The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense [1 ed.] 9781443832533, 9781443832137

Citation preview

The Surplus of Culture

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

Edited by

Ewa Borkowska and Tomasz BurzyĔski

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense, Edited by Ewa Borkowska and Tomasz BurzyĔski This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Ewa Borkowska and Tomasz BurzyĔski and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3213-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3213-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix List of Images ............................................................................................. xi In Place of a Foreword.............................................................................. xiii Ewa Borkowska and Tomasz BurzyĔski Part I: Canon Re-Visited Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd: On the Fringes of the Neo-Victorian Culture Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity in Sesame and Lilies Andrzej Wicher Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 29 Hybridity, Surplus and Absence: Medieval Monsters and Contemporary Visual Arts Rafał Borysławski Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 39 “The Jungle Rises Far Above Our Heads”: On Reading Sensation Novels Małgorzata Nitka Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 49 The Ill Logic of Analogy: Uses and Abuses of Chess in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll Leszek Drong Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 61 The Sense of “Cinnamon Shops” Stanley S. Bill

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 71 Anarchtopia: Zany Film Comedy from the Marx Brothers to Monty Python Anthony Barker Part II: Politics of Language Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 93 A Political Non-sense: Gilles Deleuze on Common-sense, Non-sense and the Possibility of the Political Itay Snir Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 105 A Not Funny Nonsense: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Nonsense in Philosophy Janyne Sattler Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 117 On the Virtue of Idleness Wojciech Majka Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 123 “The Sovereign Mistress of our Opinions”: Making Sense of the Scottish Philosophy of the Senses Jacek Mydla Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 133 Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future Marcin Sarnek Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 145 Understanding Common Sense: Kant, Gadamer and Habermas Rekha G Menon and N Sreekumar Part III: Sense and Multi-Cultural Dilemmas Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 157 Thaid Up in Knots: Making Sense of Thai Socio-cultural Values Katarzyna Ancuta

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

vii

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 167 “[A] Vanishing People”: The Caribs and Kincaid’s Carib-bean in The Autobiography of My Mother Jude Nixon Part IV: Structure, Non-Sense and Uncertainty Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 181 The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic Tadeusz Sławek Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 199 Liminal Beauty: The Aesthetics of Nonsense in Kant and the Early Romantics Alina Mitek-Dziemba Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 211 “Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”– Of Poetic Surplus and Cyclical “Vicissitudes” of a Poet Ewa Borkowska Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 223 The Surplus of Structure: Towards the Morphogenetic Approach to Cultural Studies Tomasz BurzyĔski Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 235 Praise of Frolic: Toward an Epistemology of Nonsense Maciej Nowak Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 245 Sense in the Machine: Buster Keaton and The General Sławomir MasłoĔ Contributors............................................................................................. 255

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our deep gratitude to professor Steven James Joyce from the Ohio State University, Mansfield campus, for his taking care and time to read and review The Surplus of Culture volume. As a poet himself of Afternoons in the Scriptorium (2011) and the author of The Winds of Ilion (Eyecorner Press, 2011), professor Steven J. Joyce’s intellectual, poetic, philosophical and critical insights have helped us revise and re-think a few ideas which he suggested to us as a reviewer. His intellectual instress as well as his most valuable comments and opinions have been accepted with our understanding and gratitude. His comments about our writing were of great support. Our thanks go most particularly to all authors who replied to our intellectual invitation of writing and submitted their essays to the Surplus volume within the prescribed time limits; without their intellectual contribution our book would not be accomplished. Many thanks to the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia in Poland, for sponsoring the international conference called The Surplus of Culture. Our thanks go as well to the University of Economics and Humanities in Bielsko-Biala (Poland) for the financial support of the international intellectual meeting in the mountains in 2009 thanks to which the essays in the volume could have been assembled. We also wish to express our sincere thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing without whose generosity and kindness this book would have never been published.

LIST OF IMAGES

Fig. 5.1 Lewis Carroll’s chess diagram. The image based on Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, in: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992), p. 106. Fig. 7.1 The Marx Brothers. A studio still photograph taken from Duck Soup dir. Leo McCarey (1933).

IN PLACE OF A FOREWORD

Despite its overtly and overly economic implications, the category of surplus can be reflected by deeply-seated and culture-wide mechanisms of cultural production in which the added value of sense, common sense and nonsense is represented as languages of irony, irrationality and absurdity potentially subverting the well-entrenched “regimes” of cultural meaningfulness. As a consequence, the term “surplus of culture” refers to situations in which our understanding is no longer commonsensical and it requires a scholarly effort to interpret, to unveil idiosyncrasies implicit in the supposedly ordered sphere of symbolic reality. The essays collected in this volume share this need for critical re-examination, a want to present the elusive surplus of culture in the spotlight of theory and academic practice.

Canon Re-visited Ours is an ultra-modern world in which technological and social progresses shatter the well-established foundations of institutional and symbolic orders. Hence, the times of (post)modernity connotes as an era of rampaging post-traditionalism, an advent of future-oriented culture which does not look at history with awe and veneration but, contrariwise, with a critical attitude to re-examine (and sometimes ridicule) the legacy of the past. Hence, there is always some surplus left in the classical literary works which allows for parodies, mocking, but also re-examination and revision. Victorian novels, for instance, can be mocked and parodied as Agnieszka Gołda demonstrates in selected instances of neo-Victorianism in fiction in which the critical or parodic lenses have been directed not so much at the poor Victorian scapegoat from the past as, in a type of selfreferential gesture, the neo-Victorian culture itself. In this context, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) departs even more radically from earlier practised politics of reparation and plunges both metaphorically and literally into the text world of Jane Eyre. The reference to the past, which has always offered an excess of the literary and cultural, can also be observed in Andrzej Wicher’s writing on John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies where Ruskin makes sense of the conception of femininity. In his reexamination Ruskin, one of the most eminent scholars and aesthetes of the

xiv

In Place of a Foreword

19th century, goes back to medievalism in which the surplus of courtly love ideology inspires his future postulate about the “infallibility of women,” the idealization of the feminine as launched in Sasame and Lilies. The surplus can be well provided by another medieval concept (Rafał Borysławski) such as monstrosity that may provide an interpretative schmata for contepmporary visual arts. In this sense, the monsters present mainly in the Liber Monstrorum inspire and assign sense to arts movements in the 1990s and 2000s which draw from the surplus of medieval imagination. The nonsensical disregard for the rules of logic, credibility or common sense summarises the follies of critical responses to the sensation novel. In her search for the idiosyncrasies in the 19th century criticism, Małgorzata Nitka comments on the uneasy response to the sensation novel which conveyed an awareness that not only did it pervert the complacent image of domestic life, but also, and more dangerously, it perverted the experience of reading which took a sensory rather than an intellectual turn, therefore exposing, as many would have it, society’s mental poverty. (Post)modern literary studies very often encourage us to a take a “second look” at previously interpreted works in order to re-discover novel interpretative solutions that would dispense the rigid form of canonical hermeneutic. From this perspective, Leszek Drong wishes to re-visit Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass by means of looking at the sensuous rationality of chess themes which reveal their own internal logic, peculiar to the world presented on the pages of literary texts referring to them. Consequently, by analysing the classical chess problem presented at the beginning of Through the Looking Glass, Drong argues that chess is neither a convenient antithesis of fiction, nor a particularly adequate analogy of the rules which organise the fictional universe. Instead, chess may function very much like the linguistic sign itself, i.e., an arbitrary device, whose significance is subordinated to a unique artistic vision. The post-traditional overtones implicit in the contemporary culture signal that literary traditions are reflexive institutions engaged in the perpetual process of repetition in which the past, as Robert Lovell teaches us, “changes more than the present.” In this essentially nostalgic context, Stanley S. Bill re-examines Bruno Schulz’s theory of sense and engages us in a close reading of one his most famous stories, Cinnamon Shops. Schulz’s language directs us on the straight path back to “primordial myths” of humanity, all within the framework of his own very particular mythological system in which the sense of the story is created by these linguistic redirections and would seem to be linked with the metaphorical process in general. If the nostalgia mode may serve as an interpretative

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

xv

schemata for (post)modernity, this is especially true of cinema which, as Frederic Jameson remarks, thrives on the aesthetic principle of back reference. From this methodological perspective, Anthony Barker traces the tradition of zany comedy in the twentieth century, from the beginning with the vaudevillian Marx Brother to the latter part of the century, with the British performing troupe Monty Python. In this case, the interpretative link between the two groups is the animated film-making which kept alive the zany tradition in the creative out-put of Tex Avery and his followers at Warner Brothers.

Politics of Language The tradition of post-structural methodologies teaches us that language cannot possibly assume an ideal system in which the interplay of signs remains objectively and scientifically neutral, devoid of extra-linguistic considerations. In this sense, contrary to commonsensical view on the matter, language reveals its hidden agenda of political and ideological interests lurking at the hinterlands of supposedly autonomous discourses. From this essentially post-structural perspective, Itay Snir applies the Deleuzian methodology in order to challenge the ongoing debate on common sense which constitutes a philosophical reaction to the unnerving fact of multiplicity which could be seen as a basic feature of reality. In his view, common-sense conceals multiplicities behind images of unity, images it creates in three different spheres – the subject, the object and the community. An analysis of the political implications of Deleuze's concept of common-sense allows one to conclude that the commonsensical action is bound to remain within the order of politics and can never become political. The collapse of the distinction between common-sense and nonsense re-opens the possibility of political action. Philosophical inspirations are also crucial for Janyne Sattler’s view on Wittgenstein’s thought which serves, quite subversively, to show what the non-sense is not and hence her choice of Alice in Wonderland which provides an example of the problem’s analysis. From an ethical point of view each philosophical attempt of establishing (ethical) sound arguments shows our misunderstanding of what it is to search (and find) the sense of life, something which literature – but not philosophy – would have full rights to accomplish. Our everyday perception of sense is very often hidden behind the political façade of language and rhetoric as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels in which human subjectivity is dethroned with the help of the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit, an attitude of letting-be, i.e. an existential

xvi

In Place of a Foreword

position which allows us to see existence from the perspective of being itself and not from that of the subject (Wojciech Majka). Consequently, idleness is a mood that can allow us to adopt an existential stance and make it possible to approach life in fuller meditative sense which allows us to see that there is more to being than instrumentality and manipulation. Dwelling at the intersection of the literary and the political, rhetoric constitutes a powerful philosophical strategy as in the case of Scottish philosophy of Hutcheson and Reid (Jacek Mydla). Distinct as they are, the aforementioned philosophies of sense and common-sense complement one another: the former with its universality or commonness of the Moral Sense and the latter a veneration of Common Sense in a rhetoric strongly suggestive of moral obligations. Besides the shared genealogy of their thought in the tradition of empiricism, Hutcheson’s and Reid’s philosophical sense dwells in their sharing interest in the civic and the legal, i.e., in the source of mutual obligations among members of a community, which is not only social but also ethical and cultural gesture. In the technological politics nowadays, the philosophy of sense, common-sense and non-sense still bears various meanings and the legalrational (non)sense of the political, to use Max Weber’s words (as in Marcin Sarnek’s view), can be perceived in the context of some effects of the recent piracy-panic on the contemporary, future, and – perhaps paradoxically – past creativity. Today, the technological, legal, social, and cultural conflicts surrounding intellectual property violently narrate (through the use of informal anecdotes referring to the absurdities of the current copyright regimes) the birth of curious by- and end-products of a culture of excess. Social and political overtones cannot be overlooked in the “culture of everyday life” (Rekha G. Menon and N. Sreekumar) in which the politics of language assumes a venture into the intellectual origins of common sense as it is expounded by Kant, Gadamer and Habermas in their philosophical approaches. By means of commenting upon distinctive traditions in social philosophy and arguing along with Anthony J. Cascardi, the authors attempt to point out that Habermas’ idea of common sense differs from Kant’s interpretation which is reflected in latter’s failure to incorporate the affective dimension in inter-subjective interaction.

Sense and Multi-Cultural Dilemmas Socio-cultural gestures which are highly valued with sense are studied in the context of globalisation which relies, to a great extent, on the universal acceptance of Euro-centric rationality as the preferred method of making

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

xvii

sense of the world. But apart from Europe, there have been also such countries like Thailand, never colonised, nor coming to the position of a significant world power. Thai socio-cultural values cannot be treated purely in terms of post-colonial heritage, and their apparent irrationality and incompatibility with the Western system of sense-making should not be merely seen as a result of cultural hybridization. To make sense of Thai culture, as Katarzyna Ancuta admits, one must be aware of how Thai socio-cultural values evolved irrespectively of the Western principle of rationality. The sense of “Thainess” can be sensed through Thai media, commercial and publicistic advertising, literature, film, and critical theory and the way these representations reflect the cultural values underpinning Thai society. Thai society presents us with an independent value system, whose evaluations of sense, non-sense and common sense developed irrespectively of Western rationality. Related to Thai socio-cultural constructs are also values that can be found in the Carribean literature and culture of, for instance, Jamaika Kincaid (in Jude Nixon’s essay) whose Autobiography of My Mother (1996) reflects a deep sense of national West Indian literature emblematic of cultural and political history and experience. Kincaid’s is the story with the sense that dwells deep down things as it tells the truth about the feverish struggle of West Indians for freedom from occupation, imperialism, slavery, paternalism, and the gender inflicted paradigms of power accompanying them. Jamaica Kincaid is the only West Indian novelist to attend closely to the plight of the indigenous Carib, after whom the region takes its name. Nowhere is the plot of this deracinated, displaced, and destroyed people so dramatized as in The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), where disparate versions of the authorial self (“my life with her”) and its Carib ancestry enact the pathologies of that history. So fundamental is the Carib plot that as the novel ends, Xuela and her English husband Philip return to the motherland, to the Carib reserve in the hills of Marigo and Castle Bruce, far from the madding crowd of Roseau, which Xuela had earlier anticipated in a dream. J.Nixon’s essay addresses the Carib presence in the novel and the way it mirrors their absence, their erasure. Demanding an explanation, Kincaid discovers that she does not posses “the luxury of an answer.” Ultimately, a sense of justice is what the Kincaid and the novel demand.

Structure, Non-Sense and Uncertainty In spite of attempts to grasp the ontology of culture in a rigid form of synchronic, quasi-positivistic theorems, cultural processes seem deprived

xviii

In Place of a Foreword

of a universal, totalising structure rendering order at a price of a reified agent whose identity is neatly reduced to the acquired status in discourses, social structures or power relations. Ontologically speaking, the terms “structure” and “uncertainty” address the liminal (perhaps dialectical) character of culture conceived as an entity fusing contradictory powers of structural determination and interpretative autonomy. It seems that the aforementioned interplay is illustrated by Alfred North Whitehead’s claim suggesting that “[A] chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is a wreckage, and beyond it harbourage and safety. The categories governing the determination of things are the reasons why there should be evil; and are also the reasons why, in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended”. Tadeusz Sławek addresses this quotation in his essay in which – endorsing the view that facts make sense, i.e. that what has been actualised separates meaningfulness from nonsense and, in the long run, cancels evil, and seems to be good-oriented – it is argued that due to the discrepancy between the human time and the world's time is only a hypothetical notion which can be neither proved nor refuted and therefore the „barrier reef” of facts is not as tight and hermetic as Whitehead wished it to be. Hence, the points of its perforation which make the barrier permeable, regions where the wreckage meets the harbourage, are places of no-sense, of the tragi-comic. Reading works of such diverse authors as Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce, the significance of the tragicomic could be demonstrated as a major philosophical category which helps us to get closer to understanding our life experience. The aforementioned dialectic character of cultural processes is indicative of the liminal character of our cognitive categories, such as nonsense. Therefore, the ambivalence of nonsense is founded on the assumption that – contrary to analytic philosophers’ view which portrays nonsensical propositions as radically devoid of meaning – nonsense is not only able to carry sense but is also a meta-reflection on the very processes of understanding and ordering our experience (Alina Mitek-Dziemba). These two processes can be referred to as the activity of “making sense of” as opposed to “making nonsense of”, a phrase that sounds accusatory even if used for purely descriptive purposes. The cognitive category of nonsense is, as Maciej Nowak postulates, in league with the notion of folly, a feminine, protean trope and a rhetorical strategy that assumes various axiological standpoints to show the relativity of social ranks and empty titular dignities. In this context, Praise of Folly by Erasmus can be seen as a very successful humanistic address that questions the backward and dull scholastic outlook of the Middle Ages.

The Surplus of Culture: Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

xix

This ambivalence of cognitive and cultural constructs paves the way for a methodology of researching into human agency from the perspective of the liminal character of cultural processes as events in statu nascendi, that is fusing the historical necessity of structure and the autonomy of an individual (Tomasz BurzyĔski). In this sense, a new, middle-of-the-road cultural ontology can be founded upon the continuity of agency and structure conceived as dialectically intertwined aspects of cultural reproduction. The dialectic intertwining of surplus (“the divine grandeur”, instress, meaning) and the poetic act of creation can be shown in the choreographic act of circling (“windhovering”) as enacted in Hopkins’ famous sonnet (Ewa Borkowska). The joyful surplus of motion, the circling of the bird (as in Hopkins’ sonnet) and the “gyring to the ancient tower” of the divine (as in Rilke’s poem) are intended as choreographic scenarios to show the creation (“oozing”) of meaning that will not only delight the seer but also elicit emotional or kinesthetic responses. The ritual of metamorphosis from the visible (structure, inscape) to the mysterious (uncertain) is enacted in a work of art which seduces the viewer/reader by the surplus of choreography and dance performance (sensuality), yet delays the expression of the ineffable (surplus, “grandeur”, instress). The interplay between structure and uncertainty is also indicative of attempts to re-interpret, to proceed beyond the established structures or schemes of understanding. In this essentially anti-traditionalist sense, Sławomir MasłoĔ argues against the common interpretation of Buster Keaton’s The General, which, referring to Walter Benjamin, presents it as a critique of mechanisation and therefore dehumanisation of everyday human life. The text tries to show that it is precisely the “spiritless” body which is presented as the object of interest in the film and that it is this body, not the spontaneous spirituality, which is the source of autonomy of the main protagonist and his poetic charm. Moreover, it is argued that, taking into consideration the form of the movie, it is the perfectly selfcontained mechanically constructed plot of becoming-engine of Johnnie which is “polluted” by the supposedly organic sentimental and heroic conventions artificially forced upon it. Not only can this offer comment on the claims of spontaneity and sentimental organicity, but it can also be understood as a verdict on this side of the Civil War conflict whose identity is founded on such concepts.

xx

In Place of a Foreword

*** The essays presented in this volume share the sense of investigation into more latent aspects of cultural meaningfulness where supposedly wellentrenched and socially rationalised phenomena suddenly reveal their implicitly subversive nature of cultural surplus. From the perspective of such an essentially critical methodology, the surplus of culture dwells at the intersection of interpretation and tradition in which the literary cannon is re-visited, language reveals its hidden agenda of political origin, the Orient reclaims its own perspective of sense and established structures of cognition become questioned in the tragic-comic and autonomous gesture of interpretation. In this sense, the texts in this volume refer to an ambiguity of interpretation, the elusive surplus of explanations which – to use Słavoj Žižek’s terminology – may gesture to the arrival of the Real lurking at the hinterlands of symbolic culture. —Ewa Borkowska and Tomasz BurzyĔski University of Silesia

PART I: CANON RE-VISITED

CHAPTER ONE THE FUNNY, THE EXAGGERATED, THE ABSURD: ON THE FRINGES OF THE NEO-VICTORIAN CULTURE AGNIESZKA GOŁDA-DEREJCZYK

Neo-Victorianism: From the Politics of Reparation to the Aesthetics of Repercussion Ever since the term “neo-Victorian” was coined by Dana Shiller in 1997 to label the subgenre of novels that, as she writes, “adopt a postmodern approach to history and that are set at least partly in the nineteenth century”1 several monographs and collections of essays on the subject have been published,2 numerous articles written, and a few conferences including the major University of Exeter Conference entitled: ”NeoVictorianism: The Poetics and Politics of Appropriation”3 have taken place. In addition, the year 2008 witnessed a launching of the peer1 Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel,” Studies in the Novel, vol. 29, no. 4 (1997), p. 558. 2 See, for example: Julian Wolfreys, Victoriographies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), John Kucich & Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism. The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (and Two Case-Studies) (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), Christine L. Krueger, ed. Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), and Cora Kaplan, Victoriana. Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007). 3 The conference organised by the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter took place between 10-12 September 2007.

4

Chapter One

reviewed scholarly Internet journal neovictiorianstudies.com devoted, as its editors advocate, to “the exploration of the contemporary fascination with re-imagining the nineteenth century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts in both British and international frameworks.”4 Universities have expanded their course offer with a new proposal which may bear a variety of names: neo-Victorianism, Victoriography, Victoriana or such like, and some bookshops have even secured a separate bookshelf for fiction labelled “neo-Victorian” or “retroVictorian.” These and other instances of academic appropriation of neoVictorianism (including the very emergence of neo-Victorian studies as an academic discipline in its own right) may be perceived as a clear sign of neo-Victorianism gradually but steadily being transformed into, what can be seen as, an established literary and cultural mode, and as such subject to processes of theorization, classification and categorization; well-groomed and pampered. As a consequence, much of neo-Victorian fiction, born out of the need to re-conceptualise the nineteenth-century literary canon, has itself become canonised5 and as such exposed to critical re-reading and open to redemptive or parodic transformations of the same or similar type it once employed against the Victorian or, in a broader context, nineteenthcentury novel. The “neo” in the term “neo-Victorian” thus seems to have lost its initial, though only transitory significance of novelty or innovativeness. For Shiller back in 1997 the neo-Victorian novel’s engagement with the past possessed the quality of enhancement for the postmodern present.6 Today instead, what we can observe is what I see as, for want of a better expression, a passage on the part of neo-Victorianism from the reign of the politics of reparation to the privilege of the aesthetics of repercussion, and accompanying change of tone and mood from frequently applied austere seriousness of earlier re-visionary fiction to parodic exaggeration and comic absurdity of more recent novels. 4 See http://www.neovictorianstudies.com. The e-journal is hosted by Swansea University, Wales, UK. 5 It should suffice to mention the two earliest examples of neo-Victorian literature: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) which have been widely criticised, analysed, taught, re-written, adapted for film, television, opera and the stage, and so on. But also more recent neo-Victorian novels have met the same destination of canonisation, e.g. Byatt’s Booker-winning Possession (1990), or even more recent fauxVictorian trilogy authored by Sarah Waters: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002), which all entered university curricula and have been filmed. 6 Shiller, “The Redemptive Past”, p. 558.

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

5

By the politics of reparation I mean the tendency derivative of the ideological revolution of 1970s, the outcome of which was the political fashion for reparatory revision: the process of reclamation and a challenge to the authority of canonical literature coming from a variety of ideological grounds: feminist, post-colonial, Marxist and so on. Cora Kaplan, for example, observes that “a revived interest in Victorian literature and society is associated with the ascendancy of feminists as literary scholars and the priority of gender and sexuality in their work.”7 This resulted in launching a full-scale rewrite of not only the literary canon, but also social history of the long nineteenth-century.8 “Reparation” thus in this context with its double meaning of, as Webster Dictionary prompts us, “the act of renewing, restoring” and “the act of making amends or giving satisfaction or compensation for a wrong or injury, etc; also often used in the context of war”9 is more expressive of this literary phenomenon than a less ambiguous “repair” or “renovation.” “Reparation” understood in this double sense may be thus seen as the principle underlying the ideological and narrative strategy of a substantial portion of revisionary neo-Victorian fiction, which initially aimed, in the words of Kaplan again, at “highlight[ing] the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire, as well as challeng[ing] the conventional understanding of the historical,”10 in line with the trend set famously, for example, by Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken” (1971). The aesthetics of repercussion, on the other hand, the term which may be used to define more recent renderings of neo-Victorianism in fiction and elsewhere, evokes the departure from politically grounded narratives towards the prominence of the play with word and text, including the play with neo-Victorian component itself. In this context “repercussion” with its significance of “the act of driving back; reflection; reverberation as, the repercussion of sound; rapid reiteration of the same sound”11 and in the plural “repercussions” meaning “a remote or indirect consequence of some action” seems an exceptionally apt description. The sense of reflection, reverberation or reiteration is what may more accurately describe the 7

Cora Kaplan, Victoriana. Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007), p. 93. 8 Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 93. 9 Webster Dictionary on-line: 30 Aug 2009

10 Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 3. 11 Webster Dictionary on-line: 30 Aug 2009

6

Chapter One

strategy behind more recent novels whose critical or parodic lens have been not so much directed at the poor Victorian scapegoat from the past as, in a type of self-referential gesture, the neo-Victorian culture itself, where like in an echo-chamber the sound, or the nineteenth-century textual original gets reiterated so many times as to lose its attachment to the original source. In this type of fiction politics thus gives way to the prominence of aesthetics, the aesthetics of repetition, recycling, reiteration, deprived of the earlier gravity or frequently parodying the political charge of the neo-Victorian novel. The process of the passage from the reign of the politics of reparation to the privilege of the aesthetics of repercussion can probably find the most apposite illustration in three novels, all referring to the same Victorian textual original but approaching it from a varied perspective and with the use of often diametrically different set of interpretative and revisionary tools in their fictional box. These three novels may serve to emblematise, though only for the purposes of clarification, three stages in the development of the neo-Victorian fiction, or rather three different approaches to the Victorian constituent as seen from the modern perspective. Certainly, we need to offer a disclaimer here, and state that this division does not apply to all instances of neo-Victorianism – since it is too vast and too varied mode – but rather, it serves to highlight some recognizable and classifiable tendencies at work. The first of these is a classical revisionary approach, which, for the purpose of this analysis, may be represented by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). As at once a feminist and post-colonial revision of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre it represents the politics of reparation per se. As Veronica Marie Gregg writes in Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination Rhys’s biggest quarrel with the Victorian novelist is over the inscription of the mad white West Indian woman, the portrayal of which Rhys insistently challenged in her revision.12 But her novel does not only constitute the critical response to the Victorian textual original. Rhys’s strategy to shift the original dates in order to place her Antoinette/Bertha Mason within the context of post-slavery West Indies makes Wide Sargasso Sea deliberately anachronistic, and it thus also “imaginatively reinvents a category evacuated of social and political meaning in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of writing when colonial structures are being dismantled.”13 The second and the third approach represented respectively by D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: the Final Journey of Jane Eyre (2000) and Jasper Fforde’s first 12

Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 82. 13 Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, p. 83.

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

7

novel of Thursday Next series The Eyre Affair (2001) challenge the neoVictorian politics of reparation by using and abusing the Victorian and neo-Victorian constituents, installing and subverting both the Victorian and the neo-Victorian canon. D.M. Thomas’s novel, pertaining to a postmodern playful approach, may be seen as a pastiche of a neo-Victorian pastiche of the nineteenth-century novel. Fforde’s novel, difficult to categorise by critics and readers alike, may be seen as pure wordplay, depending on its textual original only for the purposes of entertainment, humour and exaggeration. In other words, if Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in order to challenge Victorian assumptions about colonial otherness, D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: the Final Journey of Jane Eyre and Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, both published almost forty years later, cannot and do not retain any of Rhys’s seriousness. Thomas’s novel mocks and parodies the very recriminative impulse behind Rhys’s text and other literary instances of neo-Victorian remedying. On the other hand, Fforde’s amalgamation of all possible genres: fantasy, science fiction, detective story departs radically from both the revisionary tradition represented by Rhys and comparatively mild playfulness of Thomas’s novel to offer in the words of one bewildered critic: “a grand literary joke, post-modernism played as raw, howling farce.”14 Let’s then spare a few lines on a closer analysis of the ways these two novels: D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte and Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair sensationalise and nonsense the neo-Victorian; how they appropriate, paraphrase, plagiarise and twist both the Victorian and neo-Victorian constituents of their plots and narratives. We need to begin where the three novels actually began – the nineteenth-century narrative. It is not a coincidence that all three of the texts discussed here recycle, in a more or less obvious manner, the novel which has come to be seen as the most productive novels in English literature, often serving as a foundational myth for numerous other texts15 – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.16 It has been not only productive in 14

Margarete Rubik, “Invasions into Literary Texts, Re-plotting and Transfictional Migration in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair,” in The Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, eds. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 170. 15 Barbara Schaff, “The Strange After-Lives of Jane Eyre,” in The Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, eds. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 28. 16 The list of Jane Eyre’s reworkings includes a dozen film versions, several musical adaptations, including opera and ballet, a number of adaptations for television, and numerous fictional rewrites: prequels, sequels, continuations, etc.

8

Chapter One

literary terms but as a potentially fruitful text for literary criticism - in the twentieth century the novel has been contextualised in all major critical schools:17 historicist, liberal, humanist, feminist (e.g. Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar), Marxist (Terry Eagleton in Myths of Power), postcolonial (Gayatri Spivak) and so on. In other words, rather than being based on some fixed textual ontology, its canonical status depends, as Barbara Schaff observes, on its “adaptability which has guaranteed the novel’s place in the cultural consciousness over time.”18 For Rhys the nineteenth-century text served as an impulse for renovation, for Thomas and Fforde its potential attractiveness lies both in its status as one of the most recognisable texts of Victorian literature but also a crucial intertext in a number of neo-Victorian novels (starting with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938)) and a text with such an extensive twentieth-century critical history. Thus choosing Jane Eyre as their material for recycling, reiteration and re-appropriation they would immediately evoke not only the nineteenth-century realist fiction tradition, but also late-twentieth-century literary fashion for re-inventing Brontë’s text. In other words, they immediately place their texts in the context of a double reworking: a revision of a revision or a repetition of a repetition or, and I shall play with prefixation now, a post-neo-Victorian repetition of a neo-Victorian repetition of the Victorian textual original.

Postmodern Playfulness: Sensationalising Jane Eyre in D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre “I decided to do something special for my father’s sixtieth birthday. He collected Victoriana. I rewrote the ending of one of his favourite novels – a dozen or so pages – then laboriously copied it onto special old paper I found in a drawer.”19

D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre unfolds in parallel a Victorian and a contemporary story, thus offering the reader two temporal levels. In its Victorian setting it recreates – in a form of a pastiche – the final lines of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, beginning with the Victorian catchphrase: “Reader, I married him” only to dissent from the nineteenth-century realist convention within a space of a page or two and indulge in a blatant violation of all possible rules: principles of credibility 17

Schaff, “The Strange After-Lives of Jane Eyre,” p. 28. Schaff, “The Strange After-Lives of Jane Eyre,” p. 26. 19 D.M. Thomas, Charlotte: the Final Journey of Jane Eyre (London: Duckbacks, 2001), p. 125. 18

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

9

and nineteenth-century codes of decency and reticence being the more conspicuous of those infringed: Reader, you will expect me to draw a veil over the intimacies which transpire between a man and his wife. I am sorry to disappoint and offend you. I will tell you that everything seemed blissful to me; it was bliss to lie side by side with Edward; to feel his passionate embrace and kisses; to feel my entire soul and being given up to him. The only surprise was the absence of anything that a married woman, except she were of the most puritanical disposition, could find displeasing or disturbing. There were a few moments of pain as I was deflowered – strange word, for something that seemed like a flowering of my womanhood.20

In Thomas’s rendering of Jane’s allegedly freshly discovered diary the Victorians turn out sexual freaks and Jane Eyre experiences something of a feminist awakening. To relate these “transgressions of 19th-century fictional codes” and “infringements of codes of decency” one would end up with material an editor of a gossip column would not omit to appreciate since Thomas’s version goes beyond happy-ever-afterness of Brontë’s text. In her supposed dairy Jane discloses her suspicion of Rochester’s impotency, confronts him with this accusation upon which he rides off in anger, falls off the horse, and breaks his neck. Rochester’s death induces Jane to leave England in order to search for Bertha and Rochester’s son, whom they apparently left behind on the island of Martinique in the West Indies as the child was born dark-skinned. Jane sets sail for Martinique accompanied by Grace Poole and manages to pin down the whereabouts of Robert Rochester, now DuBois (named after the priest who reared and educated him). She falls for Rochester’s son and gets pregnant by him, and only a premature death impedes her from becoming a mother to her husband’s grandchild. D.M. Thomas eroticises Jane Eyre, but his strategy does not leave other Charlotte Brontë’s characters intact. Grace Poole turns out a whore Rochester hired to attend to his insane wife, and Rochester, a type of sexual masochist, who apparently has never lost his desire and his obsession with Bertha Mason: “Every few months, usually during a drinking bout, he would visit her, and Grace would be compelled to restrain her, to an extent, while he enjoyed his marital rights. (...) He said he had no other outlet, could have none other. All of his supposed mistresses were bravado, gross exaggerations. No one can love like Bertha, he told Grace.”21 20 21

Thomas, Charlotte, pp. 17-18. Thomas, Charlotte, p. 193.

10

Chapter One

Such an overt reference to sexuality serves not only to disconcert the reader but also, in a self-reflexive and explicitly exaggerated manner, to comment critically and parody the somewhat commercialised fashion for representing in contemporary literature and visual arts the nineteenthcentury from the backstage and in a marriage-chamber, or at least in garters. With its insistence on explicit sexual references in the Victorianstylised narrative D.M. Thomas’s novel in fact uses and abuses, installs and subverts the contemporary neo-Victorian preference for the presentation of the saucy and bawdy version of Victoriana, and that critics, Christian Gutleben among them, see as “a provocative association of pornography and hagiography,” one which “combines the prestige of illustriousness and the promise of licentiousness in order to entice a wide audience.”22 After the initial tour de force the novel takes a temporal turn and the twentieth-century perspective is introduced. The alleged original diary of Jane Eyre is uncovered to be authored by the twentieth-century heroine of the novel: a disconcerting figure – Miranda Stevenson, a literary academic and feminist working in the field of Victorianism. Miranda immediately evokes and at the same time parodies more veritable characters of such neo-Victorian novels as: Byatt’s Possession (the figure of Victorian feminist critic: Maud Bailey) and The Biographer’s Tale (literary theorist Phineas Nanson), Graham Swift’s Ever After (literature professor Bill Unwin) or David Lodge’s Nice Work (feminist critic and lecturer Robyn Penrose). The modern story begins in Martinique where Miranda has arrived to attend the feminist conference on Brontë’s fiction, and where she introduces herself to a West Indian as Charlotte. In D.M. Thomas’s text double meaning, twosomes, parallelisms, and doppelgänger motifs abound. Miranda Stevenson, for example, is, as her names discloses, a double self. Her behaviour often parallels, in a modern context of course, that of Charlotte Brontë’s protagonist, but she is also Jane Eyre of her own fictional manuscript. Also, as a self-made author of the sequel of the Victorian classic, Miranda comes to impersonate Charlotte Brontë herself.23 In fact, Miranda Stevenson is built as a composite figure of her nineteenth-century literary antecedents, repeating their gestures and fates: Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason and Adele Rochester. She re-lives in the novel’s 22

Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism. The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 175. 23 Miranda is an author and forger of Charlotte Brontë’s allegedly authentic manuscript that provides the continuation of Jane’s diary after she married Mr Rochester. The meticulously prepared manuscript was Miranda’s present for her father, a collector of Victoriana.

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

11

present the past of her Victorian equivalents and she thus becomes both the narrator and the narrated. Like Jane Eyre of the manuscript Miranda travels to Martinique, exercises her sexual prowess with Martinique’s black inhabitant and like Jane she gets pregnant by one of them. Miranda’s father acts out the role of Rochester; he is half blind and his half-erotic relationship with his daughter (Miranda poses in front of him dressed in her dead mother’s clothes) parallels that of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester’s. But Miranda becomes symbolic Bertha Mason, too. Her sexual rapacity brings her closer to mad and often tempestuous Bertha than sexually repressed Jane. Additionally, Bertha’s uncontrollable sexuality finds its rather perverted reflection in her modern counterpart Miranda’s mother – Emma who was suffering from manic depression and frequently took to exposing herself nude in the public, or having fits of aggressive sexual behaviour. Like Bertha, Emma commits suicide and Miranda’s father (who parallels Rochester) also tells his daughter he is “going to kill himself on the day of the eclipse.”24 Thomas’s novel eroticises both its Victorian and modern characters but while sexing the Victorians renders them de-sanctified, though of course also exaggerated, sexuality in the postmodern reality becomes a barren Waste Land and Thomas’s postmodern characters seem to inhabit Unreal City of T.S. Eliot’s poem. Miranda, a hollow woman, is a product of postmodern, post-traumatic and post-romantic society. She had an abortion and, like her mother, often suffered from long periods of depression. Similarly to Maud and Roland of Byatt’s Possession Miranda is a victim of adamant scepticism she inherited from her distrustful culture. She discerns her life so far as a series of predictable incidents, the life theatre where she only played a minor role: By then, I’d gone to university, got into sex and drugs, failed my first year exams, had my first breakdown, then went to a third-rate poly where I scraped a pass (almost impossible not to) and met David, Art and Design Tutor with Wife and Toddler. (...) Then, marriage, kids, Valium, a flat in Sidcup, a maisonette in Blackheath, a lectureship in Women’s Studies in the same third-rate poly, now laughingly described as a university, a minor reputation as a narrowly-based academic, Prozac, an increasing urge to escape from reality into fiction, as that eighteen-year-old gym-slipped girl did. There you have it, dear reader.25

24 25

Thomas, Charlotte, p. 198. Thomas, Charlotte, p. 128.

12

Chapter One

The portrait of postmodern reality that Thomas paints is thus deeply disturbing. For Miranda predatory sexuality has come to replace the real human communication, and though Thomas’s novel is not explicitly sentimental for the lost era of authenticity of demeanour, nostalgia for the past resounds on the novel’s pages. Miranda escapes into Victorian fiction and whether she constructs herself as a modern Jane Eyre or really builds Jane Eyre’s narrative around her own postmodern experience is for the reader to decide, and Thomas certainly does not facilitate it. Fact, fiction, authenticity and falsity in the novel become almost synonymous. When Miranda arrives in Martinique to attend the conference on women writers she is mistakenly introduced by the conference assistant as Charlotte Brontë who is going to give a talk on a Victorian novelist Miranda Stevenson. She then uses the name as her sexual pseudonym. It is as Charlotte that she seduces three black men on Martinique, among them a queer whom Miranda later recognises in a gay club as a transvestite who chose to introduce his other feminine self as Charlotte. Additionally, Miranda’s fragmentation and her incapability to reconcile her official and social self with her sexual self can be deduced from the connotations her family name provides. Stevenson is the name of a Victorian novelist, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, interpreted as a classic study of dualism of human nature. And so is Miranda dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde, a respected academic, wife and mother by day, and a sexual maniac by night. Paradoxically then, modern Miranda enacts the two polarities of Victorian sexuality: respected and sanctified motherhood and active female sexuality, but she also personifies a distressing inability or aversion to neutralise and reconcile the two. Thus she remains a split self, able to draw her primary self-definition neither from the domestic domain nor from the sexual realm. As befits a double reworking, D.M. Thomas plays not only with the nineteenth-century classic, but he also tries to resurrect Rhys’s text and Rhys herself. As Gutleben observes, “a novel which presents a new version of Jane Eyre in a Creole setting inevitably recalls Jean Rhys’s revision of Brontë’s novel.”26 And so, in a type of a metafictional gesture, Thomas abuses not only Rhys’s text but the figure of Jean Rhys herself, suggesting she might have been Miranda’s father’s lover (“I’d reread Wide Sargasso Sea, and of course it brought back memories of my meeting her as a child, when she’d lived near us in Cornwall. I’m sure my father had something going with her, though he’s never hinted at it, and I’ve never

26

Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p. 180.

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

13

asked him.”27) The allusion at the sexual relation between a Victorianist and the novelist who began the revision of the nineteenth-century canon “might bespeak the literary abuse of the first neo-Victorian novel.”28 It might be also read as Thomas’s critical attitude to some instances of neoVictorian clichéd and often simplified revisions of the nineteenth-century, which he sees as not so much innovative or illuminative but abusive of the Victorian constituent. Thomas’s seems thus a curious type of double-edged parody. It recreates the canonical novel in order to produce an imitation which at first sight mocks the Victorian original and appears to laugh at the moral and social restrictions of the age of repression. But its object of ridicule is much more likely the age that helped to produce it, on the one hand, and the neo-Victorian repetitiveness and political correctness, being a consequence of the reign of the politics of reparation, on the other. In his novel thus subversion originally directed at the age of repression turns against the agent of the seditious, against the age of liberation, while textually it seems to turn against the very practice of revision.

“The grand literary joke”: Non-sensing Jane Eyre in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair “Intrigued, I opened the package. Firstly, there was a handkerchief that despite several washings still bore the stains of my own blood. There was an embroidered monogram in the corner that read EFR. Secondly the parcel contained a jacket, a sort of casual evening coat that might have been popular in the middle of the last century. I searched the pockets and found a bill from a milliner. It was made out to one Edward Fairfax Rochester, Esq., and was dated 1833. I sat down heavily on the bed and stared at the articles of clothing and the bill. Ordinarily I would not have believed that Rochester could have torn himself from the pages of Jane Eyre and come to my aid that night; such a thing is, of course, quite impossible. I might have dismissed the whole thing as a ludicrously complicated prank had it not been for one thing: Edward Rochester and I had met once before …”29

If D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre seems like postmodern exaggeration, in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair the reader is in store for comic absurdity and the literal and literary – and I am not 27

Thomas, Charlotte, p. 100. Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p. 181. 29 Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 62. 28

14

Chapter One

confounded here – loss of sense. For Thomas Charlotte Brontë’s text served as a pretext to discuss the crisis of modern self, on the one hand, and criticise the neo-Victorian politics of reparation, on the other. For Fforde the nineteenth-century classic is not merely a novel, containing fictional representation of the textual world, it is the world in its own right, one which might be entered freely. Fforde creates in his novel an alternative world of 1985 where not only time travel but also literary travel is possible. In this world the contemporary characters are able to not only plunge into their favourite books’ reality by indulging their imagination but they are afforded a literal journey into the space and time of Jane Eyre. In a similar vein, Rochester and other Brontë’s familiar figures may step into the twentieth-century reality and interact. The novel’s eponymous protagonist Thursday Next is a literary detective, whose first job is to find and bring Jane Eyre back to her fictional world after she has been kidnapped by a notorious literary thief, Acheron Hades. And since in the world of The Eyre Affair Jane Eyre is the most popular and widely read novels, everyone fears how the absence of the main protagonist will change the novel’s plotline, which here has a different ending to the original one. It ends with Jane Eyre accompanying St. John Rivers to India in order to assist him in his missionary work. Literary allusions and jokes abound in the novel: Thursday Next, for example (her mother is Wednesday by the way) in her first fight against the novel’s arch-villain Hades is helped out by a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be Rochester himself, while the bullet from Hades’s gun that would have certainly killed her gets stuck in a copy of Jane Eyre she carried in her breast pocket. Intertextuality in the novel is understood literally as a journey from one text to another. Thursday’s uncle Mycroft (explicit paraphrase of Microsoft but also a possible allusion to Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother) is an ingenious inventor, whose Prose Portal enables people to enter freely into literary works. His wife Polly, for example, is transported into one of Wordsworth’s poem, and gets stuck there. It is through the Prose Portal that Hades enters the text world of Jane Eyre and is followed by Thursday, who manages to kill him and, as a side effect, changes the novel’s finale to the familiar ending with Thornfield burnt, Bertha Mason dead and Rochester blind. Fforde’s inventive technique of complementing the story line which runs temporally parallel to an established, well known text has earned itself a new term of ‘parallelquel’30 to distinguish it from the more familiar and 30

Mark Berninger and Katrin Thomas, „A Parallelquel of a Classic Text and Reification of the Fictional – the Playful Parody of Jane Eyre in Jasper Fforde’s

The Funny, The Exaggerated, The Absurd

15

more frequently practised prequels and sequels (e.g. Thursday first entered the textual world of Jane Eyre as a child, when she scared off Rochester’s horse and caused his fall). Fforde’s female protagonist, similarly to Thomas’s Miranda Stevenson, is a modernised version of Jane Eyre and thus destined to re-live her fate, though in different space, time and circumstances. This similarity to the Victorian heroine is especially visible in, as Margarete Rubik writes, “her troubled relationship to her war-disabled lover about to marry another, uncongenial woman, and in her oscillation between emancipation and domesticity.”31 Yet, unlike Thomas’s work of fiction, Fforde’s text even though hinging textually on Jane Eyre, does not demonstrate a recriminative or revisionary impulse. It does contain a substantial portion of satire but directed not against the Victorian scapegoat but some contemporary issues (such as questions of globalisation and neo-liberalism). The alternative world is not driven by a similar force. As Beringer and Thomas observe, “Instead of attacking Brontë’s novel, The Eyre Affair is an elaborate tribute to it.”32 In fact, Fforde goes the opposite direction than the novelists who have been writing under the spell of the politics of reparation, and instead of renovating the textual original, he chooses to have the ending of his version of Jane Eyre repaired, even though accidentally, to fit the original one. Fforde may exploit the nineteenth-century classic but he does it aesthetically and textually, and not politically, and himself enacts the role of an arch-villain and the literary arch-thief: borrowing plot and characters from other text to people his own invented reality In this sense, Fforde’s novel represents the idea of the aesthetics of repercussion; a departure from ideologically charged fiction into the world of intertextual play and repetition without the necessary recriminative overtones. A repetition or reiteration, appropriation of plot and characters from earlier Victorian model then is not driven by the corrective objective but rather an exploitation of literary allusion and clever wordplay with a wink of the eye to the reader. That such a treatment of the Victorian textual models has become a standard rather than an exception may be seen in a number of other literary examples where Victorian or, in a broader sense, nineteenthcentury characters have been lifted from their original context and exploited in modern narratives without the idea of renovation in mind. The Eyre Affair” in The Breath of Fresh Eyre, eds. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, p. 181. 31 Margarete Rubik, “Invasions into Literary Texts”, p. 167. 32 Mark Berninger and Katrin Thomas, “A Parallelquel of a Classic Text and Reification of the Fictional”, p. 182.

