, all of which are not related to either of his exiles.
The book is driven by a generation of realistic but absurd plots that all proclaim their independence from the mysterious Holocaust and the mysterious exile. Most strikingly, the old man seduces a starlet by telling her the story of a boy narrowly escaping the camps by jumping from one train to another. She’s convinced it’s him: “I know it’s your story, the way you tell it, has to be your story.” He scores, but hates her and hates himself, and continues to insist that it was not him, “just a story.”
The underlying spirit at work, more than Beckett, is that of Edmund Jabes, whom Federman mentions twice. The only part of Beckett present is his playfulness, not the sparseness nor the precision, and without such stark contrast, the result can seem frivolous. “But that’s the point,” a response could go, “to focus on the quotidian which can be described to elucidate what cannot.” Jabes also worked in the space around what he believed he could not speak, and Federman ultimately seems to be marking territory with “Keep out!” signs. The problem is that the lightly comedic quality of the rest of the material references the dark center without illuminating it.
That niggling quality: it is that you can work through pain and suffering and the most awful thing in the world, and you can have fun doing it while making sure to be conscious of the unconscionable past and future, and you can even write all about that, but that elliptical quality that Jabes references, illumination, is, perhaps intentionally, absent. Left instead are pure aesthetics, hovering without reason, seemingly treasured.
Immanuel Wallerstein: Don't Encourage Him By Proving Him Right
I keep waiting for Immanuel Wallerstein to pop up in the debate on the current troubles, but so far I haven’t seen him around. Wallerstein is the man who has claimed for some time that the United States’s global influence and hegemony has been in inevitable decline for thirty years and its leaders are simply deluding themselves that it will be king of the hill for much longer. Since it’s not the most obvious of theses, his papers appear from time to time with seeming bemusement from people
It’s not my main area of interest or study, but Wallerstein’s argument sure seems to have some problems. He overplays past dominance:
The history books record that World War I broke out in 1914 and ended in 1918 and that World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945. However, it makes more sense to consider the two as a single, continuous “30 years’ war” between the United States and Germany, with truces and local conflicts scattered in between. The competition for hegemonic succession took an ideological turn in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their quest to transcend the global system altogether, seeking not hegemony within the current system but rather a form of global empire.The second part sounds all right; the first part doesn’t. Wallerstein argues that the U.S. was already a major economic power by 1914—fair enough—but it’s hard to see how the U.S.‘s claim to global dominance even became an issue before the 20’s and 30’s. Working with the same evidence and a similar conceptual framework, Karl Polanyi still painted the first war as concertedly Eurocentric. At the time, states didn’t have enough truck with the U.S., and vice versa.
Wallerstein also underplays the U.S.‘s current influence. When he says:
In the Balkans and the Middle East alike, the United States has failed to exert its hegemonic clout effectively, not for want of will or effort but for want of real power.he downplays the ability of the U.S. to help put Israeli ultra-nationalists Effi Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman exactly where they want to be, or at least way closer than prudence would dictate.
But I’m not inclined to get in a debate on the matter, other than to say I think he’s offbase. It’s a slightly more conservative argument than Paul Kennedy’s because Wallerstein seems to invoke qualities of national prestige and posture that are not directly related to economic power. But after a few diplomatic disasters in the last year or so, Wallerstein is starting to look pretty good; in fact, I’d say he looks better than Kennedy, because it hasn’t been economics so much as pure posture that has turned everyone against the U.S. (Marshall has been working overtime discussing this, and there’s still so much more to be said.) In the last section of the article, Wallerstein is able to nicely retrofit his theory without much trouble on the “never thought that would happen” neocon dominance. His analysis of U.S. strongarming in the middle of last year looks extremely prescient:
Yet the U.S. response amounts to little more than arrogant arm-twisting. Arrogance has its own negatives. Calling in chips means leaving fewer chips for next time, and surly acquiescence breeds increasing resentment. Over the last 200 years, the United States acquired a considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.But Wallerstein’s position is that the strongarming inevitably used up credit and it failed (in Turkey, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, etc.) because the U.S. simply isn’t as powerful as it thinks it is, and other countries disobeyed because they could. I’m inclined to think that the administration just bungled it; those we strongarmed resisted in spite of fairly notable consequences (or, maybe, resisted because the promises of rewards were totally unreliable, in light of how the administration had already repeatedly screwed Mexico). Wallerstein’s argument, as he says, becomes one of bungling just hastening the inevitable, not wrecking a working piece of machinery.
The neocons actually look worse under Wallerstein’s version for overestimating their country’s position, but it takes some of the blame off of them, since it implies that there probably wasn’t much of a way to get multilateral support for an Iraq war in the first place. Wallerstein does not claim this (well, he didn’t in 2002; I wonder what he is saying now), but he does say that there is far less prestige for the U.S. to squander than is commonly thought. But in general, he seems too pessimistic on the amount of presige right now, and I expect he would claim his estimation as one factor in the inept U.N. wrangling of the last six months. (As much as, say, presenting garbage evidence.) I think he attributes too little power, and thus too little responsibility, to the administration. It still looks like a contingent screw-up, not even a vaguely necessary one. In the short-term, his essential pessimism still looks misplaced. But the diplomatic damage that everyone is talking about and the economic damage that everyone will be talking about look to vindicate him, and we can only hope that his theory isn’t at all useful in removing responsibility for decisions that I suspect are far more decisive than Wallerstein thinks.
The Little Demon, Fyodor Sologub: The Will to Profundity
And yet, there is one anomalous, eloquent passage that stands out from the paltry misery and conniving that dominates the book:
[Peredonov] felt that in nature was a true reflection of his own depression, a projection of his own fears. He was oblivious of that inner, indefinable life that is in the whole of nature, that life which alone creates deep and genuine relations between man and nature. Therefore all of nature was permeated with petty human emotions in his eyes. Blinded by the illusions of personality and his alienated existence, he had no understanding of those elemental Dionysian ecstasies triumphantly echoing throughout nature. He was pathetic and blind to them—like many of us.This is the one time where the veil does fall—or perhaps, is replaced—and Sologub exhorts his readers. When Gogol did this, it was preachy and disingenuous; the last few pages of Dead Souls are ridiculously romantic next to what’s preceded them. But for Sologub here, it’s the sudden glimpse into unknown areas where there are not base vices and gossip, but chaotic, immanent purity. This is the one glimpse Sologub gives in the entire book, and more than any of its characters get. Whether it is a forged anomaly or the key moment of revelation (for the reader, certainly not for the characters) depends on what you’re looking for.
