Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, Viktor Shklovsky, tr. Shushan Avagyan, Dalkey Archive 2011

What makes Don Quixote the forerunner of the age of the novel? Why is Tolstoy more popular today than many contemporary writers? Can Updike be considered as Thomas Mann’s disciple? Lovers of literature who have been pondering on these questions will be fascinated by the answers  Shklovsky provides in his 1970 book, Bowstring, translated into English for the first time. One of the founders of Russian Formalism, a school of criticism started in the 1910s, he invented the concept of estrangement, which celebrates the perception of art as an end in itself, treating its object as unimportant. Bowstring revisits the ideas of Theory of Prose 45 years after the publication of this seminal work.

​This is the distillate of a lifetime of a man who volunteered to take part in the First World War, opposed the Bolsheviks, fled the revolution-torn country, came back to the Soviet Russia, wrote a number of books which have since become classics; a man who was bereft of recognition abroad. All the more pleasing to see Dalkey Archive put out this volume, long overdue.

​Aspiring writers often praise Shklovsky’s oeuvre as a guide to writing fiction, but ordinary readers will be delighted too, for this book tells you how some of the greatest works of the world literature are made. Shklovsky dissects the process looking at a range of texts, from fairy tales to Kafka’s “anti-novels”. Those who remember his magnum opus, A Sentimental Journey, can also work out how this book is made: the trademark one-sentence paragraphs, seemingly stray thoughts, memories of youth, tributes to friends – all this as a backdrop to the main theme.

​Literature is not the only thing Shklovsky analyses; there are passages on visual arts, especially cinema, where Eisenstein’s and Antonioni’s films are deconstructed as deftly as Sterne’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays. Contemporary books are touched on with inevitable asides: “Perhaps my attitude toward the new literary movements resembles […] my grandmother’s attitude toward the new styles of hats.”
 
​Nevertheless, the lessons of Cervantes and Rabelais are enough for Shklovsky to draw insightful conclusions, as relevant today as they were in his time. Talking about printing as a  determining factor in the popularity of novels, he notes: “Literary publishing didn’t resolve anything” – the words that still ring true. It is good to be reminded of the discontinuous nature of art: “Yesterday is still there – we can hear the sound of it, but its echo should only be regarded when recording the new sound.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.

Something of the Night, Ian Marchant, Simon and Schuster 2011

I’m the screen, the blinding light
I’m the screen, I work at night
- REM, ‘Daysleeper’

The protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, The Map and the Territory, takes a break from the Parisian commercial art world to fly to the remote rural Ireland home of… the author Michel Houellebecq, who has given himself a supporting cameo in the story. To the book’s lead, the artist Jed Martin, Houellebecq is a depressive and dishevelled figure, whose house is a tip of empty wine bottles and spilled rich food. The novelist’s one remaining ambition is sleep. ‘What I prefer now is the end of December; night falls at four o’clock. Then I can put on my pajamas, take some sleeping pills and go to bed with a bottle of wine and a book. That’s how I’ve been living for years.’

There does come a point where you stop looking forward to the light and start looking forward to the dark. I, also, become happier when the clocks went back; during the Christmas holidays, I’d be active in the bright crystalline mornings and then crash in the afternoon, loving the early dusk, before the night ahead. Now, a move to some Scandanavian place, where you get like twenty hours of darkness a day, seems like a good career plan.
Night, of course, fascinates us. Most children go through a phase of being afraid of the dark — and it’s odd that the darkness of the bedroom is so different to the darkness of outside, and that you can be scared of one and relaxed in the other. Night is when the best things happen, conception and laughter and roaming through cities, and it’s also when the worst happens, suicides, murders and a life-altering mistake behind the wheel: the bad, hesitant phone calls (’Is this [Title] [Last Name]? I’m terribly sorry, but I have to tell you that your -’) always seem to come at night. Men and women who work nights aren’t always well paid but seem to carry more weight and experience than their dayclock counterparts.

Something of the Night is Ian Marchant’s history of nighttime. Marchant is a very typical baby-boomer, a jobbing writer, comedian, musician and general real-ale twat, with a history of mediocre philandery, and conventional in his radicalism. His front story and linking device is one night of drunk and stoned dialogue with an Irish friend. Ever written down, or recorded, what you’ve said when you’re stoned, and then played it back? Hilarious, wasn’t it? But Marchant loves his stand-up. There’s maybe four or five pages somewhere about going for a piss in the middle of the night, and — didn’t Ben Elton do that routine? — it gets somewhat wearying and tedious.

Get past this, though, and Marchant can be interesting, witty, informative and even moving. The book is a long meander through the English dark. Marchant interviews night garage attendants, shiftworkers on classical linen looms, and vigilants at asteroid lookout points. He goes clubbing with his daughters, and is bemused at the lines of ‘meow-meow’ they chop up beforehand (to be fair, the new drug scene makes anyone over twenty-seven feel old; I mean, horse tranquilliser? Mephedrone? Laughing gas, for fuck’s sake?) At the club Marchant does exactly the right thing, which is to buy a round of drinks, and then leave.

He also revisits his past. I was struck by the chapter on the death of Marchant’s father, and also by the death of his wife, after which Marchant was hit by a series of night terrors — he would wake up, terrified, convinced he was about to die, and by morning the sheets would be soaked in sweat as if he had pissed himself in his sleep. The raw night fear is supposed to be something of childhood, that elemental abstract terror, and when that’s gone you just lay awake thinking of money, and goals, and being found out. But sometimes the traumas and sorrows of adulthood make us children again, and not in a good way.

‘As a highly specialised and overdeveloped social creature,’ Marchant says, ‘I cannot be sustained under anything other than artificial light.’ Before electric light, people simply went to bed when the sun went down and got up at dawn. During that part of the year when the nights were longer, it was the habit to rise for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, and Marchant says that wealthy bedrooms of the fifteenth century had an aumbry — ‘an early kind of mini-bar, to hold food and drink in order to stave off night starvation.’

Our most enduring religious festival, of course, comes from a fear of the night. Pre-moderns lived in a kind of seasonal-affective terror at the turn of the year, and had to come up with rituals and belief systems to get through. Marchant, as much as he irritates me, is a man who has been to many forgotten places of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland: he has gone on long rambles over fields and fens and mountains, and he understands what it is to be alone with the night sky in the middle of nowhere.

‘Before the widespread use of artificial light,’ Marchant explains, ‘the sky would have been seen as portentous, because people could see the comets and meteorites and strange conjunctions of planets much better than we can.’ It could be said that the entire history of human civilisation has been an attempt to conquer the dark and the dangers it brings — risk of falling into rivers or down potholes, of being attacked by wolves or bears, or becoming lost in forests, lots of practical dangers, to say nothing of intangible ones.

And now we’ve made it: ‘you can stand pretty much anywhere in Britain, and see a yellow glow in the sky.’ I actually quite like the glow of light pollution — not quite yellow, but a pink-orange congealment or corona. The night still holds. I think a night spent sober and alone always seems like a night wasted.

In the essay ‘Why I’m Not Afraid of the Dark,’ the conservative journalist P J O’Rourke looked back on his childhood, a time of poverty and humiliation. ‘My father had died when I was nine, and my mother, a kindly but not very sensible woman, had remarried to a drunken oaf. He was a pestering, bullying sort of man whose favorite subject of derision was my fondness for books.’ O’Rourke developed a crippling fear of the dark, which lasted into his teens. One night, after escaping a scene of domestic carnage (’my stepfather was bellowing threats and the dog was barking and the television was blaring in the background of it all — a scene I still envision whenever I hear the phrase “hell on earth”‘) the young O’Rourke wandered the empty streets and sat in a park and tried to think rationally about his fear, and why the darkness scared him so much:

I decided darkness must symbolize something more general for me. Evil, I decided. That’s why I imagined monsters in the dark. Monsters are evil because they do evil things, which is what makes them monstrous. But I recognized that as circular reasoning. No, I had to consider what evil really was. Evil was harm and destruction. Murdering people, that was evil, or burning their houses down. These were the sorts of things evil forces might do, the kind of forces that darkness symbolized for me. Such forces might rage into a home like my own and murder one of my sisters or both of my sisters or even my mother and tear the house to pieces, breaking it into little bits and then blowing the ruins to smithereens with nitroglycerin and setting fire to what was left, and then take my stepfather and break both his arms and slice off his feet and poke his eyes out with red-hot staves, disembowel him, skin him alive. And then they’d attack the rest of the neighborhood and the police force and the school and burn and bomb and steal and break everything in that part of Ohio, from the filthy oil refineries on the east side of town all the way to the moldy, boring cottage we rented every summer at the lake. And who knew what such evil forces might do after that? I didn’t. But I sat on the swing set considering suggestions for a very long time. And I have never been afraid of the dark since.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

Stephen Emmerson, Telegraphic Transcriptions, Dept Press (2011)

Stephen Emmerson is utterly, unquestionably of the now, but he nonetheless has something of the futurist about him. His work has the velocity and violence of Marinetti in its blurred, broken asynchronous syntax. But whereas Marinetti et al unambiguously celebrated velocity and – at least until they got a touch of non-theoretical cold steel themselves in the trenches of World War I – violence, Emmerson itemises and deconstructs them. He is less interested in warp speed, more in the speed of the warp, in the rate that sociological, technological and chemical variables are wreaking havoc upon our bodies and our neural wiring. His exploration of this liminal territory is both ruthless, in that his work has no pity, least of all for himself, and relentless. Nothing is out of bounds. Telegraphic Transcriptions blends the lexes of medicine, popular culture, legality and illegality, utilising typographical mutations, objets trouve and many words that may be neologisms (“guffbox”, anyone?) or recherché slang and its own brand of Polari to create a poetic document of remarkable pace and power that perpetually dices with dissolution, only to be brought back again and again by the writer’s skill and iron control. There is something of Sean Bonney in Emmerson’s jammed, jolted, heavily freighted lines, but the reference points that sprang most readily to my mind are novelists rather than poets. Firstly, William Gibson for his concern with cybernetics and the human/machine interface and how the one informs and shapes the other and secondly, J.G. Ballard for his investigations of psychic space and how the individual reacts under different degrees of environmental tension and pressure. Just as Ballard, writing out of suburban Shepperton, had more to say about the dark drives that remained unreformed by modernity than any lettered social theorist, so Emmerson, operating also from a perceived geographical promontory in Leeds, has as much to say about modernity’s more complex younger cousin.

Telegraphic Transcriptions cannot be treated as a set of discrete poems and must instead be regarded as a single text. There are no titles. Sections, if we can call them that, are separated by various permutations of space and style but these sections cannot be understood in isolation. The star cannot be positioned outside the starfield, the cell outside the organism. Images, most notably worms, recur throughout the text, stitching together the Schwitters-esque bricolage. For all its unified nature, however, Telegraphic Transcriptions is a deeply contingent work. It is molten, in flux. One gets the impression that were this text to have been written, or indeed read, a moment later it would have been a different artefact.

This is a text of unsynthesised dialectical oppositions, in perpetual dispute both with the world and with itself, compulsively, self-reflexively disruptive. Emmerson uses a range of ingenious techniques to signal these argumentative interventions. Blocks of text in a typewriter style font appear intermittently throughout the text, like green inked eruptions of fury. These become more frequent and urgent until a page arrives which looks as if it has been defaced or as if the text’s internal tensions have finally inched the needle into the red zone and triggered detonation: a page empty of all except scattered, partially effaced capitals. At other points, syntax breaks down completely and words are supplanted by strings of alphanumeric characters. Elsewhere, we have a form to report an adverse reaction to medication inserted apparently verbatim, suggesting, playfully, that the preceding pages have been simply a side effect. Earlier, we have a feral version of source code as if the text has mutated and its wiring has been exposed, as if it has lost its skin and its skeleton been revealed. Towards the end of the book, there is what presents itself as a cipher which is anything but. This is not a guide for the reader, rather another level of complexity, another shade or slant. So too the Allen Fisher style list of source materials and references which bring Telegraphic Transcriptions to a close, or rather signal the point where it passes out of our field of vision.

Telegraphic Transcriptions is not an easy read, nor does it seek to be. It is confrontational, unapologetically dense and complex. Emmerson notes, amongst other ephemera of a late twentieth century childhood and adolescence (I think this is the first time I have seen the triangular savant and shaman Bod used as a poetic reference) Stock Aitken and Waterman, but in musical terms Emmerson himself is much more Stockhausen. This is sharp edged, jagged, determinedly dissonant work. In amongst the innumerable striking and startling images and phrases that lace and litter Telegraphic Transcriptions are two which are particularly apt summations of the book as a whole.

The first is the term “pharmapoetics”, which may be another neologism or may be a term that has previously eluded me; whatever its provenance it encapsulates the text perfectly, foregrounding the author’s exploration of chemical consciousness and the twilit borderlands of medicated states.

The second is the fragment:

…The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Through a Christmas cracker monocle
On boxing day

which describes far better than I ever could how the world looks through the shattered, prismatic lense of this work. It is a look worth taking

Telegraphic Transcriptions is also notable for being the first full length collection on the Dept imprint, previously confined to shorter works and magazine publications. This debut marks it out as one to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Jenks has two collections, A Priori and *, published by if p then q. He organises the avant objects imprint zimZalla and co-organises The Other Room reading series and website.

You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, Nick Cohen, Fourth Estate 2012

Do you believe in freedom of speech?
Are you sure?

Terry Pratchett mapped out the fantasy Discworld planet through his hapless protagonist Rincewind, a magician who cannot master even the most basic spell yet who nevertheless feels the need to write ‘WIZZARD’ on his hat. Pratchett describes the Disc as ‘a world, and a mirror of worlds’. In the novel Interesting Times he reflected on totalitarianism and revolution by dispatching his reluctant adventurer to the Agatean Empire, a hellish hybrid of Maoist/Taiping China and the Kims’ North Korea. The entire country is under the control of a vicious autocracy, which tells its impoverished citizens that the rest of the planet consists of wastelands that teem with evil vampire ghosts.

On arrival Rincewind notices roads and fields of toiling slaves, but no overseers. Where are the whips? he asks a barbarian friend. The Empire has something worse than whips, his friend replies. In his travels around this servile and unhappy country, much of it at great flight, Rincewind realises the truth of this: the Empire has something worse than whips, it has whips in the soul.

We know about thought control in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and the real-life North Korea. But how to define and fight censorship in free societies and the digital age? The impression you get from Nick Cohen’s powerful new book is that censorship is random. There is not a policeman who points at a line in chalk and says: ‘Thou shalt not cross.’ The bar is not set low. There is no bar.

Cohen is a campaigning journalist, who has been involved in a fair few free speech battles in his time. No one could write a serious book on the subject without taking The Satanic Verses as their starting point. In a landmark case, the novelist Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding for some years after he wrote a work of fiction that touched on the life of Mohammed and the Islamic assault on women (the title comes from the mythical ’satanic verses’; parts of the Koran dictated to Mohammed by the devil, posing as Allah).

Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini took exception to the novel, and urged believers to ‘execute’ Rushdie and his publishers ‘wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again.’ Khomeini made it clear that Rushdie’s killers would be regarded as martyrs, with the posthumous delights that implied, and if paradise wasn’t enough, there was also a cool $3 million for whoever stepped up. Rushdie, in effect, had what gangsters call an ‘open bounty’ on his head. Worldwide.

People who offend the religious tend to be viewed as one-trick provocateurs - talentless concept-artists, pissing on a Bible for cheap laughs. The Thatcher government and much of the literary establishment at the time saw Rushdie as a prancing dilettante, who had set out to deliberately hurt simpler and nobler folk. In fact, Rushdie was simply trying to write a story. He told the Paris Review in 2005 that, “the most extended thing I’ve ever written about England is The Satanic Verses, which no one thinks of as a novel about England, but is actually, in large part, a novel about London. It’s about the life of immigrants in Thatcherite London.”

Here is Cohen on Rushdie’s fiction:

The Satanic Verses is not just ‘about’ religion and the rights of women. It is a circus of magical realism, with sub-plots, dream sequences, fantasies, pastiches, sudden interruptions by the author, a bewildering number of characters, and a confusion of references to myths and to the news stories of the day.

Rushdie’s fundamentalist enemies caused riots, murders, attempt-murders and ceremonial book burning in many different countries. Rushdie is a freethinker writer with a critical attitude to faith. Easy to see why the fanatics want him dead. Compare this with the case of Sherry Jones, who wrote a fictional treatment of the Prophet’s marriage to a nine-year-old girl.

Jones, by the way, is not Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She thought that ‘god is love,’ that Islam had been ‘demonised’, and that Mohammed had been ‘fairly egalitarian in his attitudes to women’. She was a romantic, and another desperate liberal on the neverending quest to reconcile the law of God with feminism and basic human rights. (Cohen is not unsympathetic to Jones as a novelist: ’she is a warm woman, with a heart throbbing to the passionate rhythms of sentimental fiction, and a soul brimming over with love for humankind.’)

Jones’ novel The Jewel of Medina dramatised the life of Aisha and Mohammed while sidestepping the tricky questions of child rape, paedophilia, capacity to consent etc., etc., that preoccupy vulgar Western materialists. Random House picked up the book - then dropped it like a hot stone after a US academic, approached for a quote, warned the Islamic blogosphere that the novel ‘made fun of Muslims and their history’. A professor of Islamic history, Denise Spellberg justified her actions this way: ‘I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel’s potential to provoke anger among some Muslims.’

