Grand Hotel Abyss

There’s some shit going round the academo-blogosphere (office hours of the soul!) about the decline and fall of literary studies as an academic discipline.  External factors play a large role of course: corporate Stalinism dictates that all monies will be spent erecting shiny silver and glass buildings to house the graduate school of business and the biomedical center for the production of new diseases to be treated by the pharmaceutical companies rather than clearing the asbestos out of the English professors’ offices.  And some of the internal factors in the fall of literary studies are symptoms of this problem rather than problems strictly endemic to the discipline’s, um, ‘logic,’ as we’ve come to say in literary studies.  The problem remains, however, even if it’s not much of a problem compared to what other people are going through.  

And what is the problem?  Well, as an insider, I would diagnose it this way: undergraduates (and I’m talking about English majors) don’t know how to read a literary text and we are not teaching them.  They can, by and large, say nothing whatsoever about tone, about literary tradition, about formal structures, and this is not their fault: they are following the cues of their instructors, particularly the young ones, who were themselves reared in a tradition of the most boring and finally pointless historicism.  Not a politically engaged historicism nor a philosophically informed one; neither Benjamin’s seizing of a flash from the past in a moment of danger in order to lend strength to a liberatory politics, nor Auerbach’s sweepingly inductive text-based cultural analyses, no, none of this.  Rather instead we have a procession of ‘recovered’ texts, recovered to no obvious purpose except to ‘complicate’ our notion of this or that, which texts then get used in an intellectually illegitimate fashion to say something about some giant topic (capitalism, empire, war) which would be much better remarked upon using the techniques of historical inquiry rather than masked behind a patina of literary criticism.  Some wag parodied the circumstance decisively by characterizing all current job talks as being about ‘novels written by pirates.’  Which wouldn’t bother me (I come not to defend any canon) if those job talks weren’t actually armchair attempts to do an anthropology of pirates based on some novels.  If you want to do anthropolgy, get off your ass!  Literary criticism is not anthropology, nor should it pretend to be.  

What is to be done?  I have one revolutionary proposal to urge: we in literary studies, unless we are actually involved in the preservation or editing of texts, must cease to see ourselves as scholars and must cease to characterize our pedagogical or critical work as having anything to do with the production of knowledge.  We don’t produce knowledge.  If it’s knowledge you want to produce, you should spend your time reading non-fiction books.  If you want to spend your time reading poetry instead, and only in this scientistic society could that be seen as a worthless pursuit, then you should realize that you primarily are in the business of producing affect and creating values.  The education we provide is of the sentiments fully as much as of the intellect; indeed, literature should be that discourse which recognizes no dissociation of sensibility.  To do this properly, one must attend to the text to understand the nuances of its affective power (and intellectual power as well) rather than ramming some historical factoids into its gaps for the hell of it, for want of anything better to do.  Again, I don’t care about canons and I’m not against imaginative historicism.  But I’m not a historian and history is made out of other things than literature, and vice versa.

M. John Harrison (brilliant author, in case you don’t know, of The Course of the Heart and Light) wonders what comes after postmodernism. He writes in his comments section:

I’m only saying that pomo’s had its day as the Great Interrogator, time to look for the next one. Anything that opposes itself to a seamless theory is bound to look, at first, like a return to one of the many competing theories it has selected as its patsies; & pomo, like all the paradigms which preceded it, has many clever rhetorical patches for every possible kind of puncture. It’s been almost as busy in that respect as the Catholic church. At the moment it’s in its predictable Maoist phase, horror of the counter revolution–bound to happen, given that most of its adherents are in their 40s. All paradigms have a vested interest in claiming that they can’t possibly be replaced except by a return to some kind of demonised old days. That’s essentially a threat. But things move along despite it. Who knows what shape they’ll take ?

The reminds me of something Roger at Limited ,Inc. wrote a few weeks ago about people who had truly followed the examples of Foucault and Derrida. When I read that, I wondered what it must be like to be of a generation that experiences Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault as liberating. For me, I only experienced that material as a body of settled dogma to be genuflected toward and then ignored as far as possible.

But there are phases within phases. Postmodernism has been steadily ending and something has been steadily taking its place over the course of the last decade, but it’s difficult, I think, to perceive, unless we impose a somewhat artificial regime of connection among all levels of culture.

The end of postmodernism comes in the mid-to-late ’90s, when it dissolves into mysticism. Remember the ’90s? When Roma Downey was touched by an angel every week just as Mulder and Scully assiduously pursued the truth “out there”? At the same time, Grant Morrison received his communication in Nepal from the fifth-dimensional entities who unveiled the mysteries of spacetime to him while Alan Moore entertained a visit from the demon Asmodeus. And don’t think this is some merely low-culture matter: the gnostic black madonna brought the girls back to life at the end of Toni Morrison’s Paradise too, and the great novel of the decade, DeLillo’s Underworld, culminated in the visions of Sister Edgar and the miracle of Esmerelda. And academia witnessed the elevation of Walter Benjamin, the Marxist who found his revolution in a gnostic theology, to near-saint status.