The Little Demon, Fyodor Sologub
The obvious comparison that jumps out is to Gogol. There is a similar dark humor, and a similar cynicism, but those affinities are mostly superficial. While Gogol had larger than life archetypes as characters (the pathetic bureaucrat, the obsessive gamesman, the skinflint), Sologub’s characters are resolutely small and detailed. They hardly succeed at signifying anything other than their own pettiness. The Little Demon was written in 1907, but has nothing of the upcoming Russian futurists about it (though his poetry sure does), nor the power of premonition of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, nor the contemporary feeling of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. It is more parochial than Gorky. The Little Demon has the claustrophobia of a hellish vision of a small village beyond which no one’s thoughts ever go.
The hero, Peredonov, is a nasty little man, an abusive schoolteacher whose ambition is to become inspector of schools, through the connections of his fiancee Varvara. Unfortunately, Varvara, terrified of Peredonov dumping her for a less repellent woman, has been in league with the old spinster Grushina and has fabricated her connections. Grushina forges letters from a princess in St. Petersburg to Peredonov. Varvara keeps up the charade with increasingly unbelievable antics until Peredonov marries her, by which point Peredonov is quite paranoid, and partly with reason, since most of the people around him really do loathe him and gossip about his peccadilloes. But by the end, he has become completely crazy, unwilling to believe what everyone else knows—that the letters are fakes—and instead chasing after fabricated plots, setting fire to ballrooms, and eventually turning on his dense friend Volodin and slitting his throat, all the while spurred on by the “petty demon” of the title, which taunts him and eggs him on. The hallucinations and unreality is similar to that of Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” but there is no redemption, no moment of clarity, only oblivious dark.
In the context of the surroundings, stripped of any nobility, Peredonov occupies a role in his environment similar to that of Pechorin in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, written in 1840, seemingly as a rebuff to Pushkin’s more romantic view of Russia. Pechorin was the cynical, brash opportunist who was no more moral than the pompous nobles around him, but is incredibly successful at exploting them. Lermontov implied that the logical end of Pechorin’s mindset was an ennui-laden fatalism, but Sologub seems to have another answer: paranoia and compulsive scheming can arise just as easily when those around you are too dumb to even act predictably in their own self-interest.
Sologub fills up the book with other grotesquely picaresque anecdotes, which aren’t as shocking as they might be because the characters are so flat. Three shrill sisters, a pompous windbag headmaster, a succession of increasingly dull officials. But one story stands out and nearly takes over the book, though it’s only tangentially connected with Peredonov’s tale, and that’s the story of Lyudmilla and Sasha. Sasha is a young, persecuted student who Peredonov, in another incomprehensible scheme for promotion and fame, attempts to claim is a girl, and Lyudmilla is a shallow, nasty woman who becomes infatuated with him, driven by dreams of being the queen of a palace full of boys whipping each other. Lyudmilla dresses him up in girl’s clothes, pinches him, induces him to foot-worship, and eventually seduces him. Unlike Peredonov, Lyudmilla manages to completely cover up the affair when his aunt hears about it, with Sasha playing along perfectly.
The material is unnerving if not shocking; it’s of such a base nature that Peredonov’s insanity looks fuzzy in comparison. And Sologub seems to relish it more than the rest of the plot, devoting more and more time to the details of their meetings. (That and the general misogyny, misanthropy, and prurience suggest that Sologub was not a nice man.) Lyudmilla even picks up some pagan pretenses that she initially uses to justify her perversions to Sasha. It could be trash, but Sologub goes a ways towards justifying it by painting them in opposition to Peredonov. While Peredonov runs amok, Sasha and Lyudmilla maintain (or even, in Sasha’s case, establish) their public decency by falling back on a secret vice. The implication is that Peredonov failed because his addiction was public achievement. Sasha and Lyudmilla are undoubtedly doomed as well, but they are doomed in the way that Frank Norris’s McTeague was doomed: tolerated if not respected, they’ll go along until their private life destroys their public life. McTeague eventually abandons his dentistry practice for the promise of gold, but Sologub is a bit lighter than Norris. Sologub gives his characters their private pleasure, while in McTeague, there is clenched-teeth misery only let loose when a young boy urinates in public and humiliates his whole family, in an expression of unbelievably repressed (and oppressed) rage.
That’s not to say that Sologub is sanguine, but the two main plots of Peredonov and Sasha/Lyudmilla strengthen each other. Peredonov would just be a madmen amongst dullards, and Sasha and Lyudmilla would just be perverse caricatures, but each is a reaction to the other, as Charles Bovary’s failures make Emma’s futile dreams deeper. I will not go into detail about how the two aspects, one public and deranged, one private and devious, reinforce each other and how that might apply to the past and future history of Russia, but I’d say there’s something there.
Go! (Roll Call, Part II)
We belatedly bring you a continuation of Slate‘s Roll Call:
Peter Iovine is a marketer.
There’s a saying that juries do the right thing for the wrong reasons. I think that applies here. The evidence is bad, the diplomacy is bad, the leadership is bad, but none of them are as bad as Saddam. When all is said and done, are you really going to tell me that we shouldn’t remove this maniac from power?
Randy Brinkman owns a small chain of office supply stores
Is there even any serious debate about it anymore? Before 9/11, there were a lot of people, young kids mostly, who thought it had always been a safe, wonderful world with no enemies, so we could afford to be nice to everyone and act like we weren’t the single stabilizing force for good in the entire world. People got their minds changed quickly after the towers fell. Now we’re back in reality and these dictators are threatening the whole world. Go and take them out.
Marcy Hitt was a health care claims administrator before becoming a stay-at-home mother.
I’ve read the Pollack book. I’m with him. I do not believe that there is an imminent threat, and I don’t believe Iraq has any serious ties to Al Qaeda. But it’s unacceptable that he’s trying to obtain nuclear weapons, and it would be a disaster if he used them. I don’t like the whole pre-emptive war doctrine. I don’t want it to be a doctrine, because I think there are threats that can be handled with diplomacy. But this is not one of them. He invaded Kuwait in 1990 thinking that we wouldn’t do anything, and that if we did do something, he could fight us off. He’s a madman, and it’s better to stop him sooner than later, when he really will pose an imminent threat.
James Newton is a certified public accountant.
I don’t trust the President on this. Before you do anything this serious, you want to believe that you’re being led by a brave man of integrity. You want to believe he’s telling the truth. I don’t, and even though you don’t see it on the networks, you can see all the contradictions and phonied-up evidence if you just pay attention. USA Today is for the war, but my local daily paper isn’t. The writing’s better in USA Today, but I trust my local paper more.
Raymond Corn is a podiatrist.