In the Rushdie case at least you could say that people were offended. In the Jones case we were talking offence in potentiae. Potential offence could mean potential violence. The Danish cartoon furore showed that clerics could manufacture outrage over the slightest little thing. Best just not to go there. Cohen asks: ‘Do you believe in freedom of speech?’ Then: ‘Are you sure?’

Another way censorship operates in free societies is through money and work. Cohen: ‘Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship.’ He highlights a fascinating analysis from the economist Chris Dillow. Dillow points out that, while the idea of a command economy has become a joke, free market advocates still believe that large complex organisations can be run by a single powerful CEO, supported by acolytes and nodding dogs. It is undoubtedly the culture of high managerialism in British capitalism, and the promotion of overconfidence and self-belief over talent and creativity, that led to the great crash of 2008.

City people are not stupid, some of the brightest people work in finance, they knew, they saw it coming. But the law provides minimal protection for those who speak out. Cohen says that ‘every whistleblower I have known has ended up on the dole.’ Why take the risk, particularly when compliant governments will simply bail out the banks, and keep the champagne pyramids flowing in the Square Mile bars?

Everyday corporate censorship is subtle and discreet and insidious. England is the laughing stock of the free world thanks to its libel laws, which allow every quack, fraud, oligarch, shakedown artist and pederast to silence criticism for big payouts. Cohen’s chapter on libel is a sorry parade of wealthy and respectable scumbags: the Icelandic bank Kaupthing sued a Danish newspaper for its investigations into the bank’s links between Russian oligarchs and tax havens; Saudi banker Sheihk Khalid bin Mafouz sued American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld, who linked him with Islamist terror; fugitive director Roman Polanski sued Vanity Fair in England (he had to appear by videolink to avoid being picked up and extradited for child rape).

Many of the cases had little connection to the UK. Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil sold twenty-three copies here, through Amazon. But England has the most litigant-friendly libel laws - it places the burden of proof on the defendant. Rich litigants with multinational business interests will contrive a UK connection to win the right to a hearing, and judges are happy to oblige. Win or lose, a libel case can bankrupt most defendants. Most people will retract and apologise rather than take up a great struggle and even greater risks.

What is important is not so much censorship as pre-censorship - whips in the soul. Cohen argues that ‘with censorship in all its forms’:

[...] you should not just think about the rejected books, newspaper articles, TV scripts and plays, but remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made.

Do you believe in freedom of speech? Are you sure? You’re a talented writer, a good professional, you have something to say, a story to tell, a warning to give, a truth to expose. But are you sure you want to risk your life, your job, your home, your relationships? Are you sure you want to go through all of that just to write?

The threat is of the random example rather than the boot upon the neck. Consider the case of the unfortunate Paul Chambers, who tried to catch a flight to Belfast from the East Midlands in 2010. On the day of the flight, Chambers learned that the cold weather had closed the airport. His jokey tweet - ‘Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’ - resulted in an arrest, an anti-terror conviction, the loss of two jobs and a £1,000 fine.

It is the same with religious censorship. You never know what might set the fundamentalists off - so best not to talk about faith at all, except in the most reverent and prescribed tones. We are seeing the slow transfer of rights from individuals - living, breathing individuals, with cares and needs, and hopes and dreams - to the ideology, the belief system, the concept, the community and the group.

It is thought that only Islam is subject to this new taboo. But censors of other faiths have listened and learned, as the campaigns of victimhood and offence-taking by the Christian Legal Centre showed. We’re not there yet, but there will come a point where critical speech of any and all monotheisms will be covered by what John Stuart Mill called ‘a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’

Time and again Cohen hammers against the argument that the internet will make everything all right. Social media was a great mobilisation and communication tool in the Arab revolutions. But the secret police have broadband connections too. Regimes can display faces of demonstrators with incitements to hunt and kill. Libel lawyers have Google alerts for their client’s names so that they can keep track of bloggers who ask hard questions.

Cohen describes the new technologies as ‘Janus-faced’: they can do good but they can also help people find interesting new ways to be evil. The internet has helped people discover rages and sadisms inside themselves they never knew they possessed. Wikileaks passed information about the Belarus opposition to the Lukashenko dictatorship, and dumped the names of Afghan democrats online for the Taliban to draw up its hit lists.

Just into the new millennium and it’s astonishing how many of the old demons are still hanging around. I wonder how many of Cohen’s draft expository passages started with ‘look, it’s really embarrassing that I have to be explaining this in the twenty-first century, but here’s the deal…’ English libel law takes its principle from the Duke of Brunswick, ‘a corpulent and despised German princeling, whom the good people of Brunswick had had the sense to throw out in the revolutions of 1830′ who sent his manservant to the offices of the Weekly Dispatch, where there was an unflattering article about the Duke of Brunswick, carried in a back copy seventeen years old. There was a six-year time limit on actions, but as ever the judiciary was generous, and decided that ‘because his manservant had been able to buy a back copy of a seventeen-year-old newspaper, the publishers had repeated the original libel, even though the duke himself had instigated the repetition of that libel by sending his manservant to buy the back copy in the first place.’ The Duke of Brunswick’s Rule says that ‘every republication of an offending statement is actionable.’ Think on that, in the digital age.

In the conclusion to his writing on Salman Rushdie, Cohen concluded that freethinkers had won the battle but lost the war. ‘Western culture changed, and not for the better.’

The change can fit into a sentence. No young artist of Rushdie’s range and gifts would dare write a modern version of The Satanic Verses today, and if he or she did, no editor would dare publish it.

Cohen is a friendly and engaging writer, who combines the solitary scholar’s extraordinary range of reference with a bon-vivant wit and warmth. A lover of contemporary fiction, his polemics read like novels. He finishes his book with a list of ways to fight back. He doesn’t advocate solidarity, maybe because the lesson is so obvious, or should be. The nature of censorship in the free world is its capriciousness, its indiscipline, its rages and oversensitivity. If you know someone who is being silenced, support them, reblog their words, try to donate to any legal fund. For writers solidarity is also self-interest. To paraphrase the old lottery ads: next time, it could be you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach, Fourth Estate 2012

When Henry Skrimshander starts thinking about what he does on the baseball field, instead of simply playing, he suffers a dip in form that threatens to destroy his dream of Major League stardom. I know how he feels because, after reading and re-reading The Art of Fielding, I was struck by a fastball of self-doubt: what if I couldn’t say what I wanted to say about Chad Harbach’s novel? What if I thought I’d said it when I hadn’t? What if I thought I’d been comprehensive and acute when my efforts, like Henry’s throws, fell short?

Harbach is a writer whose first book happens to be about sport, he isn’t a sports writer. His prose exhibits an aversion to cheap effects and the obvious verbal momentum that sports fiction often thrives on. One of his most interesting characters is Pella, daughter of the handsome, charismatic president of Westish College, where the book is set. Leaving her loveless marriage to an older man, she feels, at 23, washed-up, eclipsed: “She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was behind.” There are no shortcuts, the important things are hard won, in life and in literature.

Henry’s baseball team are named the Harpooners for Westish’s association with Herman Melville but, rather than hunt in the great outdoors of contemporary themes, Harbach builds stylish sentences and lets the culture come. His protagonists are compelling and likable and Henry’s problems on the baseball field prove pivotal for them all. The college president embarks on a tender, reckless affair with Owen, Henry’s academically gifted roommate, while Pella becomes involved with Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners captain.

In part, Harbach’s characters succumb to the pitfalls that his writing avoids. “Get big,” Schwartz urges his team-mates as they pump iron. They train until they puke but no amount of running up stadium steps at dawn prepares Henry for the perils of self-consciousness. Momentum turns out to be a delusion but, with Schwartz determined to get his team-mate to the Majors, Henry submits to routine because he “knew better than to want freedom… You ate till you were full and then you drank your Superboost because every ounce of muscle meant something. .. one moment simply produced the next.” This last detail encapsulates some of the proceeding without destination that’s involved in writing fiction. The trail of moments, like footprints or words, leads Henry away but it also connects him to his beginning. The daunting sense of stepping out that one experiences when leaving university, as many characters in The Art of Fielding are about to, is a bit like writing.

Sports metaphors encourage us to view life, and even art, as a competition; this is their folly and yet there are more instances when The Art of Fielding mirrors the art of fiction. “(He) threw back his shoulders and walked as tall as his five-nine frame would allow, just like every road-tripping athlete he’d ever seen on TV.” The body may never lie but much amateur sport does self-consciously imitate the professional. The Art of Fielding is not an imitative first novel but a writer can learn from impersonating. Henry’s observation that, “you had to send your words out where they weren’t yours any more,” could be a creative writing class dictum. As could, “moments of inspiration were nothing compared to the elimination of error.”

Harbach reveres American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century but his baseball diamonds are scored on the rolling fields of the modern republic. Scott Fitzgerald, for his reckoning with dreams and the ends of parties, is as present here as he is in Robert Altman’s film A Prairie Home Companion. Melville’s statue looks on at Westish, Wisconsin as a bust of the Great Gatsby author does at St Paul, Minnesota. I thought of him as the Harpooners traversed the Midwest: “Every guy on that bus… had grown up dreaming of becoming a professional athlete. Even when you realised you’d never make it, you didn’t relinquish the dream, not deep down.” Harbach places the reader on the bus, in the locker room and at the heart of the pre-game huddle as Schwartz turns his stare to nine and gives his aphoristic team-talks. We swing at every pitch and feel Henry’s agony at each wayward throw. Don’t be put off if you know nothing of baseball, having no idea what a shortstop is didn’t prevent me from sharing the Harpooners’ exhilaration at the season’s climax. I would gladly have read until I puked.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Max Liu is a writer and journalist. He lives in North London where he is at work on a novel and a collection of autobiographical essays.

The Beautiful Indifference, Sarah Hall, Faber 2011

Reading the spread of fascinated broadsheet raves late last year, I kind of had a double take. Short stories don’t normally review, let alone sell. An agent or publisher will say ‘You need to throw this away and write a novel’ or ‘You need to work in some kind of half-arsed linkage between the stories so we can sell it as a novel.’ Arts admins fret about the death of the medium, campaigns, prizes and publishers promote the short form, but they have little impact. The reading public is sometimes accused of a decline in attention span. But it seems that people would rather read an eighty-thousand word novel than an eight thousand word story.

The short form is hard. You need to have the scope of a novel on a canvas a fraction of the size. Your story should be something a reader will turn to from time to time in the same way that people listen to certain songs before they get ready to go out or fall asleep. You’ll need to be economical, and resist the urge of parable or one-act morality play. You need a beginning, middle and end, and a last line that resonates long after the story is over. Sarah Hall can do the short form. Reading The Beautiful Indifference gives you that cold, solid, rare feeling — that this is something special.

We begin in the countryside where Hall was raised. Cumbria has few literary antecedents — although Jenn Ashworth’s psychotic Annie Fairhurst was born there. The teenage narrator of ‘Butcher’s Perfume’ gets involved with her school’s tough girl Manda Slessor, of a sprawling and intimidating gypsy family. On the first page Manda explains how you beat up two girls at once:

She said all you had to do was keep hold of one, keep hold of one and keep hitting her. No matter what the other was doing to you, you kept that first one pinned, and you kept hammering her, so the free-handed bitch could see you were able to take a flailing and still have her mate at the same time.

This is violence description at its best, clear and hard with none of the voyeurism or self-satisfaction you so often get when authors write about working-class violence. And it is just the beginning. The Slessors are ‘known for prison sentences, and pig-iron money that built them a big house above the town’s industrial estate. They had reputations for fertility at every age, for a seed that always took, and a womb that always produced — thirteen and virgin to those traveller grandmothers suckling at fifty. The town thought it understood their cause’.

The countryside tends to be romanticised by people who don’t have to live there. Talk of rhythms of nature and closeness to the land. The Slessors are feared and loathed by most of the town, spoken of in handed-down Roma myth and prejudice: conversation stops when the family name is mentioned. They are good with soil and animals without being professional farmers, respected without being respectable, steeped in unspoken income and forgotten trades and the secrets of life and death, and redolent in fecundity more than sexuality. Add this to the hierarchies and intensity of feeling that accompanies adolescence, and you’ve got an experience of dark magic. We’re in ‘burnt-farm, red-river, raping territory’ here.

Hall’s narrator is drawn and bound more and more to the Slessors and she does not hold back from the cruelty and horror and what Marx called the idiocy of rural life. And yet, as I said, there is magic — wind on your face and the blood at the back of your throat. ‘But sometimes there’s strange beauty up here,’ she reflects. ‘It’s found in deep-cut places. It’s found in the smoke off the pyres and the pools on the abbatoir floor.’

The reviews centred around Hall’s evocation of the countryside. The Beautiful Indifference is about Home but it’s also about Away. Many stories are set abroad. The story ‘Bees’ is narrated by a woman who has escaped the Cumbria of ‘Butcher’s Perfume’. Hall is one of the few writers to understand the dangers of childbirth. Manda Slosser has an abortion at fifteen and warns her friend that ‘no bloody way was her mam ever to hear of it because her mam would’ve wanted the babby kept.’ For the narrator of ‘Bees’, remembering her marriage and the expectations of family:

‘Something in you stalled. You resisted. You kept taking the pill… You took the tablets and wore an incontinence pad and slapped the paleness out of your face and went to the pens to help with the clipping.’

Domestic emigration can be just as hard and strange as immigration from abroad. ‘Bees’ is full of the eerie contrasts of immigrant experience. London has ’such a different choreography from that which you are used to, the slow machinery in the black fields, livestock cropping the tufts, your once vernacular scenery.’ And: ‘You aren’t old for this city, where youth stretches out into middle age, where people don’t commit or own mortgages or cars. You felt older in the countryside, comparatively. Old in your hometown, where women the same age had children already sitting exams or getting pregnant themselves.’ She gazes at the mysterious rash of dead bees in her garden and feels herself caught between worlds.

Hall’s perspective is of a woman without a country. Not Home or Away but the borderlands and the hinterlands. There are landscapes and vistas of beauty — but not of indifference.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

The Walls of Berlin: Urban Surfaces, Art, Film, Stephen Barber, Solar Books 2011

Barber moves through the city with a visual system that bifurcates. He targets things that others don’t perceive. He targets things he himself doesn’t perceive. The book is both an uncanny blindsighting and mirroring effect. Berlin takes on a shape that fits his strange mind as a gigantic example of object affordance, the phenomenon whereby the grasped shape of the object activates automatic action schemata. An example of such a thing: a handle on a cup is designed to automatically activate a grasping hand action, which can be labeled ‘compulsive utilization behaviour’. A compulsive utilization behaviour caused by the city causes Barber to write.

The work of Bargh and colleagues provides evidence that actions such as these can be activated without prior thought. “They show that action schemata such as walking in the manner of an old man can be activated and executed by suitable conceptual priming,” writes the philosopher Peter Carruthers. Barber’s actions cause thoughts. The thoughts follow the writing.

How does Barber move? His writing gets implemented in immediate action or else is mentally rehearsed in images using his full repertoire. He imagines it all first. His writing is just what happens after the rehearsal. He is tuned in. He imagines the action, receiving these as emotional systems and motivation systems, pressing on him so his spirit lifts, his heart sinks and so on. He monitors these gestalt shifts. These are both affective and bodily. Inner speech follows accordingly, accessed as normal language in a normal way.

The rehearsal of action in this way is common to mammals. So the writing action schemata shares the same process as perceptual and image making processing. Barber’s book exposes the process. It is a sample of his motor schemata. It records a series of efference copies of commands that are being constantly back-projecting. These are relentlessly compared and adjusted as he proceeds. In this way creative combinations and transformations of unconscious images of familiar objects is possible. In this way what is being written, and what is to be written, is generated prior to thought and planning.

Because these prior representations are prior to conscious thought, they can be held and rehearsed and then, out of that, comes the conscious thought. The assembly of action-schemata are assembled and activated creatively before creative thought. In this way Barber’s book is a kind of jazz, an improvisation utilising an ancient part of the mental architecture of beasts, that allows him to capture the thought-independent representations of Berlin.

Carruthers has this theory of ‘action first’ explanation of creativity. ‘Thought first’ explanations are incapable of explaining this kind of performance. Barber’s writing is to be compared to Charlie Parker playing 400 notes a minute. It eludes ‘thought first’ action. It moves too mysteriously for thought. It requires an explanation that leaves the improviser shocked by his own actions. Barber is working like a moth detecting the ultrasound of a predatory bat. The moth utilises random flight mode to escape. Miller writes: “For this reason submarine commanders in the Second World War would throw dice to determine the elements of their zig-zag patrols, thereby making themselves unpredictable to the submarine-hunting vessels on the surface above.” This phenomenon is a constrained randomness. It is a survival strategy. Bird and whale song utilise the same constrained randomness. The randomness is likely to be utilising a very simple stochastic action schemata. If it isn’t very simple then moths must be much, much smarter than we thought.

The luminous strangeness of Barber’s Berlin is created out of this device. The book turns Berlin into a series of uncanny images. This supports the theory that Barber is using the ‘action first’ stochastic schemata. Creative thought can only be held in the working memory and can only be held imagistically according to Baddley and Hitch and Logie. The mental rehearsal of action is accessed directly in images and so by-pass prior thought completely. Berlin becomes exposed through constrained stochastic action-schemata activation by-passing pre-arranging thought in Barber’s mental architecture.

Barber’s Berlin is grasped as something intentional. According to Josh Knobe it’s likely that doing so means that it is being morally judged. So, ethically loaded, the city creeps up into your skin either condemned or innocent. This is writing that checks your vital signs. Some think that emotions cause moral feelings. And this uncanny Berlin elicits something akin to anger or something akin to sadness. The anger seems to pulse from the sense that someone ought to pay, that wrong was once done here and revenge is on your mind. The sadness seems to seep from the same sense that wrong was done here, that there ought to be some sort of restitution or reparation but that there won’t be, that there can’t be, that somehow we got onto the wrong road and that our sadness won’t end.