After this ascension of the spirit, the turn of the millennium clapped like disapproving thunder in every realm: the swaggering macho neo-Hegeleninism of Zizek in academic philosophy, nu-metal and rap metal in pop music, the rise of Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis ultraviolence in comics, and in politics, most obviously, the phony declaration of war between the neoconservatives and their enemy-ally Islamic warriors. After the goddess-worshipping faux-pacific wisdom of the ’90s comes a masculinist stance of violence for its own sake, with or without reference to some telos which will obviously never be arrived at. And now I think people are sick of this, sick of the wars, sick of the posture.

Where do we find ourselves culturally now? Is there any text I could point to that might suggest where we’re headed next? I think there is. Going back to the ’90s, we can find something new coming in texts as disparate as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the (admittedly very conservative and not really to my taste) novels of Michel Houellebecq. And now we have the pop philosophy of John Gray and the artpop music of Joanna Newsom. What is it on the horizon? I think it’s a kind of neo-paganism, not in the key of goddess-worshipping boosterism, but one rather that embraces a Homerically tragic sense of life coupled with a pro-pleasure attitude. The Real is acknowledged as that which will eventually bring the darkness down over one’s eyes. In the meantime, one’s creativity is to be cultivated and ethical standards, but not necessarily global or natural ones, are to be maintained. I’m not necessarily advocating this, though I find it attractive, and I find that its crytpo-Saidian Tory Anarchism comports better than a more ideologically-frought rebellion with my own preference for socialism in economics, anarchism in politics, sex-and-gender radicalism in culture and a certain classicism in aesthetics.

Well, anyway, that’s my best guess. And go read IOZ’s post of yesterday for a good example of what this looks like as an honest-to-goodness first-rate poem: “The Defeatists”.

(Caveat: I said already my scheme was artificial, and of course, for example, Gaiman could be subsumed under pomo mysticism just as Benjamin could work his way to some kind of neo-paganism and Houellebecq could be an instance of the new millennial violence. This is just a little exercise in cultural diagnosis, not to be taken too too seriously.)

Today I finished J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. This is the second Coetzee novel I’ve read, the first being the harrowing, controversial Disgrace. I’ve also browsed around a lot in his later criticism, that collected in Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

I would say anecdotally that he is a major figure for my generation of writers and intellectuals. Why? Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote of those authors whose works the ephebe was safe in reading an hour before he or she took up the pen. Coetzee is such a writer. His style is one, in Joyce’s phrase, of scrupulous meanness. The scrupulousness, not the meanness, makes him an essential figure in an age of cant and bombast. Whatever his other virtues and vices, the knowledge of the value of words for which he praised Defoe in one of his essays makes him appealing after an orgy of the vatic/phatic in international novels and high theory.

In Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee describes the journey of a hare-lipped Coloured man from Cape Town to the country and—after passing through several labor and re-education camps—back again during a civil war in South Africa. The first and longest part of the novel gives K’s journey, first with his mother and then with her ashes, up through his sojourn in the re-education camp in attentive, descriptive, quiet prose through K’s eyes. This section reaches its climax when, after escaping a labor camp back to the abandoned farm where his mother may or may not have been born, he grows his own pumpkins by dark of night while hiding out by day in a burrow. In these pages, Coetzee recalls Defoe in his careful descriptions of tools and labor, and attains an unanticipatedly high register in his evocation of K’s attunement to the earth and its cycles.

Eventually, he is captured by the army, who suspect him of guarding supplies for rebels. They send him to the second camp, and his stay there occupies the novel’s second section, narrated this time by the doctor in the camp, an educated white man of liberal sympathies. The imprisoned, starving K refuses to eat, telling the doctor that after the pumpkins he has grown, no other food tastes good. The doctor’s confrontation with this refusal, and with K’s seeming freedom from all teleologies, prompts him to what amounts to an eloquent paraphrase of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (AKA “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It’s hard to say whether we’re meant to sympathize with the doctor’s reading of K’s life as an allegory for how meaning can erupt into a system without being claimed by the system’s terms. He wants so badly to be K, but can only describe him—largely in the terms of other systems, which perhaps lends more aesthetic credibility to the echoes of Kafka and Benjamin. It reminds me a bit of Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Wordsworth, in which the latter’s “egotistical sublime” was reduced, justly or unjustly, to sheer moral obtuseness.

