Grand Hotel Abyss

People always quote that Auden line about how writing negative book reviews is bad for the soul. I submit that the proposition is false: instead, criticism purges one’s soul of the bad book that has unfortunately been read.

Some books are so bad that you can’t read them all the way through. I’ve been looking at some Iraq war books, and I thought that, given its acclaim, I might try George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. I cleared the first hundred pages before deciding that the book was ruining my day. This is the kind of journalistic account about which newspaper reviewers say, “It reads like a novel,” thus calumniating the chosen genre of Cervantes, Stendhal and Eliot. They say it reads like a novel because of sentences like this:

In a charcoal jacket and gray shirt open at the collar, he leaned forward with an apologetic smile and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to strike a discordant note.”

Worthy of Michael Crichton or, if we really want to be mean about it, Dean R. Koontz. The man described in this sentence is none other than Kanan Makiya, professional Iraqi exile and fanatic for the destruction of a country he hasn’t lived in for thirty-five years. He serves as one of the heroes of Packer’s book; Packer brings to bear all the novelistic techniques of irony to show just how uselessly abstract and creepily megalomanical were Makiya’s plans for Iraq, all the while maintaining Makiya’s nobility in tilting at windmills. Meanwhile, Packer peppers his book with other sentences, such as these:

Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War.

Isn’t life mysterious? Perhaps if Packer hadn’t spent the first hundred pages of his “novel” profiling the likes of Makiya, Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, he might have noticed what the U.S. actually did in Iraq. They did what they have long wanted to do domestically: they privatized everything. As in the dreams of teenage anarchists, they smashed the state. The difference is that teenage anarchists want to smash the state so that decentralized self-rule can take hold in human-scale communities, while the neoliberal vanguard instead cleansed Iraq of any public or collective holdings in order to allow their pet corporations to run riot in a gangster’s paradise. I fear that, whether we get Rudy or Hillary, they will bring this show to American soil.

Anyway, Packer portrays the anti-war movement as irresponsible, fanatical and subtly reactionary—as, in fact, the mirror image of Bush:

It embraced the full spectrum [just try to embrace a spectrum, gentle reader!] of opposition, from the banners of extremist groups that proclaimed “No Blood for Oil!” to the moderate calls for weapons inspections and international law of the far larger Internet-based organization Moveon.org. The message, though, like that of most protest movements, was a simple one: Stop the war. All the difficult questions raised by the prospect of a war in Iraq were erased by these three words.

We find ourselves here in the liberal topos of uncertainty, nuance and gradualism. That situations are more complex and variable than any moral judgments that can be made about them is a truism. However, in the realm of action one must in the end decide what to do and what not to do. This usually takes the form of an either/or choice, which can, I understand, be painful to make, but as anyone who has ever done anything (e.g., gotten married, chosen a major, quit a job, accepted a job, had a child, gotten a divorce etc. etc.) understands, choices must be made if life is to be lived. The anti-war movement, of which I am proud to say that I was a very small part back in the bleak winter of 2002-03, evaluated the case made for the war, the actors involved, the prospects for a good outcome, the history of American involvement in the region, and the general morality of war, and they decided that the Iraq war was unjust and worthy of being opposed, and they decided moreover to act on this decision.

Packer finds this intolerable because he finds politics intolerable. He is, to such a comic extent that one might think the book a hoax, the feckless liberal mocked by conservatives and radicals alike, the self-congratulating buffoon of the old Phil Ochs song. “My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when no one else was around,” he agonizes. Eventually, though, he decides to take the position of the “ambivalently prowar liberals,” explaining that “[o]ne doesn’t get one’s choice of wars” (a comment ill befitting the citizen of a democracy, I should think). He elaborates his position, telling us that it descends from his belief in the “interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo,” which only proves that he has a lot of nerve. He bizarrely seems to think that Iraq differs from these “humanitarian” escapades: “The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits.” Recall now that Packer does not know what this “other” thing that so concerns the warmakers is, though he finds laughably extreme those who think it has something to do with energy resources or corporations.