So there are two Barbers in uncanny Berlin. He steps out of Hanns Heinz Ewers‘ Der Student von Prag in the wrong city in the wrong time and meets himself coming the other way from his ‘vanishing map’. One self is full of silent wrath and the other full of mourning. As I read the book, I wondered which Barber was writing. Or, given that he was using the ancient device of the moth, perhaps there was a numb Barber, or one whose emotions were not yet formed. Perhaps the point of reading was to realise the emotional point and name it.

Staring in the mirror in his shabby European hotel, all that stares back is the ‘Sandman’. Nicholas Royle is below in the lobby making maniacal notes whilst Neil Gaiman is hunched silently in a corner, scratching his quill against dry parchment. Royle scribbles on a ripped out piece of notepaper: “What Sandman shows, above all perhaps, is that the uncanny is a reading-effect. It is not simply in the Hoffman text, as a theme… that can be noted and analysed accordingly. The uncanny is a ghostly feeling that arises… , and experience that comes… , as an effect of reading. The uncanny figures as the very impossibility of a so-called thematic reading.”

Freud contrasts the uncanny in literature with the uncanny in real life. He writes, “The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merit in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life.” Freud’s treatment of the uncanny was too early to include his theory of the death drive, but Royle thinks it is lurking there nevertheless, like a gigantic dark fetus. “The death drive has to do with the figure of woman… and the uncanny commingling of silence, woman and the desirableness of death is quite explicit in the 1913 essay ['The Theme Of The Three Caskets'], even if it falls silent in ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’”

Barber’s uncanny city is soaked in ghosts, dead souls, a palpable, materialistic light pearl of ambiguity, where walls, even in daylight, are like thick forests full of the swarming fancies of a warped historic brain. Barber’s city is manifest strangeness. The doppelgänger author is neither himself nor the other one, or at least, not all the time. The 1930’s drape the whole murk and tenacious dark. David Lynch was writing about his latter masterpiece Inland Empire but thinking about the mysterious Barber in Berlin when writing: “The quality reminds me of the films of the 1930s. In the early days, the emulsion wasn’t so good, so there was less information on the screen. The Sony PD result is a bit like that; it’s nowhere near high-def. And sometimes, in a frame, if there’s some question about what you’re seeing, or some dark corner, the mind can go dreaming. If everything is crystal clear in that frame, that’s what it is – that’s all it is.” Barber is dreaming the dark fantasies and wishes of the city where world histories “… past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of a wish that runs through…” He confronts the trauma and shock of a spectral century, the last, where the savage names at the hub of civilisation are but whispers haunting the Glienicke Bridge, the forest cemetery, the Skladanowsky Bioskop projecto, the Pankow railway’s station turntable and railway shed. If it all seems dark, it’s because the emulsion wasn’t so good back then….

In a destroyed video, a grainy monochrome shot of Jean-Michel Rabaté is standing in Karl Marx Forum plaza, discussing the avant-garde’s relationship to jouissance theory: “Benjamin is indispensible for Theory precisely because his central obsession was to define modernity (a modernity that is not without its shadowy double of nostalgia) without having to believe in the myth of progress as Adorno did in the name of Marxism…” The voice fades and becomes a palpable shadow in between light and dark. The film shudders and ends. Sexy revolutionary women in lipstick drink in a sloe bar. South American gangsters buy gold. At the end of the tram ride it’s the end of the GDR and East Berlin burns up. Piel Jutzi. Berlin-Alexanderplatz. The painting: ‘Rainbows over the Marx-Engels-Platz’ and the imminent annulling in mind are caught in frieze frames…

The 365m high Television Tower is described in method actor prose, “… a great exposed nail between BA and KMF.” The other Barber is marching his tongue in metaphors he takes from Cronenberg: “… one screen will not do they must virally proliferate….”, “3 transmission of memory”, etc., etc.

These Barbers ignore the young, young woman in a skirt and blouse. They listen to the walls for aural signs of the 1954 violent riots. All this is done to remind us that this is a real city, and the uncanny is real life. Stephen Barber’s historic Berlin is the Berlin of uncanny Nationalism. We want to reread it all to discover whether he is angry or sad.

He writes of forty walls in Berlin like he’s praying for its soul. There is a sense that the number forty has religious significance. The Flood lasted for forty days and nights. Moses was on the mountain with God for forty days twice. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness. Jesus fasted forty days, also in the wilderness. Jesus was seen on earth forty days after his crucifixion. These Biblical presences respect the holy grammar of Barber’s ghost text.

Berlin is Barber’s metaphorical site of uncanny nationalism. Uncanny nationalism “requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones … It follows that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogenous … if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals.” This is Ernest Gellner’s functional explanation of the ethnic cleansing that unhinged twentieth century politics and drove its wars.

Gellner, writing of the Jews, identifies the generalisable crisis for those caught in the pincers of its logic: “…the romantic reaction placed the Jews in a dilemma….They were largely deprived of the illusion of a possible return to the roots, an illusion indulged by their gentile neighbours with enthusiasm and conviction. Though shalt not covet they neighbour’s Gemeinschaft! But, of course, one does. So what’s to be done? The options which were logically open were either to infiltrate the Other’s Gemeinschaft, or to create a new one of one’s own, whether or not there had been any peasants available for the past two millennia, who could define its folk culture.” The new idiom rinsed away ‘folk culture’ and created a universal army of anonymous, retrainable and interchangeable clerks.

John Hall quotes a “crunched private” note by Gellner lamenting the risen uncanny nationalism in which, thereafter, “there will always be a false note, which ever you do, ashamed of being ashamed, etc. ad infinitum, no equilibrium possible here; where would authenticity lie? Mate in three whatever you do. Sense of play-acting, whatever one does. Impotence, ignorance, chaos, unreality.” Kafka, Musil and Broch are the great literary explorers of this. Barber’s Berlin shimmers in the grey light of weird Hitler/Stalin statues. And so we ask again, is he angry or sad as he walks through forty Berlin walls like a Max Schreck Nosferatu?

Agnes Callard contrasts sadness with anger. Anger is the emotion we feel when we think some part of the world is awry. The awryness is the gap between how the world is and how we think it should be. It is reasonable to be angry when the judgment of the awryness is true, is justified and the significance of the gap feeds into the proportionate anger felt. The bigger the gap, the bigger the anger. Anger is rational if these three conditions are met.

Agnes Callard disagrees when people argue that addressing the awryness can eliminate the anger. If you think that recompense or making the world no longer awry in the salient respect leads to the anger going away, then you will believe that people who ‘nurse their wrath to keep it warm’ are being irrational. But Callard argues that people who remain angry are not irrational if they have a reason for being angry and the reason remains. And she thinks that the reasons that made you angry in the first place don’t go away. Therefore anger is eternal.

Homer’s Iliad is about this. Achilles sulks in his tent enraged by the sleight of Agamemnon. Achilles refuses to let go of his anger. The reason for his anger is Agamemnon pointing out that the world of immutable honour codes is in fact not real. Honour in the real world is merely the result of capricious acts. This provokes in Achilles the sense of the world being suddenly and irrevocably awry. The reason for his anger is independent of his caring about those reasons. His sense of honour, embedded in a world whose meaningfulness is entwined in that code, has been taken away by Agamemnon.

The emotion he feels, the enormous rage that sees him refuse to leave his tent and fight - fighting being an action that for Achilles only makes sense in the lost world of honour - is reasonable. The reason lies outside what Achilles subjectively feels. Even if he mysteriously stopped caring about honour, only the fact of his anger would end in such circumstances. The reason for the anger would remain. Hence anger is eternal. What would the reason for eternal anger be? The reason is justice. The injustice that causes the anger remains forever, even if compensation and rectification removes its emotion.

Sadness is different. Callard argues that sadness is not eternal. The issue of sadness is raised when we consider the deep question, ’should we cry over spilled milk?’ Callard argues that we should, but only until the mess is cleaned up. The world can be changed so that the reason for the sadness has gone. But what of a sadness that is caused by something that can’t be recompensed? Callard thinks that there’s always something that can be done. Even if not directly connected to the original milk being spilled we can make the sadness go away by doing something else.

This is the difference between anger and sadness. When reasonably angry the reason for the anger cannot be removed. So even if we do something to stop Achilles caring about his honour, the reason for his anger remains. If we are sad, the emotion is about the caring. When we no longer care, there is no cause for sadness. Finding my lost cat removes my sadness: apologising for the sleight you visited on me does nothing to remove the reason for my anger. The sleight is never erased, because it happened. Even an unending sadness is not eternal. I may be sad up to and including my death because I never stop caring. The sadness of unrequited or lost love can take this form, where to keep caring means paying the price of remaining sad unto death. Callard writes about this:

“The rectifiability of sadness is, I contend, the source of its peculiar poignancy: sadness, any sadness, would vanish without a trace if things from now on started to be just a bit different from how it looks like they will be. The sadness-ending road is a perfectly possible and coherent way the world could be - it just so happens that the sad man thinks, looking down it, that that isn’t the way he’s heading. Sadness glimpses the promised land; it feels happiness slipping through its fingers. The fact that sadness is endable doesn’t mean it comes to an end: some sadnesses are very long-lasting, and we carry them with us till the end of our lives. But even that sadness which lasts the length of a life is not eternal: even un-ended sadnessess were endable.”

So reading Barber we are exposed, via the backwards and forwards rehearsals of the action schemata that occur prior to thinking, to an intentional object, that of Berlin, and we oscillate between a sadness that might not end but yet is not eternal and a rage whose subjective fact might end yet is eternal. We read the book as we might stare at a series of implacable images in a film. The images are the uncanny catastrophe of Berlin. ‘Catastrophe’ here is ‘the turning point’. We wonder what to make of Berlin after its catastrophe. Does Berlin survive Berlin?

In his book Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear writes about behaving bravely in the face of devastation of ones own culture and identity. After such a collapse, Lear broods on the comment by a survivor of the Crow people, Plenty Coups, who said that, after the buffalo went, ‘nothing happened.’ It is as if the eradication of the meaningful world by the white man removed the possibility of intentionality. Intentionality can be understood as a space of reasons that renders meaningful all thought and action in the world. Plenty Coups no longer lives in a world that makes sense.

At nine, in the 1850s, he had a dream that the elders interpreted as being a sign that they would lose their traditional culture. Sure enough, they lost their rituals, symbols and meanings when the white men invaded. That’s when the buffalo went away. They lost the surrounding context that made sense of everything they did and thought. We recall Gellner’s ‘crunched note’: “There will always be a false note, which ever you do, ashamed of being ashamed, etc. ad infinitum, no equilibrium possible here; where would authenticity lie? Mate in three whatever you do. Sense of play-acting, whatever one does. Impotence, ignorance, chaos, unreality,”Lear writes of Plenty Coups cleaving to his meanings. He interprets this as an act of brave resistance. Plenty Coups faced the world where nothing could happen after the buffalo had gone in order to remain undefeated. Plenty Coups died in the 1930s. His spirit lies inside the films of uncanny Berlin that Barber séances.

How should you face this collapse, this stripping away of the integral environment and cultural context out of which meaningful life is possible? Ethical life for Aristotle was about living to face the future and he thought that your early life trained you to face these possibilities well. But if all the possibilities of the future have been destroyed then this Aristotelian training is useless. Childhood and education can only betray you.

Aristotelian agency can be contrasted with a Nietzschean account. Nietzsche is unimpressed by accounts that assert that agency can be shaped by childhood training and education. Nietzsche insists that agency is predetermined by biology and its environment, in a way that renders training and education largely irrelevant. Over the long haul of life, you will live a life predetermined by whatever character type you happen to be. You are a trap of your type.

But on Lear’s account, this would render Plenty Coups’ action an inevitable consequence of his character type. Being predetermined, he deserves no credit. Nietzsche would agree that most of us are subject to delusions about the extent of our freedom to choose to act. But Nietzsche may also have recognised that Plenty Coups was one of the extraordinary genius’s that he sought to protect from the baleful herd ethical systems that seek to universalise a love of peace, happiness and the slave mentality of an ascetic planet. Plenty Coups’ hard, unhappy project of living on in a world without meaning can be understood by Nietzsche as heroic.

The Crow faced genocide without a fight. The Sioux, under Sitting Bull, went down fighting in blood drenched carnage. So heroic narratives of resistance can diverge. Decisions to continue without fighting face the threat of being labeled acts of collaboration. Such decisions carry with them dangerous connotations of treachery, betrayal and cowardice.

The deep threat is that in certain new contexts what you were, your very identity, is rendered ridiculous. So when Plenty Coups has his dream that tells him that everything is going to be stripped away, he faces a choice. He can fight and die as the Sioux fought. Or he can become ridiculous. He decides to live his life in this pointless future. The vulnerability of human conceptions of the good and fulfilled life is recognised in this choice he makes.

Contemporary Texan borderland poet Gloria Anzaldua writes about a new consciousness she labeles ‘mestiza.’ Out of the particular frenzied annihilations of mono-cultural identies she writes of the development of a new kind of consciousness: “The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned.” Leah Dilworth reflects that there is a latent tendency to resist this new consciousness from vested interests. This is a fact.

But there are deeper sources of resistance. To make the decision to adopt mestizan consciousness can, just like the Crow decision not to fight, seem like collaboration. When a dispute is still in the balance, calling it a day can seem like betrayal. For some, multicultural pluralism is sinister because it links up with a collaborationist reflex. In the face of this suspicion, the new consciousness calls for a deep kind of bravery. It requires that you keep breathing even if you’re not certain whether the air is not poisoned, even if you’re certain that it is. Like an astronaut on a new planet, does she dare take off her helmet and test the new, alien atmosphere? Thick cultures make this metaphor pressing. Plenty Coups’ comment that after the buffalo went nothing happened is recognition of the price you pay when you gamble for these stakes. For a Nietzschean, to live on is an act of courage that recognises the tragedy of such a heroic life.

Some say our modern culture is not so thickly hewn. Identities are atomised, modular, and meanings are not so interconnected. Modernity prefers homogeneity. A mass population of clerks with a few outliers is thought the ideal. This is consistent with the view of modernity that Nietzsche held and critisised. Nietzsche feared the loss of the genius outliers in this ‘herd’ setting. Marx saw unjustifiable inequalities in the class stratification of populations that were, after all, made up out of the same basic, homogeneous features.

Ernest Gellner writes movingly about the movement from traditional heterogeneous culture to modern homogeneous cultures. His intellectual autobiography can be read in terms of the loss of his own Czech folk culture to the momentous shifts of the twentieth century. It is sobering to consider the upheavals that created the modern sensibility Gellner describes, involving ethnic cleansing and the placing of ‘culture’ into parenthesis, so that having a traditional identity is disadvantageous. This is the crux of Gellner’s disagreement with Wittgensteinians who argue that the thickly entwined cultures of communities such as the Crow’s were ultimate. His point was that the conditions of modernity require the destruction of the very things that defined the ‘thickness’ of these cultures.

The modern idiom excludes overlapping ethnic, religious, linguistic, political and cultural distinctions and the great wars of the last century were about eradicating these messy overlaps. The horrors of ethic cleansing are horrors of this process. That the homogeneity inscribed by each nationalism is arbitrary makes the horror seem more extreme and poignant. That Serbo-Croat was invented as a literary high culture language in the nineteenth century is a sharp reminder of the lunatic pornography of modern history. Barber writes out this appalling history. He converts Berlin into an uncanny sign of this perverse history. It is written through the ancient stochastic action-first schemata that rehearses, again and again, the flickering images of its catastrophe.

Barber writes out of a strong and mysterious connection maintained between waking images and those that haunt us in our dreams and more especially during those morbid oppressions of nightmare. His poetry compels the reader to feeling dread not fear. Fear motivates us to act. If frightened we are compelled to find a way of dispelling the fear. Fear gives us a reason for action. But dread is closed to any such reasoning. Dread swallows us into an unending, unchanging moment where horror is both expressed and recognised but disconnected from any programme for action. Dread transfixes us in an awful moment of recognition. In dread, all we do is acknowledge. It is a different universe from that of action. Barber writes to the clarity of the perfectly dreadful image.

Berlin is his monument to the trauma of modernity. It is the physical instantiation of dread. Barber’s looming consciousness walks through the solid flesh of the city. It is a minded pervasiveness that generalises into an inchoate, monstrous familiarity that leaves us shuddering with an unnamed, unnameable dread. Our deepest century, our deepest time, the twentieth century, our birth time, is here piercing Barber’s strange, hallucinatory prose as he wanders, like a ghost, through a cosmopolitanism that is the root of intolerable evil.

‘The walls of Berlin’, being walls, might be thought of as being solid objects. But Barber wonders about the very possibility of solid objects in this book. The vanity of solidity perishes as an illusion. But he drills further past the initial identification of the illusion. What is Berlin that its illusion isn’t?

He turns and twists but has us in a trap. William James wrote: “Although we cannot help believing that our thoughts do mean realities and are true or false of them, we cannot for the life of us ascertain how they can mean them. If thought be one thing and reality another, by what pincers, from out of all the realities, does the thought pick out the special one it intends to know? And if the thought knows the reality falsely, the difficulty of answering the question becomes indeed extreme.” James was facing the challenge of his contemporary Josiah Royce who, contemplating the Kantian skepticism about having grounds even for skepticism itself, asked how we would escape from the limits of our own thought? Royce concluded that we couldn’t. He argued that we were condemned to Idealism, the idea that all we can ever know is to the limit of our own thinking. Reality beyond our minds is out of reach.