In the brief final section, K returns to Capetown and meets up with some shady characters: a man demonic in his sense of fun, accompanied by his sisters, who may or may not be merely his whores. One of them gives K a blowjob, an experience that brings him shame, before he returns to his mother’s small room to rest, fantasizing about finding company on his journey to freedom from all the “camps” springing up to claim human beings.

This aspect of the novel famously disturbed Nadine Gordimer’s admiration for it back in the mid-’80s. She found K’s near-anarchism and political quietism to be a slight against the liberation struggle of black South Africans and an unfortunate derogation of the intellectual’s duty to aid such struggles. She censured him in terms derived from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, saying that he had failed to provide in his novel the integration of the hero’s destiny with the destiny of his society, which is the primary task of the novel form in an age when the social totality is not immanent. Whether Gordimer still thinks this way, I don’t know. She’s not wrong: Coetzee in this novel is more Heidegger than Lukács (philosophically, I mean, not politically). Now that the particular struggle of South African blacks has ended, Gordimer’s criticism seems off the mark or irrelevant. This discloses a law of literary transmission about which we ought to be ambivalent: posterity doesn’t care whether you served or deserted.

Well, l’affaire Rushdie returns to disturb the “world republic of letters,” to use Pascale Casanova’s somewhat ironic phrase. What to say? First, any religious bigots or political opportunists who call for assault on Rushdie can of course go take a jump. This should go without saying. However, what the U.S. and the U.K. cannot do, and what its representatives in the republic of letters should know better than to do, is to claim that “we” enjoy freedoms which fit us uniquely for confrontation with the forces of repression.

For one thing, “we” are aligned with the forces of repression—in Palestine, in Iraq, in Haiti, in Turkey, in Pakistan, in Egypt and in other places as well. Indeed, it is just this alliance that sometimes calls forth counter-forces, equally repressive or even moreso. The benighted mullah is recto to the verso of the enlightened imperialist. For another thing, in the wake of Norman Finkelstein’s denial of tenure by DePaul University and David Graeber’s dismissal by Yale University, not to mention the sheer impossibility of ever seeing Finkelstein or Graeber or Noam Chomsky or Amy Goodman or Howard Zinn or Tariq Ali or Naomi Klein on mainstream American TV, it’s simply laughable to claim that, just because our rulers are wiser than the commissars of old who shot or locked up dissidents, thereby winning sympathy to their cause, they allow all voices to be heard equally in a deliriously impure pluralism. From academia to publishing to television, anyone who knows anything can tell you that we in the U.S. live under a regime of de facto censorship which is, in its way, worse than that practiced by theocrats in that theocracy in its very crudeness naturally attracts opprobrium. De facto censorship is silent and thus harder to oppose because so many refuse to believe that it even exists.

I would like to see nothing more than a global united front against repression and exploitation in all its forms, but it appears unlikely in the current climate of belligerence from all quarters and amnesia about the old dreams of universal liberation that once animated both writers and workers, westerners and easterners. It brings to mind the saddest of political protest songs, The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” a satirical broadside against the censorious mullahs of Iran written and performed by a band unremitting in their attacks against their own government and the global system of oppression of which it formed a part. There once was a time when it was understood that, whatever proclamations they issued to the contrary, warmongering capitalist prime ministers and presidents were on the same side as theocratic ayatollahs, and that the proper place for an intellectual, artist or radical was on the other side. Alas, fatal confusion was sown, much of it, suspiciously enough, by al-Qaeda, that paramilitary wing of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and it will probably take centuries to recover.

Returning to pop music, it bears recalling that John Lennon came to live in the United States and risked deportation to oppose its murderous policies. He was able to do this without being a dupe of the forces of repression abroad, as he showed when he quite rightly chided those who would “[carry] around pictures of Chairman Mao.” I think he would be disturbed by the current use of his image and likeness by those who wish to “save Darfur.” What does it mean, after all, to save Darfur in the current context, when international law is either unenforcible or enforcible only in accordance with the wishes of individual states who stand to gain by concealing their drive for profit and power with reference to humanitarian concerns?

I do not for a moment doubt that the Khartoum government and its hired militias are vicious in the extreme and are bent on exterminating civilians whom they see as in the way of their territorial hegemony—though at the moment the situation is dynamic, it should be said. Nor do I doubt that the Chinese government, with its increasing need for oil, supports this vile policy. Whether or not this amounts to “genocide” (the word, like “antisemitism,” has been so cheapened by opportunists that I’m sorry to say I always regard it with suspicion), it’s certainly evil and ought to be opposed.