In order to appear fair and balanced, he profiles Eli Pariser, in charge at the time of Moveon.org, since Pariser is a self-described patriot who, though he does oppose the war, has more or less repudiated the left tradition in his own family. Packer just doesn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, he admires Pariser’s prudential non-radicalism. On the other hand, “[t]he antifascist wars of our own time—in Bosnia and Kosovo— never strongly resonated with Pariser’s generation of activists.” He’s got a point there. Pariser’s generation of activists should have been out on the street in force opposing our government’s murderous neo-Nazi support of the old Ustashe, but alas, I don’t think that’s what Packer had in mind.

For guidance, Packer turns to Leon Wiesletier of The New Republic, who solemnly informs us, “The Second World War still makes me cry.” World War II, you see, is his model for American force, while the anti-war movement fixates on Vietnam: “‘It’s sort of the isolationism of the wounded or the of the traumatized,’” he condescends. That there were real wounds and real traumas, and that the anti-war movement of the time was dead right about Vietnam, he does not stoop to mention. Nor does it occur to him that if Woodrow Wilson had not dragged this country into the pointless slaughter of World War I, against the advice of an anti-war movement whose members he simply jailed, then Hitler and Stalin might never have come to power at all, thus sparing the tears of Mr. Wieseltier.

From the reviews, it seems that Packer will go on to narrate how the Bush administration’s “incompetence” and “cynicism” and whatever else is short of “malice aforethought” betrayed Iraq and the fond liberal dreams of Kanan Makiya and Paul Berman. The first hundred pages are so poorly written and so poorly reasoned, however, that I don’t think I will stay for the rest of his tale. Though he professes to be an ardent democrat, the truth about Packer is that he hates politics and does not understand power. The masters of war understand power well: they want it all for themselves and will kill those who stand in their way. The anti-war movement too understands power: they see how the warmakers lust for it and how destructive their lust is, and so they try to block their access to more power by curtailing their ability to make war. This struggle is what politics is, fundamentally, but Packer finds that such a view sullies his exquisite mind. In the end, he chooses to believe the moral claptrap adduced by warmongers. Finding that they’ve created a hell on earth unrelated to any recognizable morality, he has nowhere to turn but back to his own pretty little consciousness, wafted hither and yon by events and personalities that he can describe but cannot understand.

Why write about this? you ask. Water under the bridge, you say. Quite false. The discrediting of the far right means the rise of the center, and Packer is the center. The Packers of the world will be upon us in any future Democratic administration, complaining like Clinton and Obama about Bush’s “incompetence” and vowing to do it up right the very next time we need to drop “humanitarian bombs,” in the odious phrase of Saint Vaclav Havel.

Two posts ago, I wrote about Edward Said. Packer drags Said into his account for a bit of roughing up, largely because the late, great critic had Makiya’s number way back in 1991. Our author brings up the usual charges—Said blames everything on western imperialism, Said is an out-of-touch mandarin, etc.—and even adds a new one: Said envies Makiya, because Makiya might do for Iraq what Said could never do for Palestine! Truly, we are beyond satire. Said knew this shortly before his death, which is why he wrote an article in March 2003 about the Iraq war that ends with the Wordsworthian apostrophe: “Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” In the middle of this essay, Said clarifies his own position for the benefit of Makiya and his ilk, before concluding with a sentence worthy of Johnson. Again, I give him the last word, with my emphasis:

I have been criticised recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba’athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam’s war against “the Persians”, as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait, but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush’s commitment to democracy Professor Makiya is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba’athi government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching the gods whom they worship politically there’s no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.

Diana Johnstone, who wrote the book on NATO’s ill intentions in former Yugoslavia, writes in Counterpunch today on the present sorry state of Kosovo and the extraordinary arrogance of its imperial overlords. She notes in passing that the rule of “the international community” in Kosovo parallels the rule over European countries of the vast EU bureaucracy. Needless to say, the US in the era of “terror” suffers many of the same problems. What will the future look like? An archipelago of armed fortresses amid a wasteland of suffering and war-of-all-against-all.