We should have done the job in 1991, of course. It wouldn’t have made us any less popular than we are now. Instead we now have to start a war for what seems like no reason, because Hussein has been there all along. He’s always been a menace. He’s an evil man. It’s never wise to tolerate evil, and we’re already paying the price for it. There are some moral black and whites. No matter what sins we’ve committed, we are the force of good, and he is a force of evil. It is our moral duty—it has been our duty—to go and eliminate Hussein, just as it seems to be Europe’s duty to appease him.
Marcus Fiorello works in the computer industry.
The United States shouldn’t have gone into Afghanistan. They’ve completely screwed the Afghanis, Afghanistan is run by warlords everywhere except Kabul, which is pretty much a gangster town anyway next to our little puppet government. And now, just because they barely pulled that off, they think they can do it in Iraq. The word is hubris. If I made promises like our leaders have made, I’d be out of a job. I think a bad wakeup call is coming for the people in this country.
Peter Linder is the floor manager of a stockroom.
My neighbors are very depressed. They think this signals the beginning of the end of the world. I agree with them. There’s too many bad things going on in North Korea, in India and Pakistan, in Israel and Palestine, and now in Iraq. Nuclear weapons in the hands of these madmen. Something’s going to blow and it’ll be the end. I’m a Christian, but I don’t welcome the end times, and they’re pretty clearly here. I’m nominally against the war, but I don’t see how it matters.
Ralph Ames works in retail.
I hope it will make us safer. I don’t know whether it will. I guess on balance I’d say it will, since state-sponsored terrorism would have one less state, but it’ll probably increase Al Qaeda recruiting. People spend all this time talking about whether or not Iraq was involved in the World Trade Center bombings. Does it matter? If they weren’t involved, they wanted to be. Saddam Hussein and his associates are monsters just like Al Qaeda and they exploit fanatical religion to foster hate against this country and all western ideas. It only takes one of them to dump anthrax on a city or infect us all with smallpox. And they’re trying to get nukes. But I don’t know what you can do other than to try to wipe them all out. I don’t want to die.
Janice Bern is a lawyer.
It’s very easy to overintellectualize these things and explain away all sorts of mortal sins. It’s too easy to criticize yourself and your own country when you should be taking action. It’s easy to feel too much shallow sympathy for these people who are going to be bombed, who have never known freedom or dissent. The people of Iraq are mere embryos, from whom an open, progressive society could sprout, if their regime were only decapitated. They have had many years to overthrow a brutal tyrant, and they haven’t done so. This does not speak well of their own values. If we have to do it for them, that’s a burden I’m willing to shoulder. I hope our example—us sticking our necks out—will instill in them a sense of nobility about who they allow to rule them. Complicity in the face of barbarism is never acceptable, for them or for us.
Doruntine and The Palace of Dreams, Ismail Kadare
For starters, neither is as good as Broken April. Part of the problem is that the prose is weaker and more watered-down probably owing to the fact that unlike Broken April, both of these were double translated, from Albanian to French to English. Kadare’s style is simple and robust enough to appear to withstand the two hops better than some of Stanislaw Lem’s work. But the major issue is that they are tangential to Kadare’s main concerns, while Broken April is fundamental. Both were written about fifteen years after Broken April, and either represent unsuccessful attempts to branch out, or ambitious attempts to claim more territory.
Kadare’s obsessions are those of an anthropologist: he believes in the power of a local self-legislated culture to perpetuate itself down through the ages and maintain a stranglehold on all aspects of life. In Albania, he had what seemed like a perfect case study, and he never lost interest in it. Doruntine and The Palace of Dreams really are works of anthropological study, but the basic materials of the books don’t lend themselves to it. Their achievement is in how Kadare contorts, often unexpectedly, the material to orient it to his interests.
Doruntine is a simple tale of medieval folklore. A small Albanian town’s police officer, Stres, investigates a ghost story where the long-dead Constantine supposedly brought his sister, Doruntine, back from the foreign lands of her husband, at the request of their mother, which he had sworn to honor under the custom known as a bessa. Since the sister and the mother both die of shock before Stres can interrogate them, Stres is rather stuck. The local church official tells him that he will face dire consequences if he doesn’t make shortwork of the idea that a man was resurrected. But Stres decides that local culture trumps even the threat of religious persecution, and that by proclaiming the power of the bessa to even transcend the Christian religion, he will solidify the power of the indigenous culture. This leads to a burlesque. Stres tortures a merchant until he admits that he and Doruntine conspired to pretend that the merchant was Constantine resurrected, then tortures him until the merchant admits that he made it up.
In spite of the torture, Kadare allows the triumph of the culture to seem honorable. But the only real success is in Stres’s integration into the community that he had felt alienated from, through the affirmation of the power of the bessa. And Kadare, having pulled the rug out from both the myth and the revelation, actually ends on a very dark note. The honor at work is completely contextual. Calling Kadare’s approach subversive would be misleading; he is an anthropological realist.
The intrusion of that realism on apparent folklore is unsettling. In The Palace of Dreams, Kadare applies the same realism to allegory and the results are bizarre. At first it seems like a modern allegory out of Camus and Orwell, something like Jose Saramago’s Blindness. Mark-Alem, through his powerful family connections, gets a job at the totalitarian-ish Palace of Dreams, where submitted dreams from the country are analyzed for dangers to the state and prophecies of what is to come. And early on, with the mechanistic, though vague, descriptions of dream analysis and the corruption in the monolithic Palace, it resembles the allegories of Vladimir Makanin and Danilo Kis. But even then, Kadare doesn’t seem to be as interested in the vagaries of dream analysis or even of the torment of the population. Instead, he focuses on Mark-Alem himself, and the political infighting between his family (apparently based on a real set of longstanding nobles in Albania, and using the same name) and the government. His family, it seems, controls a key part of the Palace and are attempting to use it to reorient the government. There is a putsch, but Mark-Alem, whose personality is underdeveloped and a bit passive, ends with an affirmation of cultural tradition and a declaration of allegiance to his family, which will outlast the imposition of the Palace of Dreams on the country.
Except for the bit about the dreams, this isn’t much of an allegory; it’s quite close to Communist Albania. If you want allegory, consider Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where modern Scotland gets put through an apocalyptic political wringer. Here, the Palace is neither inscrutable nor omniscient. Next to the castle in Broken April, the site of long-standing, immutable tradition, it’s nearly impotent. The role of the unrealistic palace of dreams is pedestrian: it represents an attempt by the new state to gain control over the fundamental culture of its people, and it can only succeed as far as a powerful family embedded in that culture joins it. Mark-Alem’s dilemma between state and culture is abstracted from specifics, but it remains too personal and too psychological to be an allegory. It’s not where Kadare’s interests lie. Like Aharon Appelfeld, in whose works the Holocaust looms unspoken, Kadare is monomaniacal in pursuing his chosen subject, but he is more willing to extend himself to new forms, even without ceding an inch of his intent.