However, the United States is not the force to oppose it. The U.S. too has an interest in oil, just as the Chinese do, and great-power interference in profitable regions can result in an intensification and exploitation of conflict rather than de-escalation and a negotiated peace. Imperialism’s policy is always “Let’s you and him fight.” But, the humanitarian would object, wouldn’t you allow that U.S. intervention, however crassly motivated or barbarously pursued, might have unintended consequences? I suppose, and so might my immediate death, but that doesn’t give you the right to kill me. It is difficult enough to realize one’s own intentions; to claim to know or control the unintended results of one’s actions is the sheerest hubris and will be punished by the gods. To repeat myself: the United States has occupied a country, destroyed its state and civil society, and instigated and continues to meddle in a civil war that will probably lead to its partition. In the process, anywhere from half a million to a million people have been murdered and an entire culture destroyed. This is a body count in excess of that for which the Janjawid is responsible. A state which has done this has no moral credibility. It has no standing from which to tell others how to live. It ought not be allowed a military, if it comes to that.

John Lennon well knew this about his adopted country, back when it was carrying out another mass sacrifice to the god of democracy, and when he sang of a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, he did not confuse it with the present, with capitalism, with the United States or with “the international community.” He did not spend his time denouncing foreign devils from a position of comfort and moral superiority but worked to exorcise those evils in front of his face, even at cost to himself. Sadly, he’s gone. We are left with a back-handed tribute to him, and with the annoying vision of his old partner McCartney selling iPods on TV with a song so meretricious and second-rate that I half suspect it to have been written by the author of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. All souls’ day. Twentyseventh I’ll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death’s door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman’s with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren’s. The great physician called him home. Well it’s God’s acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hu! Not a budge out of him. Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder. Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve.

—”Hades”

And then my favorite of the book’s many profundities:

STEPHEN (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but modern philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

—”Circe”

From the Wikipedia entry on Muriel Spark:

In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark “had pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic … that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do.”

I am not a Catholic, though I was brought up that way. In fact, I am the kind of sturdy rationalist atheist who would write a book called something like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, except that I think the people who write those books 1.) wittingly or unwittingly provide aid and comfort to those murderers who would prosecute a “clash of civilizations” and 2.) demonstrate a misunderstanding of human culture that would be put right by a quick review of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” if nothing else.

No, it’s not the Catholicism in that quotation that I appreciate, but rather its refutation of a certain cliché about novels and their writers. What is this cliché? Well, here is Jonathan Rée, who supported the Iraq war because of his dialectical understanding of history, writing about recent essays on “the novel” by Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa. Here he summarizes the views of Kundera and Coetzee:

Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.” And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the “Manicheism” that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic “battle between good and evil,” but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) “Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History’s heels,” Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. “The novel alone,” as he puts it, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.”

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is “not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros.” Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply “an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.” And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin’s Marxism—”something forced about it, something merely reactive”—it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. “As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people,” Coetzee says; he had “no talent as a storyteller,” and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

On this view, which funnily enough couples its typical anti-Communism with a Marxist understanding of cultural history, the novel is the literary form par excellence of the bourgeoisie and its liberal values. Being somewhat contrary, I have less of a quarrel with the content of this concept of the novel than with its ubiquity, especially when it comes with moralizing reference to l’affaire Rushdie, as if this were the key to understanding what novels are and what they do (Rée blessedly neglects to mention Rushdie here, but Kundera, Sontag and Coetzee have insisted on it before).

The example of Muriel Spark shows us that, in fact, one need not be a secular liberal to write a good novel. One might be an agrarian conservative, a Latin Mass Catholic, a Communist, a fascist—I believe William Gibson once opined that a fascist couldn’t write a good novel, but I don’t see why not. Look at Dostoevsky, patron saint of the dialogic. He was, in his extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism, at the very least a proto-fascist, and yet who can match his burning sympathy for the exiled and the oppressed? It might be that the best novelists are precisely those who do not feel themselves to be at the center of their culture or its professed values. They have a clearer view from their distant prospect, and more sympathy for their fellow outcasts from life’s feast, in Joyce’s phrase. They can take a truer measure of the deed as against the word. Again, a little Marx could put us right: he famously preferred the conservative Catholic royalist Balzac to the good socialist Zola.

I do think that to measure the word against the deed requires a stable metric, in Donald Rumsfeld’s felicitous locution. Thus, Don Quixote, which always gets pulled into these discussions, and which Nabokov, lately read by the good liberal ladies of Tehran, thought a very cruel book. It is cruel, but not gratuitously so; it pictures the tragicomedy (which an anti-Communist ought to appreciate!) of a man who causes havoc in his attempt to impose upon a miserably recalcitrant world a global scheme of justice. The novel permits us neither to be easy in our sympathy for his crusade nor to dismiss it as lightly as his torturers do. That (take note: a dialectic!) is its genius and the reason it should always be read, as Coetzee seems to imply. But whatever this has to do with liberalism, it has nothing to do with the cant phrases of the present day, which itself has, as anyone can see, no premium on empathy and liberality. Homer can do these as well (or as badly) as any contemporary novelist.