Is Barber’s Berlin a reproach to idealism? The brute materiality, the gap between what it was thought to be and what is here, suggests that there is more to the place than was ever in any Horatio’s head. Like Hamlet, Barber may be writing ‘this was sometimes a paradox but now time gives it proof’, adding sub voce, ‘albeit from a strange angle’, like Emily Dickinson’s shimmering exhortation to ‘tell the truth but tell it slant.’

Alternatively, perhaps Barber’s is best understood as just a project out of the uncanny. Freud takes the German word unheimlich and points out that unheimlich “… is obviously the opposite of Heimlich … meaning ‘familiar’, ‘native’, ‘belonging to home’, and [so] we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.” But this is to get the whole situation exactly wrong. “[T]he uncanny… is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us…” he writes. When what has long been known to us is annihilated, then we remain perhaps in the emotion of an extreme trauma that shapes everything. In Berlin Barber is home. It is exceedingly strange. It is a place of dread. Barber extends the metaphor to generalise out to each one of us. This dread is all our dreads.

When the environment that sustains meanings is trashed then there’s the threat that everything will be nonsense. But the truculence of this thought, that leans towards endorsing a kind of effing the ineffable, isn’t the point. Barber is not enchanting us with nonsense, but reminding us of what we used to think we grasped. Reading Berlin’s walls as he does, he takes us to where our dreams and illusions of knowing were. He asks us to wonder at the fact that once we fancied we knew such things. It is a process made familiar to us in the works of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.

Kierkegaard asks us to consider the meaning of the crucifix in Christianity in order that we might understand the paradoxical truths of religious revelation. Once recognising the depth of the paradox, we are left amazed at our own bathos that assumed we could ever grasp such truths. The philosopher James Conant makes the same claim for Wittgenstein in his Tractatus. He writes: ” … we are drawn into an illusion of occupying a perspective from which we imagine we are able to grasp such an extraordinary truth; we imagine we are able to grasp what certain forms of nonsense are trying to say. From this perspective, we imagine we contemplate the limits of reason, as well as the possibility of our being able to transgress them.”

This then is part of the answer of those who want to resist the Idealism of the obscure American philosopher Royce I mentioned above in relation to William James. We are prone to illusions. Fix up. Not by trying to get past them, but by accepting we’re systematically making mistakes. As Kierkegaard has it, we’re creatures with “the enduring capacity of a misunderstanding to assimilate even the most strenuous effort at explanation and still remain the same misunderstanding.” So what Barber is about is to deceive us into the truth. Wittgenstein put it like this: “I ought to be no more than a mirror in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right.”

But putting it right doesn’t mean in any obvious remedial sense. Kierkegaard is not arguing that knowing that the mystery of the crucifix is too deep a paradox for us to understand is to solve the paradox. Rather, it is bringing us back into a relation with the world that at the very most is capable of wondering at its mysteriousness. It is an attitude that contrasts with any sense that there is anything that can be done or known or asserted. Is this the futilitarianism of collaboration?

No, this is the tragic bravery that chooses to live in a world where nothing happens after the buffalos have gone. Barber’s whole oeuvre is about setting out before us a dream world, akin to that dreamed by the nine year old crow Indian Plenty Coups. Each of his books lay out before us the dream world that creates the world awry.

What there is and what there ought to be, or what we’d want there to be, is rent apart in each traumatising history he tells. The ethereal, luminous quality is associated with the light projected onto a screen, a “torn ochre celluloid casing” that exposes the awryness that is the history, materiality and luminous embodiment of a world rinsed away by the twin necessary demons of ethnic cleansing, Hitler and Stalin. Of course Barber knows only too well that the names of such twins extend to the dak crack of doom, on the one hand, and the lightness of forgetfulness, on the other.

Barber pitches the world ‘awry’ into his own mix, acknowledging the broken surfaces that he moves over, and the gap out of which the dread seeps. “At some point in the terminal decades of the GDR, the original and indestructible stone cladding which formed the predominant surface of the Karl-Marx-Allee had been mysteriously replaced here by a celluloid casing, as though intended as a screen for outdoor film projections, in which the film’s own celluloid had unaccountably been confounded with the surface on which it was to be projected, resulting in an ultimately awry, film-inflected urban surface. That celluloid casing, as though protesting its mishap, had then warped, split apart, and peeled, entire chunks vanishing into the street below. In some sections, where the celluloid had gone, the concrete layers and rusted metal wall-brackets below could be seen, though the concrete had grown as friably eroded as the surface of a Kiefer painting, and the wall-brackets had themselves warped like the original celluloid, expelling their nails, as though jostling for position and visibility in the city, projecting themselves outwards, even if it meant tearing themselves away from the building’s surface.”

In this typical passage Barber compresses the looming historical uncanny into a pact with the birth of cinema. The Skladanowsky brothers showed the first public performance of moving images in Berlin and this is a historical moment that Barber returns to continually throughout, as if the meaning of this event is elusive, caught up in the terminus movement of history Hitler and Stalin instantiate. We thought we knew all this. These are familiar freakshow denizens. But Barber’s séance refutes our bluff confidence.

Barber’s attention is never just the aesthetic attitude. The reference to Anselm Kiefer in the quoted passage is no unearned reference. Kiefer is another soul resisting the terminus of life ‘after the buffalo have gone.’ The territory of German history is of course never just German. Nor is the work of Kiefer, or of Barber, ever just a matter of finding out which propositions they are discovering to endorse. There is a sense of both these artists being in a distant realm well away from that kind of discussion. They are not teaching new truths. Rather, they are moving in a realm where we all have the same opinions. But these are not necessarily known. They are not even necessarily knowable.

Kierkegaard writes: “An illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it an illusion … one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion.” In this passage he is taken to be contrasting an illusion with a false belief. Barber is not confronting false beliefs but rather laying out a city of dreaming, an illusion, a series of dreams, a bunch of old films, and doing so in order that we may confront our own confusions. The contrast is between confronting and disputing our illusions.

In this respect, the confrontation that Barber requires of us is that of the religious sensibility. The loading is that of the language and grammar of Lessing and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. It is a Kantian skepticism, to adopt a phrase used by James Conant, where we are thrown back to confront the very grounds of any belief at all. This accounts for the associative, amoeboid texture of surrealist, Freudian dream that is the pervasive quality of this work. The text presents a simulacrum of the city as William Fleiss might have done, presenting “the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time by a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription.”

In so doing Barber is being threaded through a Kierkegaardian sensibility towards surreal and avant-garde reawakenings. In so doing we return to the question: is Barber angry or sad when confronting the walls of Berlin? Sadness may be a kind of sentimentality. Michael Bracewell argues that sentimentality offers “the possibility of reclaiming our deeper subjectivity.” From this perspective the sadness of Barber is capable of unveiling the illusions at the heart of our selves, including presumably our illusions about ensnaring history. Walter Benjamin makes a suggestion that links Barber’s approach to that of Renaissance melancholia, as when Max Pensky comments that in Benjamin sadness works like “a gateway emotion, melancholy mournfulness signals the passage of the contemplative mind to its transcendent home. Rather than dissipating with this spiritual ascent, sadness is intensified, urging the mind on to ever-higher levels of contemplation, a progressive deepening of speculation.”

Bracewell’s underrated masterpiece Perfect Tense, Greuze’s painting A Girl With A Dead Canary and David Lynch’s ‘affected knowledge’ of the sad, whereby he presents close-ups of crying people’s faces, as when Rita and Betty weep as Rebekah Del Rio with painted tears on her face seems to sing in the Silencio nightclub scene of Mullholland Drive, these all point to the fact that at the moment when everything is lost in the air we are still capable of being affected. A kind of feminine jouissance is suggested in saying that in The Walls of Berlin Barber is sad.

But I think the traumas of The Walls Of Berlin are eternal. They are the rational grounds for the images, the commentaries, the journeys that Barber undertakes again and again. In each outing he demands that we unmask the reasons below the skin. He wants to show that the mutually implicated meanings of his subject matter, be they the pornographic histories of far Eastern atrocities or the somber beauty of this traumatised cityscape. A key film is Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire and whilst reading this it was as if the angel Bruno Ganz played was writing for the human he becomes. The monstrous illusions of belief, knowledge and revelation that as a human might be temptations are being ridiculed. How? By denying that one can avail oneself of religious categories, and a religious sensibility, just by using the words, as if the words, and the thoughts, could carry their meanings regardless of the world.

This is to directly return to Plenty Coups and his world after the buffalos have left. In such a word everything, even the deepest core of self-identity, are stripped of meaningfulness. And the idea of history as giving one a sense of meaningfulness, that too is stripped away. As Plenty Coups says, after the buffalos have gone, nothing happens. The trauma of Berlin, written out in its walls, resonates with the equivalent kind of time. This Berlin time is the time of the awryness of the world, the tick-tock gap between what ought to be and what is. The reason for the awryness is the same awryness that, for example, is currently being felt by the new homeless in Athens.

Emmanouela Seiadaki reports movingly of the traumatising of the Greeks in the wake of the plutocratic crisis where she says, “the new Greek homeless class members have laptops and iPhones, remnants of their ‘old’ lives. “They come to us in suits with their laptops in hand. These citizens a couple of months ago had ordinary lives. They had a job, a home and car,” says Nikitas Kanakis, the head of Doctors Without Borders in Athens. Counselors from the Department of Homeless Services describe a similar situation. “We even have homeless from suburbs like Kifisia and Voula! They come here with their laptops and expensive smart phones they once used for their work, shocked and depressed”.”

It is that registered shock and depression and the arbitrary and unjust reason for such events that we can read back and forth in Barber’s work. Seiadaki notes that it is injustice that feeds the despair: “With an over bloated, corrupted, and ridiculously slow government administration, tax evaders have little to fear. In fact, tax evaders are probably the only Greek cast that doesn’t fear becoming homeless. They can still be seen throughout Athens in their Porsche Cayennes, at their favorite ‘bouzoukia’ and designer clothes shops as if nothing has changed. It is this injustice that incites the people of Greece to anger, and crushes the usually-cheery Christmas atmosphere in Athens at this time of year.”

The justice that simmers in Barber’s book is not the justice of rational independence understood through a modest set of rules, as proposed by liberal philosophers with a communitarian bent such as John Rawls. Nor is it caught in the communicative textures suggested by Sandel or Habermas where constraints for justice are found in our dwelling in communities of conversation.

Many of us live lives of quiet desperation. We don’t enter the conversations about justice. We withdraw even when we are not formally excluded. The depths of the issues of human existence are not easily found. Stanley Cavell removes justice from the domain of the conversation as such, and replaces it as an Emersonian presentation, a performance, seeking to gesture at what justice might be.

But for the person for whom there can be no more conversations, and where such Emersonian dramas assume and require a common world for interpretation that is just not available to everyone, then justice is just the awareness of the awryness. And the awareness takes the form of reasonable anger. The vastness of the gap, between what the world should be and what it is, determines the reasonable proportionate vastness of such rage.

This takes us back to the notion of eternal anger. Berlin may be being rebuilt but nevertheless the original violations remain. These are the still existing reasons for anger, the very same reasons from which the anger originated. The awryness of the world, understood in this book through The Walls of Berlin, speak as reasons for eternal anger. So in this sense Barber is angry when confronting the walls of Berlin. Although it can seem like melancholia, the strange ecstasy of his writing is more the vast unquenchable rage of Achilles hunkering down in his tent. Achilles is an elevated man, of course, related to the Gods. He is later Plenty Coups the Crow warrior who notes that after the buffalo have gone ‘nothing happens.’ Salvador Dali wrote of a delirium whereby the carcass of a mighty bull would be lifted at great speed to the mountains of Montserrat so that the eagles would eat it. The bull would be lifted “by means of an autogyro, an eminently mystical instrument and one that draws its power from itself.”

Barber has written a text that is like Dali’s mystical autogyro. It will elevate the absurd meaningfulness in a pseudo-liturgical way to render a devastating spectacle. The anger of Barber is justified by the apparitions and ghosts he lays out in the book. The book reads like a documentary of an absent film. The voice seizes and renders a preoccupation with displacement, disappearance and destructiveness. The tangible body of the city, the ‘walls of Berlin’ themselves, are impelled towards the lost meanings that his disembodied voice confronts from the vantage of a new century. His materials all seem slowed down, the equivalent of a grey Richter painting’s ghostly focusing, as if somewhere within the gliding voice is the extent of their calamity.

The religious seriousness of this devastating, wrenching work is that of Kierkegaard’s facing the awryness of the world. The prose is as ever the edgeless murmuring of baleful wrath. Scene by scene, the absences of justice become vaster. The writing revokes the conclusions of all its readers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Vault: An Anti-Novel, David Rose, Salt Publishing 2011

I am faced with an onerous task, how to deconstruct a story that is about the deconstruction of a story. Please don’t deconstruct, if you do, you will only end up constructing. Vault is about many things. A salient thing is the bicycle. The bicycle in Vault is a bicycle and only a bicycle. It is a machine and only a machine. It serves a function. The bicycle is only a tool as is the sniper rifle. A tool is only a tool. The sniper rifle is salient to a point in Vault. The sniper rifle is simply a sniper rifle. The bicycle is not the metaphor, neither is the sniper rifle (you have to read Vault). The bicycle is the metaphor-carrier.

Come on. Where’s the vim? You are writing a review on-line, for an impatient reader, there’s porn a click away, there’s news about the latest fab-celeb a poke away, come on, snap snap, you’re writing for the sophisticated kids of the void, not lecturing to a bunch of geriatrics.

Vault is a short book. But it contains many things. It is not a quick read.
The Recognitions Vs The Great Gatsby
The winner: The Great Gatsby
Gravity’s Rainbow Vs The Heart of Darkness.
The winner: The Heart of Darkness.

Vault deals with a man called McKuen. He is a sniper. A spy. A disgruntled guinea pig. He is real. He is a simulacrum. He is both real and a simulacrum. He is a competitive cyclist. This is important: he is a competitive cyclist. The examining of maps and topography is just the mundane mechanisms of an ardent and passionate cyclist, but David Rose is best when he writes about McKuen and the bicycle and the race. I could have read a thousand pages about grit and sweat and the competition.

Vault deals with storytelling (you have to read Vault) and the mechanisms of storytelling. It deals with the many simulacra that build up a story, brick by brick, lie by lie, fabrication by fabrication.

Vault is as fragmented as Europe before and after the war, Two not One. Vault has to be fragmented. McKuen is fragmented. The book is fragmented. David Rose himself is fragmented. I am fragmented. You are fragmented.

We have the real McKuen and we have the story of McKuen and we have the story teller. David Rose shows us two sides of McKuen. It is a very clever device. We get the writer’s view of McKuen. The writer like all writers is prone to mendacity and elaboration. And we get McKuen’s view of McKuen. And the cherry on the pie is David’s Rose’s two McKuens. And so the question is: which is the real McKuen? Can we trust David Rose? Is he as duplicitous as the nameless writer? Can the real McKuen please stand up!

Vault covers a juncture of disintegration. We are taken on a journey through Europe through the war, Two not One. Vault unravels within the Great Joke. The Great Joke being Europe. Instead of rebuilding after the war, Two not One, the book shows Europe patching up the scabs and wounds with ephemeral plasters, and of course, the scabs and wounds hemorrhage. Europe is shown as a quagmire ready for the mushrooms (also mushroom cloud).

There is no peace for McKuen after the war because the war never ended it simply shifted onto a different stage. It is here McKuen mirrors Europe. We are presented with the official Europe after the war, a time of rebuilding and mercy and repartition, whereas the realty is one of conflict and distrust. A time for the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof Group, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Black September, Ejército Popular Revolucionario, Revolutionary Guevarist Army, Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών, Noxçiyn Respublika Noxçiyçö, and even CND (it all depends which side you are on). McKuen doesn’t simply ride off into the sunset after the war, Two not One, he involves himself and wades through the quagmire (you have to read Vault) it is a story after all.

Vault is not a historical novel. It could have been, but it is not. It is lying out there in the ether waiting for us to catch up. More than a book about a man and war and his enjoyment of cycling, it’s a metaphor. If Rose was not a Rose but a different Rose we would be calling Rose a genius but alas Rose is simply a Rose and so he is a Rose.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Kavanagh’s book The Killing of a Bank Manager is published by Honest Publishing.

The Atheist’s Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg, W.W. Norton & Co, 2011

‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognise.’

So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.

So what are his answers to the persistent questions, as he calls them, the ones at the head of this article and his book, the ones we have that begin early in life, get crowded out by thoughts of sex in adolescence and then come steaming back afterwards? There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.

Rosenberg argues that belief in free will and purpose and all that (see above) is belief in hokum of the same order as belief in God. The atheists’ self-image as the hero nihilist choosing her fate is condemned as being just as hopeless as the religious self image. This is why this is a book with some tough and strange lessons for the atheist. His book is a genuine guide, giving the reader a thorough reading list of the key texts that everyone should read, summarising the main points quickly, smartly and expecting you to go away and do further work. He’s a teacher after all, a very, very smart professor who assumes you too can be even smarter if you sweat a little more and put in the hours. So he’s a good teacher with high aspirations for us all. But what reason does he have for his worldview? He argues for a naturalism that results in what he calls a ‘nice nihilism’. By this he means that atheists are not nihilists (although their scientific world view is) and that for good evolutionary reasons everyone tends to be nice.