16

Chapter One

This may be exemplified by Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. The former constitutes a truly extraordinary kaleidoscope of characters borrowed from most canonical texts of the nineteenth century (Sherlock Holmes, Phileas Fogg, Frankenstein’s monster, Alice, Dorian Gray, Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo and so on). The latter, not unlike Fforde’s twisted plot, has the real and fictional characters interact (Dracula, Jack the Ripper and Queen Victoria). The fascination with Victoriana and neo-Victoriana continues, yet parallel to the more serious fashion for re-imagining the nineteenth-century and its various social, political and literary contexts runs the tendency at representing the funny, the exaggerated, and the absurd of neo-Victorianism.

CHAPTER TWO MAKING SENSE OF JOHN RUSKIN’S CONCEPTION OF FEMININITY IN SESAME AND LILIES ANDRZEJ WICHER

Ruskin has often been accused of a rather anti-feminist attitude, and his opinions on women and female education are regarded as “as an exemplary expression of repressive Victorian ideas about femininity.”1 If we accepted this verdict, we might say that what Ruskin says about women makes sense in the Victorian cultural context, or within the discourse of Victorianism, while does not make any sense at all within the discourse of what might be called the 21st century version of Enlightenment, which sometimes is referred to as ‘political correctness.’ I’m going to discuss Ruskin’s views on women in connection with his remarks, made in Sesame and Lilies, on the works of William Shakespeare because, interestingly enough, it is mainly from Shakespeare that Ruskin draws inspiration for his discussion of the subject of femininity. It could be considered strange that Ruskin found anything of interest in Shakespeare. Ruskin was first of all a moralist, a moralist of the Victorian ilk, which means that he believed strongly in social progress and in bringing about all kinds of improvements to various provinces of life. Apart from being an art critic, which seems to have been his basic vocation, he was also keenly interested in a bewildering array of subjects including geology, botany, and meteorology.2 Needless to say, his attitude to art was also rather moralistic and pragmatic. According to E.D. Mackerness, “Ruskin’s great thesis” was: 1

See http://www.empik.com/sesame-and-lilies-z-importu,1623429 See E.D. Mackerness, “The Voice of Prophecy: Carlyle and Ruskin” in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, vol. 6 (From Dickens to Hardy) (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 306. 2

18

Chapter Two [...] that the ‘ideas’ presented to us by satisfactorily accomplished works of art are essentially moral ideas in the sense that they enhance our faculties of perception and render us less subject to the allurements of ignoble pleasure.3

A similarly progressivist outlook can be observed in the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who was contemporary to Ruskin. And it is well known that Shakespeare was Tolstoy’s pet hate, the writer Tolstoy strove tirelessly to discredit and to denounce, not only as a miserable graphomaniac, but, first of all, as a cynical reactionary, a mortal enemy of the people. What Tolstoy found so very objectionable in Shakespeare was, it seems, among other things, the latter’s lack of a progressive social commitment and of a clearly moral dimension in his works. As Tolstoy put it: Shakespeare’s plays are based on a most mundane, trivial worldview, according to which the upper class should be valued because of their external social position, the crowd deserve to be despised, including the working class, and a worldview that rejects not only religious, but even humanitarian efforts to change the existing system.4

Naturally, to understand fully Tolstoy’s rather eccentric position, we have to put into the context of his strict religious beliefs that pushed him, especially at the end of his long life, in the direction of an iconoclastic and quasi-puritanical denial of all aesthetic values, as opposed, naturally, to moral ones. And we should remember that is was not only Shakespeare that Tolstoy threw overboard, but also Pushkin (who already at that time was recognised as Russia’s greatest poet), just as the great poets of the classical antiquity.5 Ruskin, however, who, just like Tolstoy, hated the capitalists, fulminated against ‘the division of labour’, emphasised moral values in art, and idealised ‘the working men’, had a very different, and absolutely positive, attitude towards Shakespeare. In his famous lectures Sesame and Lilies, he uses Shakespeare to shore up his peculiar feminism, which of course not only does not measure up to the standards of modern feminism, but is clearly inimical to it. Ruskin rejects the very notion of “woman’s 3

Mackerness, “The Voice of Prophecy”, p. 308. Lew Tołstoj (Leo Tolstoy), “O Szekspirze i o dramacie” (On Shakespeare and Drama) in Szkice szekspirowskie (Shakespearian Sketches), ed. Witold Chwalewik (Warszawa: PaĔstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1983), p. 181. 5 See Antoni Semczuk, “Lew Tołstoj” in Literatura rosyjska. PodrĊcznik (Russian Literature. A Manual) vol. 2 (Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1971), p. 462. 4

Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity

19

rights” saying that they cannot be separated from the rights of man,6 and he has no reservations about using the form “she and her lord” when he refers to woman and man.7 At the same time, Ruskin is clearly disgusted with the stereotype of woman as a helpless, “thoughtless and servile” creature totally dependent on “her lord”: This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helped by a shadow, or worthily by a slave!8

Using the word ‘helpmate’ Ruskin makes of course a clear allusion to the Biblical phrase from King James Version: And the Lord God said: It is not good that should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.9 (Gen. 2.18)

In newer translations, we will find not only ‘helpmate’ but also ‘partner’ and ‘companion’, the last two terms seem to get rid of the last vestiges of the idea of woman’s subservient and auxiliary function in relation to man. Thus, and as we shall later see, Ruskin (unlike Tolstoy, who had, or appeared to have, no use for Shakespeare) appropriates the Bard for a mixture of purposes some of which are deeply conservative, while others can be described as progressivist. Ruskin, however, while approving of the higher position of man over against woman, that is, while accepting the basic tenet of patriarchy, goes on to invoke, by referring to Shakespeare, a situation that seems to resemble matriarchy. Ruskin’s argument starts with the statement: “Shakespeare has no heroes – he has only heroines”10, which is supported by an erudite vilification and playing down of the male protagonists in various Shakespearian plays, and a eulogy of the heroines: Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind,

6

See: John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: George Allen, 1905), p. 114. Ruskin, Sesame, p. 114. 8 Ruskin, Sesame, p. 115. 9 Eds. Robert Carroll & Stephen Prickett The Bible. Authorized King James Version (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 3. 10 Ruskin, Sesame, p. 110. 7

20

Chapter Two Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.11

Further on, Ruskin states the following: The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man: the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.12

Taking into consideration the characteristically biblical diction of Ruskin’s writings, we cannot fail to notice that he is here, as it were, preaching a new Gospel, and treating Shakespeare as if he were the fifth evangelist – a slightly unorthodox one, who reverses the story of Adam and Eve, suggesting strongly that the Fall, or any fall, is of man’s, not woman’s, doing and that Woman, or rather the proper kind of a woman, is also the individual and collective Redeemer of mankind, a female and plural Christ, who, just as the “real” Christ, is sinless and morally perfect, while being often, to use Jennens’s text of Handel’s Messiah, or rather the Book of Isaiah: “... despised, ... rejected of men, ... and acquainted with grief”13 (Isaiah 53:3). This could be called a ‘feminist’ Gospel, providing we understand the word ‘feminist’ as meaning, more or less, the same that P.B. Shelley meant when he talked, in his Defence of Poetry, about “the emancipation of women”, which, according to Shelley, was one of: “... the effects of the poetry of the Christian and Chivalric systems” that “began to manifest themselves” in the eleventh century.14 If then Ruskin idealises women, and uses Shakespeare as an instrument of this idealization, he does it not so much in the spirit of the medieval chivalry, or ‘courtly love’, but rather in the spirit of what the Victorian age imagined the ‘courtly love’ to be. It is well known that Ruskin idealised the Middle Ages and Gothic art, providing in this way some kind of ideological background to the artistic productions of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. And yet the quasi-feminist gospel that Ruskin preaches in Sesame and Lilies seems to owe more to the first celebrated and later denigrated poem by K.D. Coventry Patmore The Angel in the House. It is enough to have a look at the following passage from Patmore’s poem:

11

Ruskin, Sesame, pp. 117-118. Ruskin, Sesame, p. 118. 13 Eds. Carroll & Prickett, The Bible, p. 815. 14 Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co. 2001), p. 707. 12

Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity

21

Lo, when the Lord made North and South And sun and moon ordained, He, Forthbringing each by word of mouth In order of its dignity, Did man from the crude clay express By sequence, and, all else decreed, He form’d the woman; nor might less Than Sabbath such a work succeed. And still with favour singled out, Marr’d less than man by mortal fall, Her disposition is devout, Her countenance angelical; (Canto IV, 1-13)15

It is clear enough that Patmore takes here some liberties with the biblical story of the Creation and the Fall so as to represent it as more favourable to women than it is usually taken to be. Thus, woman is here shown as created from a more noble material than man, because he was made of “the rude clay”, while she of the man’s body. It is, moreover, suggested that it is only the woman, and not the man, that was created on the last, sixth day, of God’s creative work, that is, on the eve of Sabbath, the holy day of rest, which might mean that her creation was also holier than his. And, finally, Patmore claims that the Fall corrupted woman’s nature much less than man’s. This last case is, I’m afraid, rather hard to argue for, bearing in mind that the Bible makes Eve clearly more directly responsible for the Fall, and the Original Sin, than Adam. On the other hand, it should not escape our attention that Patmore had to come up with an idea of this sort to provide some theological grounds for his hypothesis that woman is an angel, if so, she must occupy, like other angels, a middle of the road place between man and God. Let us now concentrate for a while on Ruskin’s conclusion of his argument about women in Shakespeare: [Shakespeare] represents [women] as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, – incorruptibly just and pure examples, – strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.16

Here he seems to exaggerate rather grossly. The Shakespearian female characters he mentions only rarely appear as ‘counsellors’, first of all,

15

Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House, Canto IV, “The Morning” in www.victorianweb.org / authors / patmore / angel / index. html 16 Ruskin, Sesame, p. 121.

22

Chapter Two

because in the “harlot world”17 he depicts they are hardly asked for an opinion. For instance, Helena, from All’s Well That Ends Well, is hardly a ‘counsellor’ of the King of France, who owes her his recovery, she is needed for one specific purpose, that of curing the king, and later neither the king, nor his courtiers, seem to require her undeniable medical skills. Neither Imogen, from Cymbeline, wise and intelligent as she no doubt is, can be considered a successful ‘counsellor’, the counsel she gives to her husband, Posthumus, never to give away the ring he has got from her, is entirely disregarded – Posthumus very quickly loses the ring as a result of a senseless wager made with the wicked Iachimo. In this, she is similar to Desdemona and to Cordelia, whose wise and sensible admonitions and verdicts are never listened to by the ones to whom they are addressed. Rosalind, the protagonist of As You Like It, acts indeed as a kind of ‘counsellor’, for Phebe and Orlando, but only in the matters of love, and only when she appears disguised as a man, whose name is Ganymede. Even with these reservations, she appears as the one who gently satirizes the unwisely romantic attitude of her friends, rather than as someone who gives advice in the strict sense of the word. To conclude, it seems that, while it is true that Shakespeare’s female characters are often idealised, and idealised in a rather unstereotypical way, that is their brains and wits are extolled, not only their bodies and moral goodness, it is hardly true that, as Ruskin suggests, they may be seen as engines of some salutary and beneficial events working behind the scenes. If they achieve something, it is, as in the case of Helena, Imogen, or Viola, through their own obstinate and unremitting efforts, while their advice is nearly always rejected, which makes them into Cassandra like figures. Ironically, the only truly successful counsellor among Shakespeare’s heroines appears to be Lady Macbeth, who for some time exerts a powerful influence on her husband’s mind, but of course Ruskin would never include her in his list of Christlike Shakespearian women. Ruskin speaks about Shakespeare’s heroines’ power to “sanctify” which compensates for their occasional inability to “save”. It is to be suspected that here is the limit of those characters analogy with the Saviour, they have the angelic properties of the Redeemer, but they lack his redemptive power. Here is how Ruskin elaborates on this point: Lady means “bread-giver” or “loaf-giver”, and Lord means “maintainer of laws,” and both titles have reference, not to the law which is maintained in 17

A phrase taken from Charles Harpur’s poem Monodies found in: http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/H/HarpurCharles/verse/poems/m onodies.html

Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity

23

the house, nor to the bread which is given to the household; but to the law maintained for the multitude, and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal claim to her title, only so far as she communicates that help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women once, ministering to Him of their substance, were permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread.18

Ruskin’s etymologies are at best inaccurate, the word ‘lady’ means, in fact, ‘loaf-kneader’, or, to translate directly from Old English, ‘loafdigger’, that is, someone who makes bread with her own hands, rather than gives it, while ‘lord’ means ‘loaf-ward’, that is someone who keeps guard over a store of bread19, Ruskin probably thought ‘lord’ stood for ‘lawward’. The point, however, is that here women’s Christ-like qualities boil down to charity work. This seems to be the meaning of the high sounding formula: But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest.20

The limits of women’s “rule” are here plain enough to see, to find favour in Ruskin’s eyes, that “rule” must be “sweet”, rather than strict or hard, it should consist in apportioning “praise”, rather than blame, or criticism, it is essentially about giving rewards, rather than punishment, or even about being herself a reward for the brave warrior. But even this is too much for Ruskin, so he abandons the vision of the woman as a ‘giver of rewards’, in favour of ‘a giver of bread’, in the latter conception she loses the right to differentiate, albeit only implicitly, between the worthy and the unworthy, the realm of justice is, ultimately, not for her, she should rather be relegated to that of mercy – being merciful, she cannot refuse a reward of some kind even to, apparently, the most unworthy and the most undeserving. There seems to be some wavering in Ruskin between the female Jehovah, the God of justice, and the female Christ, the God of mercy, both much reduced in stature in comparison with their male 18

Ruskin, Sesame, p. 168. See Walter W. Skeat, The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Reference, 1993), p. 254. 20 Ruskin, Sesame, p. 136. 19

24

Chapter Two

counterparts, but it is definitely the latter that gains the upper hand. This ‘sanctifying’ Christ, unlike the ‘saving’ one, cannot achieve a decisive breakthrough, which would require “entering into a contest”, but he, or rather she, can be of some service, as a ministering angel. At the same time, it has to be conceded that Ruskin insists on his minor female divinities having one rather important thing in common with the big male ones, and this is infallibility. Ruskin first paraphrases, probably unconsciously, Christopher Marlowe’s famous statement put in the mouth of the devil Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus: “...for where we are is hell, And where hell is, must we ever be”21 (2.1.122-123), by saying “... wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her” and “home is yet wherever she is”22, thus subscribing to the stereotype of woman as a par excellence social creature who is, as it were, never alone even when she appears to be alone. Then he says: But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must – as far as one can use such terms of a human creature – be incapable of error. So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for selfdevelopment, but for self-renunciation ...23

This is perfectly logical, if one cannot be one’s self one cannot make mistakes because to make a mistake is to lay bare one’s self as something that needs being given attention to, to make a mistake is also to “enter into a contest” with one’s self, and Ruskin’s women are not allowed to “enter into a contest” with the outward world, and not even, as it appears, with themselves. Woman’s infallibility is not then so much a sign of authority, like the papal infallibility (which, incidentally was decreed soon after the publication of Sesame and Lilies), but rather a sign of being in perfect condition to fulfil her fundamentally subservient social functions. Naturally, a similar kind of ‘infallibility’ can be observed in the medieval courtly love ideal of ‘donna angelicata’ (the angelic woman), who may fulfil the role of the knight’s mistress and his teacher of good manners, which is the sort of relationship (like the one between Guinevere and Lancelot), in which the man is the one to make mistakes, and the 21

Christopher Marlowe, “The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus” in (gen. ed.) M.H. Abrams, 1986, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Fifth Edition, vol. 1 (New York, London: W.W.Norton & Co. 1986), p. 828. 22 Ruskin, Sesame, pp. 137-138. 23 Ruskin, Sesame, p. 138.

Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity

25

woman the one to correct them, or at least to point them out. The difference, of course, is that Ruskin applies this ideal, true to the spirit of Victorianism and Patmore’s concept of ‘the angel in the house’, also to the province of middle class domestic duties. There seems to be a connection between Ruskin’s concept of femininity and his views on childhood expounded in another set of lectures called The Crown of Wild Olive. Among the features of the child’s character, he singles out the following: humility, faith, charity, and cheerfulness. They all can be found in Ruskin’s portrayal of the ideal woman’s character, but it is cheerfulness that seems to be the most interesting as a feature of character that potentially could threaten the conventional Victorian model of culture. The child, however, appears in Ruskin’s mind as a source of inspiration for an ideal worker: It loves everything near it, when it is a right kind of child – would hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need it – does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself, and delights in helping people; you cannot please it as much as by giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way. And because of all these characters ... it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful for nothing – being full of love to every creature, it is happy always, whether in its play or its duty. Well, that’s the great worker’s character also. Taking no thought for the morrow; taking thought only for the duty of the day; trusting somebody else to take care of to-morrow; knowing indeed what labour is, but not what sorrow is; and always ready for play – beautiful play – for lovely human play is like the play of the Sun.24

The principle of ‘no thought for the morrow’ may sound frivolous, but in fact it anything but frivolous, this apparent levity only serves the purpose of proper concentration on the job in hand. Ruskin’s child is not explicitly ‘infallible’, but in practice it is just that, its ‘infallibility’ is that of an animal that intuitively always knows best what to do, and also how to do it, and is not distracted by any irrelevant reflections. The function of the father, if we apply the above quotation to Ruskin’s construction of femininity, should naturally be replaced with that of the husband, his wife’s ‘lord’. We should not, however, go too far in this direction, it is very likely that Ruskin needed this vision of the ideal child to devise an androgynous concept through which also men, at least some men, such as artists, could partake in the blessed condition of femininity without, of course, losing their ‘lordly’ status. 24 John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive and the Ethics of the Dust (London, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Cassell & Co. 1909), p. 56.

26

Chapter Two

The natural question that arises at this stage is whether, and to what extent Ruskin’s, rather paradoxical, idealization of femininity can be thought of as inspired, or corroborated, by the way the female characters are drawn in Shakespeare. Ruskin is no doubt fundamentally right in asserting that Shakespeare’s heroines are idealized or demonised (in the case of Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan), and that the former happens much more frequently than the latter. This idealization is clearly visible if we have a look at the way Shakespeare handles traditional folktale patterns. For example, the comedy All’s Well That Ends Well reproduces, quite faithfully in many respects, the plot of the tales about supernatural husbands, which in literature is probably best known in its late Roman version, that is in Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche. There we can see a girl, called Psyche, who has an affair with a supernatural being, in this case a god, called Cupid. Their relationship undergoes a crisis as a result of her having violated a prohibition that he made her agree upon, in this case, the prohibition against her ever attempting to see him. This fact, that is her breaking of a taboo, makes Cupid turn his back on his beloved, and leads to a series of trials and tribulations through which she has to go to finally regain his favours, and to achieve a happy ending.25 In folklore, there are also numerous tales based on a symmetrically contrasted plot, I mean the tales about supernatural wives, where the one to break a taboo is a man, while the one to take offence and to demand a series of sacrifices is a woman, who naturally also finally relents and is reunited with her partner.26 The famous ‘bed trick’, often considered a weakness of this play, with which Helena, the heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well, makes her husband, Bertram, return to her, has also almost exact counterparts in the tales about supernatural husbands.27 The point, however, is that, even though Shakespeare quite often uses this narrative pattern, and one can easily see it, for example, in Much Ado About Nothing (Claudio and Hero), in The Winter’s Tale (Leontes and 25

See M.C. Howatson, & Ian Chilvers, The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 456457. 26 See Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 90-93. 27 This is how the ‘bed trick’ is described in its purely folkloristic version, that is as a motif in the tales about supernatural husbands: “Before being reunited she still has to win him from the wife that he is about to marry and especially to cause him to recognize her, since he has forgotten all about her. To do this she sometimes takes service as a maid and buys with three jewels the privilege of sleeping with her husband three nights.” (S. Thompson, The Folktale, p. 98)

Making Sense of John Ruskin’s Conception of Femininity

27

Hermione), in Cymbeline (Posthumus and Imogen), or even, to some extent, in Othello (Othello and Desdemona), the hard and fast principle in Shakespeare is that the husband’s, or male partner’s, fit of anger, or bout of jealousy, directed against the heroine is always irrational, and groundless. In other words, Shakespeare’s husbands, not necessarily supernatural in the strict sense of the word, tend to behave as if their wives had broken an important taboo, even though nothing of the sort has happened and the heroines are perfectly innocent. The rest of the plot is of course devoted to making the husband see the idiocy of his behaviour, upon which a happy reunion usually takes place, naturally with the exception of Othello, where the hero is made to ‘see sense’ too late to prevent a terrible tragedy. A similar pattern can in fact be also observed in King Lear, with the rather significant difference that the relationship in question is not that between a husband and a wife, but between a father (Lear) and a daughter (Cordelia). Shakespeare’s strategy can, no doubt, be read, in Ruskin’s way, as consisting in showing the moral superiority of women over men. But this is surely not the only possible interpretation, or rather, this does not have to be the whole of the truth. It seems meaningful that Shakespeare, as far as I can remember, never uses the above mentioned symmetrical pattern of the tales about supernatural wives, the best known literary example of which, in English literature, is probably Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, where it is the woman who is offended and sets conditions for the man to meet – in Chaucer’s tale there are in fact two such women, the queen and the so called ‘loathly lady’. Shakespeare’s avoidance of this pattern chimes with the fact that his heroines tend to be suffering victims, innocent victims, but still victims, moreover, such victims who easily, and from a modern point of view, far too easily, forgive their male tormentors the moment those tormentors say that they are sorry for their obnoxious behaviour. It is true, at the same time, that Shakespeare’s brutal and irrational macho figures are never as brutal, sadistic and cynical as the hero of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, which provides a logical, but by no means symmetrical, counterpoint to The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and which, inevitably, is based on the pattern of tales about supernatural husbands, with the apparently Shakespearian (in fact not Shakespearian, but rather medieval) modification consisting in making the heroine completely innocent. It is also true that Shakespeare’s heroines, victimised as they may be, are rarely passive (as opposed to most of the heroines from courtly love romances), they are as a rule paragons of courage, dogged determination, and endurance. Thus, I hope to have shown, albeit in a rather sketchy way, that Ruskin’s slightly devious idealization of women is indeed foreshadowed

28

Chapter Two

in Shakespeare, even though Ruskin clearly ‘Victorianizes’ this idealization by making it consistent with the essentially middle class slogan of ‘the angel in the house’. Let me finally the words that one of Shakespeare’s heroine, Imogen from Cymbeline, utters having adopted a man’s disguise, and having discovered a man’s life to be definitely inferior to the kind of life she used to lead as a woman, or as an angel, not a ‘domesticated’ angel, however, but one quite capable of venturing into the wilderness: I see a man’s life is a tedious one, I have tired myself, and for two nights together Have made the ground my bed. I should be sick But that my resolution helps me.28 (Cymbeline, 3.6.1-4)

It is naturally rather paradoxical that Ruskin uses Shakespeare to support his conception of femininity that seems to be derived from the tradition of the quasi-Petrarchan ‘donna angelicata’ (the angelic woman). After all, it was Shakespeare who in the famous Sonnet 130 (My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun) made rather savage fun of this tradition. If his female characters are idealized, and no doubt they often are, it is not in the ‘angelic’ direction, they are usually too lively to be objects of quasireligious admiration, and they also have to cope with all kinds of material problems and obstacles, which leaves little room for the angelic aloofness of the Ruskinian female arbiters apportioning praise and blame. Still, I would not call Ruskin’s attitude ‘anti-feminist’, it is clear enough that he tries to be as ‘feminist’ as his Victorian, patriarchal, or perhaps generally masculine, limitations allow him to be.

28

William Shakespeare, “Cymbeline” in The Late Romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest), ed. David Bevington (Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 240.

CHAPTER THREE HYBRIDITY, SURPLUS AND ABSENCE: MEDIEVAL MONSTERS AND CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS RAFAŁ BORYSŁAWSKI

It is a platitude to say that monstrosity, that is, essentially, unnaturalness, is, in fact, deeply natural. Regardless where we look culturally, geographically, socially or historically, we will find manifestations and interests to a greater or lesser extent associated with what is monstrous, uncanny, other. In the field of academic cultural studies the concerns with monstrosities would range from the interests with monstrous manifestations present in contemporary B-class movies to the concerns with literal and figurative deformity, otherness, thirdness, abjection, hybridity and liminality across every imaginable area of research that up until recently were all the rage. Medieval studies are no exception in this respect and over the past twenty years medieval monstrosities have been analysed from so many critical angles that they are by far too numerous to be encompassed in a single paper.1 1

A selected list of publications in English on the idea of monstrosity in medieval cultural discourse includes John Block Fiedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the “Beowulf” Manuscript (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ed. Monster Theory. Reading Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); Joyce Tally Linarons, The Medieval Dragon: The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature (Middlesex: Hisarlik Press, 1998); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Karin E. Olsen, L. A. J. R. Houwen eds., Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe (Leuven: Peeters, 2001); Bettina

30

Chapter Three

The point of this paper, then, is to approach the questions related to the field of cultural teratology, that is the study of abnormalities of physiological development in culture, by taking it across disciplines, cultures and time. What I aim to do is to look at late twentieth century British visual art, commonly dubbed as Britart, young British Art or yBA, from the perspective of the study of medieval monstrosities. That is to say, I will not so much add another voice to what for the past twenty or so years has been written and presented about medieval monsters, but rather apply these studies to what Norman Rosenthal, one of the most influential British art curators, characterized as the subject matter common to a group of young British artists: “the strange, the mysterious, the freakish, the fantasy of science, the abnormality of the normal and the normality of the abnormal.”2 In other words, Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate, who was the first to see the commercial and cultural potential of the artists taking up these issues in the pre-Blairian Britain, created an artistic equivalent of a freak-show or of a cabinet of curiosities. But the words of Rosenthal are also reminiscent of a much more general comment made by the father of medieval monster studies, who in his introduction to The Monster Theory published in 1996 spoke of contemporary fin de siecle western society as obsessed with monsters: [It is] a society that has created and commodified ‘ambient fear’— a kind of total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name. This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cultural fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens. And so the monster appears simultaneously as the demonic disemboweler of slasher films and as a wide-eyed, sickeningly cute plush toy for children: velociraptor and Barney.3

Bildhauer and Robert Mills eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Anna Czarnowus, Inscription on the Body. Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego, 2009). 2 Norman Rosenthal, “The Blood Must Continue to Flow,” in Sensation. Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, eds. Brooks Adams et al. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006 [1997]), p. 11. 3 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Preface: In a Time of Monsters,” in Monster Theory, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. vii.

Hybridity, Surplus and Absence

31

Juxtaposing the words of an art critic and a medievalist commenting upon contemporary society proves not only the unabated interest with the monstrous in the realm of modern art and current popular culture, which, for that matter, often blend into one another, but also introduces what I aim to present here. Namely, that medieval monsters and the art of the yBA movement are not only similar in the manner in which they were produced, but, more importantly, are similar in their social and cultural roles. To do so, I shall begin by speaking of the way medieval monstrosities were understood and formed, and compare this with the way in which the most prominent visual artists of the movement created their work. To provide certain boundaries to this essay, I shall only refer to anthropomorphic creatures as examples of medieval monstrosities on the one hand, and, on the other, to those of the works belonging to the yBA movement that recall and refer to anthropomorphic and anthropomorphised shapes. The reason for the choice of yBA as an example of an art movement is that it appears to be one of the most recent instances of conceptual art that is identifiable by some common themes. Furthermore, it has gained a certain cult following, and the most prominent artists associated with yBA have appealed to the general public, particularly, perhaps, because of their direct concern with the form of the human or suprahuman body. Ultimately, I will ask whether it is possible to speak of the roles of medieval monstrosities as comparable to the roles attributable to contemporary visual and conceptual art. All of these observations are going to revolve around the issues of superfluity, absence and hybridity in medieval and contemporary culture superimposed upon the question of how non-sense gives rise to sense. For what is contemporary conceptual art if it is not a form of some surplus of culture, sense combined with nonsense and common-sense turned upside down? And what were medieval monsters if not these very points just as well? Three early Church Fathers are crucial in attempting to understand the construction, representations and applications of medieval monstrosities. These are St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. All three were heavily indebted to the tradition of ancient natural historians, most notably to Pliny the Elder’s monumental Historia naturalis, itself being based upon a number of now largely lost earlier Greek sources. In Historia naturalis Pliny presents an all-encompassing account of everything, including also the descriptions of various marvellous and monstrous births and instances of anthropoidal, zoomorphic and hybridic creatures. However all of the most influential medieval texts containing catalogues of monsters and of monstrous human races, ranging from the ninth or tenth century Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus,

32

Chapter Three

“The book of monsters of various kinds,” through The Marvels of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville, tended to present Pliny’s monstrous entities in the light shed on them by St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, “City of God,” and Isidore’s Etymologiae, “Etymologies.” However disparate and of different aims these two texts were, they both spoke of what may be described as naturalness of monstrous human forms. In Book XVI of De civitae Dei Augustine lists several of the monstrous races of men, the Androgynes, Cyclops, Pygmies, Sciapodes, using their only leg to shelter themselves from the sun, and Cynocephalis, the dog-heads, but these serve him only to venture into the questions of what is and what is not human. He does not pose any judgment as to the monstrous form of these races, but very commonsensically says that, first of all, one should not believe everything one is told, and, secondly, whatever one finds to be marvellous or disgusting is not for us to judge as such and may not necessarily be so in the eyes of God. In this Augustine is so-to-speak rather favourably disposed to monstrous human races: Quid dicam de Cynocephalis, quorum canina capita atque ipse latratus magis bestias quam homines confitetur? Sed omnia genera hominum, quae dicuntur esse, credere non est necesse. Verum quisquis uspiam nascitur homo, id est animal rationale mortale, quamlibet nostris inusitatam sensibus gerat corporis formam seu colorem siue motum siue sonum siue qualibet ui, qualibet parte, qualibet qualitate naturam: ex illo uno protoplasto originem ducere nullus fidelium dubitauerit.4 [What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog’s head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man – that is, a rational and mortal being – derives from that one first created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part or quality.]5

More importantly, however, concluding his chapter on monstrous human races, Augustine also speaks of monstrous humans in the sense that is etymologically close to the word monstrum, which means a “portent” and 4

Sanctus Augustinus, De civitate Dei, Book XVI, Ch. 8., The Latin Library: 16 March 2010 5 Saint Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1972]), p. 662.

Hybridity, Surplus and Absence

33

is ultimately derived from the Latin verb monere, that is “to warn.” But the warning meant by Augustine is not against deformity itself, but that against a rash judgement: Sed si homines sunt, de quibus illa mira conscripta sunt: quid, si propterea Deus uoluit etiam nonnullas gentes ita creare, ne in his monstris, quae apud nos oportet ex hominibus nasci, eius sapientiam, qua naturam fingit humanam, uelut artem cuiuspiam minus perfecti opificis, putaremus errasse?6 [But if we assume that the subjects of those remarkable accounts are in fact men, it may be suggested that God decided to create some races in this way, so that we should not suppose that the wisdom with which he fashions the physical being of men has gone astray in the case of the monsters which are bound to be born among us of physical parents; for that would be to regard the works of God’s wisdom as the products of an imperfectly skilled craftsman.]7

While Augustine speaks directly about the monstrous races of men as potentially warning us against faulty judgements, a similar, pansemiotic perspective – though not just pertinent to monsters – can be found in the apophatic, that is negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Although historically speaking Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous late fifth/early sixth century Neoplatonic theologian is distant from Augustine only by a century or so, yet his writing exerted real influence in western European thought from the twelfth century onwards. His concept of the ineffability of God and his logocentric approach to the world as a form of giant divine enigma merely pointing to what God is not, do lend a helpful perspective to medieval visions of the monstrous. For Pseudo-Dionysius, what seems monstrous to the human eye cannot be named evil, because, as he puts it in the Divinis nominibus, “Divine names,” what truly is evil is the lack of substance or, put differently, deficiency of the Good. Thus, what men commonly call evil: et erit malum in universitatis plenitudinem comperfectum, et universo numquid imperfectum esse quod propter seipsum praestitum. Dicit autem ad haec vera ratio, quia malum, si malum, nullam essentiam aut generationem facit, solum vero vitiat et corrumpit, quantum in se, et existentium substantiam. Si autem genificum quis ei esse dicat, et hujus corruptione alteri dare generationem, respondendum vere, numquid 6 7

Augustinus, De civitate Dei, Book XVI, Ch. 8. Augustine, City of God, pp. 663-664.

34

Chapter Three corrumpunt, quae dant generationem […] Et erit malum corruptio quidem per seipsum, genificum vero per bonum. [...] Omnia existentia, quantum sunt, et bona sunt, et ex bono; quantum autem privantur bono, neque existentia sunt, neque bona.8 [contributes to the fulfilment of the world and by its very existence it saves it from imperfection. The true answer to this will be that evil, qua evil, never produces being or birth. All it can do by itself is in a limited fashion to debase or destroy the substance of things. And if anyone should say that it is a begetter of things and that by the destruction of one thing it gives birth to something else, the correct reply is that it is not qua destructiveness that it brings this about. […] That is to say, evil in itself is a destructive force but is a productive force through the activity of the Good. […] All beings, to the extent that they exist, are good and come from the Good and they fall short of goodness and being in proportion to their remoteness from the Good.]9

Together with the earlier comments by Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius’s cryptic, it may seem, lines, although not explicitly referring to the monstrous, may have offered an official explanation of the ubiquitousness of monstrous shapes and visions in Christian iconography. The unofficial would be, of course, the fact that monstrous shapes and visions were possibly more exciting than the visions of heavenly paradise and saints. Incidentally, this may bring to mind contemporary art critics providing elaborate explanations to the works of Marc Quinn, Damien Hirst or the Chapman brothers, while the wide public is much more interested in seeing the gory or shocking details. The views of Pseudo-Dionysus and his later followers in the via negativa undoubtedly, however, contributed to the concept that the truth can be accessed through enigmas, drolleries and unnaturalness. David Williams, writing about the function of the monster in medieval thought and literature, speaks of medieval monstrosities as “deformed discourse” which facilitates “stepping outside language in the direction of metalanguage […] made possible partially through the poetic and rhetorical constructions of the paradoxes, ambiguities, grotesqueries, and monstrosities of medieval art and legend, which sufficiently deform the normal process of signification so as to urge the mind beyond the 8

Iohannes Scotus Eriugena, Corpus Areopagiticum. Sancti Dionysii Areopagitae Liber Tertius De Divinis Nominibus, J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 122, in Corpus Areopagiticum, 2008: 16 March 2010

9 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (London: SPCK, 1987), pp. 85-87.

Hybridity, Surplus and Absence

35

restrictions of language and logic.”10 It seems only right to claim that these very principles are also the principles beyond contemporary conceptual art. While Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius may be described as providing the theoretical framework for understanding the roles ascribable to medieval monstrosities, the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville offered both a clear and succinct definition of the concept of a monster as well as an encyclopaedic typology of monstrous races. It is the Etymologiae then that will serve as a direct point of contact between medieval monstrous races and contemporary conceptual art. Isidore’s introduction to the section on monstrosities while not directly influenced by the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, is, in fact, contiguous with his and Augustine’s idea that deformities are not contra naturam but contrary to what we know of it, that is in contrast to our epistemology: Portenta esse Varro ait quae contra naturam nata videntur: sed non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt, cum voluntas Creatoris cuiusque conditae rei natura sit. [...] Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura. Portenta autem et ostenta, monstra atque prodigia ideo nuncupantur, quod portendere atque ostendere, monstrare ac praedicare aliqua futura videntur. Nam portenta dicta perhibent a portendendo, id est praeostendendo. Ostenta autem, quod ostendere quidquam futurum videantur. Prodigia, quod porro dicant, id est futura praedicant.11 [Varro says that portents are things which seem to be born contrary to nature. But they are not contrary to nature, since they happen by divine will, when it is the will of the Creator and the nature of the created thing. […] Therefore a portent is not what is contrary to nature, but contrary to what is known in nature. Portents are called ostenta [signs], monstra [monstrosities] and prodigia [prodigies] because they seem to denote (portendere), display (ostendere), show (monstrare), and predict (praedicare) some future events.]12

What Isidore highlights, however, is the meaningfulness of a monster as a discourse which, given enough knowledge, may be unravelled (for Isidore that unravelling would be through language and etymologies). Monstrosity, 10

David Williams, Deformed Discourse. The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 9. 11 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, XI. 3. 1-3, The Latin Library: 16 March 2010 12 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, Vol. II, trans. Priscilla Throop (Charlotte: Medieval MS 2005), XI.3.1-3.

36

Chapter Three

then, becomes an effective sign, but Isidore also indicates how such monstrous signs are comprehensible through what we know of nature, namely through the manifold variations involving the variations of overall size, of the size of a body part, of the presence of a superfluous part, an absence of parts, a transformation of parts, a change in the position of parts, a merging of parts, a failure of one or more parts to grow or a complex of many differences involving any of the above and even including a mixture of sexes.13 Thus, seen from a broader perspective, all humanoid monsters of the medieval world, both those listed and not listed by Isidore, would be established upon the three principles which I mentioned at the beginning of this paper: that of surplus, that of absence and that of hybridity. The six-armed people, the Gigantes, giants, or the Panotti, the all-ears, who use them to shelter themselves from the cold are examples of the principle of surplus; the one-legged but swift Sciapodes, shading themselves from the sun with their one foot, the headless Blemmyas, with mouths between their shoulders, are clearly characterized by absence, whereas Androgynes, the Antipodes walking backwards, or the dog-headed Cynocephali, along with other transhuman beings are clearly hybridic. Modern taxonomies of medieval monstrosities can also be arranged under these three principles: Williams’ monstrous bodies are either the bodies of surplus or absence, when he discusses the abnormalities of size, position, headlessness or multiheadedness, presence or absence of limbs. They are hybridic bodies when he discusses various combinations and deformities of the monstrous human races of medieval imagination. But, following the theological understanding of the monster, these three principles do not only act as constructive principles, for superfluity, absence or hybridity in a monster would entail the superfluity, absence or hybridity of meaning and an effective dealing with a monster would in fact entail disentangling the senses it represents, lacks or combines, that is, it would entail solving it, the way one solves a riddle. Only then would it cease to be purely monstrous and would become the bearer of a new sense born out of the nonsense it was constructed of. If such a process resembles approaches towards contemporary conceptual and visual art, so do the principles of surplus, absence and hybridity, which largely underlie the conceptual art of the yBA movement. The representations of the human body and its alterations in the works of such artists as Marc Quinn, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Ron Mueck and, most notably, the Chapman brothers, are very much constructed upon 13

Cf. “Introduction” in Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe, eds. Karin E. Olsen, L. A. J. R. Houwen (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), p. 7.

Hybridity, Surplus and Absence

37

these very principles applied to various degree and in varied combinations. The taxonomy of monsters proposed by Isidore of Seville reads almost like a set of instructions for a late twentieth century conceptual artist and the enthusiastic words by Norman Rosenthal, the curator and critic already cited earlier, that “the greatest images are those that invoke both reality and sensation,” may equally well be used to describe the monstrous visions from the Middle Ages. In fact, Jake and Dinos Chapman, notorious for the art that has been described as “a kind of punk art that spits in your face, punches you in the stomach, and nicks your wallet while you are puking on the floor,”14 themselves openly spoke of the idea of monstrosity influenced by Batallian abjection that constituted one of their important inspirations: “We take the ‘monstrous’ to describe a numenal or vampirical sublime which preys upon corporeality in moments of aesthetic bliss. […] One thing for sure is that ‘humanity’ and ‘monstrosity’ are not dislocated as a duality, are not even related equivalents but the same. Human monstrosity describes the superconductive ability to expend energy which occurs perfectly well in psychosis. Humane monstrosity merely describes activities sublimated along ‘meta-scatological’ levels.”15 And, as has recently transpired, Damien Hirst, together with several other representatives of the yBA, such as Mat Collishaw, drew inspiration in the early nineteennineties from a colour atlas of forensic pathology, featuring graphic photographs of murder scenes, decomposed bodies, dissected organs and medical instruments.16 The crucial and concluding point towards which this paper has been edging is then what a medievalist can say about such instances of contemporary conceptual and visual art on the one hand, and what a conceptual artist can say about medieval monstrosities. Can we repeat after Umberto Eco that “in rereading the past there is always a kind of pessimism of the eternal return. We realize that there has been less

14

Jonathan Hari, “The art of subverting the enlightenment,” The Independent 05/02/2007: 16 March 2010

15 Jake and Dinos Chapman in an interview with Maia Damianovic in Journal of Contemporary Art Online: 16 March 2010

16 Miles Goslett, “Meet the grandfather of Britart,” The Telegraph, 01.07.2007: 16 March 2010

38

Chapter Three

progress than we thought”17? Or, rather, can we indeed speak of medieval monstrosities and contemporary conceptual art taking up the theme of the body as corresponding not only in the use of surplus, absence and hybridity of elements and of meanings as their methods of composition, but predominantly in their cultural and social purposes? Regardless of what the artists themselves say about their work and regardless how each of us judges these cultural manifestations, both the principles of creation and the purposes behind the art of the yBA and medieval monstrosities seem to be clearly comparable. Through the use of apparent nonsense, the focus on what is grotesque, shocking and, at times, revolting. In so doing they pose questions about the limits of humanity, about what is human and not human. In this, it seems, Augustine and twentieth century philosophers of culture would find a lot in common. Secondly, both medieval monstrosities and conceptual art force themselves on their audiences and require active participation (again, regardless what that participation is) and, by doing so, they do not indicate one, premeditated meaning, but they delineate what this meaning is not, in the manner suggested already by the apophatic theology. Because of this medieval monstrosities and conceptual artists follow the path of Isidore of Seville by offering the coding and decoding which “denotes, displays, shows and predicts” if not some future events, as Isidore would have it, then at least some future senses and future warnings. The apotropaic, that is, evil-preventing function of monsters and of contemporary conceptual art can be derived from such a transcending of aesthetic and epistemological boundaries. And, last, but not least, both medieval monstrosities and contemporary conceptual art offer playfulness and humorousness teasingly and appealingly combined with the fear of what lies beyond the limits of reason and beyond the limits of the known world. For, as the anonymous author of the prologue to the eighth century Liber monstrorum, “The Book of monsters,” would half-jokingly say, “now, when humankind has multiplied and the lands of the earth have been filled, fewer monsters are produced under the stars.”18 Contemporary art, it seems, would never let us forget about cultural teratology, resounding with Norman Rosenthal’s words: “the blood must continue to flow.”19 17

Umberto Eco, quoted in Panorama, November 2000, cited in Cristina Farronato, “Umberto Eco’s Baudolino and the Language of Monsters,” Semiotica, 144 (2003), p. 322. 18 Liber monstrorum in Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies. Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Toronto – Buffalo – London: University of Toronto Press, 2003 [1995]), pp. 256-257. 19 Rosenthal, “The Blood Must Continue to Flow,” p. 8.