Perhaps he could even do them better:

In this book, the events aren’t enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few writers in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building—or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets—but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, which is to show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing Square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of September 11, 2001, could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject to both the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.

I haven’t read DeLillo’s novel, though I admire many of his other novels, particularly Underworld. I won’t comment on this paragraph at length except to say that I find its second sentence disturbingly true. Perhaps it’s to do with the paucity of commies and Catholics and witches scared away from novel-writing by the liberal/secular dogma!

Forget Left and Right. Let us posit two other approaches to truth and community: there is the party of the Inner Light and the party of Tradition. The former believes that truth lies not “out there” because “out there” does not exist and/or presents only a lying aspect unless it is transformed by the understanding emanating from within the self, which in its turn is a shard of the golden reality submerged beneath the dross constituted by that which the unillumined take to be “reality.” The latter believes that the individual self exists in darkness, blind and ignorant, and that its task, which can only be completed in unison with others, both the living and the dead, is to beat back the darkness which hides our understanding of the world by careful attention to it, uneclipsed, insofar as this is possible, by the intrusive self—the self is only good insofar as it is augmented by the accumulated wisdom of the past.

These two parties are not political parties. Many a right-wing Protestant fundamentalist believes that a personal experience of Jesus outweighs all fact and reason, and one would be hard-pressed to claim that the great left-wing philosophy of Marxism is not a self-denying, outward-focussed tradition. These two examples should clarify the obvious truth that the party of the Inner Light can tend toward mad irrationalism and solipsism that militate against sympathetic engagement with the world, while the party of Tradition can tend toward sterile and lethal doctrines that hammer the human into unnatural angular shapes. Extremes meet, and the Nazis, whose distinction is to have held every bad idea simultaneously, provide our worst example of iron-clad tradition wedded to wild subjectivism and relativism.

Is there any more fertile common ground for the opposed parties? Let us take an example.

Probably the greatest American humanist of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Edward Said, was a radical who nevertheless prefaced his masterpiece Culture and Imperialism with a quotation from Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In the early ’80s, moreover, he wrote a a series of essays in which, with great tact and subtlety, he inveighed against the creeping religiosity that he saw overtaking literary studies with the embrace of deconstruction, a philosophy of language that turned from language and literature’s essential imbrication with the world and with ideology in favor of an understanding of the Word as an inscrutable alien essence pure in its expression of itself. For Said, “Secular Criticism” is that which is hostile to such self-aggrandizing self-referentiality. To this extent, he is hostile to the claims of the world-eating, world-dismissing “I.”

But Said was also the inveterate scourge of incurious, imperialist America, sectarian, racist Israel and the zealot-plagued, tyrant-burdened Muslim world, as well as the defender of the intellectual’s right to stand apart from all traditions. He in no way subscribes to a view that the individual must bow to tradition, and indeed in one of his last pieces of writing, the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Auerbach’s Mimesis, he reminded us that a critical or creative project is only ever going to be personal. He seemed to agree with George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch, who describes Dorothea Brooke, partisan of the Inner Light, stupified by Rome because she lacks the “quickening power” of that knowledge which would enable her to unite the fragments of the city’s history into a meaningful narrative.

The self is all we’ve got, but it alone is no reliable guide to anything. We need others.

Said never lost faith in the possibility of attaining the truth through a sympathetic understanding of the reality outside the self. People forget that Orientalism attacks its eponymous target not primarily as an impersonal Foucauldian discourse emanating from power, but as an outward projection of a spurious western identity, an untoward and basely-motivated over-reliance on an Inner Light which is an ignis fatuus.

Eliot wrote, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” which is all any of us can say for ourselves, and as long as we do this in good faith and with a trust in the agency and autonomy of other people, then we will produce that which is alive and worthwhile. In so doing, we will not retreat into the idiocy of mere egotism, but neither will we accept the claims of those authorities who would foreclose the imagination’s outward flow into the larger world of people and things and time.

If I may conclude with a bit of polemical business, Said’s example should provide the artist/intellectual with an alternative to all of those things I’ve been complaining about: Leninist revivalism, liberal imperialism, identity politics, global corporate capitalism and Enlightenment fundamentalism. It is a universalist vision of community that remains suspicious of all collectivities, a scholarly understanding of history that distrusts all determinist narratives and a call to liberation that does not fetishize violence or authority. A vision suspicious of visions, an understanding nervous about our ability to understand, and a call not to rally or to arm but to respond.