3 Movies
The same inarticulateness and lack of differentiation described below makes it difficult to come up with much germane to the major event of the day, but when words seem like a luxury, there’s always film. Most war movies come off as voyeuristic or dilettantish, but there are three that come to mind which don’t seem altogether frivolous. Maybe they make for a good break from the news.
Fires on the Plain: Kon Ichikawa filmed the post-war novel in 1962, when the self-flagellation present in a lot of 50’s films (see Kobayashi’s 10-hour purgative The Human Condition for that) seems to finally wane; here it seems to be directed at all of humanity. A soldier with tuberculosis wanders through plains and jungles amongst desperate men killing and eating each other. His sickness is not made out to be a sacrament, only a method of detachment that makes the film something other than nonstop horror.
Beau Travail: It’s not really a war movie, but it is a military movie, and a very aesthetic one, with endless shots of soldiers training on African beaches. They keep quiet, too, which turns the artifice into something visually affective. The story is a rewrite of Billy Budd, and is nearly irrelevant. It’s about a mindset and a lifestyle, and the non-verbal aspects of them. Claire Denis has never come close to matching it.
The Red and the White: Miklos Jancso made this movie in 1967 in Hungary and supposedly passed it off as pro-Soviet propaganda, though I can’t believe anyone ever bought that explanation. It deals with the Russian Revolution skirmishes along the Hungarian-Russian border around 1919, and like Jancso’s The Round-up, takes place on one large piece of mostly open land, which might as well be the entire world for how it’s shown. No characters, no plot, no explicit structure, and still one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. The plot summary linked to above gives a better idea of the sensibility than any actual attempt at description.
You don’t watch these things to try to empathize with experiences (luckily) foreign to you, but to be shown something inexplicable, at least by all those fancy modernist novels you read. Hey, I liked the first 90 minutes of Three Kings too….
Fighting for the Right to Fight the Right Fight for the Right
If something that affects a person is too overwhelming for him, whether sudden fright or an unremitting spiritual pressure, it can happen that this person suddenly “loses his head.” He can begin to howl, basically no differently from the way a child howls; he can “blindly” rush away from a danger or just as blindly rush into it; he can be overcome by an explosive tendency to destroy, swear, or wail. Altogether, instead of purposeful behavior that would be appropriate to his situation he will engage in a great many other kinds of behavior that always appear to be, and in reality all too often are, aimless, and indeed counterproductive. We are most familiar with this kind of contrariness as “panic fear”; but if the term is not taken in too narrow a sense, we could also speak of panics of rage, of greed, and even of tenderness; or indeed wherever a condition of excitation cannot give satisfaction in such vivid, blind, or senseless fashion. A man as intelligent as he was courageous noted long ago that there is a panic of courage, which is only distinguished from the panic of fear by its reversal of polarity.Psychologically, what takes place when panic breaks out is regarded as a suspension of the intelligence, indeed of the entire higher intellectual faculty, in place of which a more primitive spiritual mechanism emerges; but it might well be added that with the paralyzing and ligature of reason in such cases, what happens is not so much a descent to acting instinctively as rather a descent leading straight through this area to a deeper instinct of ultimate necessity and an ultimate emergency form of action. This kind of action takes the form of total confusion: it has no plan, and is apparently bereft of reason and every other saving instinct; but its unconscious plans to replace quality of action with quantity, and its not inconsiderable cunning rests on the probability that among a hundred blind attempts that are washouts there is one that will hit the target. A person who has lost his head, an insect that bumps against the closed half of a window until by accident it “plunges” through the open half to freedom: in their confusion they are doing nothing but what military strategy does with calculated deliberation when it “saturates” a target with a volley or with sweeping fire, or indeed when it uses shrapnel or a grenade.
Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” 1937
I searched long and hard for a relevant passage from The Man Without Qualities, since he says so much there and the translation is better, but I had to go to 1937 and a speech to find him addressing the basest instincts of humanity, because even the vilest character in The Man Without Qualities (excluding the murderer Moosbrugger, who is not a character anyway) looks pretty good in absolute terms, and by the later portions, it is threatening to float off into a world that is still far too rational and considered to be applicable.
I can’t blame him. “On Stupidity” is as close to a scream as I’ve read of him, disguised unconvincingly in increasing abstraction and stilted detachment. More selfishly, it drives him nuts that it is increasingly cutting him off from what he once thought was important and valued:
But today it is even more important to place the concept of what is significant ahead of the upstanding mind; I will mention this concept only in the most utopian way.Me too. The comments at Daily Kos’s board, the Happy Tutor’s fable, the lyrics to “The John Birch Society”, they’re all the same to me for now.The significant unites the truth we are able to perceive in it with qualities of the feelings that give us confidence for something new: for an insight, but also a resolve, for fresh perseverance, for whatever has both intellectual and emotional content and “presumes” a certain kind of conduct in ourselves or in others; this is the way it could be put; and what is most important in connection with stupidity is that the significant is accessible to criticism’s understanding aspect as well as to its feeling aspect. The significant is also the opposite of both stupidity and brutality, and the general disproportion in which, today, emotions crush reason instead of inspiring it also merges with the notion of the significant. Enough about this, indeed perhaps already more than one might be able to answer for!
C. Wright Mills: The Malaise of Anticipation
Attempts to reinstate the old emphasis on the power of man’s intelligence to control his destiny have not been taken up by American intellectuals, spurred as they are by new worries, seeking as they are for new gods. Suffering the tremors of men who face defeat, they are worried and distraught, some only half aware of their condition, others so painfully aware that they must obscure their knowledge by rationalistic busy-work and many forms of self-deception.No longer can they read, without smirking or without bitterness, Dewey’s brave words, ‘Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril,’ or Bertrand Russell’s ‘Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid,’ much less Marx’s notion that the role of the philosopher was not to interpret but to change the world. Now they hear Charles Péguy: ‘No need to conceal this from ourselves: we are defeated. For ten years, for fifteen years, we have done nothing but lose ground. Today, in the decline, in the decay of political and private morals, literally we are beleagured. We are in a place which is in a state of siege and more than blockaded and all the flat country is in the hands of the enemy.’ What has happened is that the terms of acceptance of American life have been made bleak and superficial at the same time that the terms of revolt have been made vulgar and irrelevant.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 1951
Today he would be wrong: they don’t hear anyone but themselves. But there is an appeal to the passage right around now, in its generals rather than its specifics, just as the Pé quote is taken rather out of context. There is nothing ironic about these words except for when they were written, in a period closer in spirit to the early 1990’s than today. So take a slight bit of hope, or at least perspective, from the knowledge that the above will always apply.