CHAPTER FOUR “THE JUNGLE RISES FAR ABOVE OUR HEADS”: ON READING SENSATION NOVELS MAŁGORZATA NITKA

“The jungle rises far above our heads,” is how one exasperated reviewer voiced his frustration with “the wild tangle of plot and counterplot”1 of the novel he was reading. The novel in question was Charles Reade and Dion Bousicault’s Foul Play, one of many sensation pieces dominating the English literary market in the 1860s. John Cordy Jeaffreson, reviewing the book for Athanaeum, brought against it the by then familiar charge: the jungle metaphor was just another way of pointing at the impenetrable thickness of the plot, overgrown with action or incident, which constituted both the trademark of this newly emergent genre and, in the critics’ eyes, the proof of its artistic deficiency. “A sensation novel […] abounds in incident,” declares Henry Mansel in an 1863 essay, analysing the phenomenon of sensation fiction, and while this sentence apparently serves as a definition of the novel genre it is far from neutral as Mansel completes it by saying that the sensation novel not so much abounds in incident as it actually “consists of nothing else.”2 The sensation novel, let us recapitulate its brief history, emerged in the 1860s indeed as a sensation, in the dictionary sense of a cause of “intense interest or excitement among a large group of people” as well as in the more economic sense of “having a run,” i.e. “a period of being in demand or favor with the public,” which is how the genre possibly

1

Quoted in Ellen Miller Casey, “‘Highly flavoured dishes’ and ‘highly seasoned garbage.’ Sensation in the Athenaeum,” in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, eds. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), p. 6. 2 Henry Longueville Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review, vol. 113 (1863), p. 486.

40

Chapter Four

obtained its name.3 Its prime example is, of course, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which largely set the convention and fashion for a new kind of literature tendering tales of “murder, bigamy, and forgery.”4 Immediately successful with readers, it sparked off a spate of replicas, produced both by Collins himself and “a shoal of copyists”5: numerous more or less gifted writers (perhaps less rather than more), in response to the popular demand. “These books would certainly not be written if they did not sell; and they would not sell if they were not read; ergo, they must have readers, and numerous readers too,”6 Mansel contemptuously explains the existence of fiction which, were it up to the critics, should not exist at all. The statement “they must have readers” works here both as a logical argument and an expression of surprise. If sensation fiction was baffling as a literary fact, it was even more baffling as a popular literary fact, read by too many readers, read by different readers and read, so it was claimed, differently; and all of the above puzzles reviewers and critics felt obliged to investigate. It is also baffling that the sensation novel, so quickly identified and dismissed as a subgenre, an example of low requirements in art, for some years kept stimulating a curiously extended and serious response from respectable critical circles, thus, as it were, proving to be worthy of their attention after all. Certainly, the original impulse in the critical consideration of the sensation novel - as always in the case of some “new school in fiction”7 was simply making sense of it: describing or defining its distinctive features, whether thematic or formal. Trying to make sense of sensationalism usually entailed relating it to wholesome realist fiction, against the background of which it presented itself as radically, even anarchically, different, and hence disturbing. First of all because of the nature of incidents which composed the plot - with writers seldom settling for something less than cruelty, bigamy or insanity - it was seen as “contradictory to actual life.”8 Though it has to be added that Mary Elizabeth Braddon would breezily sum up the violence-ridden plot of her

3

Cf. Bradley Deane, The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 68. 4 Quoted in Casey, “‘Highly flavoured dishes,’” p. 5. 5 Margaret Oliphant, “Sensation Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 91 (1862), p. 568. 6 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” p. 486. 7 Oliphant, “Sensation Novels,” p. 565. 8 Oliphant, “Sensation Novels,” p. 565.

“The Jungle Rises Far Above Our Heads”: On Reading Sensation Novels

41

Aurora Floyd as “a simple drama of domestic life.”9 In so doing she did, of course, point at the falseness of the complacent image of domesticity purveyed by many a realist novel of the nineteenth century, however false her version of it might have been. The contradictory-to-actual-life criterion would be complemented by repeated arguments about the absence of logic and credibility that haunted dense sensation fiction; Mansel, whose essay is grounded in his heroic reading 24 novels of the genre, fumes at “the glaring untruthfulness and incongruity” or “improbability of the incidents.”10 The reviews of individual books, too, pick on this very trait: the heavy-ish use of coincidence and “palpable violations of probability”11 as “circumstances grotesque or improbable meet [the reader] at every turn.”12 Finally, the feature which reviewers and critics incessantly highlighted in their examination of the genre was its affective property, whereby the act of reading acquired a different quality. Here the word sensation would be conceived as physical sensibility: the reader’s sensory reaction to the exciting tale replete with “sudden surprises.”13 As Ellen Miller Casey reminds us, Victorian reviewers would tell sensation novels from other types of fiction because of “their bodily impact on the readers.”14 Perhaps the most famous formulation of this effect comes, again, from Mansel who wrote of “a class of literature” that was “preaching to” or “electrifying the nerves of the reader”15; other reviewers would directly name the sensations which supposedly accompanied reading: the creeping of the flesh, the curdling of blood, or the setting of the teeth on edge. To this property of the fiction, very much the critics’ invention, allude, perhaps in a kind of self-ironic reflex, writers themselves, like Wilkie Collins who in his late novel The Law and the Lady has a half-witted character almost masochistically craving for “a good long story. All blood and crimes,” yet the craving is less for the tale and more for a torment-like excitement it

9

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 547. 10 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” pp. 502, 491. 11 Unsigned review, The Times, 30 October 1860, in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 99. 12 Unsigned review, Dublin University Magazine, February 1861, in Wilkie Collins, p. 105. 13 Quoted in Casey, “‘Highly flavoured dishes,’” p. 4. 14 Casey, “‘Highly flavoured dishes,’” p. 4. 15 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” pp. 482, 489-90.

42

Chapter Four

will produce: “Puzzle my thick head. Make my flesh creep.”16 Even if apparently there may be some kind of intellectual challenge that is requested here, in the case of the imbecilic person it is precisely incomprehension that will be the source of the thrill, which still is only secondary, for what is truly desired is the agitation of the body, the electrifying of the nerves, indeed. This particular example actually inscribes itself within the heavyweight debate that sensation fiction stimulated, in the end, paradoxically, becoming the source of a considerable intellectual turmoil. At the centre of which debate, carried out by reviewers and critics, was however not the sensation novel itself, but rather its implications for the experience of reading and, more broadly, for culture and society. Naturally, as indicated earlier, the critics did make “attempts at defining or characterizing the genre,” but as Bradley Deane judges them from today’s perspective, they were by and large “failed” since the enumerated distinctive features, as he argues, could not effectively be proven to be entirely original or unique to sensation fiction.17 On closer inspection of the numerous reviews or essays one may see these struggles with definitions of sensationalism not only unsuccessful but also somewhat half-hearted as if in the midst of going through the critical motions reviewers would realize that in the case of this particular phenomenon they ought to do more than define, describe, and, in the end, decide the poor quality of books they were dealing with. Something graver was at work for the immense popularity of fiction that in their eyes was but impostor literature suggested that culture was nearing a turning point. The imposture consisted not just in artistic poverty of sensation novels but also in their intellectual impoverishment which manifested itself, as they claimed, in their provoking bodily excitement and so, as Deane points out, reversing the established “hierarchy of mind and body.”18 Along with other things, this turn towards the body suggested culture might be taking a precarious step backwards. For in the popularity of sensation novels critical circles believed to recognize “a serious danger to public culture,”19 a threat of a mass cultural decline as new groups within society abused the privilege to read by reading the wrong kind of literature. That the masses could not be trusted 16

Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 332. 17 Deane, The Making, p. 68. 18 Deane, The Making, p. 70. 19 G. H. Lewes, “Criticism in Relation to Novels,” The Fortnightly Review, vol. 3 (1865-66), p. 354.

“The Jungle Rises Far Above Our Heads”: On Reading Sensation Novels

43

with their tastes was not a novelty, but in this instance the feeling was that the preoccupation with sensationalism went too far to be simply disparaged and then ignored since irrelevant to the culture represented by the environment of literary periodicals. For this time round fascination with excitement was not confined to the vulgar reading public; it was proving itself infectious, spreading onto pedigree readers who discovered, or maybe rediscovered their lower sensibilities, and indulged all too eagerly in unsophisticated reading matter. Such a state of affairs required critics take a more committed attitude as they now sought to undermine the sense of reading sensation novels not just on aesthetic grounds but in the name of securing culture from imminent atrophy. The medical vocabulary used above deliberately reflects the idiom that permeates specifically high-brow reviews and which was employed to play on the Victorian middle class’s fear of infection spreading from the poor districts. The idiom of disease20 is one of dominant strategies that are to alert the fine public of the threat that a lesser category of readers may bring to culture. On such rhetoric Mansel occasionally falls back in his essay too, while mixing with an equally common metaphor of eating as when early on he states that the only ambition of sensation novels is “to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite.”21 A more rigorous application of the idiom comes from The Westminster Review where we find the following diagnosis: “From an epidemic [the Sensational Mania in Literature] has lately changed into an endemic. Its virus is spreading in all directions, from the penny journal to the shilling magazine, and from the shilling magazine to the thirty shillings volume.”22 In the lamented shift from an epidemic to an endemic, the reviewer first and foremost outlines the scope of the disease, but more important in all this seems to be its social expansion when the aforementioned virus spreads but spreads, so to say, vertically since contamination moves up the social ranks. The escalation is disguised here in economic terms: the contagion infects more and more expensive and more and more cultured forms of writing as it strikes the shilling magazine and then the thirty shillings volume. What remains unsaid is that the virus works its way into the better writers’ minds (therefore it began to be hard for critics to entirely dismiss the sensation genre when some respectable “aristocratic” authors showed little immunity to it, Dickens being one fine example), and, which, as already mentioned, will become a truly critical issue, the better readers’ minds. 20

Cf. Deane, The Making, p. 70. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” p. 483. 22 Unsigned review, The Westminster Review, October 1866, in Wilkie Collins, p. 157. 21

44

Chapter Four

Mansel, Deane reminds us, had no doubt: “the craving for sensation extends to all classes of society.”23 Thus the sensation novel becomes posited as a threat to the social body in that along with dissolving the boundary between high and low culture it threatens to obliterate the distinctions between classes and thus make culture and society alike regress. It is in these terms that one should consider the aptness of the rhetoric of disease which The Westminster Review critic uses: “Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken minds.”24 Central to the idea is the stereotyped association of disease with poverty, and therefore lower social orders; but to these one could add also the criterion of foreignness. As Pamela K. Gilbert explains, the very period in which the sensation novel ran riot coincided with anxieties about cholera whose uncontrollable outbreaks in urban England were identified with immigrant workers’ districts, with the actual source of the disease being India. Inevitably the disease, she writes, was seen as “an alien enemy from the colonial lands which attempts to ‘penetrate’ and lodge itself in domestic soil.”25 Thus the representation of the Sensation Mania as an about-to-transform-into-an-endemic epidemic links “the sensation novel with the foreign, with disease, with filth and refuse, with poverty, and with invasion.”26 But it has to be noted that in the already quoted The Westminster Review analogy there is no elaboration on the extraneous origin of the disease, and poverty is “mental poverty”: susceptible to the sensationalism virus are “the most poverty-stricken minds.”27 Thus the process of mental degeneration is believed to be well under way, and it seems that the implication is that English society has already suffered an intellectual throwback which affected each and every class. Therefore perhaps the sensation novel did not produce this condition but merely helped reveal it. If the apparent argument used by Mansel and other critics to explain the popularity of sensationalism was economy based (“a 23

Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” p. 505. Emphasis mine. The Westminster Review, p. 157. 25 Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 75. 26 Gilbert, Disease, p. 75. 27 The Westminster Review, p. 157. Emphasis mine. 24

“The Jungle Rises Far Above Our Heads”: On Reading Sensation Novels

45

particular product of industry for which there is now just brisk demand,”28 to quote this time The Edinburgh Review), in an actual fact the popularity of the genre resulted from its appealing to a weak point in human nature, to some atavistic elements which even the privileged classes could not effectively eradicate. One of the strangest images suggestive of the retrogressive tendency within Victorian society is provided by The Westminster Review where nature and culture clash only to curiously merge: “When Richardson, the showman, went about with his menagerie, he had a big black baboon, whose habits were so filthy, and whose behavior was so disgusting, that respectable people constantly remonstrated him for exhibiting such an animal. Richardson’s answer invariably was, ‘Bless you, if it wasn’t for that big black baboon I should be ruined; it attracts all the young girls in the country.’ Now bigamy has been Miss Braddon’s big black baboon, with which she has attracted all the young girls in the country.”29 Here culture, or “culture” is embodied by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in whose several novels bigamy carries the intrigue forward to become somehow her specialty: an anticipated thrill, by no means devalued on account of its predictability, however fatal predictability may be for the production of excitement. Yet the principle turns out to be identical to that on which Richardson’s menagerie operates, the public keeps coming to see the familiar spectacle in which the “big black baboon” constitutes the central, if known, attraction. If the reviewer aligns here bigamy with the “big black baboon,” he does it not necessarily for the sake of alliteration alone. The real point of connection - which is at the same time the point of connection between the human and the animal world, and culture (with bigamy metonymically related to sensation literature) – is unspecified filth and disgust which inexplicably attracts the public and, one must not forget, to attract means to sell. Where the paradox resides is in the idea that what implies culture turns out to conspire with crude nature by “drugging thought and reason, stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instinct,”30 as another reviewer would put it. Thus when one thinks back about the jungle metaphor originally used in order to render the complications of the intrigue, one may also see it as a perhaps inadvertent metaphor of retrogression, intimation of a certain cultural primitivism which the sensation novel was seen as complicit with.

28

Henry H. Breen, “Modern English Literature: its Blemishes and Defects,” The Edinburgh Review, vol.120 (1864), p. 53. 29 The Westminster Review, p. 157. 30 “Our Female Sensation Novelists,” The Living Age, vol. 78 (1863), pp. 352-353.

46

Chapter Four

On perusal of a number of reviews or critical essay one cannot but wonder about the medley of metaphors deployed for the sake of denigrating the phenomenon of sensationalism. Common enough were the already mentioned here physiological, biological and bodily images, no less frequent are those related to eating and cooking, and another large group includes vocabulary denoting garbage or trash. It is not always though that these images are used consistently or effectively; often critics tend to produce processions of them with little or no respite for the reader to take them in, in a fast, breathless manner of discourse for which they so strongly reproach sensation writing. This rapid accumulation may breed further irregularity, to which best testify dense, impenetrable metaphors, as if also hastily compounded. In developing the metaphorical, the reviewers thwart the growth of the argument as if in recognition that in attacking sensationalism arguments make no sense and in order to reason readers out of their infatuation with excitement one should apply practise criticism and rely on the exaggerated style that appeals to them. Disjointed as they are, these images conspire to convey the dramatic idea of decline, degeneration or regression, the fear of which could have more dissuasive force than any logical expostulation. The critics thus would prefer to dramatize the popularity of sensation fiction as “a leap in the dark,” to use, perhaps not entirely out of context Lord Derby’s famous phrase he used in connection with the Reform Act of 1867 which was to give the vote to the workingmen in the towns. If Wilkie Collins had sanguine expectations towards what he described as “the Unknown Public,” “the lost […] tribes,” dwelling “right out of the pale of literary civilization,”31 believing they would make progress and learn to read good books, critics and reviewers feared that a different movement could take place, and the Known Public would yield to the impulse from below thus pulling culture down. While the major objective of criticism centred on popular fiction was to question the sense of reading sensation novels, in the midst of the debate there emerged another larger issue concerning the role of criticism at the moment of the expansion of “lower forms” of writing. As Bradley Deane sums it up, “The central project of emerging criticism was to chart the boundaries of legitimate culture and preserve them from the impulses of the reading masses […] [regulate] the anarchic tendencies of the public, its inability to differentiate.”32 Thus sensationalism entailed the re-viewing 31

Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public,” in Victorian Print Media: A Reader, eds. Andrew King, John Plunkett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 210, 209. 32 Deane, The Making, p. 70.

“The Jungle Rises Far Above Our Heads”: On Reading Sensation Novels

47

of the role of reviewers and critics, who would position themselves on the side of what they understood as culture proper to act as its custodians. Yet it seems that it is just at an exposing or diagnosing cultural degeneration and expressing their disbelief at the public’s poor taste that most critics stopped. What Mansel sees as a solution of sorts will not in the end require the critic’s vigilance or intervention for “The appetite, even of a novel-reader, has its limits; and if the best of the old books could be brought in, the worst of the new must drop out to make way for them. There would be an increased struggle for existence, under the pressure of which the weaker writers would give way, and the stronger would be improved by the stimulus of effective competition.”33 “Sensationalism,” another critic added, “must be left to be dealt with by time, and the improvement of the public taste.”34 Still others, like Geraldine Jewsbury, hoped for the inevitable exhaustion of sensibilities under the siege of strong stimulants provided by morbid fiction, or, again, the exhaustion of the sensation formula itself, its “running [itself] to seed”35 and passing away like so many other fashions. Strangely, having displayed their anxiety about the threat the popular taste posed for culture, critics end up tacitly and conveniently recognizing their helplessness or, to put it more strongly, powerlessness as they delegate ultimate reforming responsibility to the reading public. Thus for all this ranting and raving, most reviewers end on a note of resignation. The jungle that was rising over their heads would in time be cleared, but on its own accord.

33

Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” p. 513. The Westminster Review, p. 157. 35 Quoted in Casey, “‘Highly flavoured dishes,’” p. 5. 34

CHAPTER FIVE THE ILL LOGIC OF ANALOGY: USES AND ABUSES OF CHESS IN THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS BY LEWIS CARROLL LESZEK DRONG

The chess diagram1 which precedes Carroll’s Preface to Through the Looking Glass does not appear to be, nonsense-wise, a particularly spectacular element of the book. It is easily eclipsed by talking flowers, or oddly shaped and uncommonly opinionated characters like Humpty Dumpty. It is only when we take a closer look at Carroll’s peculiar insistence that his chess puzzle is, after all, “correctly worked out”2 that we may grow suspicious. Carroll hastens to add that his puzzle is correctly worked out only in “so far as the moves are concerned”3 but nowhere in the Preface does he bother to explain its larger significance. What follows his confident assertion is a list of disclaimers, which includes an erratic selection of the irregularities involved in the puzzle. Still, Carroll concludes his paragraph by reassuring his readers that, at the very least, “the final ‘checkmate’ of the Red King will be found, by anyone who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game.”4 Well, that, we shall presently see. 1 See Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There in: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992), p. 106. 2 Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 107. 3 Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 107 (emphasis added by Carroll). 4 Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 107. In an interesting essay called “The White Knight,” A.L. Taylor defends Carroll’s design by claiming that Carroll “was not interested in the game as a game, but in the implications of the moves” and his story is based not on a game of chess but on a chess lesson given to Alice Liddell. See A.L. Taylor, “The White Knight” in: Burt Hochberg, ed., The 64-Square

50

Chapter Five

Those of us who are prone to seek enlightenment from great philosophers and famous interpreters of Carroll’s books are likely to reach for Gilles Deleuze’s seminal work The Logic of Sense in order to explore the enigmatic appearance of chess at the beginning of Through the Looking Glass. Deleuze will offer us an unambiguous explanation of the role which the chessboard and the pieces play in the book: After having behaved briefly once again as the good object or the withdrawn voice vis-à-vis the chess pieces (with all the terrifying attributes of this object or this voice), Alice herself enters the game: she belongs to the surface of the chessboard, which has replaced the mirror, and takes up the task of becoming queen. The squares of the chessboard which must be crossed clearly [sic!] represent erogenous zones, and becoming-queen refers to the phallus as the agency of coordination.5

Sophisticated as it sounds, Deleuze’s profound explanation ignores his own initial proclamation that Through the Looking Glass is about surfaces, and Carroll’s designs indicate an aversion to going below them.6 The problem with Deleuze’s psychoanalytic diagnosis7 is that it also skirts the significance of chess as a game, with its implications of logic, rules, and systemic structures. Therefore, skeptical of his categorical pronouncement, emphasized by the disarmingly natural adverb ‘clearly,’ I want to return to the chessboard represented on the first page of the book, and focus on what is immediately available there. In defiance of Deleuze’s penetrative method, I intend to remain on the surface for a while, and pursue a largely superficial reading of the book.8 Deleuze is particularly sensitive to the paradoxical aspect of Carroll’s oeuvre. At the outset of his treatise on the vagaries of meaning, he credits Carroll with having pioneered a new literary tendency, the Alice books representing “a play of sense and nonsense, a chaos-cosmos.”9 Carroll emerges as the first writer to have Looking Glass: The Great Game of Chess in World Literature (New York: Times Books, 1993), pp. 94-95. 5 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 236. 6 See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 10. 7 This is the actual phrase that he uses to describe his own reading of Carroll’s work on the page immediately following the quoted passage – see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 327. 8 It is worth noting, however, that my design is in accordance with Deleuze’s general perception of Carroll’s book – see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. xiiixiv. 9 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. xiii.

The Ill Logic of Analogy

51

provided an exhaustive account of “the paradoxes of sense,”10 which is reflected in his persistent exploration of surfaces. In this sense, the chessboard, which Alice is supposed to cross, is a depthless surface par excellence, what with its absence of subterranean meanings and arrested play of signification, which stops dead outside the game in question. The paradoxes indicated by Deleuze are not internal to chess itself, however. It is the use of the chess problem vis-à-vis the plot of the book that generates a paradoxical potential of Carroll’s work. As we shall see, one of the paradoxes of Through the Looking Glass will consist in the confrontation of surfaces and depths, in Carroll’s attempts to scratch the surface of clearly laid out rules in order to test the limits of analogy. Further on I will return to the notions of paradox and analogy but for now I suggest we take the chess diagram in Through the Looking Glass at face value. Why use chess for a model of the narrative? Is this really a good choice? What is the point of the strategy? To begin with, we should bear in mind that chess is a game which has its own internal rules and, although it often resembles reality, and seems to imply that what happens on the chessboard may happen in real life situations, the similarities are deceptive. Chess is one of the oldest games invented by humankind. In its modern form it was codified and popularized in the 15th century, but its beginnings may be traced back to antiquity. Its origins are associated with India at the very beginning of the Middle Ages, although by that time other board games had been popular in Europe, too. Aristotle played a game known as petteia in which logic, skills and reason were of primary importance.11 There was no element of chance involved (you did not throw a dice, which has always been emblematic of fortuitous moves).12 Also, Plato mentions petteia in his Republic in the context of Socrates and his debating opponents, who lack skills as players.13 Now, what is worth stressing once again is that in both contexts the chess’s European ancestor 10

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. xiii. See Henry Edward Bird, Chess History and Reminiscences (London: Echo Library, 2005), p. 22. 12 See (accessed on August 1, 2009) 13 Plato, The Republic, p. 172 (trans. Benjamin Jowett), available from

(accessed on August 1, 2009). It seems fair to acknowledge that Jowett’s translation renders the Greek word as “draughts”, rather than chess, the two games still having much in common (e.g. the shape of the board). A detailed and informative discussion of the Greek games and their names may be found in Roland G. Austin, “Greek Board Games,” Antiquity (September 1940), pp. 257-271. 11

52

Chapter Five

was presented as a game of logic and reason, in which skills tip the scales, leaving little room to chance. As such, petteia reflected the players’ actual analytical skills, and its results were fair and reliable. Petteia, however, was not a major influence on Muslim Arabs in 7th century AD. The notion of the game that they had acquired had much more to do with the Indian battle game known as chaturanga, meaning “four divisions” (in Sanskrit it was also the name of the Indian army – it denoted elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry). Invented around 6th century AD, it was a direct ancestor to the Persian game of shatranj or chatrang.14 It is tempting, though, to infer a European influence there, as the game which originated in India differed considerably from what was to become the modern version of chess. Significantly, the pieces were put in motion by throwing a dice. Thereby, the game largely depended on chance, and did not reflect the actual skills of the players. Later, Arabs modified some of its rules, and eliminated the dice, so by the 15th century, when it had become popular in Europe, chess was largely what it has been till the present day, i.e., a battle of minds, rather than a game of chance. Throughout its long history chess has been a popular theme in works of literature. It has served as a metaphor, symbol, analogy or simply as an innocuous diversion. The earliest preserved texts come from Persian, Hebrew, Hindu (7th century – a Sanskrit fantasy romance Vasavadatta by Subandhu) and Arabic literature (the ancient Persian poem Chatrangnamak, i.e., the book of chatrang); those are poems concerned with chessplaying, and containing chess themes. In the 16th century when chess had already been well established in Europe, one of the most famous poems about it was Scchacia ludus by Marcus Vida (1510), in which a goddess of chess is mentioned for the first time. Also a great Polish poet, Jan Kochanowski, produced a long poem called Szachy, in which he described the game as a military battle which does not require the use of armoury and swords. Works of fiction come from a more recent period. Of particular interest are novels by Vladimir Nabokov (The Luhzin Defense), Arturo PerezReverte (The Flanders Panel) and Ronan Bennett (Zugzwang), and short 14

There are two basic positions on the origins of chess. One of them claims that India was the sole forefather of the game – see, e.g., Duncan Forbes, The History of Chess From the Time of the Early Invention of the Game in India, Till the Period of Its Establishment in Western and Central Europe (London: Wm H. Allen & Co., 1860) – while the other, more recent position, maintains that similar games developed in the early Middle Ages in various Asian countries, the Chinese Xiangqi being the most prominent among them – see David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (New York: Doubleday, 2005), pp. 13-20.

The Ill Logic of Analogy

53

stories by Edgar Allan Poe (“Maelzel’s Chess Player,” and “Von Kempelen and his Discovery”). As for drama, undoubtedly the most famous - and pioneering - effort is connected with “The Globe” performance (1624) of A Game at Chess by Thomas Middleton, a political satire in which characters have chess names (White King and Queen, etc.) and play a chess match. The play even contains a genuine chess opening (i.e., a sequence of learnt, standard moves for a given type of play at the beginning; in this case it is the Queen’s Gambit Declined). Also, Charles Dibdin’s The Chassiad (1825) deserves a mention at this juncture, as it is probably the first endeavour to popularize chess rules in the guise of a dramatic production. Earlier, one of the most spectacular and enigmatic chess themes may be found in William Shakespeare’s final drama - The Tempest (1611). In it Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, meets Ferdinand, a handsome, cultivated young gentleman. He is the first young male she gets to know on her island, which she has inhabited, since her birth, with her father and a bunch of fairy servants (Well, there is also Caliban, who is half human, half monster, but certainly not a gentleman). Miranda immediately falls in love with Ferdinand, and the feeling is reciprocated. Prospero, Miranda’s father, leaves the young couple alone to attend to some important business. The young lovers are left on their own, without a chaperone, or anyone older to keep an eye on them. And guess what they do – they start... playing chess! When Prospero leaves them, he warns Ferdinand that should he disrespect Miranda’s chastity (“break her virgin knot,”15 is the phrase that Prospero uses), horrible curses will fall upon their heads. It is Miranda’s father’s wish that the young couple should spend the time till his return on conversing. Then, in Act 5, towards the end of the play, we find them in Prospero’s Cell, where the lovers reprimand each other for playing against the rules of chess. It is worth noting that this is an episode which precedes their meeting with Ferdinand’s father and his companions (Act 5, Scene 1). At this point, Miranda, who has just taken notice of the newcomers, issues the famous exclamation: “O wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/That has such people in’t!”16 Clearly, the girl is still very much affected by the game of chess she has been playing, for she misconstrues reality and expresses admiration for the same ‘beautiful’ people who tormented and persecuted her father not that long ago. A confusion between the stringent 15

William Shakespeare, The Tempest in: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (London: Henry Pordes, 1990), p. 17. 16 Shakespeare, The Tempest, p. 22.

54

Chapter Five

rules of the game and one’s own reality (even if it is a reality presented within a fictional framework) is also one of the central themes of Through the Looking Glass. The book is formally and thematically governed by illusive mirror reflections which, in most cases, prove to be antithetical structures. The world behind the looking glass appears at first to be a replica of Alice’s living room but once she enters it, the mirror room is transformed into an unfamiliar space populated by animated chess pieces: “‘They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other,’ Alice thought to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders: but in another moment, with a little ‘Oh!’ of surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two!”17 Soon, it turns out that outside the house stretches an even more peculiar landscape: For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was. There were a number of little brooks running across from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of hedges, that reached from brook to brook. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last. ‘There ought to be some men moving about somewhere – and so there are!’ she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. ‘It’s a great game of chess that’s being played – all over the world – if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join – though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.’18

Of course, her wish immediately comes true, and the Red Queen is conveniently prepared to play Mephistopheles to Alice’s Faustus. The girl’s ultimate promotion to Queen requires that she pass a number of tests and negotiate a complicated and dangerous itinerary. Although the appearance of the territory she is about to traverse inspires confidence – what with its neat partitions, and the arrangement reminiscent of the logical and principled lay-out of the chessboard – Alice probably realizes that as a Pawn she is vulnerable in the extreme. What she does not realize, however, is that the looking glass world is in many respects the opposite of reality. Neither does Alice realize that her itinerary across the chessboard is predetermined by the author of the chess diagram presented at the very beginning of the book: 17 18

Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 113. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 123.

The Ill Logic of Analogy

55

RED

WHITE White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.19

Carroll resorts to a pioneering scheme, which creates the impression of a central intelligence’s control over the seemingly haphazard and contingent unfolding of the plot. Indeed, the illusion of authorial control would be complete but for one minor complication. It is true that the chessboard is an unexpectedly graphic sign in an otherwise verbal work20 – an intrusion of the visual and the mathematical into the realm of the linguistically fanciful and the paradoxical. And yet, for all its incongruity, such an occurrence of chess is consistently justified by the setting of the first episode (chessmen on the board in an empty room; Alice’s interest in the game; her predilection for pretending to be someone else, e.g., a chess Queen) and the development of the plot. Instead, the complication issues

19

Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, p. 106. The illustrations which accompany the text belong to a different order of signification as they are supposed to be unproblematically iconographic while the chessboard requires an effort of a more complex interpretation. 20

56

Chapter Five

from the diagram as such, or, rather, from what it represents in terms which are immanent to the game of chess itself. While there is no denying that Carroll’s design, which interweaves Alice’s adventures with the moves of a white pawn on the chessboard, is attractive and sophisticated, it is bound to generate controversy on technical grounds. To put it bluntly, the chess problem illustrated by the diagram is a scandal from the point of view of any decent chess player. Even though Carroll’s problem is loosely based on the principles of chess, it blatantly ignores the specific rules that govern the game. The moves on the board lack the elementary logic of chess, although it is true that they are subordinated to a certain pre-established conclusion. Carroll himself stresses at the outset that his pieces move according to the general principles but they do not follow the alternating sequence of moves (white-black-white-black, each in turn). The White’s moves are not alternated by the Red’s (here the Red takes the place of the traditional Black21). A long series of moves made by the White results in an absurd situation whereby we witness a castling (a move traditionally made by the King and one of the rooks simultaneously) of the Queens – an impossible and illegal move in any game of chess. According to Carroll this move consists in... abstaining from moving the pieces. The only sensible move in the problem, then, is the final checkmate delivered by the White, in consequence of which the Red King is indeed captured or killed, as some theorists of the game would have it. So far I have used the notion of a chess problem in a technical sense, which requires some explanation. By saying that Carroll’s plot is based on the structure of chess problems I mean that those problems (also known as compositions) are different from a game between two opponents. A typical chess problem will answer the following imperative: ‘Find the fastest way to checkmate the Black, assuming that the Black plays the best available moves to forestall your designs.’ In point of fact, Carroll’s problem breaks several basic rules of chess composition. To begin with, its author indicates which piece is to make the first move. Normally, this is to be divined by those who undertake to solve the puzzle. The Red fails to defend itself by giving up its moves; its moves – if made – are inefficient (certainly not the best available moves), and the whole sequence of moves by the White is against the economy of the game, because the White 21

Although it is not uncommon to encounter various ornamental chess pieces in other colours, the customary nomenclature used in discussions and schematic presentations invariably has the White confront the Black – see Władysław Litmanowicz and Jerzy GiĪycki, Szachy od A do Z (Warszawa: Sport i Turystyka, 1986), p. 169.

The Ill Logic of Analogy

57

chooses the most complicated and the least effective way of defeating its opponent. Actually, a checkmate in three moves is possible (1.Nf5-Ng3), which renders Carroll’s problem fundamentally flawed. There are two alternative conclusions to be drawn from the above. Either we come to terms with a failure at the heart of Carroll’s design and accept the sad truth that writers are fallible, and their works are imperfect, or we assume that the above mentioned blunder was intentional, and Carroll meant to offer his readers a technically defective chess problem in order to convey a special message. Now, one of the basic rules of literary criticism requires that we discard the former hypothesis, and turn our interpretive attention to the latter. As a matter of fact, literary texts themselves often invite us to break all the reading conventions established by our predecessors but in this case I shall follow a different criterion: namely, I simply believe that the “special message” alternative is much more interesting and intellectually challenging, therefore I want to elaborate on it in the forthcoming paragraphs of this essay. First, let us consider the consequences of bringing language and games together. Of all twentieth-century writings, it is in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that the conjunction between chess and language receives a particularly in-depth treatment. Wittgenstein introduces the notion of language-games to emphasize the inseparability of words from the situations in which they are uttered: “I shall ... call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’.”22 According to Wittgenstein, we play language-games the way we play chess, individual words and phrases being deployed very much like chess pieces.23 The point of his analogy is that their significations (or values) depend on the configuration of various factors on the chessboard. To determine what words signify, we have to focus on “the kind of use they have.”24 In other words, our language-games, just like chess, are governed by internal systems of rules which have the power to modify significations of their individual constituents. More than that, as Ferdinand de Saussure already insists in his Course in General Linguistics, it is only within the meaningful structure of a system that those constituents may signify anything at all.25 Unfortunately, Wittgenstein’s 22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1967), p. 5 (§7). 23 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 15 (§31). 24 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 6 (§10). 25 See Ferdinand de Sausure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 120. Incidentally, de Saussure

58

Chapter Five

analogy between chess and language has its flaws, too. Chess pieces differ from individual words or expressions in many fundamental ways. Although it is true that their values often depend on the overall situation on the chessboard, in most cases they have clearly defined prerogatives, and follow immutable rules which are not subject to contextual transmutations. Even though chess has its own history, as a game it is not part of history. Board games are not vulnerable to external circumstances; they are autonomous systems, much more like de Saussure’s abstract langue, rather than Wittgenstein’s use-oriented language. Every experienced chess player knows the average value of particular chess pieces and realizes that in direct combat a queen will defeat, hands down, a rook, or a bishop. A different outcome is possible only if we set up a match between two players of heavily unequal skills. What Wittgenstein’s analogy between language and games epitomizes is a shortcoming which seems to be common to all analogies. In this particular case, the analogy involves an intersemiotic translation, a transposition of meaning from one semiotic order (constituted by the rules of the game and the signs employed for values which are internal to the game of chess) to another (that of the narrative, in which individual words, themes and literary conventions are principal signifying elements). Analogies like that were commonly used already in ancient Greece, where analogizing consisted in the use of explicit and implicit comparisons, involving models or images.26 Moreover, analogy implies proportion, similarity, equality of ratios; it is a device used in reasoning, and a concept which historians of literature associate with the tradition of biblical exegesis. Umberto Eco has argued, convincingly, for the preponderance of the principle of likeness in medieval hermeneutics.27 Even though, etymologically, analogy seems to be associated with discourse and reason (Gr. logos), it also incorporates a rather shifty prefix (Gr. ana), which lends itself to a variety of interpretations. ‘Ana’ carries various prepositional meanings – up, back again, throughout, toward, over, against28 – which may be exceedingly also draws inspiration from chess, which he uses for comparison, to prove that language has its own arrangement – see de Saussure, Course, p. 22. 26 See Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ed., The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), p. 61. 27 See Umberto Eco, “Interpretation and History” in Stefan Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation: Tanner Lectures in Human Values (New York, Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 23-44. 28 See Online Etymological Dictionary,

(accessed on August 3, 2009)

The Ill Logic of Analogy

59

difficult to reconcile. And yet all those significations are in perfect keeping with Alice’s predicament in the book; she is also at a loss when it comes to choosing a direction, and her movements are anything but linear and principled. As a result, the chess analogy misfires, its meaning gone astray, but, in a curious twist typical of Alice’s adventures, it also doubles back on itself and delivers a judgment upon its own mechanisms. The Greek prefix both immobilizes and propels Alice’s movements, a paradox so emblematic of the looking-glass world. The chess analogy is maintained throughout the narrative (across discourse, so to speak), and yet it is displayed in its entirety outside the main body of the text, as an independent story which only the chess illuminati may appreciate. It is an integral element of the unfolding of the story, and yet the diagram, like a still picture, captures Alice’s complete progression from the d2 square to her promotion, and the eventual checkmate. If the diagram is supposed to act as a model for the narrative, it is not clear which of its essential aspects is being paralleled by Alice’s adventures. After all, chess is not a mirror reflection of life, as Benjamin Franklin used to claim.29 The mere presence of chess pieces in selected episodes of Through the Looking Glass does not seem to satisfy the requirements of an appropriate analogy. In consequence, Carroll’s chess problem simultaneously sustains and explodes his own narrative. The simultaneity of opposing energies, the contrary movements which pull Alice in different directions at the same time, is what Deleuze identifies as the supreme paradox of Carroll’s work.30 On his reading, the paradox involves “two distinct dimensions internal to language in general – one always concealed by the other, yet continuously coming to the aid of, or subsisting under, the other.”31 Or, better still, we may conclude by noting that Carroll’s analogy is ultimately paralogical: inextricably interwoven with the language of the narrative (otherwise, there would be no analogy at all), and yet logically independent from Alice’s adventures. The paralogical in Through the Looking Glass is thus an effect of combining the logic of chess and the paradoxes of language into an impossible analogy which, nevertheless, perfectly fits Carroll’s fictional framework.

29

See Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” available from (accessed on August 2, 2009) 30 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 2-3. 31 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 2.

CHAPTER SIX THE SENSE OF “CINNAMON SHOPS” STANLEY S. BILL

Bruno Schulz begins his famous 1936 essay, “The Mythologizing of Reality,” with the following basic principles: The essence of reality is Sense. What lacks Sense is, for us, not reality. Every fragment of reality lives by virtue of partaking in a universal Sense. The old cosmogonists expressed this by the statement, “In the Beginning was the Word.” The nameless does not exist for us. To name something means to include it in some universal Sense.1

Elsewhere, in his “Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz,” Schulz says: “The role of art is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus for registering processes in that deep stratum where value is formed.”2 In other words, an artist is a being who wades deep into the nameless realm – into a place of formlessness, of shapelessness, of non-sense – and finds ways to name the unnameable. There is an inherent paradox here: for, by definition, one clearly cannot name the unnameable. Moreover, this deep stratum, this realm of the nameless, is both void of value, void of sense, and at the same time, the very place “where value is formed”, the source of meaning and the wellspring of sense. Michał Paweł Markowski, in his textbook on Schulz and Polish modern literature, sums up the paradox thus: “Literature can speak about that which exists outside of language, but in speaking about it, it immediately brings it into the field of the named.”3

1

Bruno Schulz, Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz with Selected Prose, ed. Jerzy Ficowski, trans. Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 115. 2 Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 113. 3 Michał Paweł Markowski, Polska literatura nowoczesna. LeĞmian, Schulz, Witkacy (Kraków: Universitas, 2007), p. 219. Translation my own.

62

Chapter Six

Today I shall be talking about Bruno Schulz’s short story, “Cinnamon Shops,” and, more specifically, about this story as a demonstration in praxis of Schulz’s philosophy of art and of sense. My argument is that “Cinnamon Shops” constitutes a kind of artistic fantasy, the artist in his probe, or in his “horse-and-carriage”, as the case may be, sinking fearlessly into the nameless and bringing it into sense. This paradoxical operation is made possible by a process Schulz calls the “mythologizing of reality,” turning the unnameable into myth, thereby making it truly real in a human way. For Schulz, therefore, myth literally means “making sense of reality,” bringing it into language, making it human, making it into something that means for us. Story-making is myth-making; it is a process of revelation – not the revelation of an unnameable realm that can never be known as it is in itself, but the revelation of what it means for human beings. It might be useful to offer a brief gloss on the basic narrative arc of “Cinnamon Shops.” The story initially follows a pattern of interrupted revelations. The main character, an unnamed prepubescent boy, goes to the theatre with his family, but is sent home to retrieve a forgotten wallet just before the sky-blue stage curtain can “burst open to reveal incredible and dazzling events.”4 Perhaps inspired by the machinations of the night sky, the boy decides to take a detour via the eponymous “cinnamon shops,” which, among other things, trade in forbidden publications, which promise to lift the veil “on tantalizing and unknown mysteries.”5 But again, this anticipated revelation is closed down, this time because the boy becomes lost in the labyrinth of streets that the nighttime city soon becomes. He finds his way again when he recognizes his middle school and is once more tempted into a detour, this time to stop by the evening drawing lessons of a mysterious professor, a man who exudes “an aroma of secrecy.”6 Again, in the attempt to gain access to a place of secret knowledge, the boy becomes lost in an unfamiliar labyrinth of rooms. Eventually, he finds his way out and embarks upon a horse-drawn cabride which begins as an aimless circumnavigation of the city and then – once the cabbie has abandoned his vehicle, leaving the old cab-horse to lead the way – becomes a magical journey out of the city, into the forest, and on into wooded hills, all under a shower of falling stars and with the

4 Bruno Schulz, The Fictions of Bruno Schulz. The Street of Crocodiles & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Picador, 1988), p. 60. 5 Schulz, Fictions, p. 62. 6 Schulz, Fictions, p. 63.