Left? Right? Who knows, maybe we should call it “Tory Anarchy.”

The last word goes to Said. The concluding lines of his essay, “Swift’s Tory Anarchy”:

A real event is projected into the fictive element of language and submitted bravely to the chaos of gossip and transience, until what must be lost cedes to the assertion of posterity’s “impartial” gain. In the process Swift the man, of course, dies, buried in the trivia of an age that neither could nor would let him live. This must be the source of the persistent legend of his madness—his alienation from the prescriptive canons of decency that he himself yearned for but which the unendurable honesty of his last years forced him to believe were lost. So he believed himself to have lived and died in that loss. Yet the poem demonstrates how his Irish exile is reinstated as a subject of discourse, but not at all as a personality, nor as a body of works, but rather as a presence for those who can simultaneously accept, as he did, waste and power. It is in that condition, between the world and the archive, sharing both, that Swift lasts. His imagination was the transactor of that difficult business, and an extraordinarily difficult challenge for the twentieth-century reader.

If my (rather meager) understanding of child development is to be trusted, children between the ages of four and five learn to distinguish not only between fiction and non-fiction, but between fantastic and realistic fictional modes.

I call upon this datum because it puts into question the modernist dogma that every fictional text ought to announce in some more or less overt way its own status as a text. And not only that, but to announce the inherent inability of textuality to make any aspect of reality fully present without resorting to trickery of one sort or another.

I suppose I must cop to rather a different view. But first: what underwrites the modernist dogma is a gnostic and salvific vision of literature. Posing as the deconstruction of the very category of literature in the name of human liberation, it smuggles in an esoteric elitism according to which that text is best which eschews language’s referential function in order to attain a purity of language qua alien code uncontaminated by the muck of human intention. Literature is the apotheosis of the god language. As a writer often considered a modernist (Clarice Lispector) once had a narrator observe, there is so much God at the expense of men.

All smart writers and readers know that language always arcs pitifully to the ground before it can hit the target. But I prefer to think of literature as a game, and some players come closer to the target than others. Beyond that, I’ve ceased to have or want any grand theory of literature. If someone put the proverbial gun to my head and said I have to have one, I would say that literature is an open category that includes any deployment of language which can primarily be experienced affectively. (Oh boy, some philosophers could shoot holes in that one!)

Anyway, language generates affect by way of its referential function in combination with its capacity for more or less musical arrangement. A much older critical mode called successful literature the successful marriage of the two, that is, of sound and sense. Much of the baggage of our older critical modes has been quite rightly tossed overboard, but that one’s worth keeping.

I don’t know what that makes me. But that’s how I see it.

The Anglo-American literary/journalistic elite, apparently following their counterparts in Latin America, has generated an awful lot of hype about Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean/international novelist and poet, so I thought I owed it to my own cultural capital to check the guy out. Bolaño’s long novel The Savage Detective has recently been translated and published, and his much longer novel 2066 is on the way. The short novel that I plucked from the library shelves, Amulet, apparently contains characters from these other works, including Arturito Belano, Bolaño’s fictional alter ego. Auxilio Lacouture, an illegal Uruguyan immigrant to Mexico City who spends all her time hanging around with the young poets of the city, narrates Amulet in a phantasmagorical interior monologue seemingly delivered from her fortnight’s captivity in a university bathroom during the Mexican government’s brutal suppression of the 1968 uprisings. Though apparently confined to these two weeks within the bathroom, Auxilio’s reflections and memories scatter over a range of years extending into the ’70s, and evoke not only various locales in and around Mexico City, but also hallucinatory plains, abysses and realms of ice, in what amounts to a brief epic about the struggle of a generation of artists, misfits and radicals to survive and find joy despite the barbarism of the times.

Indeed, at the end of the novel, in a kind of politico-moral excresence, Auxilio tells us this herself as she experiences a vision of a mass of children marching and singing across a valley toward an abyss:

And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.

It’s my contention that Bolaño did not have to say this outright because it is implicit in all the best moments of this novel. Wayne Kostenbaum’s blurb on the jacket of the library copy of Amulet says: “I am addicted to the haze that floats above Bolaño’s fictions.” This is a perceptive comment: atmosphere is, as far as I can tell from this book, what he does best. He calls up a blighted urban landscape, a bohemia of passed-out writers, reclusive poets, tortured revolutionaries and self-destroying prostitutes that, let’s be frank, looks impossibly glamorous to an international intelligentsia whose last three decades of cautiously conformist politics and whimsically well-behaved fiction are beginning to look a lot less appealing in the sickening light of Iraq’s ruin (not to speak of Afghanistan’s, or Yugoslavia’s). Here is Bolaño, in the voice of Auxilio, creating atmosphere:

I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up, under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up, exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.