Johnstone:

The post-Cold War capitalist West, needed to drape itself in a noble cause. “Human rights” did the trick. To preserve and expand the U.S.-led Cold War military machine after the dismantling of its official adversary, the Warsaw Pact, NATO was endowed with the new mission of “humanitarian intervention”. The 1999 “Kosovo war” was the trial run for this new mission.

Thus hatred and prejudice must be perpetuated.

And, for good measure, Gabriel Kolko returns us to end of the nineteenth century, where the imperial manipulation of identity politics began:

Vienna was surely the most intellectually creative place in the world at the end of the 19th century. Economics, art, philosophy, political theories on the Right as well as Left, psychoanalysis – Vienna gave birth or influenced most of them. Ideas had to be very original to be noticed, and most were. We must understand the unique and rare innovative environment in which Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew who became the founder of Zionism, functioned. For a time he was also a German nationalist and went through phases admiring Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state – especially those in Russia – would become revolutionaries.

It was scarcely an accident that in November 1917 Lord Arthur Balfour was to make Britain’s historic endorsement of a Jewish homeland in their newly mandated territory of Palestine in a letter to Rothschild. Some of these Englishmen also shared the Biblical view that it was the destiny of Jews to return to their ancient soil. Others thought that this gesture would help keep Russia in the war, and that nefarious Jews had the influence to do so. Most saw a Jewish state as a means of consolidating British power in the vast Islamic region.

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 you’ll forgive me for citing a crazy right-wing Rand-quoting libertarian, here is Justin Raimondo speaking good sense:

Which is why I have to laugh when I hear criticisms from the Democrats and the growing number of antiwar Republicans in Congress who complain that we don’t belong in Iraq any longer because, you know, it’s a civil war. This is largely seen as an unintended consequence of the American invasion – but what if it was intended?

It would, after all, make perfect Bizarro “sense.” If, instead of trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq, you’re trying to wreak as much destruction as possible and turn Arab against Arab, Muslim against Muslim, and the Kurds against everyone else, then the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the right thing to do. And please don’t tell me that none of these dire consequences – blowback, for Rudy Giuliani’s benefit – were known or predicted in advance. The recent release of the much-awaited “phase two” [.pdf] of the Senate Intelligence report – detailing prewar assessments of what was likely to occur in Iraq if we invaded – shows we knew all along what would happen. Yet we went ahead and invaded anyway.

As Ayn Rand once put it, don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes. If we look at the public reasons for the Iraq war, it is clear that none of these have been accomplished, nor are they likely to be achieved in the near or even distant future. Iraqi “democracy” is a bizarre mutation of clerical domination, unimaginable corruption, and rule by death squads, and those “weapons of mass destruction” have returned to the netherworld of the neoconservative imagination from whence they emerged onto the front page of the New York Times.

Exactly right. I don’t think people really understand the radical nature of the neoliberal challenge to moral, legal and political norms of the past. The invasion of Iraq is to be understood in the light of Thatcher’s notorious proclamation, “There is no such thing as society.” We are talking about elites who have a deep hostility to the state understood as anything other than a private security force for the rich. The goal in Iraq is chaos. The model is not the British or Roman Empires, with their “enlightened” proconsuls and extensive collaboration with local elites. The model is gangland warfare, with the U.S. President as the godfather playing one family against another. When liberal imperialist types claim that traditional imperialism is preferable to this loosing of anarchy, they are only wrong insofar as traditional imperialism is morally repugnant, if less overtly destructive.