Nietzsche was probably the best philosopher who guessed this naturalist worldview without knowing the science (Hume did pretty well too), but these days we can all get the science as well, even if only via reports from the front line, and even if we don’t always follow the ins and outs. After all, it was genius physicist Richard Feynman who told us that we weren’t to worry if we didn’t follow the implications of quantum mechanics because no one does, even him. Now, it’s only relatively recently that Nietzsche has become accepted as being a naturalist. The post-modernist readings of him, typified by Simon Critchley, for example, are, simply wrong according to this new picture. The philosopher Brian Leiter’s brilliant 2001 guide to his ethics outlines the basic naturalistic position that he considers essential to a proper understanding of Nietzsche. Nietzsche held three crucial views: science proves we have no freewill, that we can’t know ourselves because we are full of hidden inner drives and that we are all different so a universal morality is immoral. Science has pretty much proved him right.

So reading Rosenberg reminds us of how much of contemporary naturalism has borne out Nietzsche’s inspired guesses. But Rosenberg is an extreme case of the position and so becomes someone with arguments that are urgent, vital and iconoclastic. What does Rosenberg argue?

He takes naturalism to be the thesis that the natural sciences are the best guide to what exists in the world and that its methods are the best ways of extending knowledge of what exists. And then he argues that the naturalistic programme is constructive. Wilfred Sellars considered that naturalism aims to make humanistic scholarship safe in a world of science. Rosenberg agrees with this naturalistic, Sellarsian project of reconciliation.

Now we’ve read how this is supposed to work out when we read the likes of evolutionist philosopher of consciousness Dan Dennett, and nihilist post-modernist philosopher Simon Critchley. Critchley argues that the nihilism of the meaningless universe requires us to work hard to reclaim that lost meaning. So in Very Little…Almost Nothing Critchley argues that once we accept the ultimate meaninglessness of the universe – God is dead and all that – what we have to do is work back meanings through understanding our relationship to the ordinariness of our common existence. Critchley assumes that we have a choice, that we have the freewill and potential self knowledge required to confront and build new meaningfulness out of this nihilism. But by assuming that freewill and self-knowledge are unproblematic Critchley underestimates the naturalistic challenge. It helps explain why he thinks he can be a nihilist, something that Rosenberg disputes, as we’ll see.

Nietzsche’s nihilism is much more thorough than Critchley’s. In fact, there’s a sense that there’s really nothing too nihilistic at all about Critchley’s version. If we are still justified in helping ourselves to freewill, responsibility, self knowledge and all that, then for the atheist, what is there to fear, what’s the big deal? With superstitions all gone, the revaluation of values can be turned into a political, ethical, aesthetic programme for freethinkers no longer shackled by voodoo metaphysics. From a certain angle this looks kind of cool and romantic, brave, sexy and underwritten by rationality in a way that gives philosophy a role. Some types, especially those seeing themselves as a philosopher, might be drawn to it. They might see it as endorsing a self image of the thinker as cultural hero. But Rosenberg’s naturalism renders this version of nihilism bogus.

Dan Dennett we might suppose is less sanguine than Critchley and his beard signals a different kind of hip from the Critchley angst. He’s a hard-nosed naturalist philosopher guy who loads up evolutionary theory to dispel the Cartesian idea of mind body dualism, sharing platforms with Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the evangelical wing of the Darwinists. It’s the brain, stupid, is what his slogan could be. Consciousness is just what our brains produce and he explains the mechanism in terms of what he calls an intentional stance. But after making the case that the brain works in terms of matter and purely causal laws he makes a move not unlike Critchley’s and in the last three chapters of his masterpiece Darwin’s Dangerous Idea explains that we are not brains. Person talk, he says, isn’t affected by brain talk, and the evolutionary acid that erodes meaning at brain state level doesn’t go further into the ontological realm of persons. As with Critchley, if there’s a nihilism on offer, it’s a pretty comfortable one, a tame and domesticated dog that is trained to bark only at targets its master doesn’t like. It kind of leaves everything where the atheist hoped it would be: evolution underwrites the rationalism of being an atheist but doesn’t corrode our human image.

Rosenberg, as I said at the start, is having none of this. His position is a mad-dog scientism. ‘Scientism’, in the past used as a term of abuse, he reclaims as a term of honour. What he argues is for a naturalism of reductive physicalism. Reductive physicalism claims that everything is just bosons and fermions. Physics explains these. They are without purpose, without meaning, are blind, law governed entities that have no encoded propositional or intentional scripts. So the problem is how we can understand ourselves as having intentionality, free-will and purpose if this is the case.

Rosenberg is a reductionist but not an eliminativist. He is committed to the view that natural sciences are obliged to rule on the range of facts we can recognise and the range of theories we can use to explain these facts. So, given that there are thoughts and values and consciousness they must be underwritten by science. The American pragmatist Quine argued that everything that was a fact had to be translatable into science. On this view the best philosophy has to be continuous with science and this means more than that it is just consistent with science. Rosenberg takes a strong Quinean position and argues that it’s not merely the logical compatibility of science with philosophy that’s required here, it has to be shown how they join and cohere. The notion is that of the great ant man E.O. Wilson, which he labeled consilience.

Rosenberg argues that although everything is made of bosons and fermions tables and people and planets really exist because they can be explained by theories of science that at bottom end up with theories about fermions and bosons. He certainly doesn’t claim that we do have the scientific theories to do this with everything at present, or even that we have to in every case, schemata are enough in many cases, but reality is only ultimately bosons and fermions.

The really hard problem is to give an account of meanings and meaningfulness – both in terms of linguistic meaning and values meaningfulness – that are more than merely consistent with the laws of physics describing a universe of only these bosons and fermions. This is the nihilism at the heart of Rosenberg’s naturalism. Can intentionality, freewill, values, forces that drive us, the spiritual bases of wider sensings that are the basis of mystical experiences, Buddhist and Critchleyesque Littles…Almost Nothings, survive being explained in terms of fermions and bosons? Rosenberg’s Naturalism is a position that argues that anything that can’t be underwritten by science, ultimately reduced to bosons and fermions, is eliminated.

So Rosenberg answers in the negative. There is no purpose, no meaningfulness, no free-will in this blind, deterministic universe. The universe of fermions and bosons is our universe. So there is no purpose and meaningfulness in our universe. Now that’s nihilism that isn’t house trained! The atheist was cool with naturalism that removed the hocus pocus of supernatural forces like a Deity. Nihilism was okay when we could inscribe our meanings in humanity as brave intellectual heroes or communes of political purpose or make distinctions between what was true of the brain and what was true of persons. But Rosenberg rips these positions to shreds.

Rosenberg argues that bosons and fermions, governed by the physics of the second law of thermodynamics, Darwinian natural selection and the Periodic Table are more than likely going to be the final word on how to understand reality. Max Weber and Wilfred Sellars thought this kind of rationalism disenchanted the world and that nihilism would result for a while. But Rosenberg argues that they underestimated just how much hocus pocus must be eliminated.

Dennett’s approach is accused of this underestimation. Dennett basically argues that Darwin naturalises purpose as do other top Darwinean philosophers like Dreier and Millikan. This means that this type of naturalist thinks biology has naturalized purpose by showing that purpose is causal. But Rosenberg just thinks this is complete rubbish. He thinks Darwin eliminates purpose from everywhere and everything for ever.

If at the bottom everything is pure blind cause and effect then purpose is just an illusion. And here’s the kick: if the atheist accepts that God has to go because science doesn’t underwrite a purposeful universe then this same reason reaches right down into the very core of our own self image. The very same illusion that makes us think there’s a purpose in the universe governs our self image as purposive and meaningful. ‘The purpose driven life is an illusion’. We don’t have free-will and we’re in the grip of a false self image. (Nietzsche said this too!)

There is a metaphor for purpose, but it’s not real. The talk isn’t eliminativist, so we talk about having plans, of having decided to do something, of having choice, of having a meaningful life and so forth, but the reality is eliminativist. There are no plans, no decisions, no choices, no meaningful lives really.

How could there be if there are no statements of meaning in physics? Rosenberg argues that it follows that therefore in reality there are no statements of meaning anywhere either. There is no propositional or sentential reality, there’s only the appearance of such. The naturalist shouldn’t say brains do things differently from persons. The promissory note of naturalism insists on this. Dennett loses the thread of logical consistency of natural selection as the acid running through everything when he contends that persons survive its corrosion. Critchley is similarly convicted.

And it’s at this point that Rosenberg’s position erodes the ‘easy nihilism’ of Critchley’s picture from a different angle. Critchley’s Littles… Almost Nothings are construed from a position that thinks that our predicament requires us to be nihilists. Rosenberg denies that this is the case. He asks the question: does the Sellarsian scientific image lead to nihilism? Weber has same worry with his disenchantment thesis. If it does, if we are all condemned to being nihilists once the naturalist position is recognised as being the truth, then we might want to know why any of us should bother getting up in the morning or why we should bother trying to be good or make out that there was something wrong with Hitler and Pol Pot.

Rosenberg thinks that if we could become nihilists in the face of the disappearance of meaningfulness, as Critchley thinks we do, then these would be genuinely difficult questions to answer. But he simply thinks it is false to think that naturalism means we have to become nihilists.

Or if we do, we can only be ‘nice nihilists.’ Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning by these determined operations in our brain which give the illusion that there are actual purposes. But there are no such things. As I said, the illusion is explained by natural selection: it has been heavily selected for so that everyone is within two standard deviations of the mean of a happy normal life – the fun life – in the biosphere we find ourselves in. We flourish, or rather, have fun, because we are naturally selected to do so. We trick out statements of purpose but they are illusions. Naturalism cannot solve the problem of philosophy in ways that satisfy those seeking confirmation of a reality that gives purpose because there is no purpose.

At this point it might seem that Rosenberg is being inconsistent. He accepts that tables exist because they are real patterns of fermions and bosons in local equilibria, so why doesn’t he accept purposes as existing as similar patterns in local equilibria? But Rosenberg argues that nothing in science underwrites the value of any categorical imperative such as thou shalt not steal or kill or you ought to look after your neighbour, the frail, weak and so on.

But then, if there are no categorical imperatives (except linguistically) don’t abhorrent values become equal with decent ones? If there’s nothing in the naturalistic worldview to underwrite goodness then Hitler is equal to Gandhi. Rosenberg accepts this but says we shouldn’t worry. Rosenberg says we are all just hard-wired to be nice. Morals are for him a type of norm expressivism. There are facts paired to norms that form a core system that’s universal, shared as a kind of species bedrock. As a species we’ve evolved the same values. There are other facts then that these pairings interact with, local ones including eco systems. So Rosenberg argues that as a species we share the same values and and that all moral disagreement is about factual matters if it persists beyond clearing up background cultural things.

And Rosenberg argues that naturalism implies a left wing politics. The argument runs from the denial of free will. Scientism deconstructs the idea of a meritocracy. A determinist is going to be soft on crime because you can’t punish and ask retribution if there is no responsibility. Core morality says I have a right to what I earn and deserve. But where there are no free choices because they are all causally determined then no one can say they have earned what they have. Nor have we earned our skills and talents. It was fate determined by a deterministic universe. He skillfully distinguishes the mechanism of the free market from the notion of a meritocracy. He recognises that free markets create more wealth than non-free markets. But free markets produce inequalities and these are unfair because deterministic fate rids us of dessert. There can be no deserving poor or deserving rich in a universe where there is no deserving anything. There’s just blind luck.

The USA has presented itself as a nation of luck deniers, although the inspirational and current 99% protest in New York’s Wall Street seem to be denying this denial at last. Redistribution is required to equalize the unearned, undeserved disparities of equality caused by free markets, and this is the role of governments.

What of the response of those who argue that if dessert is unprincipled we should just stop trying to do what we ought to do and revert to doing just what we want to do. If there is no freewill, no actual dessert, then why should we not revert to a Hobbesian state of nature? Doesn’t this imply anarchy?

Rosenberg denies this because he says the state of nature isn’t as Hobbes describes it. Darwinean natural selection has selected for coordination, cooperation, empathy, love and those dispositions that extend what Paul Bloom in Descartes’ Baby calls a ‘moral circle.’ Evolution has selected the illusions that recognise our fates are yoked to living with others harmoniously. As was recognised by the 1980s, we are not inherently aggressive and competitive but gain advantage by being good at negotiating sociability. Rosenberg argues that so long as our environment remains reasonably stable we’ll remain non-nihilistic.

This is a core belief he argues for. The bunch of illusions that our deterministic universe has blindly selected are much, much stronger than weakly selected biases towards valuing truth and coherence. He claims that we won’t be able to be nihilistic even if we have seen through the illusions and know it’s the most rational position to adopt. The illusions are cognitively impenetrable, and are so for scientistic reasons. The illusions are selected instincts that are too overwhelming and powerful to be overridden. This explains the sub title: ‘Enjoying life without illusions.’

Rosenberg is a fearless naturalist, whose ‘nice nihilism’ doesn’t imply that we can become nihilists. He disturbs the comfy domestication of the naturalistic world view. Evolutionism and physics gives us a nihilist universe, purposeless, meaningless, ultimately devoid of everything we think is important. But it has constructed us as having evolutionary reflexes that grant us illusions of freewill and purpose we cannot but believe.

Of course, this is hardly the last word on the matter. There are plenty of people, naturalists and non-naturalists, who contend that he’s plain wrong. But the strength of his book is that it sets out his position clearly and therefore allows those who disagree to know what they must do to answer him. A recent dissenter from the Rosenbergian view is the philosopher Timothy Williamson at Oxford who recently wrote in the New York Times that ‘Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.’ And he points out that oddly mathematics seems to elude this scientific world. Williamson thinks the bad news for naturalism is that mathematical proof seems to be just as effective a route to knowledge as the scientific method of observation and experiment. Williamson adds that there may be facts that can only be investigated and found by non-scientific means. There may even be unknowable facts about reality. His brilliant book The Philosophy of Philosophy takes up these arguments. Williamson is just unconvinced by the idea that science will be better at answering the question as to what caused the First World War, for example, than history. He doesn’t agree that we don’t have knowledge when we know the plot of, say, a Stewart Home novel. Literary critics pay careful attention to literary texts, much more so than the casual reader, and what she knows is genuine. He wonders how much science would be possible without history. He argues that Collingwood knew that our knowledge of past experiments is itself historical.

Williamson’s general line of attack is reminiscent of the attack that proved fatal for the logical positivists. The statements of the Logical Positivists contradicted what the positivists argued were the criteria of meaningful statements. Therefore Logical Positivism was meaningless. Williamson, in replying to Rosenberg’s response to his own article denying the naturalist position in the New York Times writes: ‘We can formulate the underlying worry as a sharp argument against the extreme naturalist claim that all truths are discoverable by hard science. If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. “Are all truths discoverable by hard science?” is not a question of hard science. Therefore the extreme naturalist claim is not true.’

Nevertheless, Rosenberg has written a provocative and clever book that is fresh, shocking and revelatory. Kant in 1748 thought that there would never be a Newton for a blade of grass. Then came Darwin. Then Nietzsche. Things keep changing, and the human image is not immune from this. It’ll make you think.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Andrzej Stasiuk, Dukla, trans. Bill Johnston, Dalkey Archive, 2011.

I won’t say anything about Andrzej Stasiuk, and I’ll try not to say much about myself. About Poland, nothing. The text doesn’t need to be contextualised. Equally though, Dukla shouldn’t be subjected to a ‘close’ reading. Words on the page aren’t worth as much as we think. What matters is the way that a work presents itself. The experience it evokes; the constellation of images it conveys.

This is not simply something linguistic. Literary language is not what makes literature literature. I could subtract all literary devices from Dukla, or paraphrase it in purely prosaic terms, and it would still be Dukla.  Books aren’t what we as readers believe them to be. There’s something beneath the words that we read. With Dukla, one way of saying this is that language is ‘backlit.’ The book is lit up by something shining behind it.

Dukla should not be read critically, only impressionistically. It should be read while in bed, the book becoming a bridge between being awake and asleep. It shouldn’t be concentrated on, still less interpreted. It’s a book to be read with the eyes while the mind is kept empty.

Dukla is a small town close to the Carpathian Mountains. Dukla is a discontinuous set of descriptions of Dukla. Because the book bears the name of the place, the two seem to stand in some sort of relation. Perhaps the relation of Dukla to Dukla approaches the ‘pure’ form of what links a work to its object. But if so it’s a doubled relation, since reality is already relational. After all, Stasiuk’s subject is not so much Dukla as what Dukla reflects or refracts: what its reality relates to him. He doesn’t just look at a landscape; in so doing he looks through a lens at what makes a landscape possible. The aim is to train the eye on the root of every relation: light.

So this is a book that wants to look at the sun, although it can’t do so directly. As Stasiuk says, ‘light can’t be described, all that can be done is to keep imagining it afresh.’ Light may be made obliquely available to literature, but only through multiple layers of mediation. Dukla’s formula for filtering light is to focus it through a memory of a perception of a place. Literature as viewing apparatus; language as camera eye. At one point, Stasiuk reflects on his reason for writing this way:

‘I always wanted to write a book about light. I never could find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I never was able to imagine things that don’t exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me. Events and objects either come to an end, or perish, or collapse under their own weight, and if I observe them and describe them it’s only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it a form that we’re capable of comprehending.’

Is light then the same thing as God? No. It’s merely ‘reminiscent’ of eternity, homologous with it, or situated in a similar structural position. Nothing would exist without light, because nothing would appear. Elsewhere Stasiuk implies that light is causa sui and will outlive the cosmos. But unlike God, it isn’t transcendent. Dukla takes pains to deflate false claims to transcendence, theological or otherwise. Its mysticism is more akin to that of Wittgenstein, who once wrote: ‘everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen.’