The Sense of “Cinnamon Shops”

63

signs of a “secret spring” all around.7 The horse sacrifices itself in carrying the boy to the top of a hill, where he reaches a joyful epiphany of sorts, before half-running, half-skating back to town in a weightless ecstasy. In the city, the sky has now fully disclosed, or revealed, its “internal mechanism,”8 and the story concludes with the promise of the coming dawn, or perhaps even the suggestion that the dawn and the brightness of that wondrous night are one and the same. The revelation of the dawn is already a secret presence within the night itself. The story of “Cinnamon Shops” – or, more specifically, the night ride at its conclusion – is on a certain level representative of the artist’s work: a journey into that sub-stratum which is both the origin of sense and the place of non-sense. In diverse discourses, we might call it the “unnameable,” the “inhuman,” the “extra-linguistic,” the “unconscious.” The poet is the exemplary artist for this task, because it is ultimately through the word that reality is endowed with sense. After all, according to Schulz, “reality is the shadow of the word,”9 and it is the poet who liberates the word from a purely designative function into its primal existence, not as a mere sign, but as myth, story, sense. “Cinnamon Shops” is an example of what happens when, as Schulz puts it, “short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths.”10 These myths concern human contact with an inhuman realm, the creation of sense from non-sense. So how does this work in the story? First of all, we can assume that the boy-protagonist is associated with an imaginative principle. This is clearly a Romantic axiom, but it also has a particular meaning in Schulz, as an artistic reversion to childhood brings him closer to the mythical origins of his own thought. It is worth repeating here an oft-quoted passage from one of Schulz’s letters: The kind of art I care about is precisely a regression, childhood revisited. If it were possible to reverse development, to attain the state of childhood again, to have its abundance and limitlessness once more, that “age of genius,” “those messianic times” promised and sworn to us by all mythologies, would come to pass. My ideal goal is to “mature” into childhood.11

7

Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. 9 Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 117. 10 Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 115. 11 Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 126. 8

64

Chapter Six

In order to send his probe into the nameless, the artist must first regress into a child-like vision of the world, where ordinary things are full of hidden meaning and the universe is ever poised upon the brink of spectacular revelation. The protagonist of “Cinnamon Shops” inhabits this world, pregnant with possibility and filled with the tantalizing taste of secret knowledge. And yet, the search for this knowledge is fraught with difficulty. The boy is first of all sent away from the theatre on a mundane mission by his parents, then he twice becomes lost in human labyrinths – the nighttime streets and the school building. The city is a labyrinth of streets in the same way that language is a labyrinth of linguistic signs. One sign leads into another, then branches out into several different signs, and one can never quite pin down the location of one sign relative to another. Sometimes there are dead-ends. In this labyrinth, sense can be cruelly chimerical, and meaning, or perhaps revelation, is a process which is constantly deferred. The boy cannot find what he is looking for in the human world of the city, at least not at first. If we take the city as the ultimate place of human meanings – nature transformed into the form of human desire, as Northrop Frye put it12 – then what happens next is most interesting. At the beginning of the cab journey, the boy and the driver cannot agree on a destination, so they simply drive in a circle around the city. When he loses his human guide, the boy is left “to rely on the horse’s will.”13 And so, “we turned into a suburban street, bordered on both sides by gardens. As we advanced, these gardens slowly changed into parks with tall trees and the parks in turn into forests.”14 The boy’s journey takes him from the brick, wood, and stone of a city street, into a district of gardens, vegetal growth bent to the desires of human beings; from there still farther through parks, where the trees and vegetation are not quite so tightly controlled, and finally into the untramelled nature of the nighttime forest. The boy travels from culture, through some liminal stages, into nature; from form, through stages of looser form, into pure material; and from the traditional topos of sense, of human meanings, into the region of non-sense. And yet the boy is on the true path to the universal sense that the artist must seek: out of the labyrinth of names and into the space of the nameless. Suddenly the world opens out into the beginnings of a wondrous clarity:

12

See Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, among others. Schulz, Fictions, p. 66. 14 Schulz, Fictions, p. 66. 13

The Sense of “Cinnamon Shops”

65

I shall never forget that luminous journey on that brightest of winter nights. The coloured map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. The air became light to breath and shimmered like silver gauze. (...) The whole forest seemed to be illuminated by thousands of lights and by the stars falling in profusion from the December sky.15

The boy has journeyed into a forest at night. If the city is the place of human meaning, then the dark forest – from fairy tales to Dante – has often been a symbol for lost meaning, for darkness and death, for absence of sense. The forest speaks to a basic human dread of what is unknown, what cannot be understood, cannot be illuminated, cannot be named. But according to Schulz, the artist’s job is to plunge his probe deep into these forbidding regions and in “Cinnamon Shops” the young boy rides on a magical carriage into a nocturnal forest which is sparkling with lights and alive with the expressions of human desire. Even the stars are accessible as they fall down from the sky into that very forest, so that mysterious bands of wanderers can gather them in the snow. We should also consider the season. The story is set “at the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days,”16 around the period of the winter solstice, when the sun is at its farthest remove and the days are at their shortest. This is a time which is mythologically associated with the cruel march of darkness and death. And yet, paradoxically, it is also the moment of rebirth. The sun stands still, but then it commences its return journey and the days slowly begin to lengthen again. Thus, symbolically, the seeds of the spring are sown in the depths of winter. Rebirth comes at the moment of apparent death. Of course, much scholarly work has been done on how this phenomenon has expressed itself in various religious and mythological traditions. For us, however, it is significant that the signs of this rebirth in the very dead of winter are strongly evident in the nighttime forest of Schulz’s “Cinnamon Shops.” From the beginning, the smell of violets is in the air, the snow is likened to a white wooly lambskin, and “trembling anemones”17 appear. Later, “the air pulsated with a secret spring, with the

15

Schulz, Fictions, p. 66. Schulz, Fictions, p. 59. 17 Schulz, Fictions, p. 66. 16

66

Chapter Six

matchless purity of snow and violets.”18 And finally, “my lungs soaked up the blissful spring in the air, the freshness of snow and stars.”19 On a simple level, when Schulz uses the image of a woolly lambskin for winter snow, he is doing precisely what he says a poet must do: restoring conductivity to words, allowing the short-circuits of sense to occur which regenerate the primeval myths. A covering of snow is not literally a lambskin, but the image represents the mythologized, humanized reality of winter – that it passes, and that the secret signs of the spring-to-come are already present within it. In the same way, violets do not literally flower in December, but the seeds for their rebirth are present in the earth and the turn of the sun at the solstice is a sign, for human beings, that they will be regenerated. Life returns after apparent death; this is perhaps the central concern of all human mythology. And, as Schulz maintains in his essay, “all poetry is mythologizing and strives to restore myths to the world.”20 So, the nighttime journey is a fine example of Schulz’s mythologizing, of his restoration of primordial myths. But the journey in itself also seems to offer an idealized version of the artist’s journey into the nameless realm, into the unknowable source of a universal sense. This forest is not dark and threatening, but brightly illuminated and full of meanings which open themselves up to the boy-poet. The very air is transparent and light to breathe. The carriage enters a landscape of hills, which rise “like sighs of bliss,”21 and then climbs higher and higher. This ecstatic ascent surely appeals to mythological traditions of hill-top epiphanies, whilst also reflecting the specific geography of the area around Schulz’s home town of Drohobycz. The primeval myth is united with the particularity of Schulz’s own little postage stamp of native soil. In order to continue this reflection on the forest journey as an ideal form of the artist’s task, it is necessary to turn now to the vehicle which carries the boy through the forest and up into the hills: the horse-drawn cab. In his 1935 essay for Witkacy, Schulz wrote about the special place of this object in his private mythology: From the age of six or seven there appeared and reappeared in my drawings the image of a cab, with a hood on top and lanterns blazing, emerging from a nocturnal forest. That image belongs to the basic material

18

Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. 20 Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 116. 21 Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. 19

The Sense of “Cinnamon Shops”

67

of my imagination; it is a kind of node to many receding series. To this day, I have not exhausted its metaphysical content.22

Indeed, Schulz continued to invent diverse variations on this originary image throughout his creative life. The horse-drawn carriage appears in several stories and in numerous drawings, each time seeming to shift its valence slightly, whilst still maintaining the core of its secret power. Piotr Millati, in Słownik schulzowski, wisely cautions against overinterpreting the image, but also underlines its fundamental significance: Thus, horses harnessed to a carriage constituted the writer’s most personal proto- image (“the iron capital of the soul”), in which, as if in a nutshell, the mystery of his being had been enclosed. His writings are nothing else but the attempt to penetrate this mystery, a ceaseless revolving around the visions which at the beginning of life emerge from the unconscious, determining the boundaries of the questions to be taken up and of the creative imagination of the artist.23

Michał Paweł Markowski put it thus: The image of the horse-drawn cab emerging from the Night will accompany the Schulzean conception of creative work as a drawing of light out of darkness, and also of sense out of the unconscious.24

In spite of its everydayness, the image is clearly rich in its symbolic possibilities. For example, we might think of birth – the emergence into the world, into the light of existence; or perhaps, more radically, of the mysterious origins of life itself, the unthinkable conundrum of something having emerged from nothing at the beginning of time. We might also imagine a connection with language, as Markowski clearly does, a coming out of the darkness into the light of language, from the forest of non-sense into the light of sense. We might go further and think this in the terms of Heideggerian Lichtung, or clearing. Indeed, much has been written about this symbol, but how does it function in “Cinnamon Shops”? The young boy’s journey into the nighttime forest represents a direct reversal of Schulz’s archetypal image. The driver-less horse-drawn cab carries the boy into the forest, not out of it. The city, the place of human 22

Schulz, Letters and Drawings, p. 110. Piotr Millati, “KoĔ,” in Słownik schulzowski, eds. Włodzimierz Bolecki, Jerzy JarzĊbski and Stanisław Rosiek (GdaĔsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2003), pp. 176177. Translation my own. 24 Markowski, Polska literatura nowoczesna, p. 182. 23

68

Chapter Six

significations, has become a labyrinth of confused meanings for the boy, where one street is easily conflated with another and he loses himself in a panic. He must leave the place of human meaning and enter the mythological topos of fear, darkness, and meaninglessness. Put in a different way, we might say that he must enter the unconscious, or, as Schulz describes it, the nameless. And because this is a fantasized, idealized version of the journey, he finds that the forest is not a place of fear at all. It is the home of a secret spring, where a bright moon bathes the landscape in light, and the stars sparkle between the flowers in the snow. Only in this regenerate region of the nameless can the boy experience illumination. Only there does the world open up to him. He must enter into non-sense in order to find sense. The role of the horse in all of this is also mysterious. It struggles to carry the boy up the hill and eventually the boy is upset to discover tears in its eyes and a round black wound on its belly: “‘My dearest, I did it for you,’ the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy. I left him and I felt wonderfully light and happy.”25 In reference to the horse’s apparent sacrifice, Piotr Millati suggests that “the gift of experiencing beauty must be atoned for by the artist with a mark of suffering which condemns him to solitude.”26 We might also take the wounded horse as a metaphor for sexual energies, so often bound up with creativity and so often troubling in Schulz’s work. Perhaps these energies are simply unconscious creative instinct; after all, the boy has to rely on the horse’s will, and the horse seems “smarter than its driver.”27 Either way, it would appear to be these wounded energies which carry the boy into the heart of the mystery, but then, at the moment of illumination, they become “small, like a wooden toy,” and the boy feels “light and happy,” as if a weight had been removed.28 As he runs back into town, he seems almost to be flying, as if his body had ceased to weigh him down. The burden of corporeality has been eased. In this state of transcendence, the boy returns to the city, where the sky has “disclosed on that magic night its internal mechanism and showed in infinite evolutions the mathematics of its cogs and wheels.”29 The sky, previously a labyrinth like the city, has revealed itself. The streets are full of people out walking, enchanted by the sky’s display, by its disclosure of itself. The revelation here is one of a basic identity between things. In the 25

Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. Millati, “KoĔ,” p. 178. 27 Schulz, Fictions, p. 66. 28 Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. 29 Schulz, Fictions, p. 67. 26

The Sense of “Cinnamon Shops”

69

final lines of the story, night and day have lost their traditional valences, as they appear to dissolve into a single metaphor of silvery light: We went for a walk altogether along a steeply falling street, pervaded by the scent of violets; uncertain whether it was the magic of the night which lay like silver on the snow or whether it was the light of the dawn...30

At its heart, “Cinnamon Shops” contains a fable about artistic creation and inspiration. The boy-protagonist must leave the place of human meanings and journey deep into a winter forest at night. When he gets there, he finds not darkness, cold, and death, but sparkling lights, a secret spring, and the signs of new life in the dead of winter. He finds an explosion of metaphorical interconnectedness and identity: winter and spring, death and life, earth and sky, night and day, non-sense and sense. The artist must sink his probe into the nameless region which is both the wellspring of sense and its negation. In other words, for sense to exist within its full human potential, with its innermost mythological significance restored, we must first make the journey into non-sense.

30

Schulz, Fictions, p. 68.

CHAPTER SEVEN ANARCHTOPIA: ZANY FILM COMEDY FROM THE MARX BROTHERS TO MONTY PYTHON ANTHONY BARKER

There has been very little academic analysis of comedy as performance for the purpose of generating laughter. On the one hand, most critical reflection has centered on comic form and its cultural signification; on the other, interest in laughter has tended, in the well-known instances of Bergson and Freud, to focus on psycho-social aspects, that is, what it tells us about a society’s values and practices. Freud writes in his The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905) that humour may say more about social life at a particular time than about particular people. In addition, the great comic practitioners of the last 3,000 years have left little of themselves behind except anecdote and text, which, if you are interested in the mechanics of comedy, tells you little about delivery, timing or audience response. For these reasons, detailed analysis of comic performance is largely confined to comedians of the last 100 years and is more or less coterminous with the invention of mechanical recording equipment. With technology, performance has achieved some, if not all, of the stability of text. Funny men (usually men) have been a staple of popular art and entertainment for a long time. Most forms of comedy are inclusive – there may be a comic butt or target for the mockery, but the majority of people are intended to share in a good feeling. Sometimes comedy is corrective and intended to wound, but for every case where injury is inflicted there are more where the object of ridicule is forgiven and brought back into the fold. Comedy which confuses and alienates a mass audience is relatively rare and of restricted popularity. If one accepts that most comedy works in the service of reinforcing social norms by lampooning aberrant behavior, what are we to make of a comedy which flouts social norms, prizes

72

Chapter Seven

eccentricity and breaks rules, even those of comedy itself? The Dionysian spirit of fun usually stops well short of out-and-out anarchy. However some artists have chafed at the restrictions of polite comedy and have taken it to places where offence is courted, not just in respect of the comic target but of society’s elders and leaders, its most cherished values and even paying customers themselves. My subject is zany or anarchic comedy. “Zany” the term means “fantastically or absurdly ludicrous”, and is derived from the bumpkin or comic idiot ‘Gianni’, diminutive of Giovanni, from Commedia dell’arte. The “zany” is therefore the classic comedy victim, the ridiculous object of everyone else’s mirth. What happens, to apply the quote about the start-up of United Artists, when “the lunatics take over the asylum,” when the world is made over in the image of the lunatics. Bergson1 thought that Don Quixote was the definitive comic character because he lived his delusion and the rest of us could thereby enjoy his folly. The most original comedians have indulged that folly and made of it a ‘brave new world’. Anarchism in comedy is both hard to define and hard to apply to cases, but it is clear that a sort of untrammelled wildness lends to this kind of comedy a particularly intellectual edge. We can understand why from philosopher David Hall’s observations on anarchism: We live in a world that is, for the most part, kindly disposed toward principles and princes, rules and rulers – a world which presumes order, in both its cosmological and social senses, to result from orders. It is a mistake to believe that anarchism is primarily a social or a political doctrine. It is a perspective with the most radical of metaphysical implications. To believe otherwise permits its easy refutation as a simplistic, philosophically unramified, theory of insurrection, or an overly idealistic vision of the gradual limitation of governmental power, or of the development of syndicalistic economies, or communal societies.”2

Anarchic comedy throws down a challenge to existing hierarchies and stable social understandings. It may or may not be scatological but it cannot expect to find either sustained commercial support or avoid trouble from the censors. At its gentlest, it has affinities with English nonsense literature of the late 19th century.

1 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton, chapter 3 “The Comic in Character”: 18 Feb 2010

2 David L. Hall, Eros and Irony: a Prelude to Philosophical Anarchy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), p. xii.

Anarchtopia

73

The godfather of English ‘topsy-turvy’ performance comedy is William Schwenk Gilbert. His burlesques and comic operas dealt with perverse and ludicrous situations carried through to a conclusion with rigorous logic. Along the way, much loved national pieties are mocked. One of his late (and least popular) operettas was called Utopia Limited and concerned a Pacific island trying to ape Great Britain. Gilbert’s parody of a state’s checks and balances, embodied in the figure of the King, who is obliged to defame himself in the scandal sheets to show he is not above criticism and whose heir and successor is constitutionally bound to assassinate him if he exceeds his authority (his operettas are full of violence and threats of sudden death), is hilariously surreal, as is the make-over of the country as a then-fashionable limited liability company. Qualified as a lawyer, Gilbert escaped this profession by working as a book illustrator and cartoonist. As a carton sketch artist, he went on to develop his surrealist gifts. Later, as a writer of burlesque comedies, librettist, director, set designer and sometime actor and singer, he took these finished gifts to light opera. All of these sides to his artistic nature seem to have helped his absurdist approach to creativity. W.S. Gilbert died3 a year before the Marx Brothers first took to the stage. His late Victorian burlesque is connected to the vaudeville of the Marx family by the much-loved traditions of Music Hall. In vaudeville, a succession of variety acts succeeds each other, without logical or narrative connection. Apart from comedy, Vaudeville was a pot pourri of vocal, musical, acrobatic, animal and magic acts. This was the world of the Marx Bros 1913 to 1924, when they were taken out of school and pushed into entertainment by their ambitious stage-door mother, Minnie, at first as a musical act. The brothers transformed into a comedy act when they found it was easier to get laughs than to compete with the many (better) singing acts around. Their vaudeville careers peaked in 1920 when they topped the bill at vaudeville’s Mecca, the Palace Theater, New York. Thereafter they performed and toured as top-liners until 1924 when they began to appear in scripted and crafted stage musicals, that is, musical theater customized to fit their brand of organised lunacy. They progressed from having a back-up team of gagsters producing variety and sketch shows such as On the Balcony (1921) to vehicles, like I’ll Say She Is (1924), provided for them by skilled stage dramatists. Those writers were some of the east coast’s brightest wits4, and had been responsible for many of its most successful comedy and musical comedy shows. 3

A classic absurdist’s death at 75, drowning trying to rescue a girl not drowning. Men such as George S. Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz, Morrie Ryskind, S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, Nat Perrin. 4

74

Chapter Seven

The relationship between the Marx Brothers and their writers is at the heart of the issue of what zany comedy was or could be. Musical comedy theatre operated on the basis of storylines. Any form of sustained narrative is the enemy of zany comedy. The Marx Brothers were not educated men, they were not for the most part capable of generating the story postulates on which their comedies were based – they needed these skilled writers. To fit within the moulds of Broadway (and later Hollywood) success, extended narratives and dramatic structure were required. To be effectively zany however, narrative needs to be broken up, retarded, subverted and contradicted. Fortunately, 15 years of vaudeville disinclined the Marxes to stick to the script. Most of their stage and film triumphs resulted from the creative opposition of scripted wit and improvisational brilliance. Their most celebrated writer George S. Kaufman said the brothers ad-libbed so much that “somewhere in Act 2 I think I heard one of my original lines.”5 In the early days, before their shows were finalized, they were taken on the road and tested before provincial audiences, modified before their New York premieres. This occurred with the stage shows The Cocoanuts (1926) and Animal Crackers (1928), and the adaptations of them which were their first two Paramount films (1929 and 1930 respectively) also benefited from the process. Improvisation is common in vaudeville but it is uncommon in feature film production. What first attracted the studios to the Marx Brothers was the ready-made and proven success of these two shows. An accidental factor was the need to showcase new film sound technology, which drew Hollywood to musical theater in the first place. Once established in film, and cut adrift from the stage, Marx Brother’s scripts became shorter and tighter as the discipline of film-making began to impose itself on them. Turning to film comedy, it is easy to show that anarchic comedy was and is a difficult sell. Narrative is, along with budgetary constraint, a great instrument of control in film production. Films are proposed to producers and studios executives on the basis of a 5-to-10 minute “pitch”, a punchy story summary. Film treatments are then commissioned, which are more extended story versions. These would then be converted into scripts and shooting scripts for 80-minutes-plus films. At each stage, potentially noncreative people would have to be convinced of the desirability of greenlighting the project. Imagine the difficulty of producing a story synopsis of an anarchic comedy - low on formal plot elements and high on improvisational comic business. How would you explain developments 5

Ronald Bergan, The Life and Times of the Marx Brothers (London: Green Wood Publishing, 1992), p. 37.

Anarchtopia

75

based upon speed and skill of delivery, on turns, twists and gestures, on charm of performance? Another difficulty is that anarchic comedy is conceptual in its underpinning. It defines itself by what it is not, that is, it is not conventional. It usually requires a community of practitioners believing in and committed to its comic agenda. That is to say, it is a collective project. In addition, success in the form of acceptance can be quite damaging to its subversive aims. The movie business functions by well-established genres and categorizations – of which comedy is one. Most film comedy is deeply conservative and traditional in nature. It is either concerned with social justice, the good/weak overturning the bad/strong, or with the correction of social error in a return to accepted patterns of behaviour. I refer (very synoptically) to the separate comedies of knaves and fools. Anarchic comedy confounds foolishness and knavery, making both curiously admirable rather than aberrant. It is an assault upon conventional morality and dominant power structures. It says no less than that we cannot look to society for a proper set of moral values and so anything goes! It should be clear from this brief analysis that anarchic comedy is not popular at all times and will rarely appeal to the majority who depend upon social norms for their bearings. For this reason the Marx Brothers were found to be subversive by intellectual groups like the Surrealists, and by radical modernists like Antonin Artaud and T.S. Eliot. Even the industry trade press Variety understood that they were not so much satirists as anarchists. In Horsefeathers (1932), Groucho’s patter song is an anarchist’s anthem entitled “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The New Statesman and Nation understood them to be operating in the same realm as Freud: “They introduced the psychological disturbance that is caused by seeing something that is mad and aimless… something which, if not utterly disconnected, depends for its connections on the workings of the subconscious.”6 The fact that the Marxes combined comedy with adept musical performance was very much to their advantage at the beginning of the Sound Era. Musical abilities, like comedy routines, create space by unobtrusively (often diagetically) arresting film narrative. Another factor that brought the Marxes to film was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The proceeds of Groucho’s and Harpo’s stage careers had been wiped out by the crash (Chico was always broke due to an uncontrollable gambling habit). They repaired their fortunes by signing for Paramount because they could film their old stage successes at Paramount’s Astoria Studios in New 6

Cited in Kanfer, Groucho, p. 162.

76

Chapter Seven

York at the same time as they were appearing on Broadway in a new show. The Crash and the Depression that followed it were the ideal seeding-ground for their brand of humour. The brothers adapted but never lost their original inspiration as social interlopers, as “unvalued” German-Jewish immigrants. The original act had Julius/Groucho affect a German accent to match Leonard/Chico’s Italian, and, with Adolph/Harpo not speaking, they therefore resembled three different forms of fresh-off-the-boat immigrant. Ethnic stereotypes had long been stock characters in vaudeville and therefore had little future potential; the brother’s genius was to adapt their comic personas to more subtly radical and ‘regressive’ types. Radical and regressive go together because the act reclaims many of the insolent postures of childhood. Harpo’s muteness is not that of a man who hasn’t learned the language. It is the pre-language phase of an infant. Chico’s child-like hat belongs to a toddler, as does the violence he inflicts on English grammar and lexis. Groucho is the adolescent of the family, wholly self-directed but at the same time assertive as only obstreperous teenagers can be. Even his trademark painted-on moustache marks him as someone not yet able to grow a beard. This regressive strategy enable the brothers to retreat into a kind of free-wheeling childishness, and to create around themselves a charmed nursery that only superficially resembled the world of power and wealth and position. As an idea associated with nonsense art is the concept of excess or surplus, it’s worth pointing out that there were two surplus Marx brothers. Milton/Gummo was an original member of the act but felt more comfortable in management. Herbert/Zeppo accompanied his three famous brothers through their glory days without ever really finding a role for himself. Equally as talented as his brothers, and able to double any of them (the brothers looked remarkably alike with their make-up off – it is perfectly possible to argue that sibling differentiation and rivalry was the driving force in the act’s group dynamic), the problem seems to have been that there was no age left for Zeppo to be, and so by default he was stuck with being the adult straight-man. In Horsefeathers, uncomfortably, he plays Groucho’s son. In 1933 he was shed, left to become a successful theatrical agent, when the remaining three brothers, after the relative failure of their masterpiece Duck Soup, left Paramount to go the MGM. Duck Soup is one of the most complex comedy films ever made. It rests on the same postulate as their earlier films, that inexplicably Groucho is invited to take up a position of authority and prestige. As ruler of Freedonia, he acts as a Trojan horse for his cronies; once inside the castle Groucho and his brothers can run riot. I would argue that the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression made that perverse postulate acceptable

Anarchtopia

77

to a mass audience. Duck Soup is, amongst other things, a three-pronged parody – of the war film (following the recent film success of Alls Quiet on the Western Front and its imitators), of the Ruritanian adventure film (of The Prisoner of Zenda type) and of the Light Operetta (newly brought to film because of sound technology). The brothers´ musical abilities put them in a privileged position to pastiche opera, their street-wiseness contrasted amusingly with the pomposity of phony mittel Europeans and their sauve-qui-peut selfishness and cowardice mocked the fake heroics of the war film. The plot of conflict between the countries of Freedonia and Sylvania does not impede the insertion of recognizably vaudevillian routines like ludicrous trials, the harassment of a street vendor and a mirror gag that is the film’s finest set-piece. For our purposes, the fact that the brothers take over a state and then take it to war and then wreck that state is perhaps film comedy’s most apocalyptic vision before Dr Strangelove (1963). The comedian as agent of generalized destruction is beautifully caught in this studio still from Duck Soup:

78

Chapter Seven

En passant, it is worth observing the similarity between Zeppo’s pose above and the characteristic manner of Monty Python’s “Gumbies”. All great comedians, like Groucho, cultivate funny postures as well as developing signature funny walks. They do this because their bodies are primary instruments of comic expression. The Brothers were invited to MGM by Irving Thalberg Jr. himself. Thalberg was a fan but felt he could improve them. This is what he said about their five Paramount pictures when he lunched with them: They were very funny pictures. The trouble was they had no stories. It’s better to be not so funny and have a story that the audience is interested in. I don’t agree with the principle: anything for a laugh. For my money, comedy scenes have to further the plot. They have to be helping someone who’s a sympathetic character. With a sound story, your pictures would be twice as good and you’d gross three times as much.7

Compare this with what uncredited producer Herman Mankiewicz said about the scenarios for their earlier films: “If Groucho and Chico stand against a wall for an hour and crack funny jokes, that´s enough of a plot for me.”8 Fortified with a proper Thalbergian storyline, the brothers went on to make A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) for MGM. This involved incorporating male and female juvenile leads, an attractive couple audiences could root for, and whom the Marx Brothers could rescue. Their normally 80-minute films immediately ballooned to over two hours each and in them one can detect the returning optimism of the New Deal period, in the deployment of comic agents as supportive/ameliorative rather than egoistical/destructive. Thalberg, although he did not live to see it, was proved partly right however – they did make three times as much money. Where he was wrong is neatly caught by writer Graham Greene. Reviewing A Day at the Races, he noticed that “the capitalists have [finally] recognised the Marx Brothers”. Realising that “real people do more than retard, they smash the Marx fantasy”, he was particularly aghast at a scene where Maureen O’Sullivan reacts to a piece of the brothers’ comic business with the word “Silly!” He was right to confess a fondness for the “cheap rickety sets, those titles as meaningless and undifferentiated as Kipling’s: Horsefeathers and Duck Soup”9; even though there are many good comic scenes in these two MGM films, in each case the whole is a lesser thing, and the rest of 7

Bergan, Marx Brothers, p. 79. Kanfer, Groucho, p. 148. 9 Kanfer, Groucho, pp. 223-4. 8

Anarchtopia

79

their film output went on to describe an unmistakably declining arc. Although the screwball comedies characteristic of the second half of the thirties are not devoid of a certain wildness, it is in the cause of defending the family and the heterosexual couple. The Marx Brothers’ films made no effort to make the union of Groucho and the matronly Margaret Dumont or gold-digger Thelma Todd seem anything other than opportunistic. There was one final throw of the vaudevillian anarchic comic spirit in feature-film making. The New York stage revue Hellzapoppin (1939-41) was brought to the screen by Universal Studios in 1942. Like the brothers´ shows, this had been a long running success – at 1,404 performances, it had been the third most successful theatre production of the 1930s. Starring comedians Ole Olson and Chic Johnson, it brought together a miscellany of comedy acts, impersonators, acrobats, musicians, dancers, magic and animal acts. After a fantasy sequence in Hell, whence its comic energies are presumed to derive, the stage and therefore the screen are invaded by zanies all clamouring for attention, calling out their catch-phrases and interrupting the comic byplay between the principals. It settles down eventually into a putting on a show in a rich person’s home drama, complete with young romantic leads, but the incidental zanies continue to steal the show. The film is notable for its trick effects and its direct address to camera. Indeed it offers much more obvious violations of the realist conventions of movie-making (rewinding and speeding up projection, including the theatrical audience in the film, etc) than the brothers set out to achieve but, although written by one of their regular writers Nat Perrin (in collaboration with Warren Wilson), it is done in a spirit of self-satisfied fun. Olson and Johnson depend heavily on one-liners, puns and visual gags and themselves lack charisma as comedians (the film’s sequel sank without a trace). In that respect, they very much resemble Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, the duo who fronted the TV’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s – two relatively stable paterfamiliases orchestrating a sketch-based party-happening. Hellzapoppin´s most subversive turn is the scene where the black servants come out of their normal social recessiveness and take over the musical instruments and the dance-floor. They proceed to perform the Lindy-hop, possibly the most anarchic and riotous form of popular dance. The Marx brothers´ MGM films are sometimes criticised for their patronising use of coloured folk as appreciative entourage. Hellzapoppin redeems itself with this amazing tribute to black American vitalism. Many vaudevillian theatres were converted into cinemas from the late 1920s onward and vaudeville’s days were accordingly numbered. Stage

80

Chapter Seven

entertainers like Al Jolson and W.C. Fields began to give way to a newer generation of entertainers, and these entertainers began to colonise film comedy. Although performers like Bob Hope and Red Skelton continued to ply their trade, it was comic actors who became more influential in stories that were written to amuse rather than as vehicles for the preestablished comic persona. Anarchic comedy was not to be found in these quarters. Instead it is found in abundance in American animated filmmaking. The surreal conventions by which US cartoons function were all invented in the 1930s and 40s by teams of animators, gag men and story editors, mostly working in the shack on the Warner Brothers lot, known as Termite Terrace. Warner Brothers’ animation was conceived in opposition to that of the graphically superior Disney Studios. There Walt would invest 30 to 40,000 dollars and unlimited time in making a comedy short. Warners produced 13 seven-minute animations a year from each of its units for 3,000 dollars each. Naturally, under such constraints, comic inventiveness was highly prized. Fred “Tex” Avery was the leader of the group and the man accredited with producing the Warner house style of animation. He worked with men like Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Fritz Freleng, Robert McKimson and Frank Tashlin, many of whom were better graphic artists than Avery. But they all paid tribute to Avery’s surreal sense of humour and his commitment to what Thalberg repudiated, “anything for a laugh”. Avery’s pursuit of the comic sublime meant the reorganising of the laws of physics. Disney had already asserted the plasticity and durability of figures in this medium. What Avery brought to the party was speed and outrageousness.10 His and his colleagues output is considerable, and familiar from the Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny cartoons of our childhood (Bugs’s insouciance owes more than a little to Groucho Marx – and the charmed world of cartoons resembles the Marx Brothers in its licensing of consequence-less violence). Perhaps less well-known are his seven reworked fairy stories made for Warners and MGM before, during and after the war. These seven shorts Little Red Walking Hood (1937), Cinderella Meets Fella (1938), The Bear's Tale (1940), A Gander at Mother Goose (1940), Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), Swing Shift Cinderella (1945) and Little Rural Riding Hood (1949) take the stories not only far away from Disney sentimentalism but also from the Bruno Bettelheim school of folk tale moralising. These are cartoons for adults, in some instances, for servicemen abroad. The wolf is sexual appetite incarnate (his response of going rigid when glimpsing Red Riding 10 See Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 158-9

Anarchtopia

81

Hood received the attention of the censor, as did his salivating, howling, Red Hot is a babe and war-years pin-up - but the predictable logic of the story is hijacked by Grandma as even more rampantly libidinal and with designs upon the hapless wolf. Each one of these films is a masterpiece of repression cast aside – sedate action and dialogue from the story is replaced by inflamed desire and anarchic violent pursuit. Avery’s legacy has been, perhaps unfortunately, more of the latter than the former. We can see this in the 1950s pyrotechnics of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Mainstream cinema did not take these accomplishments very seriously. Cartoons like these were fillers, mainly for kids and to pad out a programme along with a B feature. The only occupant of Termite Terrace to make the transition to A-feature film-making was Frank Tashlin. Tashlin was by nature a restless individual, walking out on jobs regularly. As well as an animator and strip cartoon writer, he worked as a gag man, provided (fittingly) gags for both Harpo Marx and Jerry Lewis in their solo careers. He eventually gravitated to directing Jerry Lewis’s solo films in the late 1950s, but not before he had produced his two most famous film comedies in 1956, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, both starring Jayne Mansfield. Tashlin’s achievement was to bring some of the cartoonist’s iconoclasm to the feature comedy. The sort of flouting of formal conventions one finds for example in Chuck Jones’s seminal Daffy Duck comedy, Duck Amuck (1953), is transposed to live action. Actors complain on camera about the confines of the cinematographic frame, they grumble that the studio is saving on Technicolor and so on. And in Jane Mansfield, they have Red Hot Riding Hood made flesh. Literally, ice melts, milk bottles burst and men’s tongues loll out when she walks by. Tashlin’s comedies however cannot sustain this level of invention over 90 minutes and lapse back into more conventional narrative fare, but they managed a parodic/facetious tone as well as any comedy could in the ultra-conservative 1950s. Just like Hellzapoppin before it, The Girl Can’t Help It buttresses its claim to anarchic artistry by innovative use of popular musical forms, in this case subversive new rock n roll, performed by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. One can measure the 1960s notion of the comic bizarre from the genre which briefly grew up then, the “wacky race” sub-genre. Originating with Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and going on with Blake Edwards’s The Great Race (1965) and Ken Annakin’s Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) and Monte Carlo or Bust (1969). The humour was really broad, as these films are packed with

82

Chapter Seven

comedy actors doing turns as national stereotypes. Terry-Thomas appeared in many of them as the comic British “bounder” – Gert Frobe is his analogue as a comedy “junker”. All of these films were well over two hours and the first of them was over three hours long. Much of 1960s film comedy was timid because the industry was desperately clinging to the myth of a unitary family audience in the face of competition from television. Films embraced the logic of bigger and brighter to beat off their smaller, black-and-white cousin. The fact that they were held together by the narrative of racing or pursuit meant that there was little time for the comic byplay and invention that might have justified their length and big budgets. By the late 1960s the family audience had been exposed as a myth, mostly by the massive losses sustained by the above films and other moribund forms such as the historical epic and the film musical. The collapse of a long-maintained conservative consensus at the end of the 1960s is behind the emergence of comedy innovators Monty Python. We can see this, for example, in Python’s sabotage of Julian Slade’s jejune 50s stage musical Salad Days by the excesses of New American cinema iconoclast Sam Peckinpah.11 All the cosy targets of the post-war consensus were lined up to be knocked over, as well as some smug new arrivals, amongst whom the most prominent was television itself. What had been kept in place by a censorship climate of polite repression gave way completely in the period 1966-9, as a succession of repeals and legalisations under Harold Wilson’s government transformed the social scene in Britain. Stage licensing disappeared, homosexuality was decriminalised, film censorship was liberalised - indeed legislation was enacted to try to close the gap between rich and poor. In America, Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” reforms were coming into force. Monty Python rode this wave or zeitgeist more effectively than any other humorists. The first challenge to the status quo had come from comedy satirists like the Beyond the Fringe team, Tom Lehrer, and That Was the Week That Was12, who cheekily rang the doorbell of authority and ran away. Soon after, Python later marched in to desecrate the furniture. Just as the 60s had given rise to the figure of the singer/songwriter, so we see the appearance in numbers of writer/comedy performers. The old separation of functions (upon which the prosperity of stars such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Hope and their backroom staff rested) broke down in the cult of authenticity, which saw Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson, 11

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Series 3, Episode 7 (7th January, 1972). Humphrey Carpenter, That Was Satire, That Was (London: Victor Gollancz, 2000) is a history of British satire in the 1960s. 12

Anarchtopia

83

Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks writing and delivering their own material. One of the ironies of the emergence of Python is that they probably would not have come into being without the patronage of the hand they most frequently bit, that of state broadcaster, the BBC. Most commentators agree that no private broadcaster, with their dependence on advertising revenues, would have taken a chance on them. Indeed the fact that they were Oxbridge graduates and could rely upon personal university networks to obtain some measure of protection from the confusion and wrath they provoked probably sustained them through their difficult first television series. In any event, between 1969 and 1974 45 half-hour television shows were conceived, written and performed by 6 men in their late twenties, who had access to limited technical assistance and a paltry budget. Adopting a surreal sketch format, these men played virtually every role and no part twice. Thus no form of stable characterisation, one of the cornerstones of conventional sitcom, was allowed to develop. This entailed no use of comic catch phrases, and even more radically no punchlines. The sketches drifted in and out of one another, or were rudely broken off or abandoned as unsuccessful, the show building self-criticism into itself rather more aggressively than Groucho had, when he denounced to camera the material he was obliged to deliver. On the surface, this functioned as a parody of television with its bogus pretence of continuity (while offering jarring leaps from violent news to melodrama to light entertainment). Perhaps the only phrase13 to gain any traction from the show was the opening credit announcement (that became the title of their 1971 movie compilation And Now for Something Completely Different), but which was designed to formalise and accentuate the ludicrousness of its transitions. The high standard of the comedy was the consequence of competition between the members of the group to get their material into the show. Each writer individual or team had to run the gauntlet of the others. The big Cambridge Pythons (Cleese and Chapman) were the more established figures, having written before for some of the biggest names in British comedy. The little Oxford Pythons (Palin and Jones) were the more productive team, but had to suffer the ignominy of having more material binned. Even more put upon was Eric Idle who wrote alone and therefore had no ally to defend his compositions. Finally, there was the American cartoonist Terry Gilliam, who, working in a graphic medium, was largely left alone although he was also able to protect his independence by being 13

It’s a feature of Python that what they don’t usually do can become something they do to excess. Thus the wholly inept and unfunny “Lemon Curry” becomes a free-floating signifier/catch-phrase across episodes.

84

Chapter Seven

only just able to meet his deadlines and therefore live beyond the critique of his peers. He was however marginalised by the others as a performer until the later series (he became a much more familiar face as Cleese began to absent himself from the show). It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Gilliam’s contribution. At first seen as a bizarre linking device between disparate sketches, his cut-and-paste artwork came to represent Pythonic iconoclasm in a very pure form. This is how he describes it: My animation style came out of necessity, nothing more. I had to do something quick and fast and all I could do was cut out things. I think it was the crudeness and the outrageousness of it that worked... I was always looking for free things, so I’d go to the library. There are a lot of dead painters, a lot of dead engravers, so we could use that stuff. Then you start playing with it... I went down to the Tate and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards...14

From the start Python had both a radical tone and a radical aesthetic. Whether it was Cleese lying seductively on his newsreaders table in a bra and panties or Eric Idle’s man who couldn’t pronounce the letter “C” calling someone a “silly bunt”, the Pythons, like the Marxes before them, seemed to enjoy a charmed life at the BBC. Interference was often minimal because the humorists were several intellectual steps ahead of their minders. For the mockery did not stop at television, it was directed at comedy itself. Just as there had been a thing called “the well-made play” as written by Noel Coward and Terrence Rattigan, so there was such a thing as the “well-made sketch”. The Pythons knew because they wrote them for comedians like Dick Emery and the Two Ronnies (Barker and Corbett). In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they attempted to deconstruct the sketch form itself. Five Pythons dressed in shorts, tight tank tops, Wellington boots and with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, stand under a high-rise building intoning “Architect Sketch”15 idiotically. The camera holds on them unable to understand what they are saying. After repeating it several times they begin to gesture upwards. Finally the camera gets the message and we cut to the interior of the building where an Architect sketch is about to begin. It cannot begin however because we are distracted by the same intoning coming from below. The Architect breaks off from his presentation to throw a bucket of water over the 14

Bob McCabe, The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons (London: Orion, 2004) p. 180-1. 15 Series 2, episode 4, 18th September 1970.

Anarchtopia

85

Gumbys standing below the building. Sounds of idiotic surprise and grumbling rise up, then silence falls. The window is shut and the sketch resumes. Neither the status of the Gumbys as introducers nor the architect who acknowledges their presence is ever made clear. Instead, the show simply rolls on assimilating without demur all incongruities. The architecture presentation is of an abattoir masquerading as a block of flats. It is rejected not because all the occupants would be slaughtered but because the architect is not a mason and does not know the hand-shakes or have an apron. A powerful and secretive organisation is made simultaneously to seem subversive and infantile at the same time. Another instance might be parodying the voice-over nature documentary by showing two TV naturalists locked in a life-or-death struggle over repeat fees. The sketch then veers off into the combat of pantomime animals followed by a surreal struggle between a pantomime Princess Margaret and her breakfast tray.16 The very precise cultural reference of their subject matter, together with the extreme silliness and crudity of its visual realization (cf. the Batley Townswomen’s Guild’s reconstruction of the Battle of Pearl Harbour17 is a case in point) was something new and wholly absurd. Neither had audiences encountered anything like the show’s density of construction. The camera wanders past Michael Palin dressed as a bishop rehearsing lines.18 He informs a passing character that he’s not in this show (he plainly is!) but will be in some future episode. Many episodes later he does appear. A playful intellectuality informs many of the sketches, most famously their Proust Summarising Competition.19 With none of the contestants getting beyond the opening pages of A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, the compère decides to award the prize to the girl with the biggest tits. A number of American comedians recall hearing this line with wonder, both that it could be said on television in 1972 and that it should fall so unexpectedly, like a thunder clap, in such a context. The making of the TV series eventually became quite attritional for the group, tensions flared up and Cleese decided not to appear in the fourth series, although he continued to provide it with written material. Part of the problem was that the Pythons were quite poorly paid for the level of work they were putting in and so were obliged to seek other comedywriting assignments. Shooting on location was also very time-consuming. It was in this context that the group decided to adapt its comedy style to 16

Series 3, episode 4, 11th December 1971. Series 1, episode 11, 28th December 1969. 18 Series 2, episode 1, 16th July 1970. 19 Series 3, episode 5, 16th November 1972. 17

86

Chapter Seven

feature films. Now for Something Completely Different had not been either original or a great commercial success (it was designed to break them on US campuses and in US film clubs but it was largely seen and appreciated by their fan base in the UK). The one thing they had enjoyed however was working with a budget of 90,000 pounds.20 Alas, obtaining financial backing was a fraught issue in making both Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Once again, the problem of film narrative was to prove critical in conceiving and producing these films. The films either lacked a story line or had one to antagonise the wary investor. Holy Grail was made around the time Python first broke in America on public service television. The US networks at first wouldn’t touch the television shows and when they finally did, it was to re-edit and bowdlerise them. This was the cause of much self-protective litigation in America and some falling-out with the BBC, who did little to defend the integrity of the programmes they sold on. Python however made their peace with the BBC when, perhaps out of guilt but certainly in a moment of commercial lunacy, the corporation ceded Python the rights to all their television series. Holy Grail was planned and executed on an astonishingly small and insecure budget, under trying circumstances.21 Held together by the quest motif, it betrays its origins in sketch-writing, with individual writers producing sketches for themselves as characters. It nevertheless contains some of the team’s finest writing and performing, and stands with Duck Soup as perhaps the greatest surreal comedy feature. Indeed its mud-and-grunge aesthetic seems to have been a major influence on the best straight Arthurian feature, John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981). In any event, the hard-won success of Holy Grail emboldened the team to attempt another feature in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Here the situation was reversed. A film that had been a delight to write in Barbados and make in Tunisia proved to be a nightmare at the releasing stage. EMI had dropped the project at the last moment, fearing a charge of blasphemy, and it was only rescued by George Harrison’s Handmade Films in 20

The film was bankrolled by Victor Lowndes, Head of the Playboy Organisation in London. Libertarians and libertines made common cause at this time, as the O! Calcutta! (1969) stage show attests. Journalist Charlotte Chandler’s biography of Groucho, Hello, I Must Be Going (London: Doubleday, 1979) began as an interview for Playboy magazine (March, 1974). 21 Graham Chapman was battling his alcoholism throughout the shooting, the team lost most of their carefully-scouted locations at the last minute, first time jointdirectors Gilliam and Jones had uneasy demarcation issues and the weather was (to say the least) uncooperative.

Anarchtopia

87

extremis. However, liberated from television commitments and having had the benefit of long periods apart, the Pythons had written and prepared the film at leisure and enjoyed their happiest shoot. But anxieties about the film’s breezy attitude to New Testament pieties led to distribution problems, bans and boycotts. Unprotected by studios, the Pythons had to go to the media to defend their work. Cleese and Palin’s television debate22 against Christian pundit Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark was as surreal as any of their sketches, rational argument quickly giving way to ranting and abuse. Brian is the only Python film to preserve a balance between sustained narrative and short sketch. The cultural charge and familiarity of Christ’s life allow the Pythons to just pick off the episodes which seem most whimsical to them: virgin birth, miracle cures, the mechanics of addressing large crowds, the casual cruelty, group hysteria and gullibility of mobs. In particular, they build up the roman presence in the story, satirising the schismatic leftist politics of the 1970s and the toadying and deference which accompanies great asymmetries of power. Gilliam’s cartoons play a central role in representing (and comically deflecting) divine elements of the story. And music, in the form of the final crucifixion number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, transform pain and suffering. The film may not be anti-Christian but no work of art has ever so firmly established the dominant secularism23 of its country of origin (and its intelligentsia). No wonder it met with great opposition in America. When the group came together for their last feature, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983), they had already begun successful individual careers and Python was in an advanced state of disintegration. Ironically, the project was made easy by the backing of Universal Studios, who agreed to finance the film for 10 million dollars in return for the kudos and good will that it would bring them from more bankable US comedy stars like Steve Martin, Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy, who were avowed Python fans. But no longer enjoying the daily intimacy they had had during the 1970s, the Pythons worked in separate and distant units and could not agree on an overall structure for the film. In truth, they could not find a story at all. “The Meaning of Life” was an exasperated default suggestion in lieu of a title, and so its chapter structure (emulating Shakespeare’s seven ages of man) is a transparent cover for what is in 22 Broadcast on chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning, 9th September 1979, hosted by Tim Rice (lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar). 23 So much so that the comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News, in a parody of the television debate, could accuse the Bible of plagiarising the Life of Python (J)esus (C)hrist being a transparent fictionalisation of the sainted (J)ohn (C)leese.

