Incensed at Peppermint
The South Korean film Peppermint Candy begins with a man gunning down some random person who’s ripped him off and then committing suicide, then traces his life backwards through his career as a dirty cop, a cowardly soldier, and a youthful innocent.
It’s not much of a film, but it did get me thinking back myself, before Irreversible, Memento, and Betrayal, to an earlier example of reverse chronology, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along, a morality tale about a successful playwright who gives up his dreams for fame and cash. As you’d expect, Kaufman’s gags fit very uneasily into the contrived framework, and on paper at least, the thing doesn’t work. (It was also excluded from the new Library of America Kaufman collection.) Stephen Sondheim tried to retrofit it as a musical fifty years later, and it bombed.
(Okay, I admit, I usually ignore films I dislike, but I came up with the title for this entry and had to use it….)
Update: Brendan Wolfe (who, if you follow the link under his name, has himself written a good assessment of Aharon Appelfeld) has asked why I didn’t care for Peppermint Candy.
I thought that the film consisted of plot elements that weren’t in themselves distinctive: a despondent, broken, hollow man committing suicide; a corrupt cop losing his morality; the man trapped in a marriage while he pines after his symbolic first love; the tragic death of an innocent in a war zone poisoning the man forever; the innocent youth naively ignorant of the horrors of the world.
The film takes two approaches to justify these generic mechanisms: first, through (backwards) structure, and second, through context (of recent Korean history). The contextual approach fails because the corrupted everyman protagonist does not become a representative of a particularly Korean experience; the movie actually feels quite American next to, for example, Shohei Imamura’s remarkable Vengeance is Mine, which makes a much greater attempt to place one man’s life (a serial killer’s, specifically) into the context of modern Japanese society. The structural approach fails because it does not provide any revelation about the content of the film. Thematically, it’s not hard to see that the man has progressed from innocent to corrupt to despondent, and the suspense is muted because the protagonist is too representative to be seen as an individual.
I haven’t seen other films by Lee Chang Dong, and it’s possible that were I Korean, I would appreciate subtexts that I missed as a foreigner.
Another update: I had originally posted this in the comments, but since no links are allowed there:
Another perverse backwards-chronology exercise is Anne McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The, where Crichton/Wise’s film The Andromeda Strain is run with its scenes in reverse order, fencepost-style. Fred Camper says:
This somewhat playful “deconstruction” of mainstream Hollywood has its virtues: with narrative causality flipped, one looks for causes of events already seen, questions traditional forms of narrative organization. But while we often hear the dialogue reversed—many lines get only single shots—longer takes contain whole conversations that we hear in the original order, providing a confusing disruption of the film’s “backwardness.” It is unique, but the interest of this rather mechanical exercise exhausts itself after a half hour.Waggish says check it out.
Fires on the Plain
The first hour of Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain was slower and less gripping than I remembered, but it’s all a setup for the last forty-five minutes of sheer hell. The structure is conspicuously Dante-like, as our tubercular soldier hero, stranded with his fellow starving and injured soldiers on an island of the Phillipines where the Japanese are badly losing ground, encounters horror after horror, cannibalism representing the absolute deepest form of amorality and evil.
The most memorable scene comes at midpoint, where a group of wounded, starving soldiers are trudging down to base camp, walking down a path strewn with bodies. The camera shoots them from behind. An enemy plane flies overhead and they all collapse to the ground in unison. The plane, unseen, strafes the area, and then some, but not all, of them get up and walk on. It best captures the Beckett-in-a-shooting-gallery feel of the entire film.
The hero, while he refuses to give up the final shred of humanity and eat other people, is hardly a paragon. Though never made clear, there’s as much fatalism in his decision as ethics: he knows he’s going to die of tuberculosis. Though ostensibly a passive observer, he is largely complicit. (Unlike Dante, he does not attempt to intervene, knowing it to be hopeless.) And the film subverts at least one paradigmatic antiwar trope: after our hero guns down a Filipino woman and pushes aside her body to steal the rice under her house (this detail I’d forgotten, incidentally), he tosses his gun in the ocean in a symbolic renunciation of violence…which lasts for all of about fifteen minutes before he gets another one. Moreover, he’s been holding on to a grenade the entire time, a detail which hasn’t been mentioned for quite a while. For all the horrors in the film itself, the sickly feeling of nihilism only grows after things are over and amoral continuities start to become apparent.