Mills’s next step was an embrace of Cuban communist rule, and its motivations are the mirror image of those in the above passage. It’s not a sign of weakness from Mills, but neither is it quite as clear-sighted as it intends to be.
Cassandra, Christa Wolf: The Ones to Get It In the Neck
Cassandra‘s concept is simple and thorough: Cassandra, daughter of Priam, the ruler of Troy until its demise, has been brought back by Agamemnon after the war as something of a trophy, and his wife Clytemnestra kills them both for Agamemnon’s “it was for good luck” murder of her daughter Iphigenia. In her last moments before she becomes a bit of collateral damage, she jumps through her past in the Iliad, the Oresteia, and other assorted bits and pieces. The basic plots are covered here.
Wolf’s book is classically revisionist in that it mostly sticks with the material. It is classically feminist in seeing Cassandra and the additional characters of slaves and women as fundamentally oppositional to the male characters of the original stories, and even Clytemnestra, who is one of those women, unlike Cassandra, who never do “stop wearing themselves out trying to integrate themselves into the prevailing delusional systems.” Its additions are ones of interpretation and of layering: notably, Cassandra has an affair with Aeneas in her youth, and he remains a fixture in the book. This is Wolf’s key addition, and the one that produces the most resonance, about which more later. But Wolf also overlays Cassandra’s interactions with servants and the invisible people of Troy, particularly her servant Marpessa. Marpessa is something of a pagan Sappho stand-in who provides Cassandra with the glimpses of an alternative, less “heroic” world that is clearly meant to be superior. Consequently, the hysteria with which she delivers her prophecies comes out less as insanity or desperation than as a fundamental (and willing) disconnection from the world of Priam, Paris, and Hector.
Aside from the overlays, Wolf plays up the escalation aspects of the Trojan War, taking the view that the abduction of Helen was a tit-for-tat response to Priam’s sister Hesione’s willing “abduction” by a Spartan who she has married. The parallels to the Cold War in the 80’s when the book was written (except for a couple of post-colonial elements that get pushed slightly too hard, there is nothing to suggest it couldn’t have been written a few decades earlier) are entirely implicit, but quite apparent. Wolf was a nuclear disarmament unilateralist living in East Germany, and she had no patience for half-measures.
Of course, it’s all seen through Cassandra’s eyes, through tight but mercurial narration, and Wolf’s attention to her rape by Ajax and her identification with the doomed amazons led by Penthesilia, but Cassandra’s personal persecution and the general horrors of the war, for which she is mostly an observer, aren’t resolved. Maybe they couldn’t be. Wolf comes closest with Cassandra’s relationship with Aeneas, marked out as the only real relationship she has had with one of the “heroes.” To Wolf, she shares with him an unwillingness to be a part of the historical narrative, and at the end of the book she signals her acceptance of Aeneas’s unavoidable fate of going down the dark, violent road of the Aeneid to found another empire. Cassandra’s fate as victim and hysterical prophet, as with Aeneas and Penthesilea, is contextually necessary, and Wolf uses that to endorse the other, overlaid context before it is destroyed by the heroes.
It’s a dogmatic book, executed with great skill. The emphatic cry that lies beneath the flowing surface seems to have gone out of fashion, what with Gunter Grass’s missives against German reunification already seeming dated, or at least mistargeted. Wolf’s academic polemicism actually shares more with Amos Oz and David Grossman, those Israeli writers for whom the solution to war is obvious yet completely out of reach, and for whom the approach is fundamentally emotive. But the sensibility has faded elsewhere. It’s not fair to chalk it up to the end of the Eastern Bloc, and the demise of the passion that some (Sergey Kuryokhin is a good example) claimed only came out of repressive states. Part of me thinks it’s about to make a reappearance.
Anglo-French Relations
Via The Fall Website, we bring you the only comic to compare Mark E. Smith to Michel Houellebecq:
The choreography of Mark E. Smith is as startling as that of Michel Houellebecq waiting in line at an orgy.Fair enough, even if Houellebecq doesn’t translate to music quite as well, even if “Le rock est ma couture!”
Oulipo Postscript: Because They're There
Having roughly delineated the areas of generative writing mechanisms and how their purposes can be at odds with traditional notions of “meaningful” work, a personal statement. I discovered the Oulipo as a teenager through a series of Martin Gardner Scientific American articles, which focused on the most mathematical and formal of their work: the long palindromes, N+7, the million zillion sonnets, the lipograms. Most of this work was not readily available; most of it wasn’t even translated. But I kept the names in mind and bought what I could.
Like Eudaemonist, I was fascinated by Perec’s La Disparition, though I didn’t have the necessary French to read it. I tried a few (unfinished, unsatisfying) exercises in the same mode. By the time I got to college it had been translated as A Void, but I found that in the intervening years with their intervening troubles, Perec’s conceits had ceased to interest me or resonate with me. The trick could not, in my mind, be justified in execution, only in theory, and the resolute attempt to bring everything in line with the motif read as quaint. The final bit of Life: A User’s Manual, that the puzzle-maker’s last piece is a “W” but the whole is the shape of an “X”, seemed trivially self-defeating rather than profound.
It applied to other works. I could admire Ulysses for its structural properties but only warm to them as far as they related to the business between Stephen and Bloom. I never did get through Tristram Shandy.
I’m still stunned by the amount of effort and care put into the arrangement of such works, and sometimes the willingness to make things so much more difficult. I don’t plan on looking down on them from the pinnacle of awesome respect for their achievements, but they still are very useful reference points.
"Here", Richard McGuire
Which isn’t to say that formalist experimentation can’t occasionally produce absolute total genius. Richard McGuire‘s earliest fame came as bassist for early 80’s minimalist funk band Liquid Liquid, authors of “Cavern” (or “White Lines,” more or less), and who apparently just played a reunion show. But he also fell in with Art Spiegelman and the RAW anthology crowd and drew comics. And one of those, “Here,” from RAW 2.1, is a concentrated masterpiece.
“Here” is six pages long, drawn in a clean, neutral, almost nostalgic style. Its main construct is that each panel portrays the exact same location and space at different, marked times, non-linearly. The space mostly a corner of a living room, of a house built in 1902. A family moves in, a child is born, he grows up and continues to live in the house, he leaves and another family moves in, the house burns down. McGuire subdivides each panel into multiple time periods, so that the bottom left quarter of the corner can portray 1948, and the rest portray 2032, with an inset in the middle from 1968.