88

Chapter Seven

effect an assembly of disparate sketches. Its greatest joke, the main feature being attacked by the B picture, Terry Gilliam’s Crimson Permanent Assurance pirate short film, was the serendipitous product of the project’s essential disorganisation. Designed to be a cartoon segment of the film, Gilliam spent the lion’s share of the budget on a live-action film that ran too long at 16 minutes (edited down from 30 minutes). It therefore had to be taken out and run as a separate B picture. With Python, these decisions were often felicitous. Given over frankly to sketches, The Meaning of Life has great songs and sequences which are gross or bizarre just for their own sake. The bigger budget also allowed them to indulge a taste for Grand Guignol in the Live Organ Donor and Mr Creosote sketches. The fall-out from Life of Brian meant that there are some antiChristian swipes in the movie, notably its oblique defence of contraception and its depiction of Heaven as designed for the American Bible belt. What emerges is the formidable comic intelligence24 of the group. All the big questions of birth, growth, life and death are addressed. Having explored every chimerical clue based on traditional explanations for the meaning of life, the film finishes with Michael Palin, dressed as a 1950s female television announcer, confessing the failure of the film to deliver: Well, that’s the end of the film; now here’s the meaning of life... (woman enters with card) Thank you, Bridget. (reading) Well, it’s nothing special... “Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and again, get some walking in, oh, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” (throws card away) And finally here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy which, it seems, is the only way these days to get the jaded video-sated public off their fucking arses and back into the sodding cinema. Family entertainment? Bollocks!25

The pure core of Python’s secular liberal humanism is found here, dressed in drag, trapped in a period television limbo and spiced with casual and gratuitous profanity. Entropy won in the end. The sheer amount of time needed together to write, rehearse, shoot, edit and promote a film took a toll on their friendships. They were not after all brothers. Python broke up as a complete performing unit. The premature death of Graham Chapman from cancer in 24

Python are taken seriously by professional philosophers. See Gary L. Hardcaste & George A. Reisch, eds., Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think (Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 2006). 25 Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, “The End of the Film.”

Anarchtopia

89

1989 finished off any hope of a future reunion, although the surviving members remain close in their smaller sub-units and frequently appear in and support one another’s individual projects. It says something about the exuberance of the team as performers that they have been closer to reforming in live concert or stage touring projects. But age and family and personal success have taken away the collective desire to go on the road as they had done during the 1970s. Between Brian and Meaning, they recorded a Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl concert movie, based on four performances they did at that venue between the 26th and 29th of September 1980. This film gives some idea of their gifts as stage performers, but perhaps it reflects better their and their audience’s love for the television material they had written. Had the BBC not taken the risk on Flying Circus, it is not impossible that they would have mostly spent their careers as comedy writers, with few or undistinguished performing credits. Nearly 30 years on from the break-up, they remain Britain’s most revered and inventive comedy troupe. Although zany comedy abounds in British television, no one has matched their brio or unpredictability. This is in part because you cannot push at a door that some one else has already kicked in. There is no son of Python, as there was no school of Marx. As John Cleese has said, “Python certainly changed comedy but it a rather negative way. Because instead of people taking our stuff to the next stage, they avoided it. So it had a rather disappointing effect which was to close off an avenue for a particular type of humour and I’m surprised that that’s the way it happened.”26 This observation fails to take account of the fact that the Marx’s and the Python’s comedy was constitutive of particular (and unrepeatable) social revolutions, of the 1920/30s and the 1960/70s respectively. Shortly after Python’s break-up, the group Talking Heads released a concert movie called Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984), which takes its title from the lyric "As we get older and stop making sense..." In comedy terms, this could not be more wrong. Radical comedy is certainly a young person’s game, but eventually with the depletion of their collective energies even the most iconoclastic comedians must start making sense and then they fall back, as the Pythons have individually done (and as the Marxes were prevailed upon to do), into the arms of narrative.

26

McCabe, The Pythons, p. 432.

PART II: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

CHAPTER EIGHT A POLITICAL NON-SENSE: GILLES DELEUZE ON COMMON-SENSE, NON-SENSE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE POLITICAL ITAY SNIR

This article discusses the concepts of common-sense and non-sense in the thought of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and examines their relationship to politics and to the political. As will be demonstrated, the meaning of common-sense is not obvious, and it is not senseless to make sense of non-sense. I will start, however, by clarifying the other conceptual pair – "politics" and "the political." In line with an important differentiation in contemporary political thought,1 I define politics (la politique) as the order of the polis – the structures of power, government and domination (not necessarily those of the state) – as well as the discourses that explain, justify and make these structures possible. The political (le politique), on the other hand, is the problematization of politics – actions or events that question the established order and the relations of domination within it. This distinction implies that although every thing, concept or phenomenon is embedded within a system of power relations, it does not follow that everything is political, only that everything can be political once it becomes a locus for challenging the order of politics. An important precondition for an event to be political, however, is that the challenge it poses to politics must be public; it must be apparent to many and have meaningful effect in the public sphere. Does this mean that a political 1 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 1-60. Rancière's version of the distinction is particularly relevant here. See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 28-29.

94

Chapter Eight

event must make sense to everyone? Is common-sense a precondition for the political, or is it something belonging to the order of politics? Can nonsense be political? Interesting, even surprising answers to these questions can be drawn from Deleuze's concepts of common-sense and non-sense. I begin by reconstructing the concept of common-sense presented by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. After examining and expanding on Deleuze's readings of the history of the concept, I offer a comprehensive picture of its function. Deleuze, I suggest, understands common-sense as a philosophical reaction to the fact of multiplicity, which he sees as a basic feature of reality: common-sense conceals multiplicities behind images of unity, images it creates in three different spheres – the subject, the object and the community. I continue by analysing the political implications of Deleuze's concept of common-sense, namely that common-sensical action is bound to remain within the order of politics and can never become political. Finally, I discuss the collapse of the distinction between common-sense and non-sense, arguing that it re-opens the possibility of political action. *** Deleuze cites common-sense as one of the guiding postulates of "the dogmatic image of thought" that has characterized the main stream of Western philosophy at least since Plato. Thought appears in this dogmatic image as a natural faculty that facilitates recognition of the truth by adequately representing objects in the subjective consciousness. As such, the image presupposes the existence of subjects and objects that have fixed, determined identities. But subjects and objects are not original beings, according to Deleuze. In his reading of the history of philosophy, common-sense is the organ that generates the unity of the object out of the multiplicity of differences and singular points in the world. Simultaneously, it constitutes the subject as a unity of senses or faculties belonging to one person. This model, writes Deleuze, originates with Plato. In a passage in Theaetetus, a dialogue on the nature of knowledge and its connection to sensual perception, Socrates explores the relationship between the five senses and the mind's perception of a unified object in the mind: Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses, which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive objects of sense. […] The reason why I am thus precise is,

A Political Non-sense

95

because I want to know whether, when we perceive black and white through the eyes, and again, other qualities through other organs, we do not perceive them with one and the same part of ourselves […].2

Plato did not elaborate further on the need for a unifying element for the various sensations. He bestowed the ability to unify on the mind in general rather than on a specific organ or faculty within it. It was Plato's student and rival, Aristotle, who addressed the demand for a unifying principle and made it part of a comprehensive epistemological theory. Aristotle's interest, unlike Plato's, lies not in the Forms but in the rich variety of phenomena that he studies in great detail. Yet variety in the Aristotelian world view is never chaotic; it remains organized and classified into unities endowed with order and hierarchy. In his de Anima and Parva Naturalia, Aristotle employs the term "common-sense" (koine aisthƝsis) to designate the shared origin of the five senses, "a common faculty associated with them all,"3 which is "one part of the soul with which it perceives everything, although it perceives different objects with different parts."4 This organ enables the perception of the "common sensibles"5 by synthesizing sense data into unified objects of perception and, at the same time, constituting the unity of the self to which the various sensations (or faculties, in medieval Aristotelian scholasticism) belong.6 This Platonist-Aristotelian model sets the initial conditions for the entire philosophical tradition in which "truth" is the correct recognition of objects. Stable and durable identities – made possible by the faculty of common-sense – are the precondition for every act of recognition in which the object is properly represented in thought, as well as for re-cognition, that is, the ability to remember or to imagine the same object in the same mind. Deleuze asserts that "recognition may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined, or conceived […]. Recognition thus relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for 'everybody' – in other words, a common-sense as a concordia 2 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Cirencester: The Echo Library, 2006), p. 98 [184-5]. 3 Aristotle, "On Sleep and Waking," in Parva Naturalia, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 327 [455a17]. 4 Aristotle, "On Sense and Sensible Objects," in Parva Naturalia, p. 281 [449a10]. 5 Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 143 [425a15]. 6 On Aristotle's concept of common-sense, see Deborah Modrak, Aristotle: The Power of Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1987); Daniel HellerRoazen, The Inner Touch (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 21-71.

96

Chapter Eight

facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philosopher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of the thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities."7 Put differently, common-sense takes multiplicity (the assemblage of pure differences that is a basic feature of reality) and turns it into organic collectives endowed with order and hierarchy, that is, into identifiable objects and thinking subjects. Common-sense, which lends merely the principle of identity, determination and unity to dogmatic thought, has a necessary complementary that Deleuze terms "good-sense" (bon sens). Good-sense is not synonymous with common-sense. It is used by Descartes, along with the concept of "natural light," to designate the source of self-evident truths, namely first principles or ideas whose validity is beyond any reasonable doubt. Goodsense, therefore, is basic knowledge accessible to man, layman and philosopher alike, as Descartes famously puts it in the opening sentence of his Discourse on Method: "Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess."8 In Deleuze's terms, while common-sense provides the "norm of identity," namely the form of cooperation among the faculties, good-sense is the "norm of distribution," which "determines the contribution of the faculties in any given instance."9 It establishes how identities are qualified, which identities are assigned to each subject and object, and what values are attached to those identities. That is to say, good-sense provides concrete content to the form of common-sense. Furthermore, in accordance with the range of meanings of the French word sens, good-sense generates a demand to choose a direction, to organize things into a determinable spatio-temporal order (i.e., to direct their orientation in space and forecast their occurrence in time).10 Therefore, for every concrete historical reality, good-sense determines the shared modes of thought and representation, of sensation and orientation.

7 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 133. 8 René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Weitch (London: J. M Dent & Sons, 1962), p. 3. 9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 134. 10 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 1, 75-6.

A Political Non-sense

97

Taken together, then, common-sense and good-sense create a doxa, an accepted opinion.11 This is where the Deleuzian understanding of commonsense meets the ordinary, "common-sensical" use of the word: it designates simple common knowledge, which is seldom articulated and discussed explicitly. Common-sense draws its strength from being an implicit presupposition ("subjective" in Deleuze's terms), one that everybody is supposed to acknowledge: "[this supposition] has the form of 'everybody knows…'. Everybody knows, in a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual manner […]. Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative."12 A third unity, then, corresponds to the unities of subject and object that are explicit in Deleuze's discussion of common-sense and good-sense – that of the community: common-sense and good-sense determine the common ways people think, sense and orient themselves. The community is constituted as a unified collective that has an "everybody," and "everybody" is the representative of the community and its ways of thought. Hence, a philosophy that wishes to rely on common-sense and good-sense alone, to do without arbitrary presuppositions and thus be acceptable by every layman, in fact presupposes the very form of common-sense rather than conducting a "rigorous struggle" against it.13 The connection between the model of common-sense and the social community is more clearly apparent in its most developed articulation – the thought of the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, which Deleuze completely neglects. Reid defines common-sense as "certain principles […] which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life […]"14 and seeks to defend it against attacks by philosophers, primarily George Berkeley and David Hume, who seemed to him to doubt common-sense rather than embrace it as a starting point for philosophy.15 Although Reid insists that the principles of common-sense 11

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 134. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 129-30. 13 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 132. 14 Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense," in The Works of Thomas Reid, Vol. I (New York: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), p. 108. 15 It is worth mentioning that Reid blames what he understands as modern skepticism on Descartes' "theory of ideas", according to which our perception of objects is mediated by ideas that are representations in the mind. Reid rejects, therefore, the theory of representation that Deleuze associates with the model of common-sense. Nevertheless, Reis is undoubtedly a representative of this model, 12

98

Chapter Eight

are self-evident and therefore cannot and need not be proven, he nevertheless presents arguments in support of their validity, thereby granting the concept important depth and anchorage that are merely implied by other philosophers.16 Reid's main argumentative strategy is a kind of reality check that demonstrates the absurdity of sceptical philosophies by confronting them with different aspects of what he takes to be real, practical daily life. According to Reid, a position rejecting common-sense might, perhaps, be held in theory but not in practice. When philosophizing on one's own, in solitude, one may doubt any principle of common-sense, even the existence of the material world or of other people. In real life, however, people have no choice but to conform to common-sense; not doing so could endanger them physically or justify committing them to a mental institution.17 A similar argument is applied to linguistic communication. The fact that linguistic communication that employs ordinary language does normally work, while any significant deviation from the norm is regarded as non-sense, testifies that ordinary linguistic usages (giving meaning to words such as "sensation" or "judgement")18 and syntactic structures (such as the relationship between an active subject and a passive object)19 do indeed reflect reality. In other words, without common-sense, people would not be able to act together and communicate with each other, and the fact that they succeed in doing so demonstrates that the common-sense that makes their communal life possible is reliable. This view notwithstanding, Reid's "common-sense" is no mere social convention. It is natural and of divine origin, and hence perfectly universal and objective. But this collection of first principles, the bedrock of reasonable thinking, is tightly connected with the social world. What works in theory must necessarily work in practice, and vice versa. This is why common-sense is far from being an abstract philosophical concept. It sets the boundaries not only between reasonable and absurd thinking, but also between normal and mad behavior and meaningful and nonsensical speech – thereby binding together thought, practice and language. Accordingly, the very model of common-sense that Deleuze specified as whose essence is the relationship between unified, identifiable subjects and objects. 16 P.D. Magnus, "Reid's Defense of Common Sense," Philosopher's Imprint, vol. 8, no. 3 (May 2008), pp. 1-14. 17 Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind," p. 184. 18 Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind," p. 115. 19 Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man," in The Works of Thomas Reid, Vol. I (New York: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), p. 224.

A Political Non-sense

99

the presupposition of dogmatic thought rests on yet another presupposition – the existence of a unified field of shared meanings, perceptions and practices. Under this presupposition, common-sense can function as a normalizing mechanism, conditioning all that appears to be meaningful, conceivable and perceptible. *** The preceding elaboration of the common-sense model reveals a strong link between presuppositions embedded in ordinary action, speech and thought and those embedded in the order of politics. The connection is not simply one of reflection: the common-sensical image of a unified community composed of subjects who act and communicate within a stable, common sphere of objects and meanings gives birth to an assumption that the body politic remains unified despite clear hierarchical differentiation among its organs. This image, therefore, plays an essential role in the legitimization of every order of politics: it naturalizes the relations of domination and enables the agreement necessary for the continuous existence of government. Moreover, this image becomes the cornerstone of bourgeois ideology, for it entails a promise of equality: "Good sense is the ideology of the middle classes who recognize themselves in equality as an abstract product."20 In this sense, the concepts of common-sense and good-sense form together a hidden point at which metaphysics and politics meet. On this basis, Deleuze believes that no claim or action deriving its meaning from the order of common-sense and good-sense can undermine the existing relations of domination: "[H]ow derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a commonsense and established values, for the attainment of current values."21 That is to say, every struggle that fully adheres to common-sensical presuppositions, regardless of the demands they seem to raise, at the same time confirms and enables the basic power structure in which government is anchored. Agents of these struggles may change their location within the power structure but cannot alter the structure itself. In terms of the distinction between politics and the political, we can say that no proposition or action that remains within the boundaries of common-sense

20

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 225. See also: Claire Colebrook, "Bourgeois Thermodynamics," in Deleuze and Politics, eds. Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 128-9. 21 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136.

100

Chapter Eight

and good-sense will be able to escape the discourse of politics and become genuinely political. We must conclude that a political event, as Deleuze views it, cannot fully abide by the rules of common-sense; it must have non-sensical characteristics. But how can it? Deleuze himself speaks of a deviation from common-sense as an "isolated cry"22 while a political event, as defined earlier, must appear and have meaning in public. Does this mean that common-sense, as a shared space of meanings and perceptions, is a precondition for the political as much as for politics? How can a nonsensical occurrence that no one fully understands, not even its agent, be political? In short, how can we reconcile the political demand for publicity with the monopoly politics demands over communication? I suggest that the key to understanding Deleuze's answer lies in the relationship between the dogmatic image of thought – and, as we have seen, of the entire social sphere – and the reality in which this image functions. The word "image" in this context does not signify a complete illusion (something that does not exist at all) but a derivative case that is mistakenly credited with exhausting the domain of thought and adequately representing the whole of reality. Respectively, the claim that the common-sense-based model is a dogmatic image does not imply that the acts of recognition and representation contained in the model never occur. On the contrary, these acts comprise a major part of daily life and have a significant function in the field of politics.23 The Deleuzian project, rather, intends to explore the conditions of possibility for this dogmatic thought, to articulate what generates it: Deleuze traces the series of syntheses through which identifiable subjects and representable objects are constituted out of a reality of pure differences. He tries to make room for experience in which latent pre-individual subjects are in immediate contact with a reality of pure differences.24 For that matter, Deleuzian philosophy is much more than mere transcendental analysis: by drawing the limits of dogmatic, commonsensical thought, it also indicates the blind spots of this thought, thereby exploring the possibility of transgressing the limits it drew. Deleuze demonstrates that common-sense, being a principle of cooperation among the faculties, delimits what can be sensed, understood, remembered or imagined – that it reproduces a regime of thought and sensibility predicated on implicit presuppositions that guide and condition every 22

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 130. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 135. 24 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 23, 56. See also: Joe Hughes, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 28. 23

A Political Non-sense

101

reasonable thought and action without themselves being an object of critical examination. The dogmatic image, as well as every philosophical system based upon it, is therefore blind to the dynamic aspect of reality, to events of "becoming" and to differences that repeat without being the same. What it misses, in other words, is the new – the new as a real event opening the door to new life experiences that transgress the limits marked by common-sense. An important example of a system that rests on common-sense but also marks the horizon for transgressing it, according to Deleuze, is the philosophy of Kant. Kant's "doctrine of the faculties" grapples with the complexity of cooperation among the faculties and even comes close to exposing its fissures. But eventually, rather than overturning the model of common-sense, Kant merely multiplies it.25 According to Deleuze's interpretation of the Kantian system, each interest of Reason – the speculative, the moral and the aesthetic – corresponds to a specific kind of common-sense, in which the faculties of reason, understanding and imagination cooperate in line with a model provided by one of them. Logical common-sense attains speculative knowledge using rules provided by understanding; moral common-sense uses rules provided by reason; aesthetic common-sense is a free, spontaneous activity of the faculties, which nevertheless act together in harmonious accord.26 This description indicates clearly that Kantian common-sense is a hierarchical regime, to be found in subjective, objective and social reality. But Kant's account is complex enough to suggest another possible direction: the experience of the sublime confronts the subject with a situation in which commonsensical cooperation among the faculties fails, thus suggesting the possibility of discord or disharmony in the interaction of the faculties.27 Following Kant and going beyond him, Deleuze views the departure from common-sense as a disturbance in the cooperative, hierarchical structure of the faculties. The aberration frees each faculty to dwell on what is essentially its own: "rather than all the faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognizing an object, we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns it essentially, each faculty is in the presence of that which is its 'own'."28 Such discordant exercise of the faculties, which radically deviates from common-sense and 25

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 137. Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2008). 27 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Eric Mattheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §§23-29. 28 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 141. 26

102

Chapter Eight

cannot be held as either true or false, falls under Deleuze's notion of nonsense.29 To think of something impossible to visualize, like Lewis Carrol's Snark, or to sense something impossible to conceptualize, such as highly unconventional sexual practices, is to experience a non-sensical disturbance that generates a new and unusual life experience, an event of "mad-becoming"30 that breaks the boundaries of the common-sensical regime and challenges what it takes to be reasonable and sane. It is not always possible to predict, or even initiate, the occurrence of such thoughts or sensations. They are usually the outcome of an unexpected encounter that awakens the faculties without forcing them to cooperate. Such encounters, however, can occur at any given moment – their existence may be denied but not prevented, since the mantle of common-sense can never adequately cover all possible events or subsume the "chaos-cosmos" of differences under one organized model. Seen from this perspective, non-sense is not something superfluous or recreational that lies at the margins of thought and language. It cannot simply be disposed of since it is always already there, subsisting in language and forever returning in its cloak, like the unconscious from which thought can never shake itself free. The stubborn persistence of non-sense testifies to the inadequacy of the unified community image in which everybody thinks and acts according to the same presuppositions – for no set of presuppositions can create a communicational public sphere in the form of a comprehensive unified field where all activities, linguistic and non-linguistic alike, have clear and stable, fully communicable meanings. Common-sense, then, as presupposed by the dogmatic image of thought, does not exist at all. Not only is it culture-related, as claimed, for example, by Hans-Georg Gadamer;31 it is never really the closed, homogeneous sphere of understandable meanings it is taken to be. Every common-sensical system is forever churning out non-sense; hence common-sense and non-sense co-exist, as two inseparable sides of the same coin of reality. Deconstructing the dichotomy between common-sense and non-sense in this way has far-reaching implications for politics and the political. In the absence of a closed set of common-sensical presuppositions that make every meaningful action affirm the foundations of the established order, the fabric of political co-existence turns out to be a weave of 29

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 153. For a thorough discussion of nonsense in Deleuze, see: Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 67-73. 30 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 141. 31 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshal (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 17-27.

A Political Non-sense

103

heterogeneous elements, creased and badly stitched. These distortions in the surface of politics can give rise to encounters and events that do not coincide with the existing order; but neither are they completely meaningless within it. They make it possible to conceive of a new concept of political action, one that is non-sensical from the point of view of common-sense and the power-structures related to it yet visible and effective in the public sphere. Deleuze helps us understand that non-sensical experience, the break-up of harmony among the faculties, is not necessarily a private occurrence – an island of madness in the pacific ocean of common-sensical normality – but an opportunity for a truly political event. Since it is the harmonious unity of the faculties that creates subjective and objective identities (as well as the distinctions between them), the non-sensical experience that shatters these identities may also upset the common-sensical order that relies on them. Non-sense, so conceived, is something that happens no less than it is something someone does. It is not a property of an act, utterance or person; it is an event in motion, in which people (or things) deviate from their identity, thus becoming other then themselves.32 This change, however, is by no means a mere transformation of the self but a rift in social reality, making it not only a question of ethics or lifestyle but a public problematization of what is regarded as the constituting principle of publicity. It is a way of altering the system not by acting directly upon it, but by generating new systems within it.33 Put differently, binding together the unities of subject, object and community under the concept of common-sense implies that to undermine identities or distinctions that the common-sensical order presents as self-evident is to undermine, at the same time, the order of politics. This kind of political action aims to seize opportunities to deviate from common-sense wherever they occur, and to use these opportunities to create a disturbance in the relations of domination that are embedded in common-sense. In the reality of politics, according to Deleuze, such opportunities always already exist, meaning that the political event can occur anywhere and be initiated by anyone, even when the places and actors are least-expected. While in dogmatic thought the concept of common-sense creates an appearance of equality but in fact legitimizes 32

A "becoming woman" of a man, a "becoming child" of an adult, and a "becoming bug" of a man are only some examples in Deleuze's writings of identity-breaking becomings that undermine existing power structures. See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 232-309. 33 Colebrook, "Bourgeois Thermodynamics," p. 126.

104

Chapter Eight

hierarchical relations of domination, in Deleuze it is the breaking away from common-sense that upsets hierarchies and opens the possibility of political action for all. Political non-sense, as portrayed here, by no means exhausts the various political trajectories drawn in Deleuze's thought; nor does it encompass all Deleuze has to say about non-sense. Here, too, Deleuze is a philosopher of multiplicity, for whom there are many ways to think of the political and many kinds of non-sense. This article points to the liberating option that reveals itself when the two meet: an option of "a new politics which would overturn the image of thought."34

34

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 137.

CHAPTER NINE A NOT FUNNY NONSENSE: WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS AND THE NONSENSE IN PHILOSOPHY JANYNE SATTLER

General Introduction Wittgenstein makes use of two different German terms to talk about nonsense in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: sinnlos (from now on referred to as senseless) and unsinnig (nonsensical proper). He is not that much consistent about the use of both these terms, and not few discussions have been raised about which kind of things should go under which label. He says, for instance, that logical propositions are senseless, but that philosophical-metaphysical propositions are nonsensical. Some interpreters do not pay too much attention to this distinction as it appears in the book (as is the case of Cora Diamond, one of the polemical-contemporary interpreters of Wittgenstein’s work).1 And some of them argue for a more or less strict interpretation (as does Hacker, for instance).2 Besides the discussions about how to define Wittgenstein’s nonsense and about how in some way to classify the propositions of language, there’s also the debate about the Tractatus own status. Both subjects are interconnected and one has a stance about what the Tractatus’ propositions are in accordance with one’s stance about what the Tractatus’s nonsense is. I don’t want to enter into too many technical details of both these discussions because my purpose is another one; but I’ll give a general 1 Cora Diamond, “Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 149-173. See also: Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991). 2 Peter M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

106

Chapter Nine

account of what I think it is Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense as opposed to that one of Diamond and how this conception could (and finally should) be extended to embrace the whole of philosophy. I’ll begin by saying what I think Wittgenstein’s nonsense is not, to later give a conception of what I think it is.

What kind of nonsense is not Wittgenstein’s nonsense? The only paragraph of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein gives a fine and clear and sure example of what a nonsensical proposition is, is the 4003; he says: “(They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful).”3 We can find another fine hint in the last but one paragraph (6.54) where he says that whoever understands him will recognize all of his propositions as nonsensical. Like this, we can actually take no matter which of the Tractatus propositions as an example of what a “nonsensical proposition” is.4 And we can do it because in some way we understand what Wittgenstein is trying to say. And this finally means that nonsense here has a strong appearance of sense, this meaning that what Wittgenstein is trying to show us is that philosophy is nonsense due exactly to its illusion of sense. This is why his distinction between saying and showing becomes so important: beyond its appearance of sense philosophy would show its very illusion. And this applies to the Tractatus itself. (This position will be clearer later when we talk about the ethical role of Wittgenstein’s work). But there are some interpreters who don’t think we can take things this way. The American philosopher Cora Diamond maintains the controversial position that we should understand Wittgenstein’s nonsense as “plain nonsense”, that is, as plain absurd, and that this should also be applied to the propositions of the Tractatus itself. All of its propositions should be understood as having the same status as “piggly wiggle tiggle” –

3 All references to the Tractatus will appear with the numbers of the paragraphs. Minor changes in the translation concern the use of the German term unsinnig. I’m using Ogden’s translation: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2006). 4 And I write it between quotation marks because a “nonsense proposition” is actually not a legitimate proposition of language. We will briefly see what a legitimate proposition of language is in the second section of the text.

A Not Funny Nonsense

107

the expression she uses – and that we should not try to see anything beyond or under its appearance of sense.5 As we know, in that last but one paragraph Wittgenstein is recommending us to read the book in the same way we use a ladder: climbing up and throwing it at last. This recommendation points to the main target of the book, which is the correct view of the world. We can read: “(He [the reader] must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” (6.54). Throwing the ladder away means a complete logical and moral understanding of the Tractatus and of its aims: by reading it we should understand what language is and what it can account for and by understanding that we should stop posing philosophical questions having theoretical, foundational and ethical purposes.6 Now Diamond says that her concept of “plain nonsense” as applied to the book is the correct manner of climbing up the ladder. The “plain nonsensical propositions” would finally result in the correct logical and moral understanding I just referred to. Reading this absolute absurd would enable one to see philosophy as the illusion it is for the sake of becoming free of it. But, how can this really be attained, if the propositions of the book are but “plain nonsense” or “plain absurd”? Taking for example some definitions of “absurd” given in the dictionary, such as “ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable,” or “obviously senseless or illogical and ridiculous,”7 makes it difficult to see how such “propositions” could lead someone to climb the ladder in question and getting the correct logical and moral understanding that is at stake. Moreover, what should we do with our first taking the Tractatus propositions as senseful?8 Are they really obviously and readily absurd? The example given by Diamond certainly falls under those definitions. But do it the propositions of Wittgenstein and of philosophy in general? Can we really put under the same label the 5

Cora Diamond, “Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 150. 6 And this is a “moral understanding” because it is the correct way of attaining a happy life and because Wittgenstein is in a certain way prescribing it as a “moral prescription,” as “the correct way of seeing the world”. 7 Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/absurd. 8 See Lynette Reid for a similar objection to Diamond in Lynette Reid, “Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The Tractatus and Nonsense,” Philosophical Investigations, 21:2 (April 1998), pp. 141-151.

108

Chapter Nine

following different expressions: “piggly wiggle tiggle” in the one hand, and “the world is everything which is the case” (1) in the other? I don’t think so. Of course, Wittgenstein speaks about nonsense in the sense of breaking the logical rules of language; but then he is not referring to grammatical rules of construction of sense but to strict logical rules he gives in the Tractatus to the very possibility of language itself; when he gives the example of proposition 4.003 (“the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful”), he’s not showing an “obviously absurd” proposition. This is not “obviously” nonsensical. This is nonsensical in another way. Here there’s something Diamond cannot explain in her account: why do we think we understand the expression “the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful” and why are we so sure that “piggly wiggle tiggle” means just nothing? The reason rests precisely in Wittgenstein’s conception of what a philosophical nonsense is and in its relation to a kind of illusion of sense: we are deceived by the appearance of sense of propositions like those of the Tractatus – or of those of no matter which other philosophical works; but we can surely see an “obvious plain nonsense” at first sight. Thus, Diamond’s kind of nonsense is not the philosophical nonsense Wittgenstein is talking about. But he is not talking about another kind of nonsense either. For Wittgenstein, literary nonsense would have its own rights as a specific non-philosophical domain. We will see in what follows that the kind of Unsinn he was forbidding and recommending to silence in the end of the Tractatus was not the nonsense found in Lewis Carroll kind of work. It was just philosophical nonsense. Here we will then find an important and considerable difference between what is literature intending to be literature and philosophy always intending to be something else (this will become clearer later). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s propositions are certainly not absurd in the same way as “piggly wiggle tiggle” and we certainly understand them in the sense of being able to fully read the book and in the sense of articulating meaningful words. A “plain nonsense,” as the one Diamond is proposing, would not make us react in the same way we do when we read Alice’s phrases; a mere junction of signs is something you can’t really say is more than mere noise and I doubt we will really find a “book” filled in but with Diamond’s kind of expressions. Carroll’s literary nonsense is different. We do understand what is written word by word, even if it sounds sometimes perplexing, and in some way or other we do interpret what he’s intending to show in his funny way of imagining things. (Again, Diamond’s kind of “plain

A Not Funny Nonsense

109

nonsense” cannot be perplexing, or funny, or even readable!). Carroll’s nonsense is not illogical in the sense of being a mere gurgling. It’s just illogical in the use made of language to distort non-absurd ways of speaking or normal daily situations and behaviors. We do laugh with the circumstances and the strange things the characters do and say because we are able to read and enjoy them. But this is exactly the kind of nonsense which is, so to speak, conscious of being nonsense: laughing, smiling or perplexing is the precise intention of it. This literary nonsense is construed to be literary nonsense: not a gurgling, not philosophy; and as such everything is just fine. Now, why the propositions of the Tractatus (or of philosophy in general) are not funny in the same way? Why don’t we laugh at the way Wittgenstein makes use of language? Well, should we really react in the same manner to both such extracts: “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental; (Ethics and aesthetics are one)” (6.421); “Very true’, said the Duchess, ‘flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is’ – ‘Birds of a feather flock together’”?9 Yet Wittgenstein himself says that all of his propositions are nonsensical and should be understood this way to a fully understanding of his work and his aims. I would like to suggest that the difference in reaction that we see here is due precisely to the intentions behind (or clearly stated in) the propositions in question - and this being so not only concerning the Tractatus but concerning the whole of philosophical-metaphysical “propositions.” In the literary nonsense case, the intention is clearly to express things in an absurd way. But in the philosophical nonsense case, the intention is to state a certain kind of “philosophical truth.” And this is why its propositions do not sound funny, because they sound as philosophical arguments having the intention to be philosophical arguments and not “nonsense propositions.” They do not state an obvious nonsense in the sense of Diamond, but they do not state a funny nonsense in the sense of literary intentional absurd either. They intend to show “the truth of the thoughts communicated” (Preface)! And, as we will see in what follows, this is exactly what Wittgenstein condemns when he recommends philosophy to silence: the pretension or the claim of truth or the claim of empirical-scientific validity. Contrary to what Kant aimed before, Wittgenstein doesn’t want to give philosophy the status of a science. From the Tractatus on there should be a clear distinction to be respected 9 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Chrysalis Children’s Book, 2004).

110

Chapter Nine

between the domains of science and of philosophy; and for Wittgenstein the right way of qualifying the last one is to call it an activity with no “philosophical propositions” (4.112). Yet again, the Tractatus itself is full of “philosophical propositions” intending to show the truth (by trying to say it), to show something definitely correct, in the logical and in the moral sense of the word.

What kind of nonsense is a philosophical nonsense in Wittgenstein’s manner? Before trying to understand Wittgenstein’s aims and reasons for writing a philosophical-metaphysical work of the same type he’s dismissing, I’ll try to provide a concise definition of what a philosophical nonsense is as given in the Tractatus itself. There are several logical and technical rules of sense which I’ll need to pass by, but a way of summarizing things is to say that a legitimate proposition of language is one which is related to reality in a figurative way: propositions represent states of affairs in the world and are therefore the main sources of empirical and scientific representations; they need a “one-by-one” correspondence with reality (and we can see well what this will mean to philosophy). The main characteristic of this legitimacy is bipolarity: a legitimate proposition of language needs to be one which can be equally true or false being comparison with reality what comes to decide its truth or falsity. Wittgenstein says: “A proposition is a description of a state of affairs (…) The proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, and therefore one can actually see in the proposition all the logical features possessed by reality if it is true. One can draw conclusions from a false proposition” (4.023). But to talk about what constitutes reality or of what constitutes language (the logical scaffolding just mentioned) and the way the last one is able to represent the first one, is already a mistake because these things are shown in the legitimate language itself; we don’t actually need to speak about this relation of representation precisely because we already see it in the use we make of language – we would otherwise not be able to understand what we are saying.10 Wittgenstein names this relation the “logical form” or the “form of representation” common to both reality and language: “the 10

See paragraphs 3.02: “What is thinkable is also possible;” and 3.03: “We cannot think anything unlogical, for otherwise we should have to think unlogically;” thought and language being actually identified: “The logical picture of the facts is the thought” (3).

A Not Funny Nonsense

111

picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth” (2.172). Now, this means that the concept of “philosophical nonsense” in question is not a matter of plain absurdity, nor a matter of absurd of the kind found in Alice’s fantastic world. It is, in a sense, a matter of misunderstanding in a very strong and consequential way of the obvious and necessary relation between reality and language. It is finally a matter of excess or of ornamentation of something which is bare in front of our eyes and which does not need to be repeatedly stated. This is why Wittgenstein says that “philosophical questions” are not really philosophical questions: they are pseudo-questions taken as meaningful propositions or meaningful arguments or theories. There cannot be “philosophical questions” as there cannot be “philosophical answers” of things which already show themselves in legitimate language (and, regarding ethics, in actions and in attitudes) and which are necessary for the very possibility of posing questions and answers. The following is one of the main paragraphs of the Tractatus concerning what nonsense in philosophy is and the one where we can find the example mentioned before: “Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false, but nonsensical. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their nonsensicality. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems” (4.003). Part of this logical misunderstanding of language is then the attempt to say what already shows itself. And this means not only the “logical form” (or the “form of representation”) mentioned above, as all the supposed “foundations” and “theories” given to reality, language, objects, soul, acts, will, God itself and all the rich constellation of subjects of (metaphysical) philosophy and its characteristic ornamental talking. For Wittgenstein, this includes even skepticism: “Skepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably nonsensical, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked. For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said” (6.51). Philosophy would remain an empirical enquiry if concerned with what is really sayable according to these rules of the Tractatus: what can be said is limited to descriptive, empirical propositions. But as we saw, science is not Wittgenstein’s aim for philosophy and what remains is therefore action, activity and, as we will see, moral activity, things which don’t need

112

Chapter Nine

to be said but which obviously show themselves. In this way, it is the whole of “philosophical propositions” which are recommended to silence. Before finishing this section I would like to return to the more concrete example furnished by Wittgenstein himself: “The question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful” can be said to be an “ethical proposition” of the kind employed by “ethical theories,” a tentative of explaining the essence of the good and the beautiful. The investigation of ethical foundations, of ethical rules and principles, ethical arguments and inquiries about what is the good, the right, the obligation, what is morality itself, etc., is as nonsense as every supposed domain of philosophy. For Wittgenstein, ethics is the condition of possibility of the existence of the world, of the subject of will and of language and cannot as such be talked about: “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one)” (6.421). It happens here with “ethics” the same that happens with “logical form”: it is shown in everyday language, in actions and moral examples, and in attitudes to life. We can see it. It is a matter of obviousness. Every talk about it is just superfluous. Finally, this is exactly how Wittgenstein conceives philosophical nonsense: not as a plain absurdity, not as a funny nonsense, but as a superfluous talk. According to the final paragraph of the Tractatus and given logical and moral rules we should not talk about what we cannot talk about; but at the same time, this also means that we don’t need to talk about all these things: everything which is important is in some way shown and every attempt to speak about it is just unnecessary, superfluous and a waste of effort. In this sense, nonsense is every philosophical try concerning what already shows itself: to try to say what is shown is then the best definition of nonsense. For Wittgenstein this includes a very good deal of things and I would say that the whole of philosophy falls under this label.

The Tractatus is a philosophical nonsense in Wittgenstein’s manner Those philosophical tries are not funny because they take themselves seriously, that is, they do not have the intention to be funny, but the intention to be truths. (See Wittgenstein’s own Preface!). And they are misled by this very intention of them. And by a sort of moral lack too. In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus the philosophical pretension to truth and to seriousness goes beyond the logical nonsense to reach ethics. All nonsensical “propositions” become a kind of excess in a very dangerous

A Not Funny Nonsense

113

way because they are a sign of an incorrect way of seeing the world. This is due to the fact that Wittgenstein’s ethics could be qualified as a stoical ethics. Despite the shortness of the topic in the Tractatus, we can see that the ethical aim of the work has stoical characteristics and that the cut of ornamentation and superfluity is an essential part of it. Following the work’s rules for sense, ethics is something which cannot be expressed in theories or arguments, but something which has to be fully experienced as a coherent consciousness about what is the right thing to do and about the happiness there involved. Correctness in life and happiness are one and the same, and in spite of talking about the consequences of the actions or about ethical laws for right actions,11 ethics should here care for an entire attitude to life arising from this very stoical point of view (“The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” (6.43)). It is precisely this attitude to life which is the very key for us to understand why we should not be sorry for the silence falling over the whole of philosophy. As we can read in the paragraph 4.003, the problems raised by philosophy are not but illusions. The sadness or unhappiness concerning the lack of answers, particularly those related to the sense of life and to the sense of the existence of the world, is the unhappiness provoked by an illusion. Or yet more clearly: the unhappiness provoked by a non-stoical attitude to life. Hoping for those answers is an incorrect way of seeing the world. Wittgenstein’s aim with the Tractatus is to show how easily we can reach the “answers” for our “philosophical problems”: since there’s actually no possible answer, we just need to stop asking useless questions, because there are actually no valid ones besides those of legitimate language. Surely, this demands a positive stance of our part. We have to see the superfluity of philosophical nonsense despite its appearance of sense, despite its resemblance to sound arguments, despite its appearance of seriousness. That is, we need voluntarily to free ourselves of this very illusion, starting from the right attitude. Finally, all this can help us to solve the puzzle concerning the nonsense of the Tractatus itself: it could be understood as the last (authorized) 11

See the essential paragraph 6.422: “The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form thou shalt… is : And what if I do not do it? But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (And this is clear also that the reward must be something pleasant, and the punishment something unpleasant).” I did some minor changes in the translation.

114

Chapter Nine

metaphysical work giving sense to the ladder metaphor at the end. If we take all of its propositions as steps to a final throwing away the ladder, then everything is all right and there’s no real puzzle to be solved. Indeed, taking Wittgenstein’s own rules, his propositions are metaphysical, superfluous and unnecessary themselves; but since they are “conscious” of their own nonsensicality (“he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense” (6.54), modified translation) and since they are at last dismissed with everything else (“he must surmount these propositions” (6.54)), that which remains is the right moral attitude and philosophy as pure activity. Thus the Tractatus would be only (temporarily) necessary for showing us why it is worthwhile to throw it away. Wittgenstein’s intention is here a radical one: to give an end to philosophy as we know it. That’s the sense of his saying in the Preface that he thinks he solved once and for all those “philosophical problems.” And this is thought to be extended to the whole of “philosophical propositions,” this meaning that, except for philosophy as activity, all philosophy is nonsense. But then, what to do instead? Literature. This would be Wittgenstein’s answer.

Literature is not to be silenced as is philosophy. In a sense, literature shows the important things philosophy wants and tries to say, but without the same pretension to truth or to empirical-scientific validity. What I mean is not that literature does not deal with “truth,” with “values” or with the “true importance of life,” for example, but that literary “propositions” do not have the intention to be empirical, factual, scientific truths and that literature does not want to establish itself as a certain kind of “science.” The way literature shows the important things to be showed is a nonargumentative way, a non-theoretical way and as such there’s nothing inessential or superfluous in its “propositions.” Literature is then allowed by the Tractatus not as legitimate language but as a real philosophical activity. Thus, literature is the very way of showing the supposed “philosophical truths” that philosophy was struggling to show but in a wrong fashion; now, this is the right fashion and a much more persuasive one. Of course, this can only be really and fully understood with the taking of the stoical attitude mentioned above. Giving up philosophy requires openness to other sorts of tools and openness to persuasion through nonargumentative moral imperatives. Literary stories can show in a convincing way what is right or wrong to do through the examples of the

A Not Funny Nonsense

115

characters exposed – or yet in many different ways. And as such, literature can serve as a strong moral pedagogical device.12

12

Of course you can only be persuaded by this if you give up the idea that persuasion can only be reached through argumentation. See Cora Diamond’s chapter Anything but Argument for a similar way of thinking about this crossroad: Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 291-308.

CHAPTER TEN ON THE VIRTUE OF IDLENESS WOJCIECH MAJKA

“Why are there essents rather than nothing?”1 is the opening question of Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Question Concerning Metaphysics. Instead of looking at the substantive sense of the question which can be roughly paraphrased as why is there something rather than nothing, we would like to regard the question in its verbal aspect, i.e. why should one do something when one can do nothing? Naturally, when we think of actually doing nothing the condition that corresponds to the passivity of action is idleness. Nevertheless, this is not the way that we propose to address the issue here. Rather, in our understanding idleness is an ontological attitude that corresponds to the notion of releasement. The concept itself was addressed by various thinkers. Plato referred to it through the Greek term anabasis, which specifically referred to the releasement one was to achieve by literally releasing oneself from illusive sensual existence and directing his attention at the ideal reality that was available through cognitive rational comportment.2 In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, a German mystic Meister Eckhart understood releasement (Gelassenheit) as a way of detaching oneself from contingent physical reality and achieving a spiritual union with God through the sacrifice of one’s individual self. In other words, releasement was a process that allowed one to achieve a higher form of spirituality at the cost of one’s own individual identity, thus in Gelassenheit “ all mean egotism vanishes [and we] become a transparent eyeball”3 as Emerson would claim The 1

Martin Heidegger, “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics,” in Classics of Philosophy: The Twentieth Century, ed. Louis P. Pojman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 480. 2 Karl Albert, Studia o Historii Filozofii (Warszawa: Fundacja Aletheia, 2006), pp. 75-88. 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ”Nature,” in The Portable Emerson, eds. Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 11.

118

Chapter Ten

experience of Gelassenheit was to unite us with God through what the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross, who had an influence on Karol Wojtyła, called the dark night of the soul which was a feeling of extreme loneliness and despair. In the twentieth century Heidegger, who was influenced by medieval thinkers like Eckhart or Duns Scotus, also addressed the concept of Gelassenheit, which he regarded as a state of willesness, a letting-be of things.4 Nevertheless, idleness as the conclusion of the process of releasement does not refer to a passive retreat from the world, a cowardly resignation. Rather, idleness is an ontological attitude that exists outside activity and passivity as well as subjectivity and objectivity. The four qualities are interconnected and form the basis of metaphysical thinking that presupposes the four constituents. Therefore, idleness is an ontological condition that stands in opposition to the whole western tradition of thinking that flows out of metaphysics. Cezary Wodzinski points out that metaphysics is reducible to two of its primal ingredients: ontology characteristic of the ancient Greeks and axiology that stands in relief of Christian theology that is founded on morality (based on the distinction between good and evil).5 The essence of metaphysics dwells in the subject - object division. Traditionally put the understanding of subjectivity underwent many modifications throughout the ages, nevertheless, its primal presupposition is that it extracts man from reality making him be against-it rather with-it. The ancient Greeks believed that the human subject is definable through the quality of rationality that makes man stand out amidst other essents. Later, the Romans used the term humanitas to refer to the idea of subjectivity. However, humanitas was reserved solely for the Romans, i.e. only to people who were educated in the Roman cultural tradition. Everyone else was a barbarian, and therefore, situated at the object level.6 In the Middle Ages the subject-object division existed stronger than ever. The essence of man was the soul that was imprisoned in the objective status of somatic existence. The dualism that roughly starts with Plato finds its culmination in Cartesian rationalism which contraposes the cogito (the subject) with the body (the object), setting it in a manipulative relation to the latter.