Other films of the period, notably Kobayashi’s ten-hour The Human Condition and Ichikawa’s own The Burmese Harp, offered more idealistic, moralistic sentiments couched in more traditional oppositions: pacifism vs. war, struggle vs. resignation, barbarity vs. civilization. They haven’t dated as well as Fires on the Plain, and they are more tied to specifically Japanese attitudes towards the end of the war. The star, Eiji Funakoshi, seems to have been cast specifically for his resemblance to Tatsuya Nakadai, star of The Human Condition: like Nakadai, Funakoshi has wide, sad eyes capable of inspiring massive empathy. But Nakadai’s torments in The Human Condition were meant to serve as a kind of societal self-flagellation, a noble sacrifice so that the humanity of the Japanese could be recovered. Here, you feel rotten for every second you empathize with Funakoshi, and yet you can’t stop, because it would mean withdrawing from the film entirely and giving up on the world.
Fires on the Plain which undercuts any message it proposes and presents an impossible situation, is simpler and more universal than those other films. While the subject matter is tantamount to that of a horror movie, Ichikawa paces it to have the cumulative shock set in afterward. The audience was very quiet when the lighs went back on. It is, along with Jancso’s The Red and the White, one of the most powerful war movies I have ever seen.
The Art of C.S. Peirce
This Public Address publishes a fascinating sketch by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Trigonometry, algebra, statistics, drawings of faces (the one at the bottom vaguely reminds me of Charles Crumb), retraced figure-eights…the impression I get is one of a man concerned with surfaces, from handwriting to hair.
TPA’s Jeff Ward observes:
Peirces realism attempted to embrace both the constructions of the mind and the minds interface with reality through perception. It seems notable to me that his semiology did not spring from psychology, but rather informed it.Which seems exactly right to me. Peirce was far too exacting to allow generalizations about the disposition of the mind to influence a study of what was right out in the open.
Bruno Schulz and Wittgenstein
Mark Kaplan thinks about Hegel after reading a phrase of Bruno Schulz:
It is though what the mind grasps, in a cursory and impatient way, is simply the idea of these things – without colour, volume, height, or any tangible qualities at all.This sent me scurrying back to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for a rejoinder. I didn’t find one, but here is a (rather Kantian) comment from Philosophical Remarks:
That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.The word points to a series of cognitive structures that give form to the world, as though, in the absence of physical details about an object itself, the formal constraints on the word bound what it means in our mind.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.
Some of Schulz’s own comments on the matter (please read the whole thing at the link, it’s wonderful):
Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth.When we employ commonplace words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that, like barbarians, we are building our homes out of fragments of sculptures and the statues of the gods.
Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions.
At present we consider the word to be merely a shadow of reality, its reflection. But the reverse would be more accurate: reality is but a shadow of the word. Philosophy is really philology, the creative exploration of the word.
Also check out some of Schulz’s drawings, some reminiscent of Tenniel.
Later thoughts: first, that attempting to mention Hegel, Schulz, Wittgenstein, and Kant in a single concept was a bit of a stretch. The Kant-Wittgenstein connection deserves more comment, though.
Wittgenstein in the quote above describes the boundaries of perception that are a given to us, both physically (in the form of our vision) and conceptually (in how our sense data, shaped by those boundaries, are reflected in mental and verbal concepts).
This is a variation on one of Kant’s core ideas, the transcendental deduction:
For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject…The analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity.
(Since this is one of the most famous passages in Kant, I fear that I’m going to bore philosophy majors here and mystify everyone else, but I will try to take it in a different direction.)
Approximately, Kant makes a case for a priori synthetic knowledge by concluding that the mind cannot simply be a blank slate on which sense impressions are made, since there must be a set of preexisting organizing principles. He then proceeds to lay out at great length what those principles are.