The device is so overwhelming that McGuire keeps the story as neutral as the artwork. Some of the juxtapositions make simple points (kid in 1955 says “Who’s a chicken!”; rest of panel shows chickens in a pen in 1870) and get out of the way; others seem to be assembled through pure intuition. Perhaps McGuire sought a neutral tone to mirror the implacability of the passage of time, which, unsurprisingly, weighs heavily here. But that pathos still dwarfed by the pure elegance of the structure itself; the impact is sublimely aesthetic above all else. The achievement of “Here” beneath that is to take material that normally could only be treated in highly subjective fashion and decontextualize it without producing alienation. (The base material is so traditional, down to the retro-futuristic fashions in the 2020’s.) It’s a strange, unsettling effect, numbing but not unpleasant.
McGuire was rumored to be expanding “Here” to book length. I’m not sure how it could be done, since the six pages succeed through rejecting traditional notions of “depth.” But the thing is seminal and deserves to be reprinted.
Oulipo: Existentialismos, John Barth, Georges Perec
Once upon a time there was an author named John Barth, and he wrote a book called The Floating Opera, in which a very nihilistic young man does the Colin Wilson/Arthur Schopenhauer thing and declares there is no purpose in living, acting, or doing, and to prove it he plots to blow up the titular boat, before coming to his revised conclusion: “There’s no final reason for living (or for suicide).” This constitutes the climax of the book. The two descriptors that best apply to the precocious (at least for a man in his mid-20’s in the 1950’s) book are callous and callow, and if not for the fluency of the imagery and environment, the book would just be a signpost on the way to Michel Houellebecq and Bret Easton Ellis. The basic ethos is mirrored in his second novel, The End of the Road, in which the formula is much the same. Perhaps a little less solipsistic, as the lookalike narrator is given a girlfriend (who dies during an abortion) and more significantly, an existential mentor named the Doctor:
Why don’t you read Sartre and become an existentialist? It will keep you moving until we find something more suitable for you. Study the World Almanac: it is to be your breviary for a while…Take long walks, but always to a previously determined destination, and when you get there, walk right home again, briskly…Above all, act impulsively: don’t let yourself get stuck between alternatives, or you’re lost. You’re not that strong. If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left; if they’re consecutive in time, choose the earlier. If neither of these applies, choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet. These are the principles of Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority—there are others, and they’re arbitrary, but useful.I’ve tried to trim down the Doctor’s obnoxious oratory; it’s internally consistent but seems a little naive in being presented as so contemporary. I’ve known people who used nearly the same argument to justify adherence to the more quotidian tenets of Orthodox Judaism.
(Quoth Rabbi Paysach Krohn:
The Torah extends more prominence to the right hand than it does to the left hand. However with regard to the act of tying, the prominence shifts to the left hand because tefillin are usually tied on the left arm. Therefore although both right-handers and left-handers put on their right shoe first (because of prominence to the right side), there is a difference with regard to tying their laces. The right-hander should tie his left shoe first (because it is on that side that he wears his tefillin) whereas the left-hander ties his right shoe first.But I digress….)
I’m not particularly interested in how the nihilism turned into the existentialism, but it’s certainly a more generative strategy for the book and for action, any action, on the part of the narrator. And that brings up the question, could the same technique have worked for Barth? (Since it also could have generated the decision, “Let’s have Terry Southern write the screenplay adaptation of The End of the Road, some adjustments may have been required.)
Barth would, only two years later, write the mega-novel The Sot-Weed Factor, totally different than what went before and driven not by any philosophical ideology as the drive to excavate his world until he popped out the other side. This would lead to metafictional excursions like Lost in the Funhouse and especially Letters, a gigantic mess where characters from all his other novels shoot letters to each other and to Barth. The former actually stands taller as a statement of purpose, since Barth makes it very clear that storytelling and storytellers are everything, and he has stuck with that focus ever since. But if I look back on his work and its permutations of fourth-wall-breakages, mythological revisionism, and old-style deconstructionism, the chosen architecture of his conceits seems a bit arbitrary. I don’t use the word prejudicially—Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice has some obvious and less obvious revisions of the Pinocchio symbolism that are fine regardless of the fact that other interpretations were possible and some more obvious—but for an author as generative as Barth, his lack of ideological reasoning behind individual architectural choices is as much a dogmatic tenet as his focus on narratology. And isn’t this starting to sound a bit like the Doctor?
The analogue that I draw on for evidence is Georges Perec, the quintessential Oulipo author, whose novels followed the same path as Barth’s. His early A Man Asleep is the story of a man who is very, very apathetic and dissociative (and, I daresay, depressed). By Life: A User’s Manual (and others, but this is the key one), he’s on to stories of people who have rituals in their own lives: puzzles, cults, writing, etc. The evolution is the imposition of arbitrary structure. You can look at this as experimental, challenging, and unexpected, and you can also see it, as early Barth does, as existential.
And this gets back to the question of the Oulipo and whether, for example, the urge to create complex characters, offer psychological insight, or illuminate mores is fundamentally different from the urge to write REALLY BIG PALINDROMES. I think it has something to do with exactly what the arbitrary structure ethic is. I believe, without conclusive proof, that many of these authors do adopt a defensive, existential mindset, avoiding justifications of their arbitrary method because (1) there is none, it’s arbitrary after all, and (2) the very act of justifying the ethic would cause a regression to the earlier, nihilistic/dissociative state.
Classically, structural decisions are made with reference to advancing a plot or character; with an existentialist writing ethic, this becomes dishonest. It’s preferable to parade the arbitrariness as prima facie.
Ray Davis says something similar:
Embodying this recognition of survival’s triviality in the very work of survival is the point and foundation of the works’ significance.But I believe the examples he references, Roubaud and Beckett, are in the minority. In most existentially-created works of this sort more commonly would reject this statement, as the statement itself is meaningless under the precepts of the work’s creation. You only get significance of this sort if you return to the nihilistic stage that most of the books work so hard to avoid.
More commonly, Barth’s approach, as with the more mechanistic approach espoused by the Oulipo, generates its significance because it works: it generates books. Lots of books. Lots of poems. This isn’t to denigrate the existential writing approach. But there are certain types of “significance” that its works often can’t contain, or admit.