There’s a scene, therefore, where Stasiuk berates his grandfather’s Catholic faith; his devotion to the ‘utterly nonexistent.’ Later we learn that ‘the soul is a fiction of the mind,’ a weak counterweight to the world of phenomena. Wherever we turn, the book seeks to stop ‘transcendence getting in the way of immanence.’ But this doesn’t mean that Dukla isn’t religious. It is richly religious, yet its entire religion is contained in two phrases: ‘that was how it looked,’ and ‘that was how it was.’ This concretisation also yields an ethics, where what is good is what ‘has no desire to be more than it actually is.’

Light illuminates everything real. At the same time, it annihilates anything not. When a novel channels light like a prism, whatever isn’t essentially novelistic is stripped from it. This could easily encompass everything we think we know about novels. Such knowledge should be suspended when we read Dukla.

The first thing to be purged from the book is its plot. ‘There’ll be no plot,’ says Stasiuk, because plot ‘melts away in the rising light of day.’ Instead there’ll be ‘nothing but events,’ arranged on a flat field where nothing takes narrative precedence: ‘nothing of any importance is going to happen, nothing.’ Dukla’s beauty is essential precisely because it’s all surface, all the way down. No subtext, just text. No depth, no metaphysics. Instead, scenes from a life are simply shown. In the end there is no novel, and all that’s left is what is sensed and felt.

Writers often ask how a work made of words might acquire the force of an image. For my part, preferring grace over gravity, I wonder how a book could live up to the depthlessness of a dream, or the weightlessness of the cinema. I feel that if heaven exists it will be empty, sun-bleached, blissfully superficial. Stasiuk’s art is one of, in his words, ‘tranquil annihilation.’ In Dukla a series of scenes simply appears, while never being ‘set.’ In this way, words should accomplish no more than a ‘pointing towards,’ a deixis. A book should just take the shape of what happens.

For these reasons, to read Dukla is to be denied the humanist delusion that the novel you’re reading is ‘about’ you; that it speaks to your experience. But beneath this it captures some other, more common commonality; maybe what Ashbery calls ‘the experience of experience.’ The most common ground is one that’s completely depopulated; emptied of every contingency. In Heidegger’s sense, a space has to be ‘cleared.’ As Stasiuk puts it:

‘This must have been what the world looked like just before it was set in motion: everything was ready, objects poised on the threshold of their destinies… the landscape, unpeopled to its furthest limits, looked like a stage set on which something was going to take place only later, or else already had.’

Light will also wipe out any ‘narrative voice,’ that illusory presence that novelists posit, always perched on the verge of vanishing. ‘One day I cut my finger,’ Stasiuk recalls, ‘and what came out was transparent like the sap of a plant.’ In Dukla the very consciousness of the novel is returned to this state of transparency; we see through the novel’s narrator, as we see through an optical element. ‘It’s exactly as if I were an extraneous addition to the world… all that comes into my mind are events, nothing more.’

To me it seems like dreams are driven by a similar logic. In a dream I encounter myself, not as myself, but as an unfilled function of what happens. In dreams I feel as others see me; an object without an interior. I exist for as long as some ‘story’ is told. I exist because it is told, and for no other reason. My dreams are as close as I come to being fictional. The art historian Joseph Koerner, standing in front of one of Caspar David Friedrich’s rückenfiguren, remarks that

‘I do not stand at the threshold where the scene opens up, but at the point of exclusion, where the world stands complete without me.’

In Dukla the world, as well, is no more than a momentary ‘obstacle to the passage of light.’ Indeed, every entity, every person or object (the book doesn’t distinguish between the two) is ‘made of the same thing as everything else,’ and will one day, soon, revert to a single substance. Thus, a ruined building on the road to Kežmarok ‘slowly turns into something mineral,’ just as every other physical thing erodes and grows ‘indistinct, imprecise.’ Entropy will level life out into a serenely ‘indifferent’ monism, in the same way that Dukla restores literature to an indifferent innocence.

For all that, Dukla is not, after Flaubert, a ‘book about nothing.’ Such modernist moves belonged to the last days of literature, whereas Dukla reunites literature with its prehistory. It is not that nothing happens in the world, but that the novel must eradicate itself if it is to capture what happens. Fiction is threaded over the real ‘the way cotton candy is wound around a wooden stick,’ but once it’s finished ‘there’s only a sweet emptiness.’ What is a novel worth, anyway? Next to a film, a photograph?  Precious little, unless it’s no longer a novel, more a ‘magic lantern, a camera obscura, a crystal ball in which snow gently falls.’ At the very moment that Dukla destroys the novel, it comes close to uncovering its condition. What is erased is retrieved as unwritten.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Winters writes fiction and literary criticism. He has written for The Millions, Bookslut, Open Letters Monthly, ReadySteadyBook, The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books and others. He is a contributing editor at 3:AM. His blog is called Why Not Burn Books?

]]> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sweet-emptiness/feed/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/cuckoldry-bankruptcy-and-utopia/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/cuckoldry-bankruptcy-and-utopia/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:57:14 +0000 karl whitney http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/?p=42644 The peculiar experience of reading Fourier now, at this moment in human (and economic) history, is that both sides of Fourier speak to you – the constructor of utopian alternatives to the vapid ‘way things are’ and the ludic, sometimes explosively vituperative, sometimes self-mocking humorist. This suggests to me that, rather than Fourier being divided between the system builder – from whom later socialists such as Victor Considerant excavated a more sober system of thought – and the quasi-lunatic who spoke of lemonade oceans and mutant tails, both were complimentary strands, and were part of the same project. In order to set oneself against society in the way Fourier did, one had to take a risk and unfetter the imagination. Fourier is not our contemporary – he’s weirder and more challenging than that. Nevertheless, his work has something cryptic and discomforting to tell our faulty contemporary world.

Karl Whitney reviews Charles Fourier's The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy.]]> By Karl Whitney.

Charles Fourier, The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy, Trans. Geoffrey Longnecker, Wakefield Press, 2011.

This wickedly entertaining pair of taxonomies emerged from the mind of Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist who, in the early nineteenth century, suggested collective living in phalanstères – large buildings which housed communities that would live according to social principles established by the philosopher. His flights of fancy often saw him mocked: for example, he had suggested that human beings would evolve to the point where they would develop a fifth limb, the archibras – essentially a powerful tail with a hand-like claw at the end. (Caricaturists sometimes depicted it as an eye on the end of a tail - see below.) Nevertheless, Fourier justly became a major influence on subsequent socialist thought. With these two texts, newly translated by Geoffrey Longnecker and published by the excellent Wakefield Press, we find Fourier in a playfully satirical mood, gleefully pointing out the foibles and shortcomings of bourgeois society.

But, as the translator’s introduction indicates, there was a serious point to Fourier’s satire, albeit one that was often buried within a complex, playful and dizzying construct, ‘mingling fantastical poetic imaginings with cutting critiques of society. Fourier outlined his plans for a future society with the often endearingly dry talent of a maniacal bookkeeper, but he would also wilfully tease his readers or bury and hide ideas like a political alchemist, either paranoid in thinking his ideas could be stolen from him, or worried that his readers would not yet be ready to hear what he had to say.’

The peculiar experience of reading Fourier now, at this moment in human (and economic) history, is that both sides of Fourier speak to you – the constructor of utopian alternatives to the vapid ‘way things are’ and the ludic, sometimes explosively vituperative, sometimes self-mocking humorist. This suggests to me that, rather than Fourier being divided between the system builder – from whom later socialists such as Victor Considerant excavated a more sober system of thought – and the quasi-lunatic who spoke of lemonade oceans and mutant tails, both were complimentary strands, and were part of the same project. In order to set oneself against society in the way Fourier did, one had to take a risk and unfetter the imagination. Fourier is not our contemporary – he’s weirder and more challenging than that. Nevertheless, his work has something cryptic and discomforting to tell our faulty contemporary world.

Fourier’s first hierarchy consists of a classification of cuckolds under various headings, such as ‘the Sympathetic Cuckold’, ‘a man who grows fond of his wife’s lovers and makes them his close friends’, and ‘the Transcendent, or High-Flying Cuckold’, who ‘marries a beautiful woman [but] gives her up for something with high stakes, like a big position or an important partnership’. The literal visual indicator of cuckoldry recurs as a refrain in Fourier’s text – variations on the cuckold’s wearing of horns, such as ‘[he] would do better to keep an eye on what is growing on his forehead’, sprout throughout the work. And Fourier doesn’t leave himself out of the equation. Of the ‘Judicious, or Guaranteed, Protocuckold Cuckold’, ‘the man who marries a rich woman for the comfort of liberty’, he writes: ‘this is the species of cuckoldry to which I would aspire if I ever married. Any woman who would introduce me to this title in the fraternity would make an excellent bargain, as much for her as for me.’

But cuckoldry, rather than being a trivial joke to Fourier, was actually the signifier of what he saw as a serious fault in bourgeois society, where passions were constrained, and women kept unemancipated, through the institutions of marriage and monogamy. However, he saw cuckoldry as a minor societal hypocrisy when compared with bankruptcy, which his second hierarchy enumerates. His taxonomy of bankruptcy is largely an attack on the laissez-faire capitalist system that encourages too many merchants and traders and legitimates wastage and fraud. (Fourier summarizes such a system in this way: ‘the lovely principle: let the merchants do what they will, they know very well what best suits their interest’.) When things go wrong, the get-out clause of bankruptcy is casually invoked, and Fourier suggests that this easy-come, easy-go attitude encourages regular, ostensibly honest men to become men of commerce, and eventually – inevitably – file for bankruptcy.

It is in this hierarchy that Fourier is at his most aphoristic: here is where he shows his claws, or, if you prefer, reveals his archibras: ‘A bankrupt man is a true citizen of the world when, after having exploited one kingdom, he then goes on to create bankruptcies in several others.’ ‘In certain cities,’ Fourier writes, ‘one no longer asks who has gone bankrupt, but who has not’. His description of the ‘Transcendent Bankruptcy’ reads thus: ‘immense and rapid growth […] and then a sudden collapse, a terrible fall whose repercussions echo throughout the four corners of the world and leave behind such a tangled mess that businessmen will be skimming profits off its repercussions for ten years after.’ Sadly, Fourier is very much of his time in his anti-semitism, visible when he elides the cheating merchant with Jewishness in a way that, the foreword suggests, is ‘unworthy of a visionary.’

These two texts provide a brief introduction to Fourier’s knottily imaginative thought. One can here witness two projects intertwining: firstly, the satirical skewering of the middle-classes that makes the book something of a companion to Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas; secondly, one can easily detect the straining of the utopian to think society in a radically different way. Fourier’s book of barbed observations thus forms part of his visionary attempt to open a gateway to another world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karl Whitney is a writer and 3:AM editor based in Paris. He has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph. His essay on Georges Perec and the Situationists is in the third issue of The White Review.

The Virtue Of Our Vices: A Modest Defence of Gossip, Rudeness & Other Bad Habits, Emrys Westacott, Princeton University Press 2011

When the late, great and peerless Steve Wells announced his Attack! Books project to Andrew Gallix here at 3:AM a decade ago he did so in the rudest possible terms. The richness of his offense and the promise of much, much more to come was ably fulfilled by the intrepid band of authors he invited to deliver his guarantees. Tits Out Teenage Totty was the quintessence of fuck-offery; from the very title to its plotline which instantiated Swells’ insistence that there be three acts of erotomania and mindless violence on every page, we are in the presence of a pungent stream of surreal bad taste designed to make revolt dreamable again. Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath stormed to offend the upper classes, Tories, snobs, the Queen, the Pope and anyone and anything else he really didn’t like. It was all smart, edgy, daft, full of spunky bad language, Gonzo extreme plot lines and went out to do to literature what punk had done to music. Stanley Manley’s offering was ditto.

Get Your Cock Out by the peerless Mark Manning did what every Manning book does; makes you laugh despite being appalled. Manning’s comic genius (plus his often overlooked stylistic felicities and Romantic sensibility) makes everything he writes compellingly ribald whilst at the same time disconcertingly and outrageously impolite and his Attack! Book was an apotheosis. Stewart Home took a wedge of Victorian pornography and converted it into a sly exercise in distaste and fetish management whilst the uber-cool Tony White’s offering was the only book that wasn’t quite as provocatively uncouth as these others, preferring to blast out a pulpy gothic joke rather than anything like a literary gob butt.

But all in all, Attack! Books are an example of rude sick joke literature. And clearly Swells thought that their embedded and rigorous offensiveness was justified. Not everyone agrees. There are those who believe that rudeness is always a bad thing and sick jokes inexcusable. There are those who would not only find the extreme offensiveness of Attack!-style books unjustifiable, but any rudeness, any sick joke, in any situation, they would find similarly unjustifiable.

The philosopher Emrys Westacott finds this a dispute of enormous interest and one that shines a light on a whole bunch of issues that moral philosophy tends to overlook. His subject matter in this serious and insightful book are five areas of social discourse that require subtle ethical thinking and which are often overlooked in discussions about right and wrong because they have been considered too trivial to demand consideration. Westacott thinks that consideration of these issues helps reveal a whole range of distinctions that are vital to most contemporary lives and sheds light on the kind of social reality that most of us inhabit. It’s an intriguing, courageous and timely book with a refreshing confidence to tell us what we ought to do. Most of the time I agree with him.

So alongside ‘rudeness’, Estacott considers the morality of ‘gossip’, ’snobbery’, ‘humour’ and ‘respect’ and with forensic skill works to show how each of them can serve both positive and negative functions in our lives. He argues that any blanket condemnation of each is unjustified and actually is inconsistent with the range of other beliefs and attitudes that are considered appropriate in a modern setting. He argues that our social reality is no longer conducive to many blanket moral judgments. What he thinks we need to do is think in subtle and nuanced ways, ponder the different ways in which each of these five subjects can be used and carefully decide in each case when it can be a good thing and when morally bad.

The choice of these five things is interesting. Westacott contrasts them with the usual topics of moral debate such as abortion, war, euthanasia, murder, rape and so forth. Those topics are heavily freighted with obvious political and ethical gravitas and that can make them seem too heavy, too serious, to allow for genuine discussion, thought and open-minded juice. They are also distanced from the everyday and the immediate, moment-by-moment decisions that we are called on to make every day, everywhere all the time. So his five topics are chosen because they are genuinely important to most people most of the time and yet are often ignored, considered unworthy of serious public debate but not so heavily guarded by taboo and convention that some headway cannot be made in changing attitudes about them.

He calls them ‘microethical’ issues, and he claims that these in fact are the issues that “…take up the bulk of whatever time most of us spend in moral reflection and decision making.” He considers them important in saliently similar ways: they figure importantly in our day to day lives, they work as indicating what our true moral values and character are, and they also help flush out the character and values of our society, “the trends we are part of, the assumptions we take for granted, the ideals we cherish, and the contradictory commitments we may harbour.”

Westacott takes most of our everyday ethical thinking to be confused, simplistic, unthinkingly narrow and conventional. He takes edicts such as ‘if you can’t say something nice about someone then don’t say anything at all’ as claims of universality, statements purporting to express an ethical axiom true of all times, people and places. He condemns them.

He condemns all such blanket condemnations, such as ‘never talk about someone behind their back’ because he argues that we should replace them with a practical moral wisdom able and willing to recognise complexities rather than “spraying over them with crude precepts.”

He argues that some generalities are defensible if there are good reasons defending their universal application. “I assume without argument that telling malicious lies about other people is wrong.” He thinks that this claim is justified because the view is “conducive to individual and social well being.” And he recognises that to get his main thesis across there needs to be some stability embedded into the general framework somewhere and somehow.

Reasons are a key to his approach. His aim is to discuss the reasons we have for doing moral things so that contradictions within our commonly held moral suppositions can be exposed. From this position he then hopes to convince us to relax the rigidity of our “moral corsets” so we might “breathe more freely.”

His approach shows how language can load up ethical rigidity in unintended ways. Shorthand attempts to summarise an ethically judged phenomenon can sometimes erase nuance and can be applied to things too easily and carelessly. By swiftly calling someone a snob we close down rather than open up moral thinking about the case. And because words like ’snob’ and ’sick’ and ‘gossip’ carry connotations of disproval, they rub out any positive features of whatever is being so labeled. It is this rigidity and unthinkingness that Westacott is attacking.

Westacott therefore believes it is valuable to analyse the way these words are actually used. He shows that once we investigate them in this way we find that we actually express more than a simple, blunt disapproval when we use them. Do we want to remove the label used once this work is done? We may decide that it would be preferable if the label itself was removed after analysis and replaced by “a more discriminating labeling system, one that, say, distinguishes between different kinds of disrespect, or between acceptable and unacceptable forms of rudeness.” But thinking about the use of our labeling may alternatively be something that deepens our understanding of the labels, providing what would necessarily be a provisional and incomplete definition but one that might still help us to draw the boundaries of a concept and in so doing “yield a whole world of unexpected insights into our language, values, history, culture, and ideals.”

So it’s through a subtle philosophical conceptual analysis that Westacott approaches his task. He’s out to clarify the concepts, articulate arguments, evaluate ethical standpoints and support specific conclusions. His definitions are normative – they’re meant to evaluate and appraise what people are doing when they use them. He wants them to be able to find space for reconceiving terms that have been crudely negative as instead allowing for acceptability and praiseworthiness in some circumstances.