Wittgenstein views these principles as a prison: they confine the ideas that proscribe our world. And thus they confine our use of language as well. In the absence of alternative principles, our words must reflect a blinkered perception that generates ideas about the world along strict, narrow lines.
Wittgenstein focuses on one of those principles at much greater length than all others, which is the placement of the self in relation to other objects. For Wittgenstein, it is the way that we pick ourselves out amongst all the objects in the world that is one of the key aspects of how our minds give shape to raw sense data.
Now, this is a jump, but can you see what Schulz is saying, the writer’s act upon words that — that it is not experiential sense data that can operate upon the mind to change it, but words in the absence of sensory referents that can stretch the boundaries of the organizing principles? And that, in the absence of sense data in which one can pick one’s self out of one’s surroundings, writing can offer a less blinkered view in which ideas may be more unfettered. This is all mysticism, of course, but at least it’s interesting mysticism.
Finally, a quote in summary from Gilbert Ryle, with regard to Mark Kaplan’s original thoughts:
Sometimes, when someone mentions a blacksmith’s forge, I find myself instantaneously back in my childhood, visiting a local smithy. I can vividly “see” the glowing red horseshoe on the anvil, fairly vividly “hear” the hammer ringing on the shoe and less vividly “smell” the singed hoof. How should we describe this “smelling in the mind’s nose?”
Narrativity Debate on Infinite Worlds!
Great discussion on John Barth specifically and experimental fiction generally at The Reading Experience (and links from thereon out). Ray Davis posits the generic nature of Barth’s work in response to Dan Green’s claim that it is seminal, in an ongoing attempt to construct a taxonomy of experimental fiction. Is the father dead yet? Somewhere I read someone (was it Gregory Rabassa?) saying that Garcia Marquez cast such a shadow over Latin American fiction for so long that he provided a ready-made taxonomy for every new book coming down the pipe.
I exhausted what little I had to say on the subject earlier, but to hear someone speak passionately in favor of these works is always the best defense of them.
Galen Strawson and Narrativity
I was planning to summarize Galen Strawson’s arguments against narrativity in the Oct 15 issue of the TLS, but I’m blessed, because Peter Leithart has already done a sterling job presenting Strawson’s argument. The key idea, in Strawson’s words, is the opposition between diachronic (or continuous, or narrative) and episodic (or discontinuous, or non-narrative) perceptions of life:
The basic form of Diachronic self-experience (D) is that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future – something that has relatively long-term Diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative. If one is Episodic (E), by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms (the Episodic/Diachronic distinction is not the same as the Narrative/non-Narrative distinction, but there are marked correlations between them).Strawson slides some of the terms around, but to keep things relatively simple, let’s consider that diachronics are inclined to build narratives around themselves and others over time, while episodics are disinclined to construct cognitive edifices that rely on the assumption of a constant body undergoing incremental change. The assumption is not intuitive for them. I have no problem instantly classifying myself as episodic, or in accepting the basic nature of the dichotomy. As Strawson says, it is not the default position in most literature, and one of the reasons reading Proust has been so revelatory has been his stance that a person at one moment is incapable of looking upon their memories, their past experiences, and their acquaintances with the same authentic eye that he or she possessed at any past point. This stance struck me as refreshingly honest and non-reductionistic, and went a ways towards justifying the book’s length. It occurs first with Swann and Odette:
Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, and was there not already in his lifetime—as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death—a posthumous happiness in this marriage with Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not attracted him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the person who, in Swann, had so longed to live and so despaired of living all his life with Odette, when that person was dead?This represents to me a more realistic and complex view of human experience than anything in Balzac or Fitzgerald. From Strawson, I would take it that my intuitions are not shared by many, and certainly not by fiction writers. Strawson’s diachronic writers are canonical, his episodic writers are idiosyncratic. Beyond that, I was gratified to see that of Strawson’s list of episodic writers—
Michel de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Laurence Sterne, Coleridge, Stendhal, Hazlitt, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch (a strongly Episodic person who is a natural story-teller), A. J. Ayer, Bob Dylan.