Oulipo Tangent: Milorad Pavic
The difference between the works most closely identified with Oulipo writers (Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies, Queneau’s Exercises in Style) and those works which, while in the same exploratory spirit, don’t quite coexist in the same genre is them, like Sladek’s below, John Barth and Robert Coover’s metafictional spirals, or Tristram Shandy, is often the existence of a procedural gimmick. If the clef to a roman is an easily referenced generative device or structural ploy, the work can seem that much more mathematical and clever.
The danger is that the gimmick becomes the book. Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted with Tea is based around a crossword puzzle, but the device does not seem to justify an entire book, which is otherwise erudite and well-written. But more interesting is Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, a self-proclaimed “lexicon novel” based around Eco-like historical research and mythology. But what is the one thing it is known for, the thing that became its main marketing point? It’s the thing so significant it made it into the rec.arts.books FAQ:
12) What is the difference between the male and female editions of DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS by Milorad Pavic?The differing paragraph is given in both forms. (And is it just me, or is the male version eerily reminiscent of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”?)
Bon Mot: Kerryn Goldsworthy on Xavier Herbert
The TLS this week brings us the following description of Australian author Xavier Herbert’s last novel, Poor Fellow My Country:
Published in 1975, it is considerably longer than War and Peace, and quickly became known in Australian literary circles as “Poor Fellow My Reader” or “Poor Bugger My Book.”In the same kind of Spinal Tap sweepstakes, there’s the review (I don’t know the authorship) of the Clash’s Cut the Crap: “Cut the ‘Cut the’.”
Oulipo Tangent: John Sladek
I was always surprised that there wasn’t more overlap between the Oulipo and science fiction, since both fields were among the most ready to dispose of character and meaning in search of advances in their respective fields. Calvino had Cosmicomics and T-Zero, but those are more fantasies than anything resembling generic exercises. There have been a few sf authors over the years who have tried Oulipo experiments, and probably more recently that I don’t know about: the latest I know of is Geoff Ryman’s 253, which also happens to be one of the more successful hypertexts out there. I believe it succeeds on its own terms, but it does come off as a bit of an exercise, a left-brained excursion in assembling fragments that’s closer to computer programming than to writing a novel—which is not a criticism. It is also, of course, not science fiction. Why Ryman chose ordinary reality for his experiment is not for me to answer, but perhaps, as with Harry Mathews’ Tlooth, it’s more coherent to maintain the physical rules of common reality if you’re going to play havoc with the metaphysics of coincidence, symbolism, and structure.
(There is an old EC Comics story, I think from Weird Science, in which a man mows his double down with his car shortly before finding a time machine, and, well, you know the rest, but the best part of the story is the appendix, in which the entire loop is graphically represented and explained for teenagers who hadn’t yet read “By His Bootstraps.” This type of structure, in its simplest form in this story, requires as much contrivance as some of the Oulipo techniques, and may offer a similar form of getting-out-of-a-jam.)
I suspected that 253 was inspired by Thomas Disch’s 334, a fix-up collection of linked stories laid out in appropriately Perecesque fashion. But Disch seems to be toying with the device with less than full passion; it’s his friend, the late John Sladek, who always read as the most influenced by the Oulipo metaphysics. (If you aren’t convinced, Sladek references Mathews and people like Robert Coover and John Barth in this nice interview.)
Nearly all of Sladek’s books are set up like Rube Goldberg machines with the strings in plain sight, as he maneuvers all his pieces into place for a final conflagration. Sometimes, as with his massive 800-page Roderick, about a robot Candide, he lets the chain of events go slack to focus more on episodes of straight satire (which is always there to the degree that it’s not being steamrolled by the plot). Other times, as with The Muller-Fokker Effect, whose protagonist disappears very early on after his mind is transferred onto computer, the overwhelming drive is action, action, action towards that blowout at the end. Consequently, he doesn’t have time to develop most characters beyond caricatured monsters—corrupt professors, foolish hicks, parochial megalomaniacs—which happen to be exactly what the stories require.
The exception is Bugs. Whether it’s because of a slightly less complicated plot or a focus on one particular character, Bugs feels more rooted in several specific places and their corresponding emotions, the most striking being the dreary gray computer company. It’s working on nutty cybernetics, but in the spaces between plot points there’s a melancholy that seems more identifiable with a technical writing job in Minnesota (Sladek’s other profession) than anything else he wrote.
Fred Jones is an English writer who, possessed of little character except for literate decency, gets caught up in the usual antics, but Jones is sympathetic enough that Sladek sticks by him even more than he did with Roderick. There are scenes that don’t figure at all in the plot, as when he applies to a newspaper to write book reviews (“I’m Fred, and literate” is how he introduces himself) and is led into a backroom teeming with shelves of undifferentiated rack-sized fantasy books. “See, about ten years ago somebody made the mistake of reviewing one of these and the word got out. I mean, Christ, they print fifty of these fuckers a month!” says the editor, then the shelves collapse and bury him.
The robot soon goes berserk after Fred has it read Frankenstein and the pace picks up, but there is still a similarity between Sladek’s games of satire and the Oulipo’s reductionistic approach to character. It’s more noticeable in Bugs than it is in Sladek’s other work, or even, for example, The Day of the Locust, because the setting is intensely realistic and very contemporary. Fred remains the only real everyman character Sladek used, and his placement in the book amidst architected madness suggests an attempted escape from the specifics of his personality through a sort of super-detailed cartography of plot. Other characters get completely sucked into the machinery, but Fred remains psychologically present, and his own experiences, though carefully contrived, are more bitter.
The conclusion? That the structural, mathematical antics used by the Oulipo-ians are inspired by the same spirit that drives Sladek’s Rube Goldberg plot machines: it’s not an inherently avoidant technique, but it is one that moves away from what characters like Fred are supposed to represent. Bugs doesn’t resolve that tension, but neither does it fall apart.
(That same architectonic spirit is also what makes chapter 10 of Ulysses a diversion rather than a sequential component of the book. To me, the book holds unexplored answers to all these dilemmas.)
Sladek suggests in the article above that he was going to go further in his never-finished project Maps, where the novelistic structures would extend, Oulipo-style, into the metaphysics of the novel. It sounds like it might have been too fanciful and too arid for Sladek to manage, because his application of structure did not encourage perfect structure as much as it did satire.
Riposte: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino
Playing Derrida to our Hegel, Ray Davis writes:
Earnestness and fooling around aren’t always so easily contrasted, however…If the Oulipo Program readies the exerciser for anything, it’s in an improved ability to apply oneself seriously to transparently arbitrary make-work.Actually, playing nominalist to our realist might be a better analogy. I respond that self-indulgence, as implied, is not always the spur to producing indulgent work. I’m willing to use this escape hatch to drive my dichotomy down a little further.