But this novel, not least by its searing construction and deconstruction of Auxilio, whom I love, dismantles the mentality that would write off the doom or disappearance of any or all the poets just because of the failure of their words. In Amulet’s centerpiece, Arturo Belano, returned to Mexico City from Chile, were he was imprisoned and possibly tortured during the (U.S.-sponsored) fascist coup against Allende’s government, journeys to a dangerous part of town to free a friend from his enslavement to the King of the Rent Boys. Unbeknownst to Arturo and his friend, Auxilio follows them to bear witness. In the end, Artuto and company discover a sick young prostitute, another slave to the King, and Belano manages to use the authority he has acquired from surviving the right-wing terror to stare down the King of the Rent Boys and free the young prostitute, who recovers in their care.

And here I can’t resist quoting from the review of this novel in the odious New Republic, just to give an example of that frame of mind which Bolaño sets himself and his characters against:

This validation for the mistakes of youth must also contribute to the reverence for Bolaño among young writers. He preserves the songs produced by ill-formed, angry, or just silly ideologies, and recognizes the underlying goodness of their intentions. Auxilio and Belano are faced with a draining of purpose from their actions when they rescue a sick, weak prostitute and set him up with a job, only to encounter him later, strung out from sniffing glue and close to death. But they concur that it does not matter that the prostitute was going to die. “Our hidden purpose,” Auxilio says, “had been to stop him from being killed.” An ultimately futile campaign is not without importance, in Bolaño’s world. A poet may not be able to stop Pinochet, but he can testify to the attempt.

There’s the moral disaster that is The New Republic in a nutshell, so disappointed that these goddamn Slavs and Arabs and Africans they keep trying to liberate with their humanitarian bombs can’t get the inferiority proportion just right: they must of course be a little bit inferior so as to steady the ego of the Enlightenment missionary, but they must not be so inferior as to reject—quelle horreur!—the advice of the missionary on how to live. Fuckin’ glue-sniffing Iraqis. Last time we help anybody! Oh wait! Darfur! Never again! Bombs away!

This kind of corruption of the notion of solidarity has no place in Bolaño’s universe—as if a someone who sniffs glue has no right to live!—and he manages too to recover the concept of Enlightenment:

I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject)…

But a fine conjecture, one which I deeply share, and which warms my anarch heart.

Anyway, the novel has a second set piece, a darker one beyond my comptence, when Auxilio visits the underworld in the form of the recluse artist son of another poet. He tells her the unfinished story of how Orestes, occupying his home country and carrying out a reign of terror against the remaining supporters and relatives of his mother’s lover, nevertheless falls madly in love with the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The coldly calculating Electra demands that this girl be dispatched, but Orestes resists and tries to plot her escape. I don’t know whether this is some sort of allegory for the various right-wing dictatorships of Latin America, but it suggests at any rate a reframing of the recovery of Enlightenment, and a taking sides against Orestes and Electra and Apollo and the deceptive reign of cold law which their actions instituted in Athens. It’s worth mentioning that Orestes only mentions the Furies once, but he refers to them as the Erinyes rather than as the Eumenides: that is, he does not call them the kindly ones. And the kindliest one, Auxilio, who calls herself “the mother of Mexican poetry,” though she is not Mexican and neither is Belano/Bolaño, might herself, as witness, be the revenge of the family of poets, that is, the family of man, on the kingdom of Order, who are men too, and have spilled the blood of men, that is, family blood.

The novel’s final set piece is Auxilio’s prophecy, delivered to a voice questioning her while she hallucinates an icebound landscape. She foretells the fates of the twentieth century’s writers:

Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.

It continues in this vein for another three pages, until Auxilio has to stop and explain to the confused voice that “Alice Sheldon” was the real name of James Tiptree, Jr., which (speaking of my cultural capital) I already knew.

The governing sentiment is almost too familiar to express, but despite its familiarity it has gained no purchase on a world run by the kinds of idiots who read The New Republic. Poetry, even that written by stupid poets who flatter tyrants, is a utopia, one where the Auxilios of the world and the glue-sniffers and down-at-heel visionaries will find permanent citizenship and a stipend to boot; and utopia will always return. And that’s it.

In his Nation review of DeLillo’s Falling Man, John Leonard wrote:

In this, among the 9/11 novels I have read, by Ian McEwan, Reynolds Price, Jay McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer, it most resembles the best of them, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, in which, after the divebombing of the World Trade Center, a linguist named Renata at the New York Public Library is asked to add Arabic to her other exotic languages (Bliondan, Etinoi), even as she tries to cope with a crazy mother, an importunate lover, a teenage mute, a dead twin and the child she thinks she lost on a merry-go-round. In both books, the melding of the psychological and geopolitical dreamworlds feels inevitable rather than willed, as starkly elegant and illuminated as the calligraphy of medieval monks.