—I felt favorably (sometimes extremely favorably) towards most of them, while of his list of diachronic writers—
Plato, St Augustine, Heidegger, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick O’Brian.
—I find Conrad, Greene, Waugh, and O’Brian extremely boring, and wouldn’t identify myself with any of the others, who I appreciate more in the role of philosophers of narrativity than when they are employers of it. Yet it’s amazing how, despite the disputable nature of the choices (wouldn’t Hegel have been a lot less controversial than Heidegger?), so many of the episodic writers are of special significance to me.
(I know people who would claim that Conrad, particular the Conrad of The Secret Agent, has a much more complicated view of character and choice than Strawson dismissively gives him. But I’ve never seen it myself.)
So whatever the debatable points of his taxonomy (and this being analytic philosophy, there are plenty of taxonomic points to debate), I think Strawson is on to something. Here is my personal experience with that something:
My great frustration with so much short fiction was not the narrative itself, but the function of change. There are stories that present a character in terrible, pure stasis and illuminates that stasis through assorted means, but the vast majority of stories end up with their characters some distance from where they started by means of some turning point event. This change is meant to stand out and mark a posthole in a character’s existence. But this assumes a backdrop not just of consistency, but of stasis itself.
After reading Proust, I came to believe that my frustration arose from the writer’s expedient mechanism of fixing the frame of reference so as to call out a moment of particular meaning or catharsis. I so often found this moment artificial, since the story would then assume an ever-extending future from thereon out with the reverberation from the story’s climax ringing down into the line. I was puzzled to run into other writers that thought of this approach not simply as natural for their characters, but for their views of themselves and others as well.
The modern American short story writer who I did feel the most identification with was Stephen Dixon, and in his endless variations on metaphysical possibility, hypothetical settings past and present for what is really a limited set of characters, he embodies something of what Strawson describes as episodic as much as any more experimental writer who has just thrown out the notion of realistic characters altogether. (Shoe gives some idea of his approach, though he requires a lot more space for the constant revisionism and moment-by-moment-ness of his style to take hold.) I wouldn’t describe it as “episodic,” but it is certainly anti-narrative in a way that owes a little to Laurence Sterne. Again, I have only my tastes to rely on, but Strawson’s framework is valuable for my own outlook if nothing more.
One last point that I couldn’t work in above. Strawson doesn’t mention Wittgenstein, probably because he tends to have the effect, like Kafka, of throwing a monkey wrench into whatever schema he’s inserted into. Wittgenstein might allow for the idea of a public narrative enshrined in language, but it would necessarily be cut off from one’s own idea of one’s self: a narrative that is not narrated. It’s entirely fitting then that Wittgenstein had no patience for most fiction save detective stories, with their objective descriptions of facts, flat characters, and galloping, punctuated plots.
Derrida on Politics
The irreplaceable wood s lot links to one of Derrida’s last speeches. I’m no expert in Derrida or in deconstruction in general, which is why I find their speeches to laymen so informative. This one has me puzzled, though. It reads like a bastardization of Derrida’s own ideas. Aren’t deconstructionists always riled by the application of their technique of breaking down dichotomies into simple “not black, not white, but gray!” statements?
Yet that is what Derrida seems to do here:
This Europe, as a proud descendant of the Enlightenment past and a harbinger of the new Enlightenment to come, would show the world what it means to base politics on something more sophisticated than simplistic binary oppositions. In this Europe it would be possible to criticise Israeli policy, especially that pursued by Ariel Sharon and backed by George Bush, without being accused of anti-semitism. In this Europe, supporting the Palestinians in their legitimate struggle for rights, land and a state would not mean supporting suicide bombing or agreeing with the anti-semitic propaganda that is rehabilitating (with sad success) the outrageous lie that is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [you get the idea]Which is all fine and well, but I simply don’t see how a compromise solution involves a breakdown of dichotomies; we aren’t talking Rorty-style ironic pragmatism here, as much as Rorty would like to have you believe that his version derives from deconstruction. (The deconstructionists are not fond of Rorty.) It instead involves promulgation of a very specific ideal derived from the better parts of the Enlightenment: human rights, liberal democracy, tolerance. There is no mention of the parts of the Enlightenment that have come in for such criticism by much of recent deconstruction philosophy: scientific hegemony, white man’s burden colonialism, prejudicially normative ethics, the search for a single ultimate truth and pretenses towards such, etc.