Speaking of liberal imperialist types, this aggressive sowing of destruction has been a bipartisan effort in the U.S. When the newly-unified German government rushed to recognize Slovenia after its secession from Yugoslavia, Bush I’s Secretary of State James Baker thought they were crazy for taking an action that would lead to a bloody civil war. The Kissingerian realist paradigm to which Baker subscribed was more traditionally imperialist: the goal was to find some local strongman (the Shah, Pinochet, etc.) to support who would funnel the profits and the resources back to his patrons. He was hard-pressed to see the wisdom of provoking a bloodbath that would be hard to control, much less of taking sides in a such a struggle. A few short years and a million words by Sontag & Son later, Clinton and Blair eagerly threw in with Iran and bin Laden to rain depleted uranium down on the unlucky heads of the “neo-Nazi” Serbs in a grisly prologue to the destruction of Iraq. The intellectual wheels greased here by a flood of post-1989 verbiage on the obsolescence of the nation-state and the great good of identity politics and so-called “respect for difference” (a philosophy that, for all its high-minded liberal-ish intentions, upholds the intellectual underpinnings of racism). The only surprising thing about Christopher Hitchens’s support of the Iraq invasion is that a hundred other prominent liberals and leftists didn’t join him. He was not wrong when he cited the precedent of Kosovo.

In this context, we should recognize the roots of this foreign policy strategy in the intelligence service’s manipulations of radical organizations in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the FBI, CIA and NATO infiltrated these groups and provoked them to commit terrorist actions (or else entirely faked such actions). For this reason, I find the Leninist left’s nominal support for groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or various Iraqi resistance groups short-sighted. It’s hard to see who in the Middle East is not working for the Man at this point. The best thing to do in terms of political action right now for citizens of the imperial center is to push the anti-war, even pacifist and isolationist line as hard as they can.

This has the added benefit of being comprehensible to most middle- and working-class people; I know, because I am one such person. People tend to look at you funny if you preach world revolution, but if you preach against blowing people up and for leaving other countries the hell alone, most people will understand where you’re coming from, even if they disagree. Here, even the latter-day conservative impulses of American culture will be helpful. Imperialism has always been a liberal project, rooted in a desire to “help” which is actually a sublimated will-to-domination for the intellectuals who want to “help” and an unsublimated fig leaf for the profit-taking of big business. There is a reason that working people find persuasive the opportunistic conservative propaganda line that liberalism is an ideology of elitist condescension and feel-good power-grabbing.

But I do not want to “help,” for instance, Africa. Africa is in the sorry shape that it’s in precisely because of all the “help” it has received over the years from Europe and the U.S. What Africa needs is to be left entirely alone: to have its debt cancelled, the IMF off its backs (and off the face of the earth) and western aid brought to an end. Our “obligation” to assist them has done enough damage. What they need is nothing more than the freedom to develop the strength and intelligence of their civilization.

(That may sound like identity politics; it isn’t because I don’t believe that cultures and civilizations are discrete. Of course, all cultures are mixtures of elements diverse in their origin and character and that’s a good thing. By contrast, western domination destroys that vital diversity by imposing one economic model on everyone. Western elites love identity politics because, by holding up such foolish ideas as Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, this politics is hostile to the vital internal diversity of all cultures and keeps all the mental categories of racism open.)

The new imperialism of today is an attack of elites against all civilizational restraints on their power. The aim of the imperialists is to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. History records no example of heaven on earth being achieved by means of extreme violence and domination.

The road to one America, according to Mr. Edwards:

Edwards also called Monday for spreading the burden of serving the country by mandating national service.

“One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America — not just the poor kids who get sent to war — are serving this country,” he said.

After the event, Edwards said he had not meant to imply that only the poor go to war, only that everyone should serve in some way.

“We have people from all walks of life in America who are serving, including Reservists and National Guard,” he said. “What we want to do is to have all Americans to have a chance to serve their country.”

If were without the grave dignity of a scholar and an artist, I would say that John Edwards could suck my cock until his phoney head caved in, and that Hillary and Obama could get in line behind him.

Not a single one of those soldiers over in Iraq is serving anything other than the bottom line of the energy and arms companies. Some of the gentle souls among us like to point out that economic circumstances compel these men and women to undertake these kinds of indefensible slaughters. In fact, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation:

By assigning each recruit the median 1999 household income for his hometown ZIP code as deter­mined from Census 2000, the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dol­lars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Cen­sus 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on aver­age, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.