He generously acknowledges work by anthropologists, historians, psychologists, social scientists and cultural critics in contributing to his approach. He sees himself as supplementing those other approaches by bringing close attention to the meaning of terms and the logic of arguments to the table. Just as an astronomer will take care to know about the lenses of his telescope so as to better know the stars, so too Westacott is interrogating the language of the concepts to better understand the things themselves.

And refreshingly, his book is an exercise of normative ethics, whereby he judges whether people are right, wrong, just, unjust, fair, unfair and so on. It is an approach that doesn’t deal in certainties but rather assesses the reasonableness of ethical claims in the cases examined. It isn’t science, it isn’t a priori, it isn’t discussing absolutes or necessities. Instead it discusses whether, all things considered, “conclusions are probable, plausible, useful or insightful.”

So how do you gauge whether our views about rudeness, for example, are justifiable? Coherence is a key value that helps Westacott answer that challenge. We all have our frameworks of beliefs, and moral beliefs are asked to be largely consistent with these. Moral beliefs about the justice of slavery, for example, were defeated by such considerations, in pretty much the same way as flat-earthers have been defeated in the domain of science.

This, then, is a Naturalist approach to morality, in the tradition of Spinoza, Voltaire and Nietzsche. Morals are human, invented by us but with roots in our biological heritage. Moral systems evolved. The first moral revolutionaries were religious. The Enlightenment secularised the process. This secular approach understands morality as a tool. “It is a set of values, beliefs, principles, practices, and ideals that we use to promote certain personal and social goals.” A key assumption of Westacott’s Naturalist point of view is that it isn’t possible to demonstrate the rightness of any particular ethical view. All that can be done is to show how reasonable it is to hold these ideals given the other beliefs and assumptions one holds. In this Westacott compares moral Naturalists with Darwinians. Darwinians can’t demonstrate that they are right and Creationists are wrong. All they can do is lay out all the assumptions held as reasonable alongside evolution and then show how Darwinianism is less of a stretch than Creationism, or any other idea so far on the table.

His approach to morals is broadly Utilitarian. Minimising pain and suffering, maximising well being and thriving, that’s the basic aim of everything he believes we are doing morally. So it is from this general position that he offers his analysis of what are often considered moral failings. He shows that surprisingly sometimes behaviour disapproved of can bring utilitarian benefits. So, for example, “sick humour can be viewed as the sharp edge of an important instrument of social criticism.” He cites Adam Smith, “what is commonly viewed as a private vice may be a public virtue.” Steve Wells et al would have agreed wholeheartedly.

There’s a Nietzschean self-recognition in the appealingly modest approach; “perspectives I offer can hardly be considered a ‘revaluation of all values’” he jokes early on. But he is ballsy: he wants to shake us up, make us think again, think harder, and as a result be more forgiving, more self critical. For those of us who find that too often the rigidity of blanket moral condemnation kills dissent, conversation and humour, this is refreshing.

He chooses his targets of discussion strategically. He targets those moral dilemmas that lie between universally approved and universally disapproved beliefs. So between ‘courage is good’ and ‘murder is bad’ are many disputed beliefs. These are where he sets up tent, thinking that movement is more likely to begin in this zone than in the more entrenched areas. His view is that as society develops, this middle band is changing and needs to be further broaden to cope with the increasingly diverse and pluralist social organisations we now tend to live in. His aim is therefore to widen the zone of disputed values and to narrow the zone of universally agreed ones. His object is to destabilise moral certainty so that we may become more flexible, nuanced, nimble when we come to make moral judgments.

His view is that playing it safe and sticking to traditions and conventions is hopeless. The contemporary world is no longer a world that makes such an approach reasonable. There is too much happening, too many different kinds of people, purposes, aims, too much difference, to suppose that we can in our day to day ethical decision-making have universal knowledge of what we should do. Sticking blindly to a general principle like ‘killing is wrong’ seems to give us stability but even seemingly rock solid maxims have exceptions. Westacott is arguing for a subtle and nuanced approach to moral matters, an approach that understands fully how conflicted and confused many people feel most of the time about ethical decisions.

He recognises that most of us will get it wrong and not on just the odd occasion but lots of times and for all kinds of reasons. Any claim of moral certainty based on blanket condemnations or blanket approval is dubious because it is dubious that we have access to the relevant facts that could give reasons for such certainty. Contemporary living is largely to do with coordinating huge numbers of people and pieces of information at a pace that makes any deep contemplation a challenge. If Westacott has a general statement to make about what kind of attitude we should hold in this context, it is that we should be forgiving. Given the complicated situation, he reckons we’ll be making mistakes, and we’ll need an attitude that can recognise that often such mistakes are honest.

He judges that we should be happy that we live in the kind of world that makes this confusion possible! It’s where everything is really clear and fixed, where there is no need for moral agility, flexibility and sensitivity to different points of view, that real trouble lies.

If we take rudeness as an example of how he proceeds throughout the book we can see how his methodical and illuminating approach helps navigate the tricky world he celebrates. So he begins by drawing attention to the sort of universal, blanket condemnation that commonly characterises attitudes towards rudeness. He notes that the condemnation is often presented in terms of ‘the good ol’ days.’ Prototypically, people claim that there’s more rudeness now than in the old days. But then he notes, as a matter of historical fact, that back in the day people were saying the same thing there too. He concludes that the good ol’ days argument seems to be too promiscuous. We should find a more faithful viewpoint.

But the folk believe that rudeness is bad and more rudeness is worse. There are reasons for doubting these beliefs too. Some intentional rudeness might be good. More rudeness might therefore be better than less in certain contexts and for certain reasons. Westacott’s approach is to begin by refusing, quietly, seriously and carefully, the premises of common wisdom about these issues. And then he begins to tease out how the terms are actually used and thought about when not being characterised in such a way.

In each case he develops a working definition. He recognises that it will be provisional, unfinished, a starting point for argument and refinements along the way, but once it is accepted that this can be a useful way to figure out many of the subtleties of nuance and refinement, he accomplishes insightful and careful analyses of each with careful precision. His opening definition of rudeness, then, is “an act violating a social convention and if deliberate would indicate a lack of care for another’s feelings.” Having argued why this is a good starting point he uses it to show how something as simple as this definition can help map out a complicated terrain.

He gives eight different species of rudeness developed from his definition as a kind of exhaustive taxonomy. Accordingly, you can be rude in situations where you don’t know the convention but you ought to have done; where you don’t know the convention and cannot be reasonably expected to know it; where you know the convention, are not aware of violating it, but ought to be; where you know the convention, are not aware of violating it, but your lack of awareness is excusable; where you know the convention, are aware of violating it but are not purposely being rude; where you know the convention, are aware of violating it, but are not purposively being rude and the violation is excusable; where you know the convention, are aware of violating it, and are purposively being rude; and finally where you know the convention, are aware of it and you are purposively but justifiably being rude.

For each of the above, he gives examples and discusses hard cases. By doing this he shows surprising results that at first seem counterintuitive but upon reflection are at the very least not as obviously mistaken as they seemed initially. So for example, using his approach, a heinously wrong act like rape becomes a matter of rudeness. This immediately strikes you as being just inept, until you consider that his approach is not saying that rape is just a matter of rudeness. Rape is much, much more serious than rudeness and involves transgressing much larger moral values, but nevertheless rape includes, alongside these other more serious ethical problems, rudeness. We should of course avoid pragmatic infelicities of condemning rape for its rudeness. But his analysis has the benefit of denying that there could ever be a polite rapist. The analysis brings up the complexities of our everyday moral thinking, and helps illuminate how layered and unobvious some of our moral intuitions are.

When rudeness is used as a statement of criticism he is particularly useful. Challenging convention can be a socially useful and even necessary function of rudeness. The Arab Spring wouldn’t be happening without rudeness. Nor would the Wall Street Occupation. He uses the story of when Goethe and Beethoven were strolling along and some toffs came walking towards them to illustrate this. Goethe follows the convention of the day and moves aside but Beethoven ploughs rudely on through the middle of them. “There are thousands of them, but only two of us” growled Beethoven in explanation.

Humour uses rudeness and it’s interesting to ask whether therefore it is real rudeness or mock rudeness. Westacott uses the interesting idea of ‘onside’ and ‘offside’ rudeness to capture the idea that mock rudeness can tip into real rudeness. But what’s important for him is what the humorous use of rudeness, however you classify it, reveals about the society you’re in. He links it to teasing whereby we establish, affirm and strengthen bond of friendship. The french fries test asks; ‘would you take a french fry from another person’s plate without asking them first?’ Calling someone an idiot is often a sign of good friendship just as taking someone’s fries without asking can be too. So here’s a case of rudeness that’s ok but of course, it is a use that is fraught with dangers. Miscalculate and you cause offense. And in a social setting that is constantly changing and where it isn’t always clear what social bonds are operating, mistakes will be made. Awareness of this should help us adopt a more forgiving attitude when the inevitable faux pas happens.

Alongside bonding, rudeness can enable people to engage with controversial issues within safe parameters. He says, “One does not need to be a dyed in the wool Nietzschean to recognise that bantering is commonly antagonistic.” And of course, the mock offense can again spill into genuine offense.

He gives other examples of good rudeness. In teaching, the sergeant major insults his raw recruits to toughen them up and builds up a bond of camaraderie. Interestingly, he argues that this kind of conventional rudeness was once common but now is frowned upon as a sign of increasing incivility! There is irony in this. How so?

As conventions change then confusion increases, like that regarding the role of rudeness in teaching. The complaint against once common practice often misunderstands the role of rudeness in the past and its carefully contextually-bound and justified uses. Westacott suggests that the idea that we are increasingly uncivil follows from the perceived decline in conventions but argues that this is to be misled by the perception. He argues that not only are rigid conventions difficult to retain in the sort of pluralistic and ever shifting, dynamic societies we now live in, but counting the erosion of such rigidity as a measure of moral decline mistakenly identifies what is actually occurring. For Westacott, offense is an unavoidable by-product of moral progress. It’s the price we pay for living in a dynamic culture. “The struggle to claim equal rights for ethnic minorities, women, and gays would never have got off the ground if people had eschewed any action likely to cause offense.”

He opposes the Confucian ideal of a rooted stability. This ideal is merely an idealised longing and even if it was ever historically true it is a hopeless dream today. People are no less moral than before, it’s just far more complicated to be morally correct now. There is no stable set of conventions we can use. What we do have is the ability to think of the reasons we have for taking the actions we do. We shouldn’t look for any nostalgic Confucian ideal but rather use the smarter situation we’re in “to self consciously establish social conventions that adequately express our values (for instance, a judicious egalitarianism), foster sound moral attitudes (for instance, respect for persons, tolerance for different lifestyles), and facilitate understanding. We should also, where possible, establish conventions that contribute to making our world more beautiful.”

This is his approach to all five areas of micro-moral quandary. It is incisive, thoughtful, analytical and very well written. He is nuanced and subtle and therefore there’s a sense that you, as a reader, are being taken on a very refined and smart tour of complex and interesting terrain. If there’s one chapter where I felt my intuitions going in different directions than his it was in the chapter on snobbery. I wasn’t sure his definition really got to the heart of the matter and because of that his subsequent discussion seemed compromised a little by being, well, a bit snobby itself. But that is a strength of the book. It provokes its readers to think about these matters and it’s unlikely that there could ever be exactly overlapping moral intuitions about these things from everyone. And given that Westacott has written an example of normative ethics where the whole point is to try and say what we should be doing then of course it’s going to provoke disagreement some way along the line.

The benefits of his rigorous approach can be seen if we return briefly to the iconoclastic Attack! Book project mentioned at the start and see what Westacott’s analysis illuminates. It is clear from this analysis that the rudeness of those writers was about them knowing the convention, being aware of it and purposively but justifiably being rude about it. Blanket condemnation of the project would not be justified. The moral purpose of the venture, something very much part of Steve Wells’s approach to everything he did, is vindicated.

And having read the chapter about the uses of sick humour, these writers were again spot on. Westacott’s discussion of humour is refined and deep, taking in the likes of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter, Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Ronald de Sousa’s The Rationality of Emotion and Simon Critchley’s On Humour. And he’s happy to tell us which jokes we should find funny and those which we shouldn’t. And it’s sick humour, the humour of childish transgression, that probably fits the Attack! Book genre best. He even tells a good sick joke: “‘Mummy mummy, what’s for dinner?’ ‘Shut up and get back in the oven.’”

There’s a Nietzschean analysis hovering around this where he argues that sometimes the source of the humour in a sick joke is connected to an awareness of the will to power. It is out of this that he argues pleasure can be aroused “… by infants, lapdogs, defeated opponents, executioners, someone else’s failed marriage, and every kind of schadenfreude.” For Nietzsche it is natural to relish health, and the sickness is “the bad conscience we suffer from when we find ourselves enjoying our sense of superiority.” Freudian transgression is another source of pleasure. And overall the historical purpose of the sick jokes of Attack! Books (and the subsequent Neo-Attack! Books of Jonny Pulp that Swells edited and supported) can be celebrated, in the words of Westacott, as “a symptom of cultural dynamism. For it perhaps indicates a historical trajectory away from a society constrained by traditional notions of the sacred and the taboo.”

Westacott’s book ends with a grand paragraph: “In the twenty-first century, the moral parameters of a modern outlook include a principle of equality and the idea of basic civil rights. That is why we would not now entertain for even a moment the suggestion that slavery be revived: the idea is beyond the pale of respectability, not worthy of our attention. And in the theoretical domain, too, there are limits to what we can take seriously as knowledge. One of these is a commitment to some form of naturalism; so claims that refer to supernatural phenomena, to entities not susceptible to any sort of empirical investigation, are off our epistemic radar, as are bizarre, unsupported assertions that contradict the mass of scientific evidence. People are free to believe what they want, of course, but not every belief deserves to be taken seriously as a candidate for truth. Withholding epistemic respect at times is one of the ways we express our current intellectual values and try to advance a little further toward a more rational society.”

I’m writing this as police clear the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park. We’re needing Swells right now. Westacott gives us the good reasons.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Anyone that receives a rudimentary education in the western world, or at least in the places I know anything about, is taught that poetry is like vitamins – it’s good for you. It’ll enlighten your mind, make you more aware of your emotions, your sensibilities, the entire scope of your inner life. It is the “highest of art forms” – so sublime that it can hardly be viewed with human eyes, read with human brains. It’s extremely difficult to understand and just to grasp the littlest bits of it requires a life-long commitment.

While none of this is necessarily untrue, the same argument could as easily be applied to rock’n’roll, to movies – to the whole boatload of “popular culture” that we (as a society) simultaneously love and loathe. Many of the so-called simple songs of the Eurovision Song Contest are in fact complex constructions that meld super-produced pop-genres with ethnic music, the history of which reaches thousands of years into the past of the participating countries. And yet you’ll never hear anyone say they didn’t quite “understand” the Armenian song – that its use of musical intricacies simply left you baffled. Very few people ask of pop-music that it should be more simple, or that movies should not have so many jump-cuts, should not be shot from weird angles or with unnatural camera movements. Quite the contrary, we’ve completely embraced all of popular-culture’s complexities, so much so that they’ve become utterly mundane – we don’t even notice them without a conscious effort to do so.

And yet, when it comes to literature in general, and poetry in particular, most people’s first reaction is to not “understand” it – giving up before you’ve tried is the name of the game – no matter how often poets and writers try to emphasize that you are in fact not meant to “understand” it. This is one of the problems of making art with and through language, a medium we first and foremost see as a vehicle for information – it’s what we use to communicate our thoughts. It’s how I tell you that I’m hungry, how you give me directions, and so forth. But poetry doesn’t work like that. Ludwig Wittgenstein (a practitioner of that other “difficult” art: philosophy) once said: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”

This misunderstanding is also why so many poems of poets that don’t read much poetry have more to do with anecdote or lineated prose, than they have to do with poetry – I feel like this [insert metaphor-cliché] and then I feel like that [insert metaphor-cliché] – and even more experienced poets often don’t seem able (or willing) to ever stray from the realm of the metaphor, the most basic of poetic tools (metaphor is to poetry, as 4/4 is to rock’n’roll).

In this manner a lot of the poetry that people find “difficult”, can seem very simple ditties to anyone that spends time reading it. Juxtapositioning one pretty image with the next, jumping between the lilies of the ponds – it’s not rocket science, and it’s not cross-word puzzles (i.e. you’re NOT supposed to “solve” it – it doesn’t “mean”, it is “mean”). It’s “Layla”, “A Hard Day’s Night” – but it’s also Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Atari Teenage Riot, African tribal music and “Mack the Knife”. You can have your pick of the litter.

Imagine for a minute that your experience of poetry was the same as your experience with music, that it was everywhere – that there was no way of escaping it. Literacy of poetry, like literacy of pop-music, movies etc. is an acquired skill and “complex” is a very relative term. It’s of note that the more anyone listens to music the more complex their taste becomes, the less anyone listens to music, the more mainstream their taste. The same goes for poetry.

The bottomline is this: Poetry is not vitamins, and you’re not going to shrivel up and die if you don’t get regular doses of it. It’s not (necessarily) any more difficult than pop-music. And you don’t need it. You can, I’m sure, live a very decent life without it. I’ve seen it done. And although you’ll miss out on the fun, that never killed anyone.

[Editor's note - this essay is taken from Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl's just published (in english) collection of essays and columns about poetry, literature, literary politics, called 'Booby, Be Quiet!' (a very learnéd reference to Auden's translation of the Eddas) with poEsia.

The book is currently available on the poEsia website via: http://www.norddahl.org/english/2011/10/booby-be-quiet/ but it can also be downloaded as a pdf for free, though a donation is appreciated.