Maybe he didn’t have space. But the piece is filled with other binary oppositions: globalization/anti-globalization, anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism, reform/reactionary. I have no problem with many of these, but the absence of Derrida’s own theory from the piece, except for a simple token dropping of “binary oppositions”, makes me wonder if Derrida had migrated toward a Chomsky-like position of separating research and politics, and had realized on some level that his academic positions, in short public speeches, could undercut the force of his beliefs. Is his rapprochement with the Enlightenment real, or a convenient reference to a belief that can be used to bring out the best in Europeans?
To Rorty’s credit, he always has worked very hard to keep the theory in his politics, and explain why he thinks linguistic deconstruction can be used as a tool in a liberal revival. I don’t think he succeeds, but I find his attempt to bring such theory to the masses in the service of social good somewhat noble.
Kaddish for a Child Not Born, Imre Kertesz
I spoke of Imre Kertesz’s Fateless earlier, and my issues with its pretense towards portraying an adolescent’s immediate experience of the Holocaust. Now I’ve read Kertesz’s other commonly available translated book, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, and it goes a great ways towards explaining the other book. (Supposedly far better translations are coming out soon….)
Kertesz is, of course, far more opinionated than his adolescent stand-in of Fateless, and this interview with Gunter Grass and Kertesz gives a good idea of where Kertesz stands. The Reading Experience excerpts the most salient bits, but for me Kertesz’s words boil down to this one sentence:
Around the time when Mr Grass was beavering away on political commitment, I was beavering away on why a writer should not commit himself politically.That rejectionist stance, in brief, is what Kaddish is about, except it is about how a Holocaust survivor, who happens to be a writer, cannot commit, period. He cannot commit to having a child, and he cannot commit to a relationship with his wife. Other writers have used the Holocaust as grounds for political action of certain stripes, or as a mark of disgrace against all or part of humanity, or as cause for fatalism. But Kertesz uses it to reject abstraction. And this comes out of anger at what he sees as more trivial representations of the Holocaust:
By way of that wretched sentence “Auschwitz cannot be explained” is the wretched author explaining that we should be silent concerning Auschwitz, that Auschwitz doesn’t exist, or, rather, that it didn’t, for the only facts that cannot be explained are those that don’t or didn’t exist…Consequently, Auschwitz must have been hanging in the air for a long, long time, centuries, perhaps like a dark fruit slowly ripening in the sparkling rays of innumerable ignominious deeds, waiting to finally drop on one’s head…I could have said about Auschwitz that the explanation is contained in individual lives and exclusively in individual lives, nowhere else. Accordingly, Auschwitz is the image and deeds of individual lives in my opinion, seen under the emblem of a particular organization. If all of mankind commences to dream, Moosbrugger is bound to be born, that attractive lust-murderer we read of in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.The paradox here is that while organized genocide requires the auspices of a state or a large functioning body, it is still individuals, and their individual dreams that grow, unknowably, to produce a single totality. Part of Moosbrugger’s role in Musil’s work is as a character who resists explanation, who may be a product of society, but not a conceptualized product of society. Likewise, Kertesz seems to say, Auschwitz is a consequence of such-and-such in the lives of millions of people over hundreds of years, and that irreducibly serves as its explanation. What is not possible is to generalize the mechanism of its creation. Debates over “Is art possible after the Holocaust?” are not just meaningless, they’re offensive.