4

Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper&Row Publishers, 1966), p. 61. 5 Cezary WodziĔski, Heidegger i problem zła (GdaĔsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2007), pp. 473-474. 6 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), pp. 224-225.

On the Virtue of Idleness

119

Therefore, the Weltanschauung of metaphysics is manipulation through which the subject relates to the world reducing it to its own conceptuality. The subject, therefore, always exists in an aggressive relation to the object; it seeks to literally absorb the object thus eliminating its otherness. In these circumstances the devoured object is an anthropomorphic one. Additionally, manipulation is, in turn, closely connected to power which is the structuring principle behind all western thinking. After man has learned to appropriate the physical world of nature to his needs and purposes he started manipulating himself. The effect of the manipulation of the natural world and man is what we call civilisation which is based on the quest for power that is connected with the freedom of manipulation without being manipulated. The metaphysical worldview is carried out through rationality. In other words, rationality is the active aspect of metaphysics. To clarify the manipulative aspect behind metaphysics we are obliged to point to the essence of rationality that puts manipulation into effect. The nomothetic and demonstrative aspect of rationality dwells in its functionality that is connected with establishing morphological relations that hold between the subject and object as well as etiological ones that exist between one object and another. Rationality, therefore, is responsible for creating perspectives for viewing its objects but in itself it never touches reality per se. All it does is transform reality by fitting the extra-human into structures of human thinking. Therefore, rationality does not really engage in reality as its interest is itself; it, therefore, allows for the metaphysical closure, i.e. closing reality on the human subject that stands behind all metaphysical thinking. The perspectives that emerge from the applications of rationality are reducible to the ontological and epistemological categories that we find in Aristotle and Kant, which simply offer ways for viewing and ordering objects that fall into our horizon of perception. However, they do not penetrate reality itself but stand strictly descriptive of it. Both metaphysics and rationality are also connected with logic. We can say that the three terms are in fact synonymous, as they all emerge from the Heracletian conception of logos which is the same as the law for Heraclitus, since he tells us that “it is wise, listening not to me but to the Law, to acknowledge that all things are one”7 Logic in itself is the science of being, as being is the most abstract concept that exists, just as space the most abstract thing. In other words, being gives birth to logic which then seeks to classify and organize its contents through the mechanics of 7

Heraclitus, Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Milton C. Nahm (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964), p. 67.

120

Chapter Ten

rationality. That logic is mainly concerned with essents derives from the principle of non-contradiction and its various forms that states that either something exists or not. In other words, there is no in-between. Logic evaluates things on an either-or basis, and therefore, logic through rationality provides things with contours and shapes thus it is the science of essents. These in turn are understood in a dianoic sense as things that are extended in space and possess physical properties or in a noetic sense, i.e. as universals or archetypes of the mind that logic calls concepts. This only means that logic’s application to essents is always spatial (the physical thing extended in space) or temporal (since concepts of logic belong to a certain tradition of thinking). However, this situation should not really surprise us, for logic is also connected with mathematics, which after all is the science of time and space, as mathematics can be divided into geometry that studies shapes that exist in space and algebra that is based on a chronological order just as the conventional understanding of time. Therefore, logic working with its concepts reduces things to potentialities of the former, or to put it differently, objects of perception are always seen through the veil of the nomothetic rationality. Much as logic is the science of essents it is frustrated by the notion of negation and nothingness that is connected with it. From the perspective of logic the nothing does not make sense, and therefore, it cannot exist, since even when we mention the very word the nothing is no longer a nothing but already the subject of our assertion. This only points to what we have alluded to before when we declared that logic is able to perceive things, in the sense of definite objects arranged in time and space. The nothing, however, is not a thing, it is rather the context that makes the appearance of things possible. In other words, the nothing contextualises being, as the latter is said to emerge from the former. In this way we come close to seeing that nothing and being are mutually connected, as the nothing is the ground out of which being emerges. After all Hegel declared that nothing and being are really the same thing, as being in its featureless state is an empty entity, it is a no thing, since if it would possess a feature it would already be a something and not pure being.8 Therefore, as we have mentioned earlier we can come to see the nothing as the apophantic aspect of being separated from being per se by an artificial line brought about by rationality. The line is, therefore, the horizon from which we look at the face of things disregarding everything that exists below it, and therefore,

8

Howard P. Kainz, G.W.F. Hegel: The Philosophical System (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 82.

On the Virtue of Idleness

121

falls outside of time and space, and thus, cannot be classified either as a concept or a thing. From the Heideggerian perspective the nothing is what we experience not in cognition that is rational but in the mood of anxiety that Heidegger borrows from Kierkegaard. In other words, anxiety discloses nothingness in that it reminds Dasein of its finitude and mortality: Anxiety reveals the nothing. We “hover” in anxiety, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves – we humans are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel ill at ease; rather, it is this way for some “one”. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there.9

Therefore, the nothing as the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility is the context of the ek-sistence of Dasein. To put it differently, we may state that mortality puts a construction on being. Because we are mortal, we feel that it is our duty to make our existence as meaningful as possible wanting in this way to stand out among other beings. This desire of meaning is the first seed of rationality and all metaphysics, which only makes sense in application to being, i.e. much as rationality is useful on a practical and theoretical basis, as it allows us to organise our material and psychological existence, it does not explain itself, and therefore, it only makes sense once there is a world in the first place. Without the presupposition of a reality that needs to be organized rationality is useless, empty or even more emphatically, rationality itself - being representative of metaphysics - is nothing. Therefore, we have really turned a full circle and come to agree with Hegel who declared that logic begins with being. Nevertheless, even from a conventional perspective we come to see that there is something negative in all human thinking. Thoughts in essence are what they are not, i.e. they only represent reality to us; they are not a reality in themselves. The representative aspect of thinking is consequent with the dianoia that applies to space and noesis that characterises time. In other words, thoughts represent things that are extended in the material world or the universals that are dormant within the environs of the human mind in the sense of a tradition of thinking. In both cases a thought reveals only a perspective of a thing or a universal, as it does not have access to the Gestalt of an object. So we see that

9

Heidegger, ”What is Metaphysics,” p. 101.

122

Chapter Ten

negativity is the background of all human thinking which only possesses a descriptive relation to reality. We should also add that rationality has a negative attitude to all reality, since as we mentioned earlier it seeks to destroy it by taking it over rather than accept reality for what it is. Therefore, rationality implanted in us a general distrust of reality, the feeling that we think that reality is a phenomenon that is alien that seeks to destroy, therefore, the safest thing to do is to annihilate it by means of manipulation. In this light rationality presents itself not as the supreme aspect of the human subject but as the most basic one, since it can be reduced to a form of instinctuality. If by instinct we mean the processes that allow an organism to survive and adapt to the environment then rationality is just that. It is man’s defence mechanism against an invasive reality, and moreover, it is based on the general fear of being, therefore, on nothingness, on the feeling that if we do not control reality it will control us. Therefore, the nothing that is based on negation is reflected in the very mood that rationality takes with regards to reality, i.e. it distrusts reality and it is more interested in absorbing rather than preserving it. In conclusion, if we, therefore, agree to participate in a world based on manipulation we should not be surprised that reality in such circumstances is founded on conflict as Sartre maintained. For this reason we should redefine our ontological attitude and instead of manipulation embrace idleness and truth. It is only idleness that reveals reality in its apophantic pre-metaphysical character. In other words, idleness presents reality in an undistorted fashion and in this way allows us to see the true face of what is real (not the structures through which reality is seen). For Heidegger truth was alƝtheia that was not to be understood along the lines of adequation where thought was said to correspond to the thing or vice versa. The correspondence theory disclosed only one face of truth, one that can be called propositional, and therefore, metaphysical. However, truth in its purest pre-metaphysical aspect was the disclosure of reality itself. Man was not to manipulate reality but rather be the Lichtung (clearing) from which reality emanates, and therefore, his job was to let what is real simply disclose itself and not arrest it in presupposed ontological and epistemological categories.

CHAPTER ELEVEN “THE SOVEREIGN MISTRESS OF OUR OPINIONS”: MAKING SENSE OF THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY OF THE SENSES JACEK MYDLA

In this paper I address jointly two “new senses” – discoveries of philosophers belonging to the so-called “Scottish Enlightenment”: the Moral Sense and the Common Sense.1 The discovery of the Moral Sense is attributed to Francis Hutcheson. An Irishman by descent, Hutcheson is now regarded as “father” of modern philosophy in Scotland. He was professor of philosophy at Glasgow and is chiefly known for a theory of “moral enthusiasm” put forth in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). The discovery of common sense understood in a specific epistemological sense is attributed to Thomas Reid, professor of philosophy at Aberdeen and then Glasgow. Reid’s two major works, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense and Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, appeared in 1764 and 1785, respectively. Scholarly treatments of the two new senses hardly ever regard them in conjunction.2 Indeed, Moral Sense and Common Sense do not seem to 1

My decision to speak of discovery rather than invention is chiefly meant to reflect the intentions of the philosophers. Hutcheson’s “Moral Sense” and Reid’s “Common Sense” will be capitalised throughout this essay. Reid is not consistent in his spelling; there are interesting reasons for his persistent use of personification and we shall discuss them in the latter part of this essay. 2 See, for instance, S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1960). One of the notable exceptions is found in the section on sensus communis in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. The section’s title itself betrays Gadamer’s inspirations in Lord Shaftesbury, but he

124

Chapter Eleven

have much in common besides the fact that while Hutcheson posits the Moral Sense as a foundation and root of a healthy ethics, Reid posits Common Sense as a basis of a sane epistemology. In what follows, I shall first sketch out a context in which both the conceptions emerged, and to which they were a reaction and a response: we shall look at two different though chronologically parallel genealogies. Next, I shall focus on what both the senses have in common, that is, on what we may call the commonness or rather universality of the Moral Sense and the ethical grounding of Common Sense.3 Further, I will attempt to show that both the positing of the new senses can be regarded a as a way to overcome the limitations, moral and epistemological, inherent in empiricism and to combat misconceptions of modern notions of human subjectivity.4 Francis Hutcheson’s conception of the Moral Sense is indebted to two influences, that of Locke’s theory of ideas and that of Lord Shaftesbury’s reflections on sensus communis.5 From Locke, Hutcheson borrows such basic distinctions as that between the external and internal senses6; he will place the Moral Sense in the internal realm and call it an internal sense.7 stresses the broad significance of the latter’s ideas: “Though the sensus communis appears here [in Shaftesbury] mostly as a virtue of social intercourse, there is nevertheless a moral, even a metaphysical basis implied.” Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, trans. revised by Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 22. See also the next footnote. 3 Reid adopted and adapted Hutcheson’s conception of the Moral Sense. For an excellent analysis of Reid’s conception of the moral sense, see Alexander Broadie, “Reid Making Sense of Moral Sense,” Reid Studies 1 (1998), No. 2, pp. 5 – 16. Reid’s conception of the moral sense does not concern us here. 4 In his Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature Gilles Deleuze, setting out to define empiricism’s subjectivity, ignores the two significant developments in British empiricism, which we address here, and which are two symptomatic and significant attempts to deal with misconceived empiricism. 5 See Shaftesbury’s “Sensus communis, an essay on the freedom of wit and humour in a letter to a friend,” in: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), II.i 3-4 (pp. 54-55). Sensation supplies the mind with ideas of external objects, i.e., those which have external senses for their source, while reflection supplies ideas of the operations of our mind. 7 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [hereafter IBV] (Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), facsimile of the 1726 edition. On internal sense see: Treatise I, Sect. I, x – xiii, and Treatise II, Sect. I, viii, p. 134.

“The Sovereign Mistress of our Opinions”

125

Here he also seems to have found the idea of a multiplicity of senses. In his Essay Locke allows for more than the common five external senses (plus the “internal sense”): “I have followed the common opinion – writes Locke – of man’s having but five senses; though, perhaps, there may be justly counted more (…).”8 Hutcheson’s approach to sense perception is symptomatic of the powerful legacy of Locke as well as being an attempt to overcome it.9 Despite his debt to empiricism is evident, he seems to be aware that within the Lockean conception there simply is no room for his Moral Sense. In the introductory sections of An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, Hutcheson first defines “sense” and then goes on to distinguish no fewer than six different classes of perceptions.10 His definition of “sense” is a combination of two aspects of sense perception distinguished later by Reid: receptive and evaluative.11 On the one hand, sense is “every determination of our minds to receive ideas independently of our will,” which makes up the first, receptive, part of the definition. The remaining part conceals an element of evaluation of the perceptive content: “and to have perceptions of pleasure and pain.” According to this rather simplistic definition, the Moral Sense is an ability or “power” of our 8

Locke, An Essay, II.ii.3. This idea was later repeated by David Hume: “We may as well expect to discover, in the body, new senses, which had before escaped the observation of all mankind.” David Hume, “Of Justice,” in: The Scottish Enlightenment. An Anthology, ed. Alexander Broadie (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1997), p. 595. 9 As Henry Laurie puts it, “Hutcheson would therefore expand the meaning of sense.” Henry Laurie, Scottish Philosophy in its National Development (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1902), p. 16. 10 Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728), Sect. I, p. 4. With this understanding of “sense” Hutcheson puts forth the assumption that we may have to accept or allow for “many other senses beside those commonly explained.” Among his classes of perceptions, he names external senses; an internal sense (allowing for the so-called “pleasures of the imagination”); public sense (making us sensible to the fortunes and misfortunes of other people), moral sense (making us capable of perceiving virtue and vice), a sense of honour (making us sensible to honour and shame). He mentions a sixth class, because he would like to leave room for other qualities, such as “decency,” “dignity,” and “suitableness to human nature.” 11 The terms used here are mine, but they answer to Reid’s distinction between two major notions of “sense,” sense as reception and sense as judgement. Reid presents this distinction in section “Common Sense” (in Essay VI: “Of Judgment”) of his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. A. D. Woozley (London: Macmillan And Co. Ltd, 1941).

126

Chapter Eleven

minds, not only to perceive the moral qualities of human conduct (e.g., merit and demerit), but also to respond emotionally to such ideas, i.e., with approbation or distaste, and to pass judgments on the basis of such response.12 Among the senses listed by Hutcheson we find sensus communis, which reveals his other intellectual debt, to Lord Shaftesbury. Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson seeks to disentangle the meaning of common sense from associations with ancient philosophy and prefers to speak of public sense.13 More importantly, like Shaftesbury before him, Hutcheson mounts a response to the reductive notion of the human agent as motivated solely by self-interest (or “self-good,” in Shaftesbury’s phrase), i.e., to the egotistical ethics put forth by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville.14 Refining Shaftesbury’s reflections,15 Hutcheson continues his refutation of both these thinkers. More radically than Hutcheson’s considerations, Thomas Reid’s Inquiry is not only inspired by Locke’s empiricism (Reid clearly is an empiricist), 12

See also IBV, Treatise II, Sect. I.ii (p. 119). Shaftesbury’s understanding of sensus communis would, in Hutcheson’s view, be a combination of several senses, chiefly the moral sense and the public (or “communal”) sense. As the Cambridge editor of the Characteristics helpfully explains: “The expression [‘common sense’] usually referred to sound practical judgment or to the synthetic sense that integrated the information gathered by the five senses. However, Shaftesbury’s entire essay [e.g., “Sensus communis, an essay on the freedom of wit …”] was aimed at interpreting this expression as ‘the sense of the common,’ that is, the human aptitude for community and civility” (Shaftesbury, Characteristics, p. 29, footnote A). See also Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 19. 14 Of the two, the latter is Hutcheson’s main object of attack. For what his contemporaries saw as a theory that recommended vice, Mandeville was renamed “Man-Devill”; see “Introduction,” in: Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 8. The opening of Mandeville’s “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” is explicit enough: “All untaught Animals are only Solicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others.” Mandeville, The Fable, p. 81. 15 As the editor of the Characteristics succinctly puts it: “The … trait in modern philosophy to which Shaftesbury objected was philosophical egoism, which was consistent with the denial of ontological foundations for ethics or politics and with the methodological individualism espoused by its supporters. A conspicuous target in this regard was the contention that human self-regard made human action an enterprise in selfishness.” Klein, “Introduction,” in: Shaftesbury, Characteristics, p. xxviii. The position opposed to egoism is called benevolism; see: “Introduction,” in: Mandeville, The Fable, p. 31. 13

“The Sovereign Mistress of our Opinions”

127

but is a refutation of what Reid summarily calls “the ideal system.”16 This term as used by Reid puts in one pigeonhole Descartes’ rationalism and Locke’s empiricism – both Descartes and Locke are “ideal” philosophers, and Hume’s scepticism is basically a predictable consequence of their shared (false, according to Reid) understanding of sense perception.17 As I suggested at the outset, Moral Sense ethics and Common Sense epistemology have an essential thing in common. Hutcheson’s positing of Moral Sense, as a reaction against an ethics of self-regard is predicated upon the existence of a moral instinct which is a shared endowment of human nature. Famously, Hutcheson claims that there is “some secret sense,”18 and that this sense (the Moral Sense, which is “internal”) creates a “secret chain between each person and mankind.”19 The Moral Sense is thus essentially common, or communal, in that it breaks down the barriers between individual selves. Reid’s Common Sense account of man’s intellectual powers is informed by faith in Nature and in God, against the Cartesian universal doubt. In opposition to this faith is Descartes’ hypothesis of a powerful and malignant demon who deludes us and makes us believe in things that have no real existence.20 This hypothesis is put forth to undermine of 16 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense [hereafter IHM] (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2003), Chap. II, Sect. vii, p. 36. 17 In a summary by Heiner Klemme, the beginnings lie with what Reid calls “the Cartesian system.” The consequences are as follows: “The first step towards this skepticism was taken by Locke, who argued that only primary qualities resemble external objects, while secondary qualities are nothing but perceptions in the perceiving mind. Berkeley took the second step by claiming that there are no material objects existing independently of the perceiving mind. The final step was taken by Hume, who showed that we do not even have reasons to believe in our own existence.” Heiner Klemme, “Scepticism and common sense,” in: The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 127. For a relevant passage in Reid’s Inquiry see IHM, VI.vi, p. 92. 18 IBV, II Treatise, I.iii, p. 122. 19 IBV, II Treatise, I.ii, p. 121. 20 Descartes writes at the end of the first of the Meditations: “I will therefore suppose that … some evil spirit, supremely powerful and cunning, has devoted all his efforts to deceiving me. I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things are no different from the illusions of our dreams, and that they are traps he has laid for my credulity.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 16.

128

Chapter Eleven

instinctive, Nature-given trust in the truthfulness of our cognitive faculties and the philosopher (Descartes, in this particular case) here reasons against that instinctive faith, in Nature as such and in the order of things. Thus the doubting philosopher acts out the role of the demon himself, the adversary of mankind, and of human nature with the instinctive beliefs planted in it by God. As we can see, both the Moral Sense and the Common Sense philosophies not only address issues which are fundamental to modern thought; they reveal areas where modern thought disagrees with itself. One of such disagreements is that between sense experience and reason; not only are the provinces of the senses and reason different, but the faculties’ titles to validity are in conflict. Here Reid endeavours to settle the discord by arguing that “[c]ommon sense and reason have both one author,” meaning of course God who warrants the “consistency, uniformity, and beauty” of things.21 But there are also disagreements within empiricism itself. One of them concerns the relation between the external and internal senses; it is little wonder that Hutcheson cannot find “room” for his Moral Sense: he puts it in the internal realm and calls it “secret.” Another, the focus of Reid’s critique of the theory of ideas, reveals a discord within sense perception itself. Moreover, Reid is clearly aware of the grave metaphysical consequences of the errors into which post-Cartesian philosophy has precipitated itself. These internal disagreements and disruptions are meaningful for they are symptomatic of the way in which the modern subject is in a state of war against his cognitive faculties, to the point of doing away with the subject himself. To describe this disquiet and to boost the strength of his argumentation, Reid persistently uses figures suggestive of litigation and warfare.22 Among Reid’s favourite metaphors is that of the legal process in which “the wisdom of philosophy is set in opposition to the common sense of mankind.”23 Further, Reid uses strong 21

IHM, V.vii, p. 68. It seems to me that too little attention has been paid to Reid’s rhetoric, even tough it is too conspicuous, obtrusive even, to ignore. Perhaps the most elaborate of his oratorical flights in the Inquiry is found in the Introductory section. Here Reid apostrophises Philosophy as “daughter of light” and “parent of wisdom and knowledge” only to put these titles in doubt: “if thou art she.” IHM, I.iii, p. 18. 23 IHM V.vii, p. 67. Two more passages are worth quoting: “The belief of a material world […] declines the tribunal of reason […]” (IHM V.vii, p. 68); “[…] there is a tribunal of inquisition erected by certain modern philosophers, before which every thing in nature must answer” (VI.viii, p. 98). Besides these metaphors, Reid intersperses his argument with strictly legal terminology, e.g., “a Quo warranto” (literally, “by what warrant,” “on what authority”; in a passage on Berkeley; IHM, V.vii, p. 67) and the distinction between “error persona” (wrong22

“The Sovereign Mistress of our Opinions”

129

defamatory language when he speaks about monstrosities bred by Reason and to describe how it (“she,” actually) turns against natural, i.e., Naturegiven, intellectual powers.24 Sceptical reason has wrenched itself free from its mooring, has run loose and feels free to call all in doubt, and to try even our natural beliefs “at the bar of philosophy.”25 This unruly reason, the father of monstrous philosophy, like that of Descartes, raises the progeny of rampant, pernicious and profane speculations. Reid’s metaphors are not morally indifferent. In other words, woven into Reid’s quarrel with postCartesian scepticism (where Hume is the chief target), are bonds of obligation,26 suggested chiefly by his persistent use of personification. Among other things, the provinces of Philosophy and Common Sense can be marked out according to a sense of their different rights and titles. In a famous passage Reid indulges in a typical figurative flight and presents an image of Philosophy as a goddess. Whimsically, she has “endeavoured to extend her jurisdiction beyond its [the mind’s] just limits, and to call to her bar the dictates of Common Sense.27 But these “decline this jurisdiction.” This deluding goddess needs to be rejected: “[F]or, in reality, Common Sense holds nothing of Philosophy, nor needs her aid. But, on the other person error) and “error juris” (error of the law) (IHM, V.vii, p. 68-9). His use of such terms suggests that he considers the logic of legal proceedings as a good weapon against his philosophical opponents. 24 IHM, VI.vi, p. 94. Hume is here described as a “midwife” who reared up and ushered the frightful progeny of the ideal system into the world: “nothing existing in nature, but impressions and ideas, following each other, without time, place, or subject.” 25 Compare IHM, V.vii, p. 67. 26 Obligation is one of the key terms (alongside duty, responsibility, and rights) in Reid’s reflections on moral and legal subjects. In Haakonssen’s excellent Introduction to this collection of writings we find a suggestion that Reid’s philosophy was “in several decisive respects he was the high point in a continuous development of Common Sense theory from the moral sense tradition.” Haakonssen also hints as to why Reid did not attempt to effect a conceptual merger of the two “new” senses. See: Thomas Reid on Practical Ethics. Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, Self-Government, Natural Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)p. xi, 27 IHM, I.v, p. 19. When Alexander Broadie introduces the main idea of the Enlightenment thus: “The only tribunal that matters is the tribunal of human reason, in particular the reason of men of letters.” – he seems to be strangely at odds with one of the Enlightenment’s chief representatives, i.e. Reid and Reid’s own use of the tribunal metaphor. Alexander Broadie, “Introduction – What was the Scottish Enlightenment?” in: The Scottish Enlightenment. An Anthology, ed. Broadie, p. 8.

130

Chapter Eleven

hand, Philosophy (if I may be permitted to change the metaphor) has no other root but the principles of Common Sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them: severed from its root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots.” In this way, Reid, the true philosopher, renounces the guidance of a philosophy (or, to change the metaphor, declines to remain in the service of a philosophy) that is doomed to waste away; instead, he turns to the higher authority: “let my soul dwell with Common Sense.”28 On his view, the problem consists in deciding to whom the philosopher should pledge his allegiance. To put this somewhat more broadly, when reaching for a rhetorical figure to support his argumentation, Reid customarily represents the troubling state of his contemporary philosophy in terms of legal contention. There are good reasons for this preoccupation with the law, for we are reminded that the Scottish Enlightenment was a period in which the legal system of the country was in the process of being shaped. In the words of a scholar, “the best law [was expected] to emerge out of the competitive litigation of individuals seeking resolution of their individual disputes.”29 But it was also a period when theorists, among whom there were many philosophers, were concerned with the law, and when philosophy and law were joined by strong ties.30 Not unexpectedly, this concern is voiced by both Hutcheson and Reid. A large section of Hutcheson’s Inquiry is devoted to issues that we may describe as philosophical foundations of law. One of the basic problems raised by him is that of obligation: “Can we have any sense of obligation, abstracting from the laws of a superior?”31 The answer is found in the Moral Sense: “there is naturally an obligation upon all men to benevolence.”32 Drawing in this manner an essential link between the Moral Sense and obligation, Hutcheson thus provides a secure foundation for common and universal law, thus for a system which would hopefully allow us to make out the strength of Reid’s 28

IHM, I.iii, p. 18. John W. Cairns, “Legal theory,” in: The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Broadie, p. 236. 30 Cairns speaks about a demand (in Enlightenment Scotland) for “adequately educated lawyers: philosopher lawyers, in a word.” Cairns, “Legal theory,” p. 233. Hume, in passing, comments on analogy as the prevalent method of constructing legal argumentation: “Many of the reasonings of lawyers are of this analogical nature, and depend on very slight connections of the imagination.” Hume, “Of Justice,” p. 590; my emphasis. This seems to be also the method behind Reid’s use of rhetoric in his Inquiry. 31 IBV, Treatise II, Sect. VII.i, p. 266. 32 IBV, Treatise II, Sect. VII.i, p. 267; my emphasis. 29

“The Sovereign Mistress of our Opinions”

131

rhetoric. The existing, divinely established order of things supplies a metaphysical basis for Reid’s Common Sense. Seen from a moral and legal perspective, this is ultimately the tribunal before which Reason and Philosophy herself are answerable. Although Reid’s point of departure is that of a post-Cartesian philosopher, an isolated mental self-anatomist; his point of arrival is that of a prodigal son’s obedient and humble, respectful of Nature-given first intuitions and beliefs, with Reason appointed as their guardian.

To conclude The way in which a Moral-Sense ethics is predicated upon a critique of self-love and interest is analogous to the way in which a Common-Sense epistemology is predicated upon a refutation of the scepticism that informs post-Cartesian inquiries into the human mind. The Hobbesian individualist, driven by self-love and blind to moral qualities of other people and their actions is parallel to the Cartesian solipsist thinker in his lone pursuit of the ultimate justification of his beliefs. We have here two aspects and types of self-centeredness, one moral and the other cognitive; a selfseeking subjectivity is a moral analogue to a self-justifying Cogito of epistemology. Consequently, the permanent state of interpersonal enmity and conflict among members of the Hobbesian commonwealth (and of any actual “large, rich, and warlike Nation” that fits Mandeville’s description) is parallel to the syndrome of permanent doubt of the Cartesian (and Lockean) ego, shut up in a world of suspicious ideas. An ethics of universal rivalry parallels an epistemology of universal disbelief; both need to be refuted. In different ways, then, Hutcheson and Reid work towards an explosion of ill-conceived individualism, of isolationist and reductive notions of human active and cognitive powers. Moral-Sense ethics is an open-subject ethics, an ethics which leaves open space for the exercise of benevolence (or beneficence) as a possible motivation of human actions. This ethics leaves room for man’s social instincts, for man as a creature that is interpersonal and thus obliged, tied to other individuals by bonds of benevolence, kindness, love, etc. Clearly, the Moral Sense only makes sense if it is communal. It is thus a common sense, a sense of a commonly shared realm of interpersonal bonds of obligation, a sense that discovers, confirms, and justifies public good or commonwealth. Analogously, Common-Sense philosophy, even in Reid’s narrow epistemological approach, is underpinned by assumptions which are far from morally neutral and which found due if “unphilosophical” expression in a rhetoric of duty and legal authority.

CHAPTER TWELVE CULTURE OF EXCESS AND NEW CANONS FOR THE NEAR FUTURE MARCIN SARNEK

To address non-sense in culture, the nonsense that becomes culture’s both productive and burdening surplus, I suggest to turn to copyright debates. More precisely, this article focuses on a particular logic of the recent developments in international copyright regulations, and of the civilization-wide lobbying for new copyright legislation, which universally advertises to eradicate all danger to human creativity: piracy. These changes, the surrounding rhetoric, and the brutal litigation against assumed copyright infringers, justify a claim that one of the most violent fronts of the new network-capitalism are the battles for access to culture.1 Of course, as anyone who has ever attempted to comprehend the notion of intellectual property finds out instantly, copyright discourse abounds in examples of nonsense and absurdity. In fact, it is a crucial and enjoyable part of any research in intellectual property to chronicle anecdotal material on how copyrights are used to ridicule the concepts of common sense logic that was once a foundation of the copyright regime, aptly summarized in a concise as much as cryptic provisions of the American Constitution. Not the first of the legal acts to protect copyrights, yet the first to place it within a constitutional framework, it empowers Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and 1

It is crucial to notice that intellectual property related discourse is really, when it comes to its economic and social impact, nothing but child’s play when compared to the reach of other intellectual property dilemmas and the effective use of intellectual property in pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. In other words, it is useful to bear in mind that all of the issues discussed in the cultural contexts, interesting as they are, may be justly treated as mere illustration of more globally pressing issues, exponentially intensified.

134

Chapter Twelve

Discoveries.” In general, as numerous authors document, the shift in these regulations is from this common sense logic, supporting compensation for creativity and promoting creativity through a promise of such compensation (which creates a bargain of privileges between authors, publishers, and the public) to an economic incentive based copyright system, securing material rights, and nearly total control over access to, distribution, and use of copyrighted works belonging to copyright holders,2 in whose interest it is often to hinder creativity, be it for censorial or – more often – economic reasons. Many of these equally scary and funny anecdotes illustrate most aptly the current copyrights crisis as well as the points made in this paper, one of those being the unprecedented ubiquity of copyrights-touched human activities, and the growing social and individual insecurity in a media world where copyrights have become a new Catch-22: a law that nobody understands, yet which covers all and which applies to all. The basic problem with the enforcement of the copyright regime is, it seems, not that hundreds of millions of people globally believe they deserve a free lunch, or that they willingly and consciously steal from authors, because they might have fallen victim to the ill ideology claiming that it is information’s nature to be free. Rather, as Litman argues, the problem lies in the simple contention that people do not believe3 in copyrights, or they do not believe that copyright laws say what they say. Generally, people fail to believe they might be infringing anyone’s rights when they are singing popular songs at a campfire. They fail to believe they are liable when they discuss ways of getting around copy-protection technologies they would want to circumvent to create a fair-use copy of a legally acquired music CD. More even, people do not know what they pay for when the money changes hands and they take a music CD home. It would be then but a slight an exaggeration to say that the copyright controversies also fittingly illustrate the more general tensions between the commonsensical understanding of the principles that underline (or, indeed, are commonsensically believed to underline) the Western Civilization, and the legal reality of the said regime. Generally, again, a commonsense belief that it is common sense 2

See e.g. Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2006), pp.82-84, 131-133,138-139,194; Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrigths and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York and London, New York University Press, 2003), pp. 174-175; Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 270-272. 3 Litman, Digital Copyright, p. 195.

Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future

135

that makes law is nowhere questioned more effectively than by the copyright laws. A crucial methodological problem in dealing with copyrights in cultural contexts is how to avoid referring to the hermetic language of the legal theory and of the philosophy of the law. Unfortunately, it is legal theory and practice that shuts down the public’s access to the copyright debate, by placing it under an argument-proof cover of legal complexity and authority which is beyond social perception. This results in a universal unawareness of the legal regime people are subjected to and in almost universally compliant responses to intimidation. Yet, on the other hand, it is in the philosophy of the law that we can find most harsh criticism of the copyright regime as well as almost ready-made solutions to the current crisis, particularly in the philosophies of the legal process (like ones hypothetically based on communicational power principles proposed by Habermas), or – on more practical levels – ideas from lawyer-academics Lawrence Lessig (the creator of the Creative Commons license), Michael Geist, Jessica Litman, and others. Also, the traditional prospective and retrospective theories of punishment that discourage punishing individuals in a manner that would violate a socially accepted notion of justice, punishing only randomly selected few offenders, in hope that the prospective function of the punishment should deter others from following, suggest a legal course to tackle the crisis. On the other hand, as piracy is persecuted more and more aggressively, the absolute model of penalization of universal illegitimate behavior has also with time be questioned, although – again – any large scale mobilization of social pressure is unlikely due to the cryptic language on the one hand and, on the other, a huge indoctrination effort from the copyright industries. It is in such sad reality that the copyright debates exploded into exchanges of heated accusations which universally conclude in the Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies manner: as the discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving copyrights infringement and stealing approaches one. Obviously, the analogy equating piracy with stealing is a curious one, it is perhaps the most vivid manifestation of the turn the logic of the copyright industries took in recent years. This logic is as powerful as it is simple: it is by incessant references to the foundational principles of the civilization (“thou shall not steal”, or even, “thou shall not kill”, as some most ingenious defenders of the new copyright regime tend to suggest “piracy is worse than murder”4) that the copyright lobby 4

Unbelievably, these are actual words from a recording artist, Szymon Wydra. See: Marcin Maj, “Piractwo jest gorsze niĪ morderstwo twierdzi Wydra,” Dziennik Internautów, (2007-03-01):12. Dec. 2009

136

Chapter Twelve

chose to hide behind, educating the ignorant public about the perennial nature of copyright protections, leaving them all the more ignorant about the legal trade-offs the public was unwittingly forced to accept in the process. The major premises of this education are multifaceted: to selectively educate about the copyright law and to provide a rigid disciplinary apparatus to massage the public into acceptable behavior. As documented by the annual IFPI Digital Music Report 2010, since 2003 more than 100.000 civil and criminal legal actions were taken against file sharers in 22 countries. The report continues to state that although “[e]ducation is an essential element in addressing piracy,” it can only be part “of the solution, alongside good commercial music services and wellenforced legislation.”5 This education supported by intimidation appears successful, as “surveys have showed both in the US and Europe that these waves of well-publicized legal actions had a very significant impact in raising awareness of the law on unauthorized file-sharing.”6 Because of these links of copyrights to education, and because in other contexts, copyrights are often presented by copyright optimists as rooted in “natural justice” and as a natural law7, while natural rights to participate in culture, embraced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of 1948, are only rarely linked to copyright legislation and rhetoric,8 in my . Also, consider this: As a Chicago resident Jammie Tomas-Rhasset was fined $2mln for illegally downloading 24 songs, Conor McCarthy reported in his blog seven crimes that would be maximum-fined less than piracy, including a calculated cash-equivalent for maximum prison-years individuals could be sentenced for these crimes. The list includes kidnapping, stealing an actual CD, robbing Bryan Adams, burning Lars Ulrich’s house, stalking Reba McIntire, starting a “dog fight empire,” murdering someone “second-degree style”. Conor McCarthy, “Seven Crimes to Consider Before Music Piracy,” Gaper’s Blog (200909-17):12 Dec. 2009 . 5 IFPI Digital Music Report 2010 (2010): 20 Feb. 2010 . 6 IFPI Digital Music Report 2010. 7 See e.g.: Alfred C.Yen, “Restoring the Natural Law: Copyright as Labor and Possession,” Ohio State Law Journal (Vol. 51, pp. 517-559, 1990); Boston College Law School Research Paper No. 1990-04. Available at . 8 See e.g.: Orit Fischman Afori, “Human Rights and Copyright: The Introduction of Natural Law Considerations into American Copyright Law,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal (Vol. 14, No. 2, 2004). Available at SSRN:

Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future

137

research I have chosen to make use of the notion of perennialism, a philosophy of education notorious for its obsessive promotion of the canon of great works by “dead white men,” employed during the educational process to achieve the ultimate goal of perennial education. Perennialism, designed by the philosophy’s founder, Mortimer J. Adler, around the great ideas of Western civilization,” which students are to acquire in the educational process, provides a possibility of a thought experiment to check the copyright logic against the market practices and legal provisions exercised and lobbied for recently. The provisional conclusions of this research tend to be far from surprising: while the piracy panic induced by the copyright-rich has indeed little to do with the actual economic losses of the cultural content providers, the calls to eradicate piracy in the name of the supposedly perennial material rights to control the distribution and use of culture, have succeeded in not as much manipulating the public into believing such claims, yet they did succeed in providing false rationalization to the revisions of the international copyright regime that is to result in a thicker, more impervious control. The critique of the significance of the canon was central to the rise of Cultural Studies in the western Academia, thus any further rationalization of the criticism the canon power-game of exclusions and inclusions gave birth to can be omitted here. I am going to note, however, a crucial aspect of the canon that, although often recognized, equally often seems to be just too easily dismissed: the compiling of the Canon provides educators with a readymade edition of the cultural archive, the archive that so frequently has been described as impenetrable. Yet, how often do we wonder what exactly do we mean when we speak about the information overflow and about the pile of knowledge that overburdens this civilization? Raj Reddy of Carnagie Mellon University and the leading researcher behind the Million Books Project establishes that around 100 million book titles have been published globally since the birth of printing, with perhaps 80% dating from after 1900.9 (On the margin it could be noted that the list of Great Books compiled by the Mortimer Foundation, consists in more than 85 % of books written before 1900. This represents the evident ambitions of the canon-creators – canons help separate the good and valuable from the worthless and incalculable junk.) Every year

9

Rej Reddy and Jaime Carbonell, "Million Book Digital Library Project: Research Issues in Data Mining and Text Mining", Talk presented at International Conference on Data Mining, Nov 28, 2005 and MSR India TechVista Symposium, Jan 12, 2006, media presentation available online: 12 Dec. 2009 .

138

Chapter Twelve

approximately 950.000 new book titles are added to this pile.10 Of these, around 450.000 titles are published in English and between 120.000 – 140.000 in the USA.11 Thus, already in 1960s it was established that a complete library in an average subfield of academic study consisted of approximately 10.000 titles.12 It is, in fact, this kind of mind boggling excess of information that moved the very authors of these findings to set in motion attempts to develop a new medium which would promise a new kind of library, and which somehow turned against its own creator’s ambitions to organize this colorful mess, since today no other medium is criticized more vigorously for maximizing chaos of information than the world wide web. Again, a marginal thought here: it is, obviously, the new media environment that makes all copyright holders uneasy, to use a euphemism. If we are (again) to naively refer to a commonsense notion of justice, it must strike as truly astounding that today the greatest legal care is being extended over the market sector which, while pretending to be the cutting edge of technology, marketed media that were technologically outdated the moment they hit the market (like the compact disc or the digital versatile disc), and for years have not only failed to recognize the potentials of the Internet, but (often successfully) attempted to hold back its development, to block numerous new technologies under a theory they might promote the ominous piracy, to litigate against creators of such technologies, and to put people who used this technology to prison. In the 19th century reality this could be comparable to Pony Express trying to stop the spread and reach of telegraph companies, which is, by the way, exactly what Pony Express tried to do, before it was pushed out of the market in just 18 months after it was set up.13 Today, the same market sector calls for taking a step back, technologically and ethically, and to promote the universal values that apparently had given us the entertainment industry. In May 2009, Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO for Sony Pictures Entertainment spilled a rare outburst of corporate honesty during a media panel:

10

Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, “How Much Information” (2003): 13 Dec. 2009 . 11 Lyman and Varian, “How Much Information”. 12 J.C.R. Licklider, “Libraries of the Future,” in Internet Dreams. Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors, ed. Mark Stefik (Cambridge, MASS: MIT Press, 2001), p. 26. 13 Robert Ellis Smith, Ben Franklin’s Web Site. Privacy and Curiosity from Plymout Rock to the Internet (Providence, RI: Privacy Journal, 2000), p. 66.

Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future

139

I'm a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period. (The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. [...] And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content – music, newspapers, movies and books – have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.14

I suggest to go back to the selected statistics that may tell us something about the condition of creativity in the Internet era. All these books referred to earlier sell at approx. 2.3 bln units a year, globally.15 Just to reflect upon a crisis in readership consider this: in comparison to 2.3bln units sold in a market which has a steady supply of nearly a million of new titles a year, a $10bln worth US music market sells approx 1,8 bln units from approx. 30.000 new releases, while global new music releases are approx. 90.000 releases.16 As everybody knows, since everybody seems to be well bathed in the oils of the perennial message from the entertainment content sector (a message that book markets never managed to put across), music industry has faced dramatic losses in recent years, which amount to average 10% year-to-year losses from the year 2000, although in some years there was actual growth in the market. The year 2000 was the one the industry recorded record high sales (in terms of units shipped, which had been a traditional, if suspect, way of measuring music sales before the RIAA made all this information semi secret in 2009), and long after piracy panic calls began. In the same period of time the number of new music releases from major labels grouped by the RIAA presumably dropped yearly an average 20 – 25 %, although this information depends heavily on the choice of sources; unfortunately the RIAA stopped publishing this information in 1999 (or so they say, as the data for 2001, the year the trend might have started, was briefly available on the RIAA website, as documented by Geroge Ziemann17). The music market’s sister DVD market grows an average 50% annually, though it seems as likely to be struck by piracy as the music market. *** 14

Michael Lynton, “Guardrails for the Internet: Preserving Creativity Online” (Huffington Post, 2009-05-26): 13 Dec. 2009 . 15 Lyman and Varian, “How Much Information.” 16 Lyman and Varian, “How Much Information.” 17 George Ziemann, “RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy” (2002, 2003, 2007, 2009): 13 Dec. 2009 .

140

Chapter Twelve

Hip hop is a suspect candidate to stand as the culture’s revolutionary spokesman. Yet hip hop, with all its bad press and frequent genuine originality problems, underlines the other aspect of canons of creativity: creativity based on a persistent appropriation and remixing of the cultural archive – the canon for a culture that has not had it and wants more. Of course, hip hop has been a veteran in the copyright wars from its earliest days, due to its use of sampling, a trend in culture that did not, however, begin with hip hop, and can be traced to almost any form of cultural activity, in music including Beethoven, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and perhaps most famously, for this composition brought about a significant dose of copyright mayhem to the world of 20th century classical music – Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which is almost entirely based on quotations from other composers, quotations often placing the quoted works in not very appreciative perspective, as was the case with a number of compositions by Penderecki plainly ridiculed by Berio. In short, however, the proponents of conservative cultural canons, who today work unwittingly hand in hand with those who say they sponsor creativity, may have a vital point: countering adolescent hip-hop aesthetics, or, more generally, countering the outbursts of creativity, they seem to be saying, “ok, we’ve had enough, time to reorganize and catalogue what we are.” And obviously, they are probably right, even when they refer to hip hop, when they say that most of the works created more or less recently do not add much in terms of qualitative values to the civilization’s archive, they only blur it. Why not cast a more sympathetic eye on the promises of the objective canon, then, to help students, or indeed society, find their way in the maze of the contemporary culture, of human knowledge? Edition, after all, is necessary. To create editions that summarize the canon, that help us know where we stand and what is humanly possible in art have been traditional ambitions of the most groundbreaking artists since Van Eyck, Velazquez, da Vinci, or Picasso. In music, too, such works have been appreciated as the masterpieces of genius composers who attempted to catalogue what had been and what may be: such was the ambition of Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Shostakovich’s cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues, Debussy’s Etudes, or Bartok’s Mikrokosmos. Now, nearly all of these works can be found in the Petrucci Music Library (also known as International Music Score Library Project)18 – a project that started off in 2006 as a Wikipedia-like or Project Gutenberglike searchable database of Bach Gesellschaft editions of Bach’s sheet music, which obviously at this point were in the public domain. Little time 18

International Music Score Library Project .

Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future

141

was needed to transform the IMSLP into a much wider project that stores and makes available for download out-of-copyright scanned music sheets, and within two years – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month, of which approximately 25% were new original works by aspiring composers who chose this way of publishing their music under a Creative Commons license.19 All these, should such staggering dynamics sustain, would amount to the annual publication of approx. 24.000 music scores, and to some unbelievable 6.000 scores of original “classical” music. Works by most of these composers will never be performed, let alone recorded and distributed, yet that all this huge creativity just happens without claims for compensation, makes a rather gloomy comparison to 90.000 new music titles of all genres released yearly by the music industry (which promotes creativity, right?). Yet late in 2007 the site’s creator, a Canadian student who thought the project was just a pastime distraction, received a Cease and Desist letter from Austria’s music publisher Universal Edition, in which the site was demanded to be closed since Europe’s copyright holders believed that while the uploaded scores may be in the public domain in Canada, they well may not be public domain in Europe, where the copyright protection for publishing rights had recently been extended to 70 years post-mortem. Thus, as long as users from Europe are not blocked from accessing the site, the devastating infringing of European copyrights may rampage on – Bartok’s music being one too obvious a case (Bartok having died in 1945), and another – works by Shostakovich, which although created under the Soviet copyrights system and thusly enjoying a very limited protection of 25 years from the original publication date, were reclaimed under the 1996 GATT agreement. Although Universal Edition did not ever present any list of actual works that might be infringed, the student first obliged, feeling he is not up to defending his activities in a Canadian court that would be forced to decide whether European regulations apply to Canadian citizens. Later, however, supported by a number of Canadian copyright lawyers, the website developed a complicated system of copyrights reviews and disclaimers, and cautiously reopened in 2008.