When comparing these wartime recruits (2003– 2005) to the resident population ages 18–24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999. (See Chart 2.) Though the mainstream media continue to portray the war in Iraq as unpopular, this evi­dence suggests that the United States is not sending the poor to die for the interests of the rich.

The point these right-wing think-tankers wish to make is that the compostion-by-income of U.S. army recruits maps almost perfectly onto the income distribution of the general population. While we certainly must allow that this distribution is hideously unjust—$43000 really isn’t much considering the cost of living—we cannot claim abject desperation as the macro cause of military enlistment. I certainly did not come from a household that made much more than the median, particularly during my early childhood, yet it never occurred to me or almost anyone else I knew to “serve” in this barbaric way. The people I know who did choose to “serve” were neither poor nor particularly uneducated. For the most part, the incentives the army held out beat the alternatives—uncertain success at an overpriced university or in the job market—but the preponderance of people that I knew chose these hardships over what are, after all, in many ways the far graver hardships of military “service.”

The truth is that the United States has, without any justification, destroyed an entire society, engineered a state of chaos and slaughtered more than half a million people and counting. This is not a secret. The only barrier to understanding this is ideology. Ideology is not watertight, and the brain does not naturally take its shape. I do not support the troops. I do not think that everyone should “serve” in one way or another, because the cause, even if one were to define the cause so broadly as the continued survival of this polity in its present state, is deeply evil. Justice demands that the “service” be abolished.

Edwards’s call for universal “service” is parallel to Zizek’s call for discipline. And here is a fine time to recall Zizek’s support for the ’90s crusade of Edwards’s party: the Iraq-presaging manipulation of and lethal participation in the break-up of Yugoslavia. I used to have considerable sympathy for both the progressive resurgence in mainstream American politics and for the Leninist revivalism of the Theory class, but now I see both as dangerous charades, new masks for power. The world is plagued by gangs of men with guns. Still more gangs of men with guns will not provide a cure. And I for one will not serve.

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?

The conservative imagination—I’m not talking just about the political right here, though most of them go in; but so do Zizek, Maoists, etc.—most abhors art, abortion and gay sex because these are three images of human freedom from purposeful activity.

If you’re writing a poem, aborting a fetus, getting it from another dude up the ass or getting eaten by another chick, then you’re not going to produce anything socially useful (or, in the case of the poem, not necessarily—the poem, I suppose, could reproduce some kind of “hegemonic discourse”).

When this topic comes up, I sometimes feel a twinge of sympathy for those eco-fascist anarcho-primitivists, who at least like to emphasize how much leisure time the hunter-gatherers enjoyed.

Anyway. Have you heard about the UK’s latest foray into Corporate Stalinism?

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.

The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

“We are not intending to have any play time,” said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.”

I can just about hear him say that. I know the type—though the commissar I’m imagining/remembering is a full-dress nun, an ironically-named Sister of Mercy, who was the principal of my grade school.

I dig the euphemism “unstructured time” too, for that thing which we must not enjoy at all. Will they next monitor our dreams? Can we get a little peace on the toilet, or will they now need to examine our excrements for traces of what they can’t control? What a world! And, hell, I can’t even blame this on capitalism either; communists did this kind of shit too when they were in charge of countries. The sickness that is the desire to dominate goes deeper than local economic manifestations.

So a toast to unstructured time! To fetus-killing, ass-fucking, rug-munching, poem-writing, picture-painting and generally running out of control! These pigs want to suck our souls and we’ve got to keep away from them as long as we can!

One sentence from Michiko Kakutani’s summary of the new DeLillo:

Lianne attends sessions of a writing workshop she runs with a group of Alzheimer’s patients.

Extremity is no guarantee, and this anyway is self-parody. Hang it up, Don. The future belongs to crowds.