Now Leonard is not a foolish man. When I was in high school, I used to set my alarm to 9:00 so I could watch his book, TV and movie reviews on the otherwise godawful CBS Sunday Morning. So, even though he did not mention William Gibson’s staggeringly beautiful novel about 9/11, Pattern Recognition, I took seriously his recommendation of The Writing on the Wall, which I’d never even heard of, and checked it out of the library.

If I hadn’t been in the mood for something thoroughly undemanding after a grueling semester in grad school, I might have thrown the book down after the first sentence:

On bright mornings, the sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals.

Sliding? Not even the sunlight sliding, but the sun. That’s bad enough, but now the sliding sun also stamps, like some kind of industrial press. The confusion in imagery is followed by a confusion in number, where a pattern resembles petals—felicity if not an actual grammatical rule demands that the singular pattern resemble another singular noun—a scattering of petals, perhaps.

Now you’re thinking, “Christ almighty, what a pedant!” Well, let me tell you that these objections didn’t occur to me on the first reading of the sentence; I just felt that it clunked. I read further, however, and it turns out that, just as Leonard had written, the protoganist, gifted with a preternatural facility for language-learning, works as a linguist for the New York Public Library, and she abhors any imprecise or obfuscatory use of language. This conceit unfortunately sets Schwartz a higher bar than she can clear.

However, except in a banal sense, the primary unit of meaning in a novel is not the individual word or even the sentence. I reject the Nabokovian modernist dogma that every sentence in a novel must have all the sonic and imagistic richness of a line of poetry. The language of novels is cumulative in effect and produces, over and above any local pleasures, a global sense of character, situation and mood. (Christ, what an old-fashioned thing to write; they’re going to throw me out of grad school yet!)

Schwartz isn’t bad at this central task—if she were, I’d have stopped reading. Her problem is evidently a lack of faith in her own skill, because she ruins what could have been a fine, slim, elegant story about the intersection of one city’s catastrophe with the emotional unfolding of one its citizens with a lot of under-developed Lifetime-movie-of-the-week stuff. See, the protagonist is so emotionally stunted because her twin sister was impregnated by her uncle and then committed suicide when they were sixteen. As if that weren’t enough, the couple who adopted the sister’s baby ran off and our heroine had to raise the child…that is, until the child was snatched off a merry-go-round! So not only does our heroine have to deal with the collapse of the WTC and the vicissitudes of her budding romance with a renegade social worker, but also a final confrontation with the nefarious uncle, now dying in a Texas hospital, as well as an encounter with a mute survivor of the attack who may or may be the kidnapped child from ten years back.

There is no need for this concatenation of unlikelihoods. Stick to the emotionally inaccessible heroine, the budding romance, the terrorist attack and maybe-just-maybe the mute girl (shades of DeLillo!). In any case, the only reason that these strained events don’t overwhelm the novel is because Schwarz doesn’t seem that interested in them, as well she shouldn’t be. The sister’s character remains insubstantial, the wicked uncle is wicked and no more, and the years the heroine spent raising her niece are sketched with insufficient lightness given what their emotional consequences must have been.

Schwarz’s story ought to have been far simpler in structure: beginning: Renata meets Jack; complications: Twin Towers collapse, Renata displaces her previously blocked emotions onto mute girl, breaks up with Jack; ending: Renata and Jack get back together. There, a classic romantic comedy, except not so funny.

(What about the objection that it’s indecent to annex a mass slaughter to such a slight tale of private life? Eh, tell it to Homer. All those men died at Troy and I’m supposed to care about Achilles? And yet, and yet…I do.)

………………….

Speaking of romantic comedy, the Gilmore Girls series finale aired last night. The show had long ceased to be any good, but the final episode somehow managed to recapture the pleasantly anarchic atmosphere of the early seasons as it wended its way through the town in a valedictory salute to all of the characters. Lorelai and Luke got together, and Rory went off to be a journalist with the Barack Obama campaign. Thus ends our unconvincing recapitulation of the rise of the middle class and of its moral codes,  embodied, as in Jane Austen, by the smartest girl in the room. (The show, overtly liberal in its politics, is deeply reactionary in a number of ways and is susceptible to Marxist demolition. But save that for another day!)

Since we don’t watch enough television in this country, here’s a Youtube clip of the Luke/Lorelai reconciliation, which was satisfyingly underplayed, thus pointing up its very inevitability (a canny move). I place it here mainly to show that these two can act, especially Lauren Graham:

There now, how can we have a war czar when such romance exists?