19

Michael Geist, “The Day the Music Died. Music copyright in the spotlight” (BBC Online, 2 November 2007): 13 December 2009 http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/ 7074786.stm.

142

Chapter Twelve

The Petrucci library case shows that access to copyrighted works is just a part of the problem. The true crisis of the copyright regulations is highlighted when we think about the public domain works which may be inaccessible due to copyright policies, and differences in copyright regimes. Today, Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes in the USA the production and dissemination of technologies, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as Digital Rights Management or DRM) and it also criminalizes the act of circumventing access controls, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. Similar legislation has been passed in many European countries, in response to the proposed European Union Copyright Directive (InfoSoc Directive). In both DMCA and InfoSoc Directive, production, distribution etc. of equipment used to circumvent both access- and copy-protection is prohibited. Under DMCA, a potential user who wants to avail herself of an alleged fair use privilege to crack copy protection (which is not prohibited) would have to do it herself since no equipment would lawfully be marketed for that purpose. Under InfoSoc Directive, this possibility would not be available since any circumvention of copy protection is made illegal. Recapitulating, for years now the industry which rhetorically protects creativity is quite busy lobbying for legal regulations that hinder creativity. The development of a future new media format for culture industries – more or less everybody realizes the new medium will be network based and would not require material intercession of a physical medium is today hindered by online piracy, most dramatically by the Peer-2-Peer services. Should Peer-2-Peer be made illegal nothing will stop the spread of the new medium which, ironically, might use a modified Peer-2-Peer model for cheap distribution of copy-protected files. Should this happen, we have to inquire about the access to public domain works which will be locked in digital management rights technologies and anti-circumvention regulations. To realize the implications of these processes, I suggest all readers to verify the prices of Amazon’s Kindle books and compare them to traditional paper books available from Amazon.com. Today, Amazon Kindle, the first successful electronic wireless book format, sells many public domain books that could be downloaded for free from Gutenberg Project library or the Million Books Project, well, cheaply for a couple of dollars, amidst promises of cheaper access to culture. Prices for copyrighted Kindle books are, amazingly, often higher than their paper editions – one does not even have to speculate the vast differences in fair use and first sale doctrine rights (like the right to resell a second hand

Culture of Excess and New Canons for the Near Future

143

paper edition) that do not apply to Kindle editions, to see there’s something wrong with this distribution model. *** In 2007, when Sony decided to drop producing copy-protected CDs (yet pressed for DRM in digital files) it also announced that the yearly implementation of their DRM and copy-protection technologies would cost them up to 65% of the annual income. In other words, should the market be shaped by players who are capable of creating and financing new piracy-secure standards, others who would lack this capability may be forced out of the market, only because they will not be able to and will not want to recognize the copy-protection standard enforced with the state’s authority and the penal system. These other players, the so called independent sector, take up today as much as 25% of the global music market, and most of them do not voice their piracy concerns in any way as loud as the major companies do. In fact, many, openly oppose litigation and silently support file-sharing. The ultimate end result of this process, should public control over copyrights regulations be continued to be sidestepped, is the dismissal and likely annihilation of the vital creative niches in the cultural market and a surrender to a preformatted canonical cultural taste. This cultural canon is becoming more and more limited. For example: as for today, only a handful of New York Times’ best contemporary American novels are available from Amazon Kindle. In such a world, plainly, the public domain ceases to be public.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN UNDERSTANDING COMMON SENSE: KANT, GADAMER AND HABERMAS REKHA G MENON1 AND N SREEKUMAR2

Introduction As part of his attempts to defend the normative ideals of Enlightenment, Jurgen Habermas attempts to reinvent the Enlightenment idea of reason in communication. In this endeavour to reinvent reason in communication and to make it a matter of this world, Habermas introduces the notion of communicative rationality. In this process, as observed by MacKendrick, Habermas ‘hypostatises the relation between reason and communication’3 by underestimating the role of affective elements in intersubjective relation. Apart from MacKendrick’s criticism from a psychoanalytic perspective feminists have raised similar concerns regarding Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Iris Marion Young criticises that Habermas implicitly reproduces an opposition between reason, and desire and feeling in his conception of communication by devaluing expressive and bodily aspects of communication.4 According to her the concreteness 1 Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology –Madras, Chennai-36, Tamilnadu, India. email: [email protected]. 2 Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 36, Tamilnadu, India. email: [email protected] 3 Kenneth G MacKendrick, Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jurgen Habermas's Critical Theory ( London: Routledge, 2008), p. 8 4 Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political theory,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota press, 1987), p.70

146

Chapter Thirteen

of the body such as gesture, facial expression, the affective aspects of speech such as tone of voice, rhythm (in writing punctuation, sentence construction) the musical and figurative aspects such as ‘metaphor, jokes and irony’ are expelled from Habermas’s communication model.5 This paper tries to explore the roots of such a problem in Habermas’s framework by analysing the role of common sense in his theory of communicative action. We trace back this issue to Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of ‘common sense’ or sensus communis as common feeling in his Critique of Judgment. We shall also examine how Hans-Georg Gadamer reinterprets this concept. Both Kant and Gadamer have exerted significant influence in shaping some of Habermas’s ideas. Further this analysis will try to expose the notion of common sense as it is understood today, by showing how the term attains different interpretations in Kant, Gadamer and Habermas. The present debate actually begins with Kant’s exposition of common sense as the basis of taste and reflective judgment in his third Critique, The Critique of Judgment. This paper tries to show how Habermas’s notion of community based on rationality differs from a notion of community that Kant presupposes in his The Critique of Judgment. This will expose some of the limitations of Habermas’s project in adequately theorizing the affective elements of human experience. Gadamer’s criticism of such a notion in his Truth and Method is based on a hermeneutic approach. Before we venture into these specific approaches we shall have a look at the way this concept is conceived in the tradition. The concept of common sense was important for the thinkers of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy and the Italian Jurist Giambattista Vico also considered it as vital. It falls into disrepute with the beginning of the enlightenment era where the belief in scientific progress and the individual’s capability of attaining truth and perfectibility are recognised.6 Kant attacks the idea of common sense in his essay titled “What is Enlightenment?” where he affirms the supreme authority of reason. He contests the importance given to common sense and interprets the term in a very different sense in his Critique of Judgment. Gadamer in Truth and Method views this enlightenment approach critically and refers to it as a ‘prejudice against all prejudices’. He states that there is one prejudice of the enlightenment that defines its essence and this fundamental prejudice is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power7. 5

Young, Feminism as Critique, p.71 Frits Van Holthoon, David R. Olson, Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Sciences (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987) 7 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continnum, 2005), p. 273.  6

Understanding Common Sense: Kant, Gadamer and Habermas

147

While questioning the Kantian conception of common sense in the third Critique, Gadamer refers to Vico and Oetinger and points out the importance of their interpretations of the term. His philosophical hermeneutics appreciates the authority of tradition in all our understanding of the world. He further places tradition in language and asserts the fundamental linguisticality of our very ontological status. Habermas, on the other hand, incorporates the idea of common sense in his theoretical framework under the umbrella term lifeworld. This paper has three sections. The first section examines the idea of common sense in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The second section analyses Gadamer’s criticism of Kant’s position and the third section deals with Anthony J. Cascardi’s criticism of Habermas’s idea of common sense. This paper attempts to argue that, Habermas’s idea of common sense differs from Kant’s and have affinities to the way it is interpreted in phenomenological and Hermeneutic traditions. The argument puts forth is that, such a position results in the failure to incorporate the role of affective elements in intersubjective relations.

The Role of Common sense in Kant’s Critique of Judgment Kant’s Critique of Judgment is an enquiry into the a priori status of reflective judgments through which he envisages to unify cognitive and moral realms and attain the unity of reason. He divides the faculty of judgment into two types: Judgments deduced from a universal, which are called determinant judgments and judgments for which a universal needs to be found, which are called reflective judgments. The latter are relevant in the realm of aesthetics and their function is to establish the unity of all empirical principles under the higher ones.8 On the other hand, determinant judgments operate under the realm of understanding, where the knowledge arrived is based on concepts and has no relevance in the realm of aesthetics. According to Kant, judgments of beauty are judgments of taste. To ensure the universality of the judgment of taste he presupposes an a priori principle in the judgment of taste which is not a determinant a priori.9 In this sense, the judgements of taste are not based on universal concepts which exist a priori in the mind but are presupposed by the mind as a result of the community sense, though they don’t exist as objective 8

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Dover Publications, 2005), p. 12.  9 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 21.

148

Chapter Thirteen

universals. He deduces the communicability of feelings from the communicability of cognitions and argues that, since cognitions are universally communicable the subjective conditions that follow them also must admit of universal communicability. This universal communicability of subjective feelings presupposes a common sense which is a logical presupposition and not based on psychological observations.10 Kant argues that the judgment of taste is laid only under this presupposition of a common sense. But he employs the word common sense differently than it is used generally to mean common understanding. Kant differentiates his idea of common sense from the mere sensus communis or the common understanding of the common men, which is a sound understanding and the possession of it does not imply merit or superiority.11According to him, common sense or sensus communis in the ordinary sense of the term, employs concepts and does not make judgments on the basis of mere feelings. He contends that the judgments of taste cannot be based on this. Therefore, he understands common sense differently and affirms that only under the presupposition that there is a common sense — by which we do not understand an external sense, but the effect resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers — the judgment of taste can be laid down.12 For him, the feeling of pleasure is produced by the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding. Thus, a beautiful object is something that elicits pleasure in us as the result of such a free play. Since it is a matter of free play of imagination and understanding, the experience of beauty never forms concepts and hence no knowledge is produced in the experience of beauty. Thus, as Kai Hammermeister points out, Kantian aesthetics is characterised by the independence of art from cognition and morality. Because of its formal nature it is free from the influence of history. Since it results in the subjectivisation of aesthetic experience it is firmly rooted in the notion of the subject.13 Gadamer in Truth and Method critically examines the ahistorical subjective nature of aesthetic experience which fails to acknowledge art’s claim to truth.

Gadamer’s Criticism of Kant’s Idea of Common Sense According to Gadamer, Kant rejects the possibility of cognitive understanding in the realm of art and subjectivizes the experience of art so 10

Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 56. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 101. 12 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 55. 13 Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 41 11

Understanding Common Sense: Kant, Gadamer and Habermas

149

that art becomes something that invokes aesthetic judgment. This discrediting of the work of art results from it being alienated from its totality of existence. Gadamer analyses the concept of taste and common sense in Kant’s philosophy in order to show how the idea of an ahistorical subjective mode of experience of art, as Kant propagates it, is problematic. Gadamer criticises Kant’s failure to give any significance to art as knowledge as he reduces sensus communis to a subjective principle. He points out that, in the Kantian concept of taste nothing is known of the objects which are judged to be beautiful. On the other hand, it is stated that there is a feeling of pleasure connected with them a priori in the subjective consciousness.14 Gadamer points out that, if we follow Kant’s understanding of taste, then there is not much significance given to the work of art. He finds fault with Kant’s peculiar notion of common sense and offers a different interpretation of this concept. Gadamer refers to Vico’s notion of sensus communis in order to elaborate this point. According to him, for Vico the sensus communis does not mean a general faculty but it is the sense that finds community. Gadamer adds “According to Vico what gives human will its direction is not the abstract universality of reason but the concrete universality represented by the community of a group, a people, a nation, or the whole human race. Hence, of developing this communal sense is of decisive importance for living. 15 He adds that, for Vico, sensus communis is the sense of what is right and of the common good that is to be found in all men; moreover it is a sense that is acquired through living in the community and is determined by its structures and aims.16 Hence common sense is a community sense developed and acquired through living in a particular community and it is not devoid of any ethical or political connotation.

According to Gadamer, Vico’s interpretation of common sense is similar to the Roman concept of sensus communis, where one’s own tradition was considered as extremely significant. He observes that, the concept sensus communis as conceived by Shaftesbury and many others ascribe considerable importance to society and he accuses that German enlightenment has emptied the term of its social role by intellectualising it.17 He points to the limitations of the distinction Kant makes between 14

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 38. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 19. 16 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 20. 17 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 27. 15

150

Chapter Thirteen

determinant and reflective judgments and affirms that it is difficult to reduce sensus communis to Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment. The main problem with Kant, according to Gadamer is that, there is no place for moral sense in his conceptualization of common sense. His philosophy is not inclusive of moral feeling and it has excluded the concept of sensus communis from moral philosophy.18 Analysing Kant’s doctrine, Gadamer states that sensus communis plays no role in Kant’s judgment and what he refers to as in the transcendental doctrine of judgment has nothing to do with sensus communis.19 Gadamer was critical of Kant’s understanding and interpretation of the term sensus communis. Gadamer further advances his discussion on common sense by equating tradition with language. He affirms that, hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition and that is what is to be experienced. But tradition, he adds, is not simply a process that experiences or teaches us to know and govern. It is language, asserts Gadamer.20 He further argues that, concepts are formed by language,21 and adds that it is because of language that man has a world at all. According to him, language is the originally human means to know the world and reality, and at the same time man’s being-in-the world is primordially linguistic.22 Hence, he asserts that all kinds of human communities are linguistic communities. He expounds a very dynamic conception of language where it is by nature the language of conversation. It fully realises itself only in the process of coming to an understanding and is not a mere means in that process. 23 He further adds that, in a real community of language we are always in agreement. He proceeds further in his argument and states that ‘the being that can be understood is language.’24 Thus he affirms that, our relation to the world is mediated through language. Gadamer states “By seeing that language is the universal medium of this mediation, we were able to expand our inquiry from its starting point, the Critiques of aesthetic and historical consciousness and the hermeneutics that would replace them, to universal dimensions. For man’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and hence intelligible.”25

18

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 30. 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 352. 21 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 427- 436. 22 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 440. 23 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 443. 24 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 471. 25 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 470-4. 19

Understanding Common Sense: Kant, Gadamer and Habermas

151

Gadamer, by analysing Vico’s position shows that moral and political meanings are attributed to common sense. Kant’s notion of common sense is obviously different from this. According to Kant, the experience of beautiful is universally communicable and he grounds the claim that the judgment of taste posses universal validity on such an assumption.26 Thus the difference between Kant’s and Gadamer’s standpoints regarding the notion of common sense becomes evident. While Kant talks about the possibility of community formed by senses, Gadamer asserts that community is linguistically constituted. Gadamer counters Kant’s claim that common sense is non-conceptual by asserting that it is situated in language. Now let us examine in the light of the above discussion what is Habermas’s position in this regard in his theory of communicative action.

Critique of Habermas’s idea of Common sense In the first two sections have attempted to expound the notion of common sense held by Kant and Gadamer. Habermas was influenced by Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, but he later develops his own position as critical hermeneutics which deviates and disagrees with Gadamer’s assumptions significantly. Habermas introduces the notion of lifeworld as a complementary concept to communicative action in his Theory of Communicative Action. As Cristina Lafont points out, Habermas’s modification of Searle’s speech act theory lies at the basis of one of the central developments of his project. She adds that, this is the introduction of the concept of the lifeworld as a necessary correlate of communicative action.27 The concept of lifeworld is introduced as ‘the unthematic knowledge that complements, supplements, and accompanies communicative action and provides the context’ within which it is embedded.28 Habermas accepts the insights of the phenomenological tradition in developing this concept although he is critical of its affinity towards a philosophy of Consciousness. Habermas conceives intersubjectivity as language or

26

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 52. Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans. Jose Medina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) p. 163. 28 JĦrgen Habermas, Maeve Cook, On the Pragmatics of Communication (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 238-239. 27

152

Chapter Thirteen

lifeworld.29 The lifeworld is ‘the sphere of what is daily taken for granted; the sphere of commonsense’.30 Anthony J Cascardi critically analyses Habermas’s idea of common sense. Cascardi’s criticism of Habermas is based on his reading of Kant’s third Critique. He points out that Habermas’s reading of Kant’s third Critique was influenced by Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of it in her works such as Lectures on Kant’s Political Theory and this has also influenced Habermas in developing his theory of communicative action. Habermas admits this in his essay The German-Jewish Heritage.31 The major difference between Kant’s and Habermas’s interpretation of aesthetics is that, while Kant does not make it a separate realm, Habermas attributes to aesthetics an independent status akin to science and morality. Thus, Art forms an autonomous sphere with independent validity claims in his theory of Communicative Action. According to Kant there is no separate realm of aesthetics, since aesthetic experience does not result in knowledge.32 Kant’s interpretation of common sense as the faculty enabling communicability finds its resonance in Habermas’s communication theory, since Habermas also presupposes a communication community. As Gerard Delanty points out, Communication as a form of social action is the central concept of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. According to this view, since social action is based on language society is conceived as a linguistically created and sustained entity.33 Cascardi bases his criticism on the distinction Kant makes between the determinant and reflective judgments. He points out that Habermas’s communicative action is based on the principles of what Kant could have called ‘determinant judgment’, whereas Kant’s notion of aesthetic reflection is closer to Wittgenstein’s interest in modes of knowledge that proceeds in the absence of criteria.34 According to him, Kant is not accepting the autonomous status of artworks because in his scheme aesthetic experience never attains a conceptual status. He adds that, Kant’s 29

J. Masschelein, “The Relevance of Habermas’s Communicative Turn: Some Reflections on Education as Communicative Turn” in Studies in Philosophy and Education Vol.11, (1991), pp. 95-111. 30 Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, Seyla Benhabib, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse on Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 226. 31 Anthony J. Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 154. 32 Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 49-50. 33 Gerard Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 113 34 Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, p. 54.

Understanding Common Sense: Kant, Gadamer and Habermas

153

third Critique is falsely seen as a theory of art, whereas it is an account of what remains left out of the discussion of cognition and morality. Cascardi tries to place the third Critique in a new light by stating that it is not concerned with the quality of the art work, but instead it deals with ‘how the subject feels the difference between fact and value, between pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and noumenal realms.35 In the third Critique Kant designates taste as sensus communis aestheticus and common understanding as sensus communis logicus36. Cascardi’s argument is based on this point. He interprets sensus communis aesthetics and sensus communis logicus as common feeling and common human understanding respectively. According to him Kant is referring to the sensus communis aesthetics (common feeling) rather than to the sensus communis logicus, which designates common human understanding.37 Cascardi observes that Habermas’s theory of communicative action ‘elides Kant’s reference to the sensus communis aestheticus with sensus communis logicus’. As a consequence, Habermas understands community as conceptually mediated while for Kant it is aesthetically.38 Cascardi repeatedly affirms the difference between Kant’s and Habermas’s positions and observes that, whereas Kant insists that claims of taste maintains a subjective universal validity, Habermas concentrates on the way in which the background of normative validity itself becomes autonomous and objectified in the modern world. According to him, while Kant’s interest in the third Critique centres on the pleasures associated with communication rather than on establishing the preconditions for aesthetic validity claims possible in the modern enlightened world, Habermas casts aside aesthetic pleasure and sensuous apprehension of the world.39 Habermas does this as he attempts to rationalise the aesthetic sphere, which was not Kant’s intention. Cascardi adds a new dimension to this debate by stating that Kant’s third Critique actually points to the difficulty of such a notion of community that both Hannah Arendt and Habermas consider as the basis of democratic politics. He adds that, though Arendt and Habermas need to presuppose such a notion of community in the way Kant presupposes common sense in his Critique of Judgment; its existence cannot be

35

Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 55-56. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 103. 37 Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 149-150. 38 Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 150-151. 39 Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 150-151 36

154

Chapter Thirteen

proved.40 He also argues that, the notion of communication in the third Critique is not based on any idea of linguistic universals. 41

Concluding Remarks In this paper an attempt has been made to expound the notion of common sense as discussed in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Hans Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas. Habermas’s idea of Lifeworld or common sense that forms the basis of his theory of communicative action differs from the notion of common sense that Kant conceives in his third Critique. This paper has also tried to link the psychoanalytic and feminist criticisms of Habermas’s theory of communicative action by MacKendrick and Iris Marion Young with that of Cascardi. MacKendrick argues that Habermas fails to theorise the role of affective elements in intersubjective relations while Cascardi points out that Habermas fails to appropriate common sense in the Kantian sense in his theory of communicative action. As a concluding remark it can be stated that Habermas’s failure in adequately theorizing the role of affective elements in his theory of communicative action overshadows his Kantian legacy. Habermas fails to theorise the role of affective elements in intersubjective relations in his theory of communicative action because of his failure in appropriating common sense in the Kantian sense. It is evident from the criticism of Cascardi that Habermas’s understanding of common sense differs substantially from Kant’s understanding of the same. The main limitation of this position, as Cascardi points is, that it overlooks the fact that life in the society may depend upon affective relations of pleasure, love, attraction and antagonism that the logic of consensus does not admit.

40 41

Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 64-65. Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment, pp. 78-79.

PART III: SENSE AND MULTI-CULTURAL DILEMMAS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THAID UP IN KNOTS: MAKING SENSE OF THAI SOCIO-CULTURAL VALUES KATARZYNA ANCUTA

To a person used to Western logic, even a brief immersion in Thai culture may seem akin to a step through the looking glass. For how is one to make sense of the place where people smile and say “yes” when they mean “no,” “half an hour” inevitably turns into “next week,” most good-looking women are actually men, politicians use black magic to crush the opposition, actors pronounce themselves angels, offerings to the spirits can be deducted from taxes, taxis are pink and cars can virtually change colour when marked with a sticker? How is one not to sympathise with S.P. Somtow’s American heroine trapped in the carnivalesque hell of Bangkok, trying in vain to convince herself: “There is a reason for everything. I think the reasons are all within my grasp. And if only I can grab hold of these reasons, if only I can truly see what’s going on… well, maybe I’ll understand what it was that impelled me to get into this mess in the first place.”1 At the same time, however, the apparent absurdity of social life and institutions in the Kingdom of Siam is much more often pondered upon by foreigners than Thais, who do not seem to see anything extraordinary in the way Thai society operates. But if Thais see sense where the West remains baffled, this suggests that the two cultural systems are at least to some extent incompatible and capable of existing independently of each other. One way to address this discrepancy is through examining key socio-cultural values manifest in contemporary Thai society and the ways

1

S.P. Somtow, The Other City of Angels (Bangkok: Diplodocus Press, 2007), p. 165.

158

Chapter Fourteen

contemporary Thais respond to these values in their shaping and reshaping of cultural identities. Since Thailand successfully evaded European colonialism in the past, its logical system developed irrespectively of European rationalism. Soraj Hongladarom looks for the origins of the Thai thought and knowledge system in the Traiphum, a 14th century text based on the Theravada Buddhist cosmology written by King Lithai of Sukothai, providing a frame of reference to the Thai world past and present. Hongladarom writes: “The world of the Traiphum is a stable one, where everything revolves around the axis that lies at its absolute centre and provides the entire universe with its core and meaning. The central axis of the universe symbolises the central authority in politics, culture and epistemology.”2 This centrality, epitomised by the divine power of the king, according to the author can account for the fact that while flirting with Western science and technology, no attempts were made “to integrate the system of thinking underlying Western science into the fabric of Thai culture.”3 In his article on the disparity between Thai and Western systems of knowledge, Hongladarom addresses the ongoing debate on “what limits should be put on [Western science and technology] in order that they do not swamp the indigenous forms of knowledge and practices that were held dear by the Siamese culture.”4 Hongladarom stresses that Thai science and technologies coexist in harmony with Buddhist teachings that form their frame of reference. He quotes as examples traditional Thai medicine and pharmacology based on the Buddhist concept of humoral body, bronze casting technologies intended for making Buddha images, and even wine and beer-making, associated by the author with Buddhist festivities. Contrary to that, modern, Western type of science, frequently seen as threatening to the values characteristic of the Buddhist cosmological system, is usually separated from its philosophical foundations and allowed to work only at the superficial, material level. As a result of that, while the specific Western technologies that do not challenge Thai cultural worldview have successfully managed to replace their local counterparts, perceived as more efficient, the system of thought underlying scientific enquiry, much more threatening to the Traiphum was prevented from coming into Thai culture. 2 Soraj Hongladarom, “Growing Science in Thai Soil: Culture and Development of Scientific and Technological Capabilities in Thailand.” Science Technology Society 2004; 9; 51. DOI: 10.1177/097172180400900103, p. 54. 3 Hongladarom, p. 59. 4 Hongladarom, p. 55.

Thaid Up in Knots: Making Sense of Thai Socio-cultural Values

159

This dichotomy of the “spiritually useful” Buddhist and “materially useful” modern science, claims Hongladarom, is best illustrated by a specific attitude to knowledge and education, understood by most Thais not as a process but as a “treasure” enhancing people’s social status and providing them with authority. It is also responsible, for creating a situation of aporia in Thai culture. The said aporia, compared in the article with a feeling of alienation and not being able to find a way out, is said to be characteristic of the Thai psyche that cannot easily reconcile the basic tenets of religious teachings and modern science, for instance simultaneously accepting and rejecting the existence of the supernatural. The almost palpable belief in the supernatural in Thailand goes hand in hand with technological developments and rampant materialism and consumerism. In Bangkok, ghosts travel by skytrain, exorcists can be accessed by mobile phone, local spirits and deities are treated as business associates, while fortune-tellers and spiritual mediums promote new shopping malls. Most Western texts describe this melange of the material and the spiritual in terms of a paradox. A Thai opinion, voiced eloquently by S.P. Somtow is slightly more ambiguous: “A paradox […] can be resolved by attacking it logically. In Thailand, two contradictory things don’t just have to seem to be true at the same time; they can actually be true! So these things aren’t paradoxes at all, at least not in the Aristotelian sense.”5 S.P. Somtow is today among the best known, and certainly the most popular Thai writers in the world. Residing both in America and Thailand, Somtow writes about Thailand in English, addressing many of the concerns familiar to the Westerners and toying with the Western concept of making sense of the Thai world in order, as he puts it “to deal with [his own] cultural schizophrenia.”6 In his novel, The Other City of Angels, he describes the trials and tribulations of a Jewish-American socialite thrown into the excessive and ostentatious world of Bangkok’s high society, where nothing is what it seems or what it is supposed to be. For Somtow, Bangkok, and by extension Thailand, “is the one place in the world where there is absolutely no distinction between illusion and reality.”7 He continues to explain: In America, there is a great dividing line – the great Either-Or. On one side of the chasm, man; on the other side, woman. Here black, there white. Republican and Democrat. Gay and straight. Hither shit, yon shinola. 5

Somtow, p. 169. Somtow, Dragon’s Fin Soup (Bangkok: Asia Books, 2002), p. 4. 7 Somtow, The Other City of Angels, p. 91. 6

160

Chapter Fourteen Bangkok, on the other hand, is a lover who can fulfil your every fantasy, and makes that fantasy utterly real for the duration of it; it is the one place where you actually can buy love.8

The motif of illusion merging with reality as a characteristically Thai feature is a recurrent one in Somtow’s writing. A very good example here can be his short story “The Last Time I Died in Venice” culminating in a discovery that a real Bangkok slum was used to fake a fake virtual realitybased software. In the introduction to his collection of stories Dragon’s Fin Soup, Somtow once again stresses the uniqueness of Thai perception of reality. Somtow, best known for his fantastic fiction, relates an event in which one of his stories ended up on a reading list for a course in modern fantastic literature in Arizona. One of the students taking the course was Thai. “The young man from Thailand couldn’t figure out why he had to read my story. ‘There is,’ he said to my friend, ‘no fantasy element in it.’ This, you must understand, is the prevailing atmosphere in the land where I grew up, so any real-life incidents I relate must be understood in that context.”9 The understanding of the material world as illusion (and, by extension, illusion as reality) is obviously resonant of Buddhist teachings and complies with the predominant Thai worldview. With the Buddhist population amounting to 95%, Thai culture can easily be seen as shaped by Buddhist religious and philosophical concepts, one of the most influential being that of kamma (karma), stipulating that through the accumulation of merit and sin people become responsible for their fate. To put it rather simplistically, negative kamma is expected to result in suffering, while positive kamma brings good fortune, both of which can extend well beyond the duration of one life cycle. When this statement is reversed, good fortune or bad luck can be seen as the direct result of one’s past deeds and are treated accordingly – the rich and beautiful are seen as reaping the well-deserved benefits of their merits while the ugly and destitute are seen as suffering the results of their previous errors. This can, to a certain extent, account for the Thai concern with appearance, both with regard to the actual physical body and to the concept of face, or the projection of the model of self one finds socially acceptable (usually discussed as originating from the Chinese concept of mien-tzu) – face that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced during interaction. Brian McGrath compares Thai faces to “reflective surfaces” and suggests that “The Thai social practice of “face” focuses an attentive mind 8 9

Somtow, p. 91. Somtow, Dragon’s Fin Soup, p. 2.

Thaid Up in Knots: Making Sense of Thai Socio-cultural Values

161

and graceful body away from vulgar and impulsive reactions to outside stimuli but instead dictates the maintenance of calm poise, polite deference, and outward serenity in all public situations.”10 What the quote does not mention is the fact that like in many other Asian countries, Thai face is a collective experience – one does not only lose one’s individual face, but also the face of the entire family, or community. As a result, Thais appear to be trapped in a continuous obligation to save other people’s face, even at the cost of their individual comfort or happiness. The Thai concept of face involves a strict division into the public and the private. Now, most cultures tend to differentiate between behaviours that are acceptable in public and in private. The Thai idea of public propriety, however, seems to be taken to the extreme in all sorts of official and semi-official situations involving human interaction. The result, logical to a Thai, is somehow perplexing to Westerners who usually expect clear answers and take official statements quite literally. It takes them a while to understand that when a Thai official answers “yes” he or she may actually mean “no” but does not want to appear abrupt, hoping to alleviate the negativity of the answer. In order to understand the Thai logic behind such behaviour one needs to be familiar with the concept of kreng jai. Nongluck Sriussadaporn-Charoenngam and Fredric M. Jablin define kreng jai as “an extreme reluctance to impose on anyone or disturb another’s personal equilibrium by refusing requests, accepting assistance, showing disagreement, giving direct criticism, challenging knowledge or authority, or confronting in a conflict situation.”11 According to the authors, Thais strive to maintain an emotionally and physically stable environment of social harmony, which, they believe, can be achieved by avoiding conflicts at all cost and showing extreme contextual sensitivity that allows them “to show proper respect, follow protocol demands, and generally attempt to interact with others in a harmonious fashion.”12 Stephen Conlon brings up the notion of kreng jai in the context of unequal distribution of power noticing that “For a Thai, the power of [a] man gives him an almost magical presence” and is associated with ritual: “umnart (ritual) power is anonymous and to be kept at a distance with appropriate

10

Brian McGrath, “Face City.” Space and Culture 2006; 9; 235. DOI: 10.1177/1206331206289363, p. 237. 11 Nongluck Sriussadaporn-Charoenngam and Fredric M. Jablin, “An Exploratory Study of Communication Competence in Thai Organizations.” Journal of Business Communication 1999; 36; 382. DOI: 10.1177/002194369903600404, p. 384. 12 Sriussadaporn-Charoenngam and Jablin, p. 384.

162

Chapter Fourteen

language and physical actions. Easily offended, it demands appropriate behaviour which is on the presentational plane, not the personal one.”13 Conlon’s translation of power hierarchies into a spatio-temporal model can be traced back to a highly influential, if controversial and outdated, dimensional model of culture developed by Geert Hofstede. The basic model of Hofstede characterised and compared cultures by investigating four areas: 1. Social inequality, including the relationship with authority (power distance); 2. The relationship between the individual and the group (individualismcollectivism); 3. Concepts of masculinity and femininity; 4. Ways of dealing with uncertainty, relating to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions (uncertainty avoidance).14

According to Hofstede, Thai culture is characterized by high power distance (or high acceptance of social hierarchy and authority), collectivism (or the valuing of social harmony over individual happiness), femininity (or a preference for the soft, caring and cooperative environment) and strong uncertainty avoidance (or feeling threatened by uncertain or unknown situations). This, to compare, makes it the exact opposite of American culture. Now, while the widely quoted findings of Hofstede’s study were the result of his extensive research into the values of people in over 50 countries of the world, a question needs to be asked to what extent his large body of data can be found reliable? If we agree with Hofstede (or Edward Hall, for that matter) that some cultures are reluctant to express their feelings and opinions in public or to form them into linguistic messages, to what extent can we trust the answers collected in questionnaires and interviews that end up being analysed by a member of culture that believes in the supremacy of language? Questions like those, however, are seldom asked, as obviously it is far easier to draw conclusions based on the available statistics. The fact that the Thai perception of Thai cultural values is not always compatible with the given model is usually dismissed as mere evidence of cultural ethnocentrism. But should it be? 13

Stephen Conlon, “Proxemics and the Novel: An Ecological Approach.” Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society 3.2., p.142. 14 Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1997), pp. 13-14.

Thaid Up in Knots: Making Sense of Thai Socio-cultural Values

163

Let us take the issue of individualism and collectivism. Like many Asian cultures, Thais are commonly described as group- and familyoriented. Collectivism, writes Hofstede, “pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive ingroups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.”15 Now, if collectivism demands loyalty then how to explain the fact that since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has experienced 18 coups d’etat and has had 18 constitutions? The current shaky political situation also seems to suggest that the interests of individuals appear to matter more than those of the larger community. With the rapid development of the urban middle classes, individualism is frequently promoted as a favourable value and meets with little resistance. In 2008, for instance, one of the leading Thai mobile phone companies, launched an advertising campaign along the lines of “Do whatever you want – because you can.” This leads to an observation that rather than dealing with a recent cultural change, what we see is yet another example of the public/private division. While in public Thais like to appear collectively connected, in private they value their individuality; when they speak and fill in questionnaires they will naturally stress group-related values, when they act, they are frequently motivated by individual needs, interests and desires. As Chai Podhisita sums up: “Individualism seems to occupy a significant place in the Thai worldview. Values and behaviour reflecting individualism and autonomy are rather usual in Thai culture […] to do as one wishes is to be a genuine Thai.”16 The duality of individual collectivism, or collective individualism is picked up by Brian Lawrence in his article on Thai culture and performance appraisal in business institutions, which he attributes to a similar observation, stating that although Thais are individualistic, they are also part of a highly hierarchical social order which severely limits any expression of individualistic behaviour.17 According to Hofstede, hierarchical societies are characterized by high Power Distance Index, which refers to “the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.”18 Podhisita agrees that the Thai understanding of society as a compilation of hierarchical positions allows Thais to organize social relations. “Individuals are seen as either higher or 15

Hofstede, p. 51. Chai Podhisita, qtd. in Brian Lawrence, “Thai Culture Meets Performance Appraisal.” Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society 2.1., p. 14. 17 Lawrence, p. 16. 18 Hofstede, p. 28. 16

164

Chapter Fourteen

lower, younger or older, weaker or stronger, subordinate or superior, senior or junior, richer or poorer, and rarely equal.”19 Everyday interactions begin from searching for contextual signals of one’s position in the social hierarchy and are always structured accordingly. A rather visible manifestation of such an attitude is the Thai fascination with uniforms. Military and police style uniforms are worn by a great majority of people, from civil servants and security guards to supermarket parking lot attendants and shopkeepers. The belief that a uniform represents authority and allows people “to be somebody” is overwhelming and it seems to cut across all the layers of the society. Hofstede’s concepts of masculinity and femininity depend on a very traditional understanding of gender that would make most feminists cringe. In his framework, masculinity amounts to such values as aggression, assertiveness, or competition, while femininity is measured by a penchant for nurturance, a concern for relationships and the living environment. Based on such assumptions, a great majority of Asian countries fall into the feminine category (which, interestingly enough, coincides with a common Western perception of Asian males as petite and feminine). The only exception to the rule here is Japan, which ranks as the most masculine of the 50 investigated countries. What’s puzzling, though, Korea, which shares a lot of cultural values with Japan is pretty much at the bottom of the list, which makes one wonder what factors played their part in calculating the masculinity index. Thailand, as it could be predicted ranks even lower than Korea, which suggests that it is purely feminine. But then, when we look at some of the implications of such a categorization, once again things do not seem to fit. According to Hofstede, feminine societies are welfare societies characterized by their caring for others. Thailand does not have a pension system or any sufficient benefit system for the poor (it does have a lot of the poor though). Feminine societies are described as permissive – once again hardly so, in a country where a refusal to stand up for the royal anthem in the cinema may cost one up to 15 years in prison. Feminine societies are described as equal – this obviously does not match Thai strong hierarchical orientation. Men and women in feminine societies take equal shares at home and at work – once again, hardly the case in Thailand where the discrimination of women is still a frequent concern of human rights organizations. Even a brief examination shows that the results of the study fail to represent Thai reality. Family orientation, aversion to violence, nurturing others and caring for the environment are not 19

Podhisita, qtd. in Lawrence, p. 15.

Thaid Up in Knots: Making Sense of Thai Socio-cultural Values

165

necessarily feminine features, they can also be found in the tenets of Buddhism. Besides, again, resorting to a particularly Western understanding of gender characteristics does not help much either. Similar discrepancy can be seen when examining the final dimension of Hofstede. In his ranking, when it comes to tolerating uncertainty Thailand is pretty much in the middle of the scale. Interestingly enough, it is only one step lower than Germany, a country stereotyped for its love of order and punctuality, the characteristics that are seldom used to describe the Thais. While some observations, regarding tight rules and suppression of deviant ideas and behaviours can obviously be valid with regard to Thai culture, other indicators, such as the belief that “time is money,” or the acceptability of expressing aggression are not. The Thai concept of sabaisabai (i.e. relax, do not worry, take it easy) also does not comply with the observation that cultures that exhibit strong uncertainty avoidance are particularly prone to stress and anxiety. One other reflection of a culture’s tolerance of uncertainty can be found in the way it structures its narratives, particularly literary and film narratives. Anyone who is familiar with Thai cinema will agree that Thai film narrative does not have much in common with the one popularized by Hollywood. As a result, many critics who evaluate Thai cinema from a non-Thai perspective describe Thai films as confusing, lacking clear structural organisation, unable to decide which genre they are supposed to belong to, or consisting of a patchwork of seemingly unrelated elements. Causation does not seem to be the strongest point in the majority of Thai film narratives, which, on the whole, commonly tend to evolve in a linear way (even if the line is hardly ever a straight one). A perfect example of such a structure can be a 2006 release, Koy Ter Yuem (See How They Run), directed by Jaturong Mok Jok, whose entire raison d’être seems to be a display of sequences of separate gags involving various locally-known comedians, connected chiefly through the central figure of a mischievous ghost-monk that everybody is greatly afraid of. Still, having said that, the undisputable weakness (not to say the non-existence) of the script, did not prevent that same picture from becoming the fourth highest grossing Thai film in 2006, with the box office estimated at 1.6 million US dollars. Obviously, Thai audience did not view the film as a failure only because it blatantly disregarded the rules of scriptwriting, as taught to the members of the profession. Last but not least, perhaps the most easily noticeable Thai cultural value is what in Thai is expressed by the word sanuk – the insatiable love of fun and enjoyment. Things which are not sanuk are simply not worth having (or doing, for that matter). For that reason alone, for instance,

166

Chapter Fourteen

Bangkok is frequently compared to a psychedelic version of Disneyland, complete with clowns and balloons aplenty. Thais refuse to believe that any colours, patterns or materials can possibly clash, comedians are the most recognizable celebrities, there can hardly be a riot without singing and dancing, even funerals are a festive form of entertainment. Sanuk is more than a lifestyle, it is in a way the essence of “Thainess” and it needs to be acknowledged by anybody trying to comprehend Thai culture. One of the best known national slogans, popularized by the Tourist Authority of Thailand is the phrase, “Amazing Thailand.” Although no official statistics exist, it is probably the most commonly used expression of exasperation used by Western expats living in the country who, lured with the promise of the Land of Smiles, found the place inhabited by the hordes of madly grinning Cheshire cats instead. The dependence on the logo-centric, rational model of sense-making and organising the universe makes it difficult for Westerners to understand the way Thai society functions and causes much frustration. And then eventually, after several years of futile resistance, Western expats invariably give up and logos gets replaced by a smile.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN “[A] VANISHING PEOPLE”: THE CARIBS AND KINCAID’S CARIB-BEAN IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER JUDE V. NIXON

The contemporary West Indian novelist, Jamaica Kincaid, was sent at age 17 to the United States to work as an au pair. This evident is fictionalized in the novel Lucy.1 Feeling betrayed by her family, Kincaid not only refused to help support them financially, but left unopened the correspondence she received from her mother. Kincaid soon quitted her job and began writing for the New Yorker. Neither Jamaica nor Kincaid, Elaine Potter Richardson wanted to her hide her identity from her family. Antiguan Kincaid and Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul are the most celebrated West Indian novelists. They are to the Caribbean novel what Derek Walcott is to its poetry. But whereas Naipaul writes from the margins of an already marginalized Caribbean, writing as if still on the Indian subcontinent, Kincaid writes from the heart of the Caribbean experience and from a broader (post-) colonial palette. Her novels, “bitter” and “dyspeptic” (Kincaid’s description), drip with the pain and poison of enslaved peoples and colonized nations, whether blacks, Indians, or Chinese. To claim that there is no national West Indian literature, only a regional one,2 is true only to the extent that the literature reflects a shared cultural and political history and experience. But there are profound differences from one island to the next given the discrete histories of occupation and peoples. Still, there are “shared themes and recurrent formal patterns” even as there are “shared psychic and historical 1

Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 10. 2

168

Chapter Fifteen

conditions across the differences distinguishing one post-colonial society from another” (Ashcroft, Empire, p. 29). Writing about Kincaid’s dedication of The Autobiography to Walcott, and Walcott’s acknowledgement of its centrality to the Caribbean experience and psyche, Justin D. Edwards observes a “thematic connection between this novel and Walcott’s writing about mixed cultural heritage. . . Part Carib, part African, and part Scot, Xuela has a fragmented identity and is torn between various races, communities, and histories.”3 The dilemma of all three peoples (Africans, Indians, Chinese), are the same, expressed powerfully in the words of Patricia Powell’s Chinese protagonist in The Pagoda: “was their Chinese history any different? . . . Was it any different from that of the Negroes, who had arrived there in a similar fashion, kidnapped and sold and bundled off and beaten up and dead in hordes on ships. Was it any different from that of the Indians coming now, standing on those very same auction blocks, trying their best to blot out the memories of their own middle passage?”4 Kincaid attempts to tell the truth about the feverish struggle of West Indians for freedom from occupation, imperialism, slavery, paternalism, and the gender inflicted paradigms of power accompanying them. For Kincaid’s eponymous Annie John, there is a direct line from Columbus’s adventurism, to British imperialism, to slavery, to colonialism, to emigration. The strategies of power in all of their manifestations must be exposed, subverted, and reinscribed. This essay addresses the Carib condition in The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Demanding an explanation for their disappearance, Kincaid discovers that she does not possess “the luxury of an answer.” The novel attempts to work against the prescribed order of things, what Kincaid routinely tropes as a black hole, a flat earth, or a precipice, whether “fields of gravity, imaginary lines, tilts and axes, reason and logic, and, quite brazenly, a theory of justice.”5 Ultimately, a sense of justice is what the novel demands, probing the question: “Can a human being exist in a wilderness, a world so empty of human feeling: love and justice; a world in which love and even that, justice, only exist from time to time and in small quantities”?6 Kincaid, to my knowledge, is the only West Indian novelist to attend closely to the erasure of the Carib. This people from the Lesser Antilles, 3

Justin D. Edwards, Understanding Jamaica Kincaid (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2007), p. 118. 4 Patricia Powell, The Pagoda (New York: Harvest, 1998), p. 75. 5 Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 134. 6 Jamaica Kincaid, Mr. Potter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 72.