He mentions a story he wrote about a Christian man who, due to Jewish blood, is sent off to the camps. This man is estranged from all concepts of heritage and culture:
But how can one fundamentally like an abstract concept as, for example, Jewishness? How can one like an unknown mass stuffed into this abstract concept?...Now he had rid himself of this pain of his assumed responsibility. Now he can, in good conscience, reject those whom he rejects and he no longer has to like those he doesn’t like. He is liberated because he no longer has a homeland. All that is left to decide now is the state of his death. Should he die as Jew, as Christian, as hero or as victim, perhaps even as a metaphysical absurdity, the victim of a neo-chaos of the demiurge? Since none of these concepts means anything to him, he decides not to taint the positive purity of his death by a lie.And here is what Kertesz was getting at in Fateless: the attempted presentation of unmediated experience as unvarnished truth, bereft of theory, ideology, meaning or meaninglessness. Throughout Kaddish, the main character rejects role after role: father, friend, husband, and writer. The last is most significant for the reader, and it gives the implication that Kertesz believes that Fateless was destined to be a failure and is a failure, because even in writing he takes on an abstract role that he does not wish for himself.
This makes for frustrating but brutally honest reading: if Fateless was the unsuccessful product of a concept (which it surely was), then Kaddish is the breakdown of conceptualization and Kertesz’s rejection of it. As an exercise in self-abnegation it has entirely different qualities from Beckett, and maybe a little in common with Ingeborg Bachmann. But the agonized image of a man for whom every written word is a lie is far stronger in Kertesz, and it puts me in mind of, ironically, William Gass’s The Tunnel, in which literary use of the Holocaust was pushed to intentionally distasteful and trivial ends. (See this review for further details.)
Return of the One Column Tyranny
For all the much-vaunted promise of non-linear hypertextual narratives (well, in 1996 anyway), the sequential simplicity of a single stream of text won out. I have to say in David Gelernter’s defense, Lifestreams wasn’t so far off the mark in positing a searchable time-ordered stream of self-documents; he just never got around to implementing it.
I am, however, happy that hypertext theory has finally met with interactive fiction, thanks chiefly to the efforts of Nick Montfort, who must have coerced Stuart Moulthrop into co-writing a paper [PDF] on Adam Cadre’s Varicella. Go Nick!
The essay spends a good deal of time explaining the nature of the beast itself, but if it spawns 100 academic flowers of interactive fiction, that can’t be a bad thing. Unfortunately, the sheer difficulty and unwinnability of Varicella will probably send most hypertext theorists running for the hills. A close friend who’s a professional computer programmer and all-around technical expert claims that she still can’t get the “hang” of interactive fiction games.
Montfort has also written Twisty Little Passages, a historical overview of the genre that I haven’t read. The chapter titles indicate that he shies away from too much theorizing (ironic given the amount of work in the genre, which dwarves that of self-proclaimed hypertext fictions).
I have to think that the same things my friend mentioned will probably keep it in the margines. The restricted degrees of freedom offered by IF have provided for some brilliant moments within their context, meaning that familiarity with the genre is pretty much a prerequisite for appreciating any of the more experimental work going on in the field. I suspect it will have to transmute into something quite different to transcend that limitation.
A Mind Forever Voyaging
This was one of those old Infocom text adventures, one of their most ambitious, and one of their least successful. It came out around 1987, when they had pretty much exhausted the cave crawl (Zork, Enchanter, etc.) genre and were branching out in whatever directions appealed to them, as graphics games slowly eroded their market share. This was not helped by their ill-advised foray into relational databases, Cornerstone (aka Gravestone), but AMFV came at a time when the future still looked relatively bright. Steve Meretzky (Hitchhiker’s Guide, Sorcerer, Leather Goddesses of Phobos) would never attempt anything so ambitious, or so earnest, again.
The game is the only explicitly political game in their catalog, an exercise in liberal agitprop/hysteria. You play a supercomputer who is going to test out a “simulation” of the future after the adoption of an ominous right-wing “Plan for Renewed National Purpose.” Unsurprisingly, it’s a disaster; forty years into the future, the world doesn’t just suck, it’s literally hell on earth, with gangs and vagrants occupying what used to be civilization. The apocalypse comes through pure social decline. You expose this grim future to people in the real world, and a different, liberal plan of social welfare, compassion, and peace is adopted, yielding paradise on earth shortly thereafter.