It’s a breathtaking collection of criticism from one of Europe’s most exciting poetic practitioners and theorists and stands as one of the most vital contributions to innovative poetry criticism in Europe's recent history.]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet, novelist and translator. He has published three novels and five books of poetry with a forthcoming collection entitled Fist or words bereft of sense (Hnefi eða vitstola orð). He is a founding member of the Nýhil poetry cooperative and instigator of the Nýhil Poetry Festival.

Scenes from Provincial Life, J.M. Coetzee, Harvill Secker 2011

Whom do we hear speaking in the following sentence?  “For a man of his age, fifty two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well”. The self-justifying tone of the opening clause, the rhetorical qualification ‘to his mind’, the telling definite article in ‘the problem of sex’, suggest an inflection on the part of the character in question. But the journalistic parenthesis ‘fifty two, divorced’, to say nothing of the fact that it is written in the third person, sounds more like the author spatchcocking in some background information to chivvy his narrative along. The voice is neither straightforwardly that of the author nor that of the character. It occupies, though the use of Flaubert’s style indirect libre, a space between the two that allows both for critical detachment and internal access.

The above, the opening sentence of Disgrace, might be cited in a creative writing course as a textbook example of a modern literary style (though the uses to which Coetzee puts it are anything but). Coetzee retains a reputation for this kind of minimal, slightly frosty precision, surgically dissecting his characters while maintaining all along an unflinching distance and restraint. Passages such as the above play out the uncertain relationship between the narrator and narrated in their every word, and this dynamic has been one of the key points of tension throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre. Indeed, his very first novel, Dusklands, begins with a narrator who labours under the gaze of a military supervisor named Coetzee. (First sentence: “Coetzee has asked me to revise my essay”).

In fact, Coetzee’s major works present us with a series of protagonists that increasingly resemble the author, shrinking the distance between narrator and narrated: A bookish magistrate in the colonies (Waiting for the Barbarians); a female classics professor at the University of Cape Town (Age of Iron); a literature professor at a fictional university in Cape Town (Disgrace); a famous novelist who campaigns for animal rights (Elizabeth Costello); an elderly South African author living in Adelaide called Senor C (Diary of a Bad Year). The progression towards characters such as Elizabeth Costello and Senor C, who serve as proxies for the author figure – whose views, though slightly displaced, parodied or exaggerated, increasingly approximate those Coetzee has endorsed as a critic – is a progression towards the self as subject. Coetzee has stated his belief that ‘all writing is autobiography’ on more than one occasion and in his recent works there has been a growing tendency to cut out the fictional middleman.

This narcissistic focus in Coetzee’s fiction reaches its logical destination in his three fictionalized autobiographies – or as he has termed them, autrebiographies – Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, collected here for the first time as Scenes from Provincial Life. A major project published over a 12-year period, the volumes see Coetzee adapting his novelistic techniques to tell the story of three distinct, formative periods in his life: his childhood and early teenage years spent in uninspiring 1950s South Africa; his early twenties as a gauche would-be poet masquerading as a computer programmer in 1960s London; and the inauspicious outset of his literary career in the early 1970s, in which we find a bedraggled Coetzee living in suburban obscurity with his father.

Coetzee has indicated that he did not originally conceive of the project as a trilogy, and Summertime represents a departure from its predecessors in both content and form. Whereas Boyhood and Youth deal with events that correspond in outline with those of Coetzee’s life, by the time we get to Summertime he has abandoned biographical fact to the extent of actually killing himself off. Summertime takes the form of a series of interviews, conducted by a young English biographer, with four women and one man who played a role in the life of the recently deceased novelist John Coetzee, alongside some unfinished fragments from his notebooks. What’s more, Coetzee has also altered other crucial biographical details. For example, though in the 1972 in which Summertime begins his father is already a widower, Coetzee’s mother Vera did not actually die until 1985; the John of the novel is a hopeless bachelor, yet by this point in his life the real Coetzee was married with children.

Certainly, if Coetzee’s persona has been treated to an artistic make-over he does not emerge from it with any great credit. Morphing from an intense and earnest child in Boyhood, to a pretentious, self-absorbed outcast in Youth and an inscrutable misfit in Summertime, Coetzee is portrayed as cold and introverted, a tragi-comic loner. A common theme is his failure to connect, emotionally or sexually, with women. For all his social ineptitude, the young Coetzee does his share of shagging around, but the result is generally anticlimactic. One youthful tryst ends with a trip to an illegal abortionist, another with a squeamish Coetzee unceremoniously ejecting a recently deflowered maiden in the middle of the night, leading to much recrimination. One particularly cringe-inducing episode in Summertime sees Coetzee attempt to induce a bemused lover to have sex to the rhythm of a Schubert string quintet. ‘Empty your mind!’ he hissed at me. ‘Feel through the music!’”

As well as being a recurrent theme, this failure to connect - the inability of the individual to truly know and be known - is in a sense the very basis for the narrative forms that Coetzee employs. Coetzee has stated that any autobiography is autrebiography (the biography of another), and this distance is maintained throughout the first two volumes of the trilogy by Coetzee’s alienating use of the third-person, present historical tense. In the first instance, Coetzee’s use of the third person constitutes an anti-confessional disavowal on the part of the author of the experiences the text recounts. This distance is accentuated by the present tense, liberating us from the controlled fictional environment of the preterit which, as Barthes famously observed, “Presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines”. In Coetzee’s hands the present historical creates a sense of detachment and disavowal, a narrative gaze - drained of ownership, affiliation or value - that merely describes.

In Summertime the gap between text and reality is widened by Coetzee’s use of distancing effects that make it difficult to straightforwardly attribute the words we read to a given character. The interviews are fancifully rewritten by Coetzee’s English biographer, in a style that is utterly indistinguishable from that of Coetzee’s novels. As in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives – also consisting of a series of documentary-style interviews about the two characters that form its subject – the real thoughts and experiences of Coetzee’s fictional persona remain inscrutable to us. Rather than giving us the convenient all-areas access of the conventional literary novel, Summertime places the reader in the tricky position of never knowing for sure whom or what to believe. The English biographer functions, in James Wood’s terms, as an ‘unreliably unreliable narrator’ – he undermines the veracity of the words that we read to an extent that is impossible to pin down.

The danger in Coetzee’s insistence upon distance and his resistance to straightforward confessional writing is the accusation – levelled against some of his novels – that for all their precision and ingenuity they are ultimately formalist exercises. Let it not be forgotten that this is a man whose PhD thesis involved designing computer programs to analyse patterns in the recurrence of words, phrases and grammatical constructions in Samuel Beckett’s prose. As Coetzee the author writes of Coetzee the character in Youth: “If there were a department of Pure Thought at the university he would probably enrol in Pure Thought too; but pure mathematics appears to be the closest approach the academy affords to the realm of forms”. While we may admire the subtlety and inventiveness of Coetzee’s writing, there are nonetheless times when we, as the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said of Nabokov, hear the clatter of surgical tools.

The difference in the Coetzee of Scenes From Provincial Life is that, while the surrogate he creates may not always be likeable – indeed Coetzee often seems to go to self-flagellating lengths to ensure that he isn’t – and for all the obstacles he places in the way of a confessional reading, we still hear an unmistakable authorial investment reverberating through the echo chamber of Coetzee’s formal distancing effects. Indeed, it is an emotion intensified by the insurmountability of the barriers that prevent it being confronted more directly. Rather than being tacked on as an affectation, the sense of alienation from the past created by these narrative forms – the inability to unify the self as constructed by memory, the memory as constructed by self, the text as constructed by memory, and the self as constructed by text – is in itself the subject, and it is one to which we can relate. Just as Proust’s striving for a past that remains tantalisingly inaccessible is an essentially pathetic exercise, so Coetzee’s alienated autobiographies speak to a wider alienation from the self that transcends the works’ formal cleverness and elevates them way above the realm of pure technique.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danny Byrne is a journalist based in London. He has written reviews for ReadySteadyBook and BookGeeks, and blogs here. He studied literature at Oxford and UCL. Twitter: @dannysbyrne

]]> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/autobiography-as-defacement/feed/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/megan-boyle-embarrassability/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/megan-boyle-embarrassability/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:26:08 +0000 Susan Tomaselli http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/?p=42072 I’d say embarrassability is the keynote of Boyle’s writing, rather than embarrassment, because it’s her uninhibitedness about inhibition that gives her poetry its energy and interest. It’s a bit like embarrassment is the backing track to which sometimes Boyle’s in tune, and sometimes she’s not at all, right down the opposite end of the keyboard, stomping out “unabashed”. So if ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’ is unabashed, all the ‘i probably sound stupid right now’ etcs are back in tune with the backing track. Colin Herd reviews Megan Boyle's selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee.]]> By Colin Herd.

selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, Megan Boyle, Muumuu House 2011

Keats is sometimes thought of as an embarrassing poet. Pejoratively by his detractors (a little too indulgent, too romantic and not enough restrained) but also positively by those, such as Christopher Ricks in his 1974 book Keats and Embarrassment, who see potential in embarrassment as a literary value. Embarrassment can be the result of a breakdown in communication, a recognition of not being at-one with those around you, and an awareness that linguistic communication is not a simple AtoB transference. Or it can be the blush of visible discomfort at categorisation. I blush, for example, when the man who showed me and my boyfriend round his flat the other day said, casually, and in a sweet well-meaning way, ‘I don’t suppose it would interest you but there are very good schools in the area.’ And embarrassment is also an undermining of stable selfhood, a gesture that the self is disrupted, unwritten, incomplete. All of which seems relevant to Megan Boyle’s debut full-length collection selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, the newest release from Tao Lin’s Muumuu House, a press whose writers have often and kind of unthoughtfully I reckon, been dismissed as self-indulgent and embarrassing.

A sense of the threshold between public/private is inscribed into the ungainly, awkward and, I may as well say it, embarrassing title of the book. What does ‘unpublished’ mean, when you have the book in your hands? Unpublished as ‘blog posts’, I guess, but publishable as poems, which suggests the poem as a kind of permissible space, free from the kind of embarrassment a blog post might cause. Except it’s not entirely free, the membrane between public and private or art and life or whatever not quite so stretchy, as in the poem ‘embarrassing moments’,

email from my dad saying he’s read ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’ (age 23)

where ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’ is a poem of Boyle’s, also in this book.

As with other Muumuu House publications, Boyle’s writing is both intensely personal and detachedly monotonous; even, in her employment of the list poem (and so many of these poems read like list poems even when they’re not): programmatic. In ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’, which for me is one of the book’s stand-outs, she uses the basic format of Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’, i.e. an act of recall, and she’s taken it somewhere via Dodie Bellamy’s ‘The Debbies I have Known’ to an uninhibited catalogue of men, women, boyfriends, anonyms, boyfriends’s brothers etc, punctuated in a really unsettling and repetitive way by the detail of whether or not condoms were used. I can’t help but find this poem extraordinarily moving, in spite of itself and beyond its disarmingly simple structure, complex and indefinably frightening, as well as funny, pleasingly outrageous and weirdly engrossing. It’s got to be something about the sketchy matter of fact details and a sense of emotionality that isn’t outright addressed and all the more haunting for it:

jess: jess is a girl and she gave me my first orgasm from another person. we hooked up twice. we were really good friends. i wish we hooked up more. i wish we were still friends. it felt weird giving oral sex to a girl, like my head was above my body and was surfing or something. I don’t know how to describe it.

Something about the short sentences and the gaps between just bows with meaning and emotion etc even in the act of foregoing much description of emotional attachments or significance. It’s like when someone asks you if you’re upset and the very act of telling them you’re not upset somehow makes you upset, even if you weren’t before. Boyle’s poems hang around on the cusp of meaning and emotional significance:

some moments are not meaningful at all

‘meaningful’ is not the right word and neither is ‘introspective’, it’s a word that exists between those words

i think some moments exist to be simple sentences that don’t necessarily have a greater purpose than to be exactly what they are

I’d say embarrassability is the keynote of Boyle’s writing, rather than embarrassment, because it’s her uninhibitedness about inhibition that gives her poetry its energy and interest. It’s a bit like embarrassment is the backing track to which sometimes Boyle’s in tune, and sometimes she’s not at all, right down the opposite end of the keyboard, stomping out “unabashed”. So if ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’ is unabashed, all the ‘i probably sound stupid right now’ etcs are back in tune with the backing track.

You get the sense of enormous attention being paid to the surface of her poems, which is as it should be, the surface being the province of the blush, and Boyle does the blush on the textual surface of the poem as well as anybody:

last night i got drunk and cleaned my room, it was okay

i don’t know why i just wrote ‘it was okay’

i think it was because it would make that line look complete

that line was a little too long

that one was a little too short

but since they were together it looked okay

that line just interrupted the ‘flow’ thing i had going on

so did that line

and this one

that one ‘brought it back’ okay

A textual disruption or flush that seems like a blemish but isn’t, it’s just a temporary, vanishing, un-pin-downable blush. Mimicking (or not mimicking I don’t know) a kind of neurotic, obsessive talkativeness, the poem’s surface is shattered and then put back together within a couple of lines, as if someone edited the film Titanic so that just as it rears up and is about to break in two, it actually sailed back into the water reconnected and carried on to New York. Just so as you realise there even is a surface, and it’s maybe cool and programmatic but it’s temporary and fragile too.

If anywhere it was obvious that the self is unwritten (unpublished) and fragmentary, then that place is the internet. Boyle’s is a book of lyric poetry when ‘everyone is searching for something on petfinder and craigslist’. It’s a book of coming of age poetry when coming of age means “i will be 24 in october/ 24/ starring kiefer sutherland”. It’s a book of confessional poetry when confession is the mode of “professional blogging assholes”. I mean, it’s an embarrassing book of poetry. But embarrassment has its value.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colin Herd lives and writes in Edinburgh. He is co-editor of Anything Anymore Anywhere. Poems have appeared in Shampoo, Streetcake, Velvet Mafia, Gutter and Pop Serial, and reviews in the blog of Chroma journal. His chapbook, Like, is published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press and his poetry collection, too ok, by BlazeVOX.

]]> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/megan-boyle-embarrassability/feed/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/luminous-hours/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/luminous-hours/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:56:02 +0000 Susan Tomaselli http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/?p=41973 Her late style is spare, sentences stand as their own stanzas/paragraphs, mesmerising rhythms propel her attempts to reckon with grief through words. In Blue Nights, she reads Auden, Eliot, Stevens and Quintana’s schoolgirl verse makes well-judged appearances. The child lists “Mom’s sayings” but Didion appropriates things her daughter said - “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it” - and her questions - “Where did the morning went?” - acquire significance with hindsight. Lines recur, sometimes within inverted commas, sometimes in italics, sometimes in standard type, which makes us consider the fluidity of recollection, reverie and its representation. Max Liu reviews Joan Didion's Blue Nights.]]> By Max Liu.

Blue Nights, Joan Didion, 4th Estate 2011

The final chapter of Joan Didion’s new memoir echoes the opening of her previous one. “When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast,” she writes in Blue Nights. The Year of Magical Thinking began, “Life changes fast.” The new sentence is fine but the old one rings truer and the same distinction applies to the two books.

Following the death of Quintana, her adopted daughter, the recently-widowed Didion resolved to “maintain momentum’ until frailty exposed her folly. Momentum is an unlikely problem for a writer whose prose fizzes with repetition and builds to poetic denouements, but Blue Nights is fast in the social sense too. Hollywood friends, famous hotels, exclusive schools, the French Riviera and Hawaii provide a ritzy backdrop. Didion, however, “will not easily cop” to the charge of privilege:

“Privilege” is a judgement.
“Privilege” is an opinion.
“Privilege” is an accusation.

To regard Quintana thus, she suggests, is “uncharitable” because of “what she endured.” Didion is profound on the “muddled impulses that go hand in hand with adoption,” but in a world where the privately-educated monopolise influence and opportunity, lack of charity isn’t something to which readers should easily cop. “Privilege” is having the means to remember that there are higher things than privilege. Her defensiveness is ill-timed, unedifying.

Martin Amis calls Didion, “the poet of California.” Her late style is spare, sentences stand as their own stanzas/paragraphs, mesmerising rhythms propel her attempts to reckon with grief through words. In Blue Nights, she reads Auden, Eliot, Stevens and Quintana’s schoolgirl verse makes well-judged appearances. The child lists “Mom’s sayings” but Didion appropriates things her daughter said - “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it” - and her questions - “Where did the morning went?” - acquire significance with hindsight. Lines recur, sometimes within inverted commas, sometimes in italics, sometimes in standard type, which makes us consider the fluidity of recollection, reverie and its representation. Quintana’s jarring use of “exactly” is, knowingly or not, emulated by Didion in one of several daughter/mother echoes.

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down,” she famously said. Early in her career she described herself as “inarticulate” before expressing doubts about a generation that invented the term “broken home.” Forty years on, would she use such language? I ask because, while she has always excelled at looking behind her own motivations and others’, her inquiries here lack their usual incision. “Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?” Give yourself a break, I wanted to say. “Did we ask her (Quintana) to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so?” The author might answer herself twenty pages later when she’s being more acute: “As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.”

From hospital windows, Didion watches ice floes on the East River and on the Hudson. America’s decline may be exaggerated but is there, in the freezing drifts that surround Manhattan, the crumbling of an empire? Are the blue lights - “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning” - yet to come or have they receded? “You may see nothing still to be lost,” is her penultimate sentence but, as with the culture Didion has documented for half-a-century, there remains lots to be lost and lots to be saved. For all its faults, this is not a book that you want to end.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Max Liu is a writer and journalist. He lives in North London where he is at work on a novel and a collection of autobiographical essays.

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