“[A] Vanishing People”

169

the Caribee Islands of the Eastern Caribbean, were warriors who preyed on the more peaceful and artistic Arawak. Whether they were carnivorous Morlocks who feasted on vegetarian Elois is perhaps more mythical than factual, including the widely popular story that “Caribs preferred Frenchmen for their delicious taste, that the English were their second choice . . . the Dutch to be rather dull and tasteless and the Spanish to be too stringy and full of gristle.”7 As Kathryn E. Morris would argue, using Carla Freccero’s analysis of the genealogical trace, the connection of the “cannibal ‘other’” to the Carib, “Columbus’s naming of the people he encountered in the Caribbean birthed an ideological entanglement between his perception of their social behaviour and their name so that the word ‘Carib’ became ‘so etymologically congealed as to seem unproblematically to designate an anthropological reality” (Morris, “Voracious,” p. 957). The Caribs were considered by many to be a thorn in the side of the Europeans because of their ferocious, warlike disposition. They formed alliances with some occupiers against others, whether French, English, or Spanish, all to ensure their survival. As Kincaid acknowledges in an interview about her Arawak narrator in “Ovando,” the Arawaks were dead within fifteen years of occupation; but “The Caribs survived because they fought. They were fierce. Their whole stance had always been fighting. We would like to think the peaceful people survived, but they didn’t.”8 Sometimes rather than surrender to their occupiers, as was the case in Grenada when they were hounded by the French, they lept to their death from a precipitous cliff on to sharp ocean rocks at Mourne des Sauteurs, a site familiar to us as Leaper’s Hill. “Eventually, the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, like the Arawaks of the Greater, were virtually exterminated.”9 Nowhere in Kincaid is the Carib erasure and culture of destruction more powerfully expressed as in Autobiography. The novel is linked inextricably to the fate of the Carib and African: “The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people had been defeated but had survived” (p. 16). Autobiography is a “national allegory,”10 for its chief protagonist is the daughter of a Carib mother whose people had been vanquished. But apart 7

Quoted in Kathryn E. Morris, “Jamaica Kincaid’s Voracious Bodies: Engendering a Carib(bean) Woman,” Callaloo, Vol. 25, no. 3 (2002), p. 957. 8 Moira Ferguson, “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” Kenyon Review, vol. 16, no. 1 (1994), p. 173. 9 A. Garcia, History of the West Indies (London: George G. Harrap, 1965), p. 102 10 Giselle Liza Anatol, “Speaking in (M)other Tongues: The Role of Language in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” Callallo, vol. 25, no. 3 (2002), p. 950.

170

Chapter Fifteen

from this, the novel as allegory falls short. This, for example, is no birth of a nation freed from the control of its mother and motherland, Great Britain. One is, of course, tempted to read the novel this way informed, in part, by Kincaid’s somewhat misleading claim that “I am writing about mother country and subject daughter country,” and that “I have outgrown the domestic implications of the mother and the daughter, and it now has wider implications for me”;11 or arguing the “loss of the mother [as] an allegory for Dominica’s decolonization,” as Kathryn Morris does, insisting that “Xuela’s abandonment by her mother mirrors Dominica’s abandonment.” If such were the case, one would not need a Carib protagonist. More to the point is Morris’s assertion that the novel “attempts to revive the Carib heritage as a founding discourse for Carib (bean) identity” (Morris, “Voracious,” p. 956). So consequential is the Carib plot that as the novel ends, Xuela and her English husband Philip return to the motherland, as though to the womb, to the Carib reserve in the hills of Marigo and Castle Bruce, far from the madding crowd of Roseau, a return Xuela had earlier anticipated in a dream. In the tradition of Victorian autobiography, Autobiography opens with this near posthumous almost Dickensian declaration: “My mother died at the moment I was born” (p. 3). The title, of course, is unusual, for autobiography is by definition writing the self, the speaker’s self, and not an-other self. For that we turn to biography. But the title finds legitimacy in the fact that the authorial self was named after the dead mother, Xuela Richardson. At age sixteen, Xuela’s mother, Annie Victoria Richardson, the half-Carib, came to Antigua from Dominica. “Her mother, a Carib Indian of Dominica, is dead; her father, part Scot, part African, of Antigua, a policeman who emigrated to Dominica, is dead.”12 Un-mothered, Xuela assumes the role of both mother and child, writing her mother’s life even as she chronicles her own, writing, as she puts it elsewhere, as “the act of saving myself. . . . I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life” (Kincaid, My Brother, p. 196). In doing so, Xuela figuratively births herself.13

11

Quoted in Veronica Marie Gregg, “How Jamaica Kincaid Writes The Autobiography of My Mother,” Callallo, vol. 25, no. 3 (2002), p. 928. 12 Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 72. 13 In Mr Potter, Kincaid writes the father, who “will never be heard from again, except through me” (p. 191): “I am the one who can write the narrative that is his life. . . . he is unable to affect the portrait of him I am rendering here, the scenes on the bold of cloth as he appears in them: the central figure” (pp. 87, 158).

“[A] Vanishing People”

171

Autobiography tells of Xuela’s growing up, the novelist as a young, precocious child of nature, and her acquisition of language, though “the language of a people I would never like or love” (p. 7). The first words Xuela learns are on a map, labelled “The British Empire” (p. 14). Her breaking of Ma Eunice’s bone china plate, showing a picture of an idealized English countryside and inscribed with the word “Heaven,” is no accident.14 The breaking of the plate has a corollary to the imagined destruction of daffodils in Lucy, both acts signalling the post-colonial enterprise of destroying myths of colonial domination. Xuela expresses no remorse, interpreting both her act and Ma Eunice’s reprimand as “the relationship between captor and captive, master and slave, with its motif of the big and the small, the powerful and the powerless, the strong and the weak” (p. 10). This childhood act of defiance, this stubborn unwillingness to “admit to myself my own vulnerabilities” (p. 15), becomes an act of resistance against erasure, which the Caribs, not entirely able to prevent, were all but eliminated. The battle of the strong against the weak and vulnerable is again analogized in Xuela’s killing of three land turtles she wanted to domesticate and possess, for such desire destroys the very object of one’s affection: “love and hate,” she discerns, often “wears much the same face” (p. 22). Domination, ownership, and control of the natural, the exotic, the vulnerable, the indigenous, is the underlying subtext of The Autobiography, which meta-textually plays out the history of the Carib and blacks on the island. Internalizing colonization, Xuela’s elementary teacher, whom, she tells us, “was of the African people,” found it “a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us” (p. 15): I was of the African people, but not exclusively. My mother was a Carib woman, and when they looked at me this is what they saw: The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people had been defeated but had survived. When they looked at me, they saw only the Carib people. They were wrong but I did not tell them so. (pp. 15-16)

14 Mothers, surrogate mothers, and mother country, Kincaid believes, are most destructive to the nurturing, development of the psyche, and independence of a child. Ma Eunice joins the plethora of bad women in the novel: Xuela’s unnamed stepmother, her half-sister Elizabeth, her teacher, the jablesse, Lise, Philip’s wife Moira, and Xuela herself, to name but a few.

172

Chapter Fifteen

The demonization of Xuela for her Carib and black heritage was perpetrated by Columbus, his protégés of French and British colonizers, and now her black teacher: “my teacher, who was trained to think only of good and evil and whose judgment of such things was always mistaken, said I was evil, I was possessed—and to establish that there could be no doubt of this, she pointed again to the fact that my mother was of the Carib people” (pp. 16-17): That “these people” were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. The people we should naturally have mistrusted were beyond our influence completely; what we needed to defeat them, to rid ourselves of them, was something far more powerful than mistrust. (p. 48)

The question, “What makes the world turn,” and, more specifically, “What makes the world turn against me and all who look like me?” (p. 132), is teased out in Autobiography. Xuela is a child without an established identity—not knowing her mother who died, abandoned by a father whose monomaniac drive is for wealth and upward social mobility, and neglected on an island surrounded by the amniotic Caribbean Sea, a place troped as the cramped quarters of a slave ship, “a very small, dark place, a place the size of a dollhouse, and the dollhouse is at the bottom of a hole” (p. 33).15 Fear of holes is an experience every Kincaid protagonist shares, expressing, clearly, the trauma of the Middle Passage. Living “at the end of the world my whole life” and placed early in “the jaws of death,” “How I escaped I cannot fathom to answer myself” (p. 211), Xuela is alert to everything. Confronting “many treacherous acts of deception” (p. 42), Xuela tries to negotiate the paradox of her existence with a dead but very present mother and an alive but virtually absent father, both mysteries to her: “one through death, the other through the maze of living; one I had never seen, the other I saw constantly” (p. 41). The Autobiography is equally about Xuela’s father, who serves as a mirror or foil for the absent mother. A “mixture of people—not races, 15

In her HIV/AIDS novel, My Brother, Kincaid describes the disease as “a falling off the horizon” (p. 156), “falling into a deep hole” and “being swallowed up in large vapour of sadness. . . . I was standing on a fragile edge and at any moment I might fall off into a narrow black hole that would amount to my entire earthly existence” (pp. 20, 140-41).

“[A] Vanishing People”

173

people” (p. 117), Alfred is of mixed race ancestry. He lives an unexamined life, taking “the world as he found it” and never questioning its complexities, its flat surfaces and ever-present ridges and holes, its “worlds within worlds” (p. 124). He is religious as he is cruel and corrupt, profiting immensely from the nefarious financial partnerships he forges with others richer than he. Xuela’s greatest Jeremiad is directed at her father’s exploitive because unexamined life. “Did my father,” she asks rhetorically, “ever say to himself, ‘Who am I, who am I?’ not as a cry coming from the dark hole of despair but as a sign that from time to time he was inflicted with the innocent curiosity of the foolish? I do not know; I cannot know. Did he know himself?” (p. 196). Put differently, her father was unable to differentiate between “man” and “people,” the former slaves, and the latter colonizers and plantation owners, the one who “came off the boat as part of a horde, already demonized, mind blank to everything but human suffering, each fact the same as the one next to it,” and the other who “came off the boat of his own volition, seeking to fulfil a destiny, a vision of himself carried in his mind’s eye” (p. 181). Not recognizing this “important distinction” (p. 118), her father sought to profiteer by exploiting the horde, those just like himself, and to distance himself as much as possible from them and their plight. Alfred remains oblivious to the very dialectical economy and narratives that define him: master/slave; victor/ vanquished; conqueror/ conquered; colonizer/ colonized; dominant/ subordinate; possessor/ dispossessed; hyphenated/ horde: My father rejected the complications of the vanquished; he chose the ease of the victor. In the vanquished, had he looked, he could have felt the blankness that all human beings are confronted with day after day, a blankness that they hope to fill and sometimes succeed in filling, but then again, mostly not; and these people, these African people in whom he could have found one half of himself—they, too, being human, would have felt the blankness. . . . (p. 186)

Rather than supply the gravedigger Lazarus with nails he humbly and politely asked for and essential to the rebuilding of his roof lost in the hurricane, nails provided by the government for just this work, Alfred, instead, hoarded them, giving away only enough of the free nails so as not to cause a scandal: “the rest he sold, and the more a person was unable to pay, the more they were in need, the more he charged them. Lazarus was such a person, more unable to pay and more in need; in him, too, the event of the African people meeting the hyphenated man had taken on such subtlety that any way he chose to express himself was only a reminder of

174

Chapter Fifteen

this” (p. 188). The struggle of her father, as Xuela puts it, was one between “the hyphenated man and the horde,” but “the hyphenated man as before had triumphed, and my father told Lazarus that he did not have any nails left” (p. 188). Alfred was entrepreneurial and capitalistic, synonyms in Kincaid for greedy, selfish, and inhumane. Ultimately, Xuela tells us, “He owned many houses in Roseau, and at the end of each month, a half-dead man . . . brought him the rent that had been collected from tenants who sometimes had not much to eat. He died a rich man,” not unlike the rich man in the Lazarus story, “and did not believe that this would prevent him from entering the gates of the place he called heaven” (p. 210). From her school in Massacre, Xuela is sent to the capital city, Roseau. Her father had all but pimped her to Monsieur Jacques La Batte, who will soon seduce the 15 year old with the approval and complicity of his caring but frail and infertile Carib wife, Lise, whom he had sexually worn down. In Xuela, Madame Lise La Batte sees an image of her youthful self, which she now wants to give to her husband: “She wants to make a gift of me to her husband; she wants to give me to him, she hopes I do not mind.” Lise’s gift to Xuela of her own beautiful dress to turn the clock back on her youth, to be “the person she used to be when she wore the dress,” seals the deal (p. 68). Gifts can be abling or disabling, liberating or enslaving, a benefit or a curse. The gift, the transaction, although it involves women, operates within established paradigms of power and through the silent though operative male authority and privilege. Xuela eventually becomes pregnant, confirmed when Lise spoke to her not in their customary French patois, “the language of the captive, the illegitimate” (p. 74), which bound them, but in English, the conqueror’s language. “The use of English, the so-called ‘father-tongue,’” as Giselle Anatol observes, marks Lise’s “complicity with patriarchal dictates for the oppression of women— including her own” (Anatole, “Speaking,” p. 946). Xuela connects her situation to a form of slavery, “standing in a black hole” (p. 82). Like Marlow’s choice of nightmares, she chooses the one she knows best, paying the local herbalist, Sange-Sange, to abort the foetus. This traumatic event evokes, not surprisingly, another of Xuela’s dream episodes. In it, she returns to the mountains of her Carib encampment at Massacre, named, fittingly, after the murder of Indian Warner [Colonel Thomas Warner], the illegitimate offspring of a Carib woman and European, by his half-brother, the Englishman Philip Warner, who “did not like having such a close relative whose mother was a Carib woman” (p. 87). Their father was the infamous Sir. Thomas Warner. Xuela retraces her ancestral past through Mahaut, the Belfast River, Layou, Merot, Coulibistri, and Colihaut. She negotiates the banks of the

“[A] Vanishing People”

175

Guadeloupe Channel, and passes through La Haut, Thibaud, and Marigot—“somewhere between Marigot and Castle Bruce lived my mother’s people, on a reserve” (p. 88). The road but not the journey ends at Petite Soufrière, near the Martinique Channel. Xuela could not see the summit of Morne Diablotin, but believes she hears the rumbling from the volcanic Morne Trois Pitons and detects sulphur fumes from the Boiling Lake: And that is how I claimed my birthright, East and West, Above and Below, Water and Land. In a dream I walked through mine inheritance, an island of villages and rivers and mountains and people who began and ended with murder and theft and not very much love. I claimed it in a dream. Exhausted from the agony of expelling from my body a child I could not love and so did not want, I dreamed of all the things that were mine. (pp. 88-89)

On her return to the La Battes, Xuela recognizes all three of them, this mènage á trois, as “a little triangle, a trinity, not made in heaven, not made in hell, a wordless trinity.” But this was no trinity of equals, for one of them was “defeated” (Jacques), one “resigned” (Lise), and one (Xuela) “changed forever. I was not of the defeated; I was not of the resigned” (p. 93). Xuela soon leaves the La Battes and becomes a travaux. She disguises herself by wearing the clothes of a dead man, and cuts her hair, making her appear neither male nor female. Performing the fluidity, the indeterminacy, of the transvestite serves to hide one identity and to lay claim to another. Through it and against the backdrop of an ethnic Carib struggle, Xuela gradually discovers an awareness of self and comes to love herself. Hers is not simply the crisis of a semi-orphaned child searching for love and acceptance, the novel’s subplot, but a child struggling against deep ancestral issues, not least of which are issues of identity, how to negotiate “the lot of the defeated” (p. 112), “someone else’s idea,” and how “to live on through the existence of someone else” (pp. 108, 110). Whereas her father, “a native; that is, a man who through blood is associated with the African people,” had succeeded, not so “These other people, the natives,” who had become “bogged down in issues of justice and injustice, and they had become attached to claims of ancestral heritage, and the indignities by which they had come to these islands” (p. 117). One must read The Autobiography, what Xuela calls “the story of my existence” (p. 226), as trope of the Carib and black condition in the West Indies, whereby one people all but perish and the other survived. Their lot, like Xuela’s, “represented a kind of tragedy, a kind of defeat” (pp. 211-

176

Chapter Fifteen

12). Xuela thinks of John Wesley, who “traded in human bodies” only then to convert and write a hymn sung zealously and fervently by descendants of the very people he trafficked. Unsung, her life amounts to very little, though it had the potential to yield much more: “the pages of my life had no writing on them, they were unsmudged, so clean, so smooth, so new. . . . If I could have seen myself then, I could have imagined that my future would have filled volumes” (pp. 214-15). Like her Carib ancestors, Xuela admits defeat, “I am of the vanquished, I am of the defeated,” but intuits that “in my defeat lies the seed of my great victory.” The novel concludes with Xuela’s employment by and subsequent marriage to a man twice her age, a white Roseau physician, Philip Bailey, obsessed with ideas of decay and lost civilization; for “he came from people who had caused so much of it they might have eventually come to feel that they could not live without it” (pp. 143-44). Her marriage to Philip, a member of “the conquering class” (p. 211), is of course ironic, perhaps even hypocritical. The marriage is also consistent with Xuela’s divided self. But the marriage is also about integration, about Xuela’s attempt to come to terms with if not reconcile her white English heritage. She discovers that she and Philip are fundamentally different, and even speak a different language, he English, she patois: “We understood each other much better that way, speaking to each other in the language of our thoughts” (p. 219). If her marriage to Philip taught her anything, it taught her to reflect deeper on life and love, discovering, for one thing, that “Romance is the refuge of the defeated; the defeated need songs to soothe themselves . . . for their whole being was a wound” (p. 216). But in many ways like hers, Philip’s past was “not a past he was responsible for all by himself, it was a past he had inherited” (p. 217). Near the end of Philip’s life, and seeking relief from the weariness of their legacies and histories, he and Xuela leave Roseau to return to the Carib reserve in the mountains. Occupying now “a world in which he could not speak the language” (p. 224), Philip becomes “convinced of a certain truth, and this truth was based on reducing, so that only what survived was deemed worthy” (p. 221). The Gilbert White of Mahaut, Philip begins collecting and classifying species. What he holds captive Xuela frees, replacing each with its phylogenic type: “one lizard replaced with another lizard, one crab replaced with another crab, one frog with another frog; I could not ever tell if he knew I had done so. He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him” (p. 222). Their courtship and marriage are brought into stark contrast with her

“[A] Vanishing People”

177

father’s and mother’s. Xuela believes that her father must have been drawn to her mother’s Carib physiognomy, her black hair, long and slim fingers and legs, thin and bony face, narrow chin, high and wide cheekbone, lips thin and wide, body similarly thin and long, a natural, graceful gait, and her skin, which must have been silk or satin, the brown skin resembling the “deep orange of an old sunset” (pp. 197-98). Their encounter, unlike the European encounter with the Carib or African, “was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and vanquished, sorrow and despair, vanity and humiliation; it was only itself, an untroubled fact: she was of the Carib people.” Instead, He would have asked who are the Carib people? or, more accurately, who were the Carib people? for they were no more, they were extinct, a few hundred of them still living, my mother had been one of them, they were the last survivors. They were like living fossils, they belonged in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass case. That these people, my mother’s people, were balanced precariously on the ledge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of nothingness, was without doubt, but the most bitter part was that it was through no fault of their own that they had lost, and lost in the most extreme way; they had lost not just the right to be themselves, they had lost themselves. (p. 198)

PART IV: STRUCTURE AND UNCERTAINTY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE LABYRINTH OF UNCERTAINTY: NO-SENSE AND THE TRAGICOMIC TADEUSZ SŁAWEK

1. In her small house overlooking Puget Sound on the Northern edge of the America's West Coast the writer Annie Dillard meditates on the “occasions” (we will have to return to this concept) of human life which must inevitably involve the question of a general pattern of events which secure a foundation of the meaningfulness of existence. What actually exists, what has been actualized, must be meaningful, otherwise history would be a narrative of perdition and debacle. Alfred North Whitehead in his classic Process and Reality clearly indicates that this patterning of events is a condition of the moral advancement of man: “A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is a wreckage, and beyond it harbourage and safety. The categories governing the determination of things are the reasons why there should be evil; and are also the reasons why, in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended.”1 Reality makes sense, what has been actualized separates meaningfulness from nonsense and, in the long run, cancels evil, through a progression of facts which, like reality itself, seem to be good-oriented. Endorsing the view that facts make sense, we would like to argue that due to the discrepancy between the human time and the world's time, the time of the non-human, what Whitehead calls “the advance of the world” is only a hypothetical notion which can be neither proved nor refuted and therefore the “barrier reef” of facts is not as tight and hermetic as Whitehead wished it to be. The points of its perforation which make the

1

A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 223.

182

Chapter Sixteen

barrier permeable, regions where the wreckage meets the harbourage, are places of no-sense, of the tragi-comic.

2. There are two principal notions working in Dillard's meditation: one is that of gods, the other of justice. The immediate source which nourishes the dramatic reflection is an accident of a small plane which crashes among the trees next to the local airstrip and, in an aftermath of the collision, a child, the writer's neighbour's daughter, who happened to be playing in the vicinity, is badly hurt: “the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face.”2 Such a drama reduces the world and its events, usually spread over large expanses of time and space, the world filled with sequences of meaningfully arranged occurrences, the reality conceived of by Whitehead to be a “chain of facts,” to one sharp point which collapses all previous arrangements. This point is the place of nosense. Long sequences of occurrences, even if outrageous and criminal, like in extensive operations of war machinery, tend to generate some kind of “sense” on two levels: first, on the level of the perpetrators who always try to rationalize an infernal logic of extermination (“rationalize” in both meanings: they make it technologically more perfect and also historically and politically motivated), and two, more importantly, on the level of victims who juxtapose to these practices of hatred and injustice a counteraction, a resistance, precisely in the name of “sense” based on the notions of justice and good. We fight injustice because we have an idea of a just ordering of things. Tragedies like little Julie Norwich's do not belong to this order: they do not result from political or historical developments which would provide them with whatever faulty and sophistic explanation, neither do they offer an individual a chance to resist them. In the realm of the human my disagreement with someone else's actions clearly indicates that history is a conflict of rights, but there are events, interventions of a power which seems to transcend all “rights”, at least, as we understand this term in the human discourse. The events which descend upon a man suddenly and unexpectedly compressing all time and space into one red-hot moment and place; they literally come “out of the blue” demolishing all constructions of senses and countersenses which constitute the scaffolding of history. This is where the burnt off face and neck of the seven year old Julie 2

A. Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 36.

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

183

Norwich belongs: outside territories of the “right” and therefore outside any, even most degenerate and ideologically corrupt, “sense”.

3. Dillard notes on the day after the accident: “It is November 19 and no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods.”3 The staccato of absences and denegations is not to be missed: no wind, no hope, no wish – quiet motionlessness of the air characterizes a space which stills the movement of hope and desire – two crucial forces for the construction of human sense. To wish (which is a subtler form of “to will”) and to hope (which guarantees a constant movement, as we must always have hope which pushes us forward and thus makes it possible for us to live, and hence to “hope” becomes nearly a synonym of to “exist”) are forces and guarantors of sense. What is more, Dillard accentuates the fact, that the crisis of both these forces is not a mere whimsical, temporary episode; just the opposite – no hope and no wish condition each other: there is no hope OF heaven because the wish FOR heaven has been cancelled. And if “heaven” stands for the most general topographical description of the final, ultimate sense overcoming limitations of human history, then what Dillard is saying is that the drama of no-sense bares the profound deficit of sense, compromises previous visions of sense as mere illusions and vain play of shadows. What is more, gods which used to stand for the ordering principle where good features as the absolute value now are demonstrated to be practitioners of a strange politics of violence which does not “make sense” in the human world: they are “hounding and terrorist gods.” The moment of experiencing no-sense has a specific dramaturgy which consists of two scenes. One reveals the fragility of life conceived of not only in terms of the brittleness of human biology but also in terms of the insubstantiality of human existence opened to profound ethical anxieties as human life now shows itself to be the very edge of hell and heaven. The other scene makes us alert to the fact that if reality is a constant transformation and metamorphosis, then the sense which make of it and which we seem to “possess” also is a subject to this transition. No-sense demonstrates the moment when sense and meaning do not cancel themselves but inevitably slip away. Pascal carefully watched and analysed both these scenes presenting the results of his meditations in two brief sentences. On the one hand, “Between us and hell or heaven there is 3

Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 36.

184

Chapter Sixteen

only life, the most fragile thing in the world”4, on the other, “It is a terrible thing to feel all that one possesses slipping away (s'écouler).”5 No-sense touches us to the quick with this red-hot experience of “slipping away.” In the moment of l'écoulement nothing remains what it has been before although everything seems to be in its place. Nothing perforates every thing. .

4. If gods are “hounding and terrorist” gods, they are doubly displaced from their usual position. Instead of protecting they not are threatening, rather than shelter they hunt and stalk; instead of guaranteeing order they subvert it by unlawful means. To use Pascal's categories we could claim that in the theology of no-sense God “slips away” from our hold, from the central place in and from which he secured the right course of events, and in the same gesture this slipping away severs our communication with God who, having lost all the essential features we have provided him/her with, now speaks the language of the ultimate Other – the language of dogs (“hounding”) or criminal elements (terrorists). We discover then that, as Norman O. Brown puts it, “God does not speak good English. Not atticism but solecism. Barbarism or speaking in tongues as in FW, polyglot turning into glossolalia.”6 In other words, gods do not have a saving power; they yield the power to worry and afflict. Gods do not belong to the civilization of sense, they come from the savage regime of matter which ridicules human sense. The “barrier reef of facts” that Whitehead spoke about separates the fragile human sense from the wildness and wreckage of Gods. The point of contact between these two realms is precisely the point of no-sense. Sense solidifies human presence in time, as ordering and rationalization are, in fact, means to isolate man from the time of matter; sense is a manner of severing a connection between man and raw matter by founding a separate universe almost totally subjected to human categories and demands of human rationality. Sense is a regular crystal of human time predictable in its regularity of structuring within the rapid, unformed, and volatile and wayward current of the non-human. The anthropology of no-sense dissolves humanity and punctures the capsule of human orderly time. 4

B. Pascal, The Pensées, tr. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 124. 5 Pascal, The Pensées, p. 124. 6 N.O. Brown, Closing Time (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 63.

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

185

Seriousness of history and culture becomes now a facetious narrative. History as a farce, as James Joyce well knew it - events which destroy the sense of the order, and the order of the sense. Even the most sanctified sense reveals its farcical, disorderly, no-sensical lining disclosing history as the “farced epistol to hibruws.”7 No-sense yields then a peculiar kind of power which does wish to demonstrate and practice its force, a power which defers from action, withholds measures for or against anything or anyone, as these possible objects of action all “slip away.” A politics of no-sense radiates from the empowerment as un-powerment, a power which goes beyond power as if recalling Christ's warning that his kingdom was not from this world. As N.O. Brown writes: “Farce is the theatre of impotence. In a situation of general social paralysis, stasis, sterility, stereotypification, the aim is not the seizure of power, but the dissolution of power (…). Beyond history, beyond tragedy, beyond genital organization of the body politic (...) the clown is a castrated penis, the little fellow; Charlie Chaplin.”8

5. Here is Dillard again: “It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools – that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras.”9 The tragic sight of the burnt face of the seven year old Julie Norwich, who just by a sheer incident happened to be where the plane fell to the ground, is the place and moment of the revelation of no-sense. What gets revealed in such places is not a denial of sense but a collapse of the human sense and its cunning tactics of incorporating gods within the human pattern of events, a deconstruction of the human hegemony which discloses the “ecology” of the matter liberated from the “egology” of the human mind. This signifies a bursting of the human atom, a dispersal of the human crystal; no-sense liquifies man who now is conceived of as a part of random operations of the processes of matter. What is achieved in the moment of the bursting of no-sense is a re-connection of man and material substance, man and universe; a moment of no-sense is a moment of utter 7

J. Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 228. Brown, Closing Time, p. 56. 9 Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 41. 8

186

Chapter Sixteen

loneliness which results from the piercing of the balloon of man's world, a temporary end of a situation of a radical distinctiveness, arrogant exclusivism of the human. Dillard, in one of her other books, describes this situation as forgetfulness of the non-human, a belief that “Up there was a universe, and down here would be a small strip of man come and gone, created, taught, redeemed, and gathered up in a bright twinkling, like a sprinkling of confetti torn from coloured papers, tossed from windows, and swept from the streets by morning.”10 A dissolution of humanity and its sense-making operations which can hold true only as long as we suffer from a strange amnesia allowing us not to remember matter. Human sense as a result of strange but powerful forgetfulness leading to all kinds of hubristic pretences. “Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras” speaks of the amnesia in question is an effect of the insensitiveness to otherness; mind left “alone” breeds monsters of excessive ambitions, hence the experience of no-sense is necessary to bring back the Other which functions as a corrective to the errors of human history. Hence the seriousness of no-sense: it re-animates memory of matter, it opens borders of the human before the unknown forces of the non-human, and - finally – it demonstrates a true seriousness which belies all the pretences of quasi serious concerns of human thinking. Schelling's call for true seriousness as a condition of a genuine solving of human conflicts needs to be recalled at this moment. David Hirst maintains that “comedy may be considered more serious [than tragedy – T.S.] because it has a greater power to disturb the audience's conventional attitudes.”11 The road towards this seriousness leads through a joke, a farce, a tragi-comedy, i.e. through the experience of no-sense. Even a horse-play, a Laurel and Hardy practical joke as a most philosophical and purifying experience. Dillard: “The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. […] One step on the rake and it's mind under matter once again. You wake up with a piece of tree in your skull.”12 We need to observe carefully: not the world AS a joke, but the joke OF the world because what we are looking for is not some external formula for the world but a way of understanding inherent mechanisms of the world. “The world AS a joke” could be dismissed as a mere frivolous entertainment, 10

A. Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 123. H. Hirst, Tragicomedy (London: Metheun, 1984), p.xi. For further illuminating remarks on the tragicomic the reader may consult Verna Foster, The name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), and Piero Fabretti, Nietzsche, Pirandello, Huizinga (Roma: Gangemi 1990). 12 Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 42. 11

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

187

a rehearsing of the Pascalian divertissement at the best, a way of getting rid of the problem by laughing it off the stage, a cabaret number at the worst. “The joke OF the world” tells us something most serious about the construction of the world, it does not avoid the problem but just the opposite – it problematizes everything, all historical monumental events and all the minute concerns and machinations of the everyday practice. The AS formula assumes that there is seriousness which would be other than that of joke, that it is possible to reach a place which would be free of the jurisdiction of the comic, perhaps a shore where true tragedy untinged by the comic would be thinkable. The OF formula precludes such an option; it tells us that the only reality is that of the joke which constitutes the unique seriousness available for the human being, a seriousness of the tragedian who walks with a funny walk, and a comedian that – like so many comic artists - commits suicide because of the incurable melancholia. This is how Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about what he also refers to as “the radical joke of life” and which emerges from an inevitable and incurable disparity between the order inducing “sense” (“the rule”) and the devious irregularity of the human mode of being in the world (“the crooked, lying, thieving fact”). Emerson's essay helps us to comprehend that no-sense which we decide to refer to as the tragi-comic is precisely the place and moment where the comic and tragic reach their terminus and begin to overflow into each other. No-sense/ tragi-comic is the experience of living on this very frontier where, as Emerson puts it, “the same scourge whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke.”13 At this point my face becomes that of a clown: we smile, but there are obvious tears underneath our eyes; the saddest person is the one who makes other people burst with laughter. A transit from comedy to tragedy and vice versa takes place within every one and is a revelation of the very seriousness of existence that Schelling was pleading for. Emerson finishes his essay with a telling story: “When Carlini was convulsing Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming his life. The physician endeavoured to cheer his spirits, and advised him to go to the theater and see Carlini. He replied 'I am Carlini.'”14

13

R.W. Emerson, “The Comic,” in R.W. Emerson, Works (London: Routledge, undated), p. 467. 14 Emerson, Works, p. 466.

188

Chapter Sixteen

6. This is a typical situation of no-sense: the meaningfulness of our activity (Carlini making people laugh and thus “making sense” as a comedian) derives from the suspension of the sense of meaning (the same Carlini himself suffering from deep melancholia, i.e. an acute crisis of the ability to “make sense”). No-sense does not designate the absence of sense but its profound crisis, its collapse which can be a source of meaningful operations. These operations do not finally overcome no-sense but acquire sense within the generally sense-less circle. The operations in question are actualizations of our existence, but if Whitehead defines nonsense as “a limbo where nothing has any claim to existence”15, the tragi-comedy of life revealed through the experience of no-sense consists in the ways in which facts do lay claim to existence without however having any wellfounded reasons to do it. Seriousness of life is conceivable only in this transit from melancholia to the comic (we need to constantly remember Pascal's warning that it is “only life” that separates us from hell or heaven); only out of “excessive melancholy” can the world be revealed AS the opposition of melancholy. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is an extended, mercilessly prolonged, joke which never tires of revealing existence of the joke OF the world, the awareness which can rise only out of melancholia. What we speak about as no-sense, the place of transit from melancholia to the comic which discloses life as tragi-comic, Luigi Pirandello in his antiBergsonian essay on the humorous published in 190816 describes in terms of a Quixotic movement between reality and illusions which assume a reality of their own. Don Quixote suffers but wills himself to be funny as a kind of morally expiatory gesture which redeems him in reality from falling a prey to the world of chivalric romances which constitutes for him an equally real universe. No-sense emerges from this transit between the tragic and the comic; the hyphen separating and, at the same time, connecting the two elements, is a graphic representation of this place in which what happens has also an ethical dimension. The reality now loses its distinct contours, things and events do continue to exist but they lose definitions and clear articulations. Neither the tragic (“tragedy can only exist in a world with clearly defined ideals and absolutes”17, writes David Hirst in his book on the tragicomedy), nor the comic (which is generated by the recognition of reality as the opposite of what is expected and 15

Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 223. L. Pirandello, L'umorismo e altri saggi (Firenze: Giunti Editore, 1994). 17 Hirst, Tragicomedy, p. 25. 16

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

189

awaited) but the tragi-comic. The tragi-comic and no-sense mark a transit from mere laughter and feeling of superiority (Carlini's laughing audience) to compassion (we who know that Carlini suffers from depression). Compassion as the ethical attitude is our response to the no-sense of human existence, i.e. to the joke OF the world. “One step on the rake and it's mind under matter once again” – the joke OF the world finds its own pedagogy, a pedagogy of no-sense, which uses most traditional techniques of the Athenian academy in a most unorthodox manner. The peripatetic walk is not a dignified, well-timed pace during which things get done, ideas defined, definitions established. It is stepping on a rake, a march whose rhythm is highly irregular, a silly walk which undoes things, destabilizes ideas, and destroys definitions. It's not a coincidence that geniuses of the comic develop their own walk, a strange, disorderly carriage, in part related to dancing, in part a cousin to a paralytic disease. Let us remember Charlie Chaplin's gait, a parodically self-assured stride of Oliver Hardy, an awkward jog-trot of Jacques Tati, a famous duck-walk of the early master of rock'n'roll Chuck Berry with his guitar, a whole mad choreography of John Cleese in the famous Monty Python invention of the Ministry of Silly Walks.

7. The lesson of the tragicomic is precisely a lesson of no-sense. In Dillard's words: “We're tossed broadcast into time like so much grass, some ravening god's sweet hay. You wake up and a plane falls from the sky.”18 The joke OF the world opens, through the experience of no-sense, also another relationship between man and time. Time is no longer a concatenation of individual moments which add up to form some general purpose and sense; now each separate unit of temporality constitutes an independent segment which must inevitably collapse God, the ultimate meaning provider and guarantor of sense. God, in our human lesson, is the redeemer of particular moments because he/she disposes of the unique force to organize and order, i.e. to collect, to gather what has been dispersed into one whole. This is basically the message of a parable of a lost sheep: a lost lamb is a moment of our existence which is saved from meaninglessness of particularity by God's effort to contain everything that is particular within a general pattern. A lost lamb is returned to the faithful herd. The calendarity of human time is threatened and redeemed by God; the former because ultimately human time is going to be overcome and 18

Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 42.

190

Chapter Sixteen

overturned, the latter because it is within the particular units of the calendar that we have to live well to deserve the future life in eternity which does not know any chronology. No-sense we are talking about here disconnects the chain of temporal measures and celebrates particular units. This promulgation of a contingent but eventful particularity proclaims the death of God, the one great God able to save individual moments by ultimately negating the contingency of their eventfulness. Dillard puts it in the following way: “No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy.”19 The word “occasion” merits some brief attention. First because it implicates all kinds of entities, and, second because it refers to the basic units of our experience. Whitehead, for whom, occasions are synonyms of “actual entities” says that they are “the final things of which the world is made up. There is no way of going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space.”20 If this is the case then “tumult of occasions” implies a radical disordering of the pattern in which entities appear, a disordering which entails not only things and events but also God. No-sense is a “tumult of occasions”, a disquieting of entities, an uncontrolled swelling up of things and events. No-sense gives us access to an alternative theology which does not reject gods but severs their immanent connection with sense and meaning. Gods now are not conceived of according to the human measure, they are “huge” and “idiotic” which descriptions deny the belonging of gods to the sphere of human interests. “Idiocy” speaks not only of the crisis of what we refer to as “normal” meaning but also, if not primarily, of a disconnection, of gods' refusal to participate in the community of the humans. Clement Rosset brings to our attention the Greek meaning of the term “idiocy”: “Idiôtès, idiot, signifie simple, particulier, unique; puis, par une extension sémantique dont la signification philosophique est de grand portée, personne dénuée d'intelligence, être dépourvu de raison.”21 If gods abandoned us to days then gods, as we had always understood them, as sense-giving agents, are dead. They belong now exclusively to the economy of particularity and unreasonableness, but this regularity is a denial of order, and no-sense is precisely this experience: a dissolution of generality, a melting of sense, a waning and, to quote Pascal again, 19

Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 43. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 18. 21 C. Rosset, Le réel. Traité de l'idiotie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2004), p. 42. 20

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

191

“slipping away” of meaning. Thus, there opens a possibility that “the accidental universe spins mute, obedient to its own gross terms, meaningless, and alone.”22 Gods are “idiots” also due to the fact that they leave behind practices of rationalization fundamental to the human world. Gods in this respect disclose themselves as paranoiac, those who speaks on behalf of what is on the other side of reason and who see the limitation which Urizenic rationality imposes upon reflection. As Rosset puts it: “the reason of madmen does not confine itself to what is reasonable; it also entails this which is not reasonable and what for narrow, fanatical spirits arbitrarily determines the borderline which restricts what is reasonable to what is effectively reasonable.”23 No-sense, from this perspective, occasions a debate on what is “usefully reasonable” and hence touches upon the very heart of Western civilization of rationality fulfilling its mission by inventing, through technology and science, ever more useful devices.

8. Two sentences from Joyce's Finnegans Wake approach the problem of reason which, its successes notwithstanding, now recognizes the lack of its own foundations, the question which Husserl investigated penetratingly in his late text on the crisis of the European Wissenschaften. The first sentence read, “Silence in thought! Spreach! Wear anartful of outer nocense,”24 the other “Lowest basemeant in hystry! Ibscenest nansence!”25 No-sense is nocense is nansence. None of the three bespeaks sheer absence of sense. They all imply that what we normally refer to as “sense” is an elimination of many voices which we prefer not to hear in a word. What happens in the experience of no-sense is silencing of the norm, muffling of the accepted meaning; no-sense is silence speaking in and through language. One needs to insist on the sonority of silence because what we come to deal with in no-sense is not just falling off of a language but a language reaching beyond itself and trying to speak that which is outside its realm. Language hovers on the periphery approaching the inarticulate and stammering. Joyce draws a map of this realm insisting on the radically alien character of this which speaks – it is located outside the usual domain of speech (“outer”), is the carnivalesque and anarchic anality 22

Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 48. M. Rosset, Principes de sagesse et de folie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2004), p. 69. 24 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 378. 25 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 535. 23

192

Chapter Sixteen

transformed into a form of art which at the same time confirms and denies art (“anartful”), and its being has both ontological authenticity and ontic shallowness of a mere disguise (“were/wear”). What speaks in such a manner makes itself heard but what is delivered is so awkward and strange that it approaches silence – it disturbs speech (“spreach”) in such a decisive way that its sound can be likened only to a radical counter phenomenon which is silence. A silence which goes beyond itself, resists confinement within what is mute, a screaming (“spreach”) silence. A destabilization of sense which no longer maintains its privileged position, and its theological force is reduced: “nocence” articulates a denial of incense burnt at the altar of sense, and hence it signifies a secularization of sense. Secularization which goes hand in hand with the carnivalesque; a force which becomes a farce. Joyce continues: “Pawpaw, wowow! Mommery twelfth, noe broed!”26 “Mommery” is precisely a case of low art well known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance for its frivolous character, a true example of the anality of art, of an “anartful” work of art which “spreaches” within every word of even dignified, sophisticated texts such as Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Mummery to which Joyce appeals in the quoted passage are an ideal representation of the overturning of the norm upheld by rationality. They twisted together the dark, nighttime, supernatural threat to the normative order of reason (“the Greek word mormo means 'a child's bugbear, a frightening mask, and an ugly female spirit'”27), and the unruly dancing and gambling of the processions of the carnival revellers (“When the Renaissance reached France in the sixteenth century, the term 'momerie' came to be used in a more restricted sense, and was almost exclusively applied to the dice-playing processions; the dancing and dramatic momerie being absorbed into the fashionable Italian masquerade, which closely resembled it and was probably of very similar origin”28). Twelfth night appears then not only as a point of chronology which highlights the carnivalesque but also as an example of how the unruliness of no-sense was incorporated in the orderly world of literary texts: “Twelfth Night by its very name suggests thoughts of masque and revelry and carnival, which suit well with the 'uncivil rule' of Sir Toby and his companions” and the nonsense song with which the play is concluded “seems to draw over the whole comedy the veil of unreality and illusion”29. 26

Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 378. E. Welsford, The Court Masque. A Study in Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 34. 28 Welsford, The Court Masque, p. 40. 29 Welsford, The Court Masque, p. 282. 27

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

193

Thus, mummeries become places of no-sense because they extend beyond language which we interpret as not only an accentuation of theatrical effects but, first of all, as a serious reservation as to the powers of language itself, the powers which claim to be able to contain and control everything that is unknown. Whereas, as a critic notes, the arrival of masquers is “the sudden intrusion a festive company of grotesquely or handsomely masked beings [which] is bound to bring the thrill of the unexpected, or even the fearsome”30.

9. No-sense is not a simple rejection of the instrumentally operating reason, neither does it decry reason as the ordering faculty of what Heidegger will later call Gestell. No-sense plays the role of echo to these two forms of reason; it mimics them and in this way points out their limitations. Echo is a figure of repetition which, however, goes beyond mere repetitiveness: it slows down the action, digresses and therefore weakens the sharpness of the linguistic act despite the suspicion that, seemingly, a repetition should, in fact, amplify the significance of such an event. Echo is a form of stammer. No-sense speaks with a stammer, a stammer which is not a fault but a critique of articulation. Itself a form of ornamentation, a poetic incrustation displaying a mastery of poetic craft, it satirizes it and shows an inner deficit within this ornamentation – a decorative trope which, paradoxically, denudes language, bares it to the bone, and ridicules its ambitions. Dillard notes that “All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind – the culture – has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sandbucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.”31 Thus the alternative theology of no-sense speaks on behalf of not what God does, but what he/she does not do. Dillard puts it in a succinct sentence: “We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel's worth of sense into our days.”32 The fire of no-sense brings about two effects: first, time gets liberated from the orderly frame of human measure, it is not rigorously organized by the efficient time-tables of the civilization, it gets 30

I. Ewbank, “'These pretty devices': A Study of Masques in Plays,” in: A Book of Masques. In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1967), p. 411. 31 Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 99. 32 Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 61.

194

Chapter Sixteen

wild; second, we cannot expect “sense” of existence from a god, and thus if “sense” becomes our responsibility, then we can draw its map in the evanescent particularity and provisionality of “days” rather than in the everlasting diagrams of the eternal general scheme.

10. In the way in which human society has been organized it is bureaucracy that becomes a major revelation of no-sense. Bureaucracy is the embodiment of the rational; in its structures the rational obtains auxiliary support as it is buffered with regulations, statutes, laws, procedures of activities. But, simultaneously, it tends to diminish the individual and its rationality by all kinds of pressures and internal intricacies which constitute the very substance of the bureaucratic organism. Hence, labyrinth as an architectural edifice which perfectly renders symbolic force of administrative agencies. The labyrinth, itself a master product of geometry and its rigorous precision, is built to house the demonic which defies rationality and goes beyond its calculated economy. As Mommsen argues “bureaucracy becomes comprehensible not only as a supremely efficient mode of social and economic organization but also as the institutional manifestation of nonrational processes.”33 Administration seems to constitute its own sphere which penetrates the world of our everyday concerns and organizes it into procedures and forms which we frequently do not understand and resist only, finally, to comply with. We claim not to see “any sense” in these painful intersections of the administrative with the everyday, but it does not mean that they are nonsensical. Reading Franz Kafka, who (almost like Melville’s Bartleby) as no other writer felt he was living in the brick office structures while simultaneously trying to write