So the politics are callow, but not much more so than your average John Brunner book. But check out the Plan itself:
The Plan for Renewed National Purpose, Legislative action: * cut tax rates by fifty percent * vigorous prosecution of tax evasion * decentralization of federal responsibilities * deregulation of all major industries * reinstatement of the military draft * emphasis on fundamentals and traditional values in education * mandatory conscription for troublemakers and criminals * a strict “USA First” trade policy * termination of aid to nations not pro-USA * cutbacks on all types of bureaucracy, e.g. registering cars, guns * termination of government subsidies to outmoded industriesDraw your own conclusions.The Plan for Renewed National Purpose, Constitutional amendments: * increase the powers of the Executive Branch * increase the Presidential term of office to eight years
Robert Musil and Walter Rathenau
Maybe now is the time to learn German. Karl Corino’s massive, 2000-page biography of Robert Musil was recently published, and apart from articles in the New Left Review and the TLS, I haven’t seen much mention of it in my English-speaking circles. Philip Payne, who translated and edited the English reduction of Musil’s diaries, did the TLS review, about half of which is present at that link.
For me it’s tantalizing, since it relates something that remains very oblique even in the diaries, which is Musil’s ongoing and shifting relation to the The Man Without Qualities, which he was creating for decades. I’m skeptical of the theorizing over Musil’s syphilis and the hint that Musil wasn’t especially good for his friends. Speaking about the brilliant but flighty and capricious Clarisse, from MWQ, and her real-life parallel Alice Donath, Payne says:
(Clarisse, like Alice, goes mad after her marriage and is eventually placed in an institution; one wonders whether Musil’s wedding gift to Alice of Nietzsche’s Collected Works, or his letter inviting her to become his “little sister” contributed to her troubles.)Without knowing the details, I have to wonder if Payne has spent too much time with Musil and his (many) flaws. Ray Monk grew to despise Bertrand Russell while working on his biography, and I’m sure that Musil’s unyielding, single-minded genius could easily have the same effect.
But I’m intrigued by the talk of Musil’s increasing isolation from his work’s sources: not just temporally, but even personally, as he stopped associating with friends who had been the novel’s models. This, however, seems secondary to Musil’s situational problem, which is that history had left him behind:
In a letter of 1934 to his friend the satirist Franz Blei, Musil, given his desperate personal situation and the Nazi takeover in Germany, compares his continued work on The Man without Qualities to “the diligence of a woodworm, boring through a picture frame in a house that is already ablaze”.The metaphor alludes to the Reichstag fire, but also to Musil’s own task. He was, very carefully, tearing apart the liberal and nationalistic ambitions and ideals personified in the characters of MWQ. The failure of “the barren conceit of the brain” manifested in the Great War is the constant theme, and there is no greater representative of the brain of statecraft than Arnheim, whom Musil repeatedly dissects as brilliant, but shallow. Arnheim was modeled on Walter Rathenau, the businessman and foreign minister who became one of the most prominent international negotiators in post-Versailles Germany, until he was assassinated by anti-Semitic right-wingers in 1922, removing one more obstacle in the way of the ideological and political ascent of Nazism.
Musil’s engagement with Arnheim/Rathenau is total, but by 1934, it could not have seemed relevant. He was attacking an Enlightenment-derived ideology in one of the better statesmen of the century while National Socialism had taken over the world around him. Excavation of a flawed “frame” was hardly noticeable while the house was on fire.
Musil treats the more extreme aspects in the later parts of the book, introducing the figure of Meingast, a faux-mystical shyster who plays like Kevin Kline quoting Nietzsche in A Fish Called Wanda. Meingast was loosely based on Ludwig Klages, a Spengler-ish conservative, anti-Semitic moron, deservedly forgotten. (I’d rather not link to the stuff that turns up, but if you’d like to be introduced to Klages and his unpleasant breathren such as Carl Schmitt, try looking for them on Google.) While Musil has some fun with Meingast (he’s the only character who is really a caricature), you sense that his heart’s not in it; Meingast is not a challenge. Anyone with a brain would hardly take him seriously. But anyone with a brain was in short supply.