Roubaud is a gnarly case and my issues with him are probably best dealt with elsewhere. I’d recommend comparing him to Claude Simon, but that’s all I can really say at the moment. Instead:
The most notable betrayal of Oulipo principles that I’m familiar with is Italo Calvino in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where after fifty pages of constructing stories based on rows and columns in a single rectangular layout of tarot cards, the river runs dry and Calvino starts designating “areas” of cards to generate stories from, which allow him considerably more leeway. It’s instructive to read it in tandem with his collection of Italian Folktales, which ironically turn out to be more architectonically constructed than the stories in Castle. (They seem to have been plotted Chinese menu style.) Whether Calvino (in Castle) was trying to invert the construction of stories by creating a generator, Lull- and Leibniz-style, or placing restrictions on himself to force his creativity in new directions, he ends up bending the rules so that he can return to his sources.
This is one of the main directions of the more serious Oulipo-style work—backwards. Underneath The Castle of Crossed Destinies is The Baron in the Trees. Underneath Life: A User’s Manual are Things and A Man Asleep. Underneath 334 is The Genocides.
What happens when, as in Ray’s examples, the writer cracks and seeks refuge in exercises not dissimilar from those logic puzzles where you have to figure out where at the table everyone’s sitting? There is an upheaval, but one that can be incidental to the techniques.
More to come…
Count d'Orgel, Raymond Radiguet
Raymond Radiguet died at age 20, having completed two novels and some poetry, encouraged by his mentor Jean Cocteau. Count D’Orgel (actually Le Bal de Comte d’Orgel in French) is the second, written when he was 18 and 19 and published in 1924, a year after he died. Since the main impact of Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child is in its clear immaturity, I kept that in mind when reading what Cocteau called a book “that cannot be written at that age.” And in its appearance and its demeanor, that very nearly seems true: there is a calm maturity to the basic devices of the book. But underneath it, in the emotional and psychological content, the plot is very ingenuous, almost adolescent. Yet even beneath that…well, read on.
I. Maturity
The name d’Orgel sounded grotesque to me, and on first hearing it I expected a chamber of horrors close to Cocteau’s more intense work (Les Enfants Terribles). Maybe it was only because it reminded me of Daniel Pinkwater‘s Borgel and Yobgorgle. But stylistically and developmentally, there’s nothing grotesque here. Radiguet’s writing, particularly when describing the aristocratic background of Anne d’Orgel and his sedate romance with his wife Mahaut, is so proper and so enmeshed in the mores of upper-class society that it takes over the novel for a while. Radiguet’s style is terse, but he is so careful in laying the social and decorative groundwork for the plot that the book seems slower and longer than it actually is.
When young Francois de Seryeuse, with a middle-class background and more impetuousness than everyone else in the book combined, meets up with the Orgels and falls for Mahaut, Radiguet keeps his distance. Francois is clearly closer to Radiguet’s demographic than anyone else, but Radiguet is careful not to shift the focus entirely on to him. Radiguet gives a fair amount of time to his skeptical mother, who Radiguet gives motivations that would seem too sophisticated if given to Francois. It’s a keen device.
There is also nearly a worshipful attitude towards the focus on class and place, and almost total ignorance of the Great War, which puts the area of the novel’s exploration closer to later Flaubert and Balzac than Proust, since Radiguet doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about class or place; he only wishes to describe them. Jean Renoir would describe the destruction of this world less than a decade later, but here it seems immortal. The fixed world and the comfort with which Radiguet describes do make the book like a much older writer. His vision is much more grounded and fixed than Cocteau’s, which makes their relationship something of the opposite of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s.
II. Immaturity
All the background and scenic parties drop away for a large part of the book, however, as Francois falls for Mahaut and Orgel does his best to ignore what is happening. The love triangle that Radiguet constructs is simple but nicely etched, yet it’s something that is based more in the vague constructs of gentility than it is in French society of any particular time. Orgel’s balls could be parties anywhere, any time, that only require some kind of upper class. The details in the early part of the book fade away as Radiguet brings Francois’s barely consummated affections for Mahaut (he grasps her arm at one point) and her torn reactions to the fore.
It’s not that the book skews towards Francois, but by the halfway point, the main chracters are in such stark relief from the faded background that the focus shifts to archetypal psychology rather than the particulars of the characters:
The Count liked to find his own prodigality in others. To him it was a true sign of nobility. He always accepted the smallest invitation or the most insignificant present with outward signs of pleasure. It was not the right thing for a noble nature to think that everything was his due, or at least to show that he thought so. Francois’ behaviour won the Count’s heart more than any calculated act could have done.As such, the book comes to read as more modern as it goes on, but also more dated. The sophistication of the early sections seems less close to Radiguet’s heart and more like the immaculate dressing done up in imitation of his forebears.
III. Some Kind of Advance
Radiguet was aware that, as he said, “The background does not count” in Count d’Orgel. The advance in the book is not noticeable until close to the end, but it’s derivable from the title. Orgel himself is the least important of the three main characters; even Francois’s mother makes a stronger impression in her greater wisdom. Orgel mainly sits around enjoying Francois’s company and ignoring what’s going on until he can’t any longer. This is not just carelessness on Radiguet’s part; at the end, it’s finally revealed that Orgel’s actions stem not from coarseness or stupidity, but an internal paralysis arising from the role he is playing. When Orgel does lose it and acts mad at his ball, it’s through his inability to process matters internally:
It was, as we know, in Orgel’s character to perceive reality only through what takes place in public. Orgel now admitted that he might perhaps suffer. He was less afraid of the suffering than of the behaviour it would impose on him.Radiguet, in spite of everything, manages to tie the background and the foreground together. The setting doesn’t count, but it functions as the web in which Orgel has been working quietly for the entire book, and what has fallen apart from him. The refraction of his breakdown such that he doesn’t take his problems out on Francois or Mahaut but on himself, in the public display of his society, marks him as someone with considerably less ego than characters in this sort of book ought to have.
So while Mahaut and Francois are fairly ordinary types of a past era, Orgel is something else entirely, a public self wondering about its private self, which has been disemboweled. It’s the sort of figure for for whom sincerity is ambiguous, whom Lionel Trilling said was the invention of modernity. Radiguet’s emphasis on the absence of (Orgel’s) self in the context of high society is a theme similar to Cocteau’s and, more loosely, to the surrealists, but Radiguet’s excavation of it is both freer and far more careful than his contemporaries. He is impudent enough to paint a history of the upper class in detail only to throw it away, but he maintains a tight grip on his materials and works them into his new shape. The message has adolescence in it—he is dealing with questions of sincerity and phoniness—but the technique is, at the end of it, subtly mature.