(For an inexact modern parallel, I think of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, where he condemns the anti-egghead attitude by pointing to how Eisenhower, the “normal guy” candidate, won twice over the wonky, detached Adlai Stevenson. Oh, for such days again….)
Musil wrote “On Stupidity” in 1937, a abstruse (for him) Benjamin-like exercise in postponement in which he never quite gets around to what he wants to say because it would get him in big trouble. I won’t subject it to close reading here, but consider the very end of it:
For because our knowledge and ability are incomplete, we are forced in every field to judge prematurely; but we make the effort, and have learned to keep this error within recognized limits and occasionally improve on it, and by this means put our activity back on the right track. There is really no reason why this exact and proudly humble judgment and activity could not be carried over into other areas as well, and I believe that the principle, “Act as well as you can and as badly as you must, but in doing so remain aware of the margin of error of your actions!” would already be halfway toward a promising arrangement of life.Why the sudden pragmatism and appeal to modesty, attitudes not particularly present in MWQ? Earlier in the same essay he closes the book on German Enlightenment attitudes, saying that the new task is “to complete the always necessary, indeed deeply desired, transition to the new with the least possible loss.” His plea for caution is an attempt at damage control, with the fatalistic implication that he himself is an anachronism, and that all his brains can only boil the present day down to a homily that should be obvious. Rathenau is long dead, and with him much of the kindling for Musil’s work.
Update: Thomas Pynchon chimes in via Gravity’s Rainbow, shortly before Rathenau is channelled by some Nazis and issues some cryptic mystical statements about industrialization, chemistry, and death:
His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Compny, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir—he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority—a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he’d engineered in Germany for fighting the World War. (165)Though Rathenau seems to have had a change of heart post-death, since the live Rathenau never spoke of “The persistence, then, of structures favoring death.”
Philosophical Bumper Stickers
Clever idea on the part of Professor Nightspore: truncate bumper stickers to philosophical slogans. I think Parmenides turned out especially well.
A few of mine:
- I brake. (Schopenhauer)
- If you don’t. (Kierkegaard)
- Visualize. (Berkeley)
- Objects in mirror are. (David Lewis)
- Don’t be. (Eduard von Hartmann, or maybe E.M. Cioran)
- If you lived. (Nagarjuna)
- Honk. (Harpo Marx)
And speaking of which, I meant to put up this Lem interview a while back, in which he condemns Spain withdrawing troops from Iraq, dismisses today’s space programs in general, and concedes Tarkovsky’s “great talent” before slamming Soderbergh’s Solaris.
Lem has declared his allegiance with Bertrand Russell philosophically, which I always took to mean that he sided with Russell’s engagement with practical issues while respecting his absolutist rationalism, versus the more pragmatic tradition that took a more detached stance from science. (I have to wonder what Lem thinks of Charles Peirce, the least characteristic and most rigorous of the batch.) Lem condemned Wittgenstein for running in circles and presumably has little patience with most modern metaphysics and certainly continental philosophy.
Yet the philosopher that pops up most often in Lem’s work is not Russell but Schopenhauer, who, while more easily reduced to a bumper sticker than most, doesn’t seem to have obvious characteristics that would endear him to Lem. Lem’s elaboration on Schoepenhauer, particularly in Golem XIV and His Master’s Voice, replicates Schopenhauer’s pessimism while reducing his outrage to a trivializing, defeatist voice. I suspect that it is this voice, grown older, more brittle, and more certain, that we are hearing in the interview. I still find it compelling in its focus and consistency.
We're All Going to Rot in the World that They Make
...still they get elected.
I suppose I’m working my way through the five stages of grief and such, but amidst the terror there hasn’t been much anger. After so much fury at the administration all year long, it seems nonsensical to be angry at the people that have enabled the next four years of god-knows-what, like being angry that sugar is bad for you. They are the products of the worst in American culture, and they have been used brilliantly over the last 30 years by the right.
Last time, none of us knew what we were in for. That’s nowhere near as true this time, but even if the Great Depression hit, would Bush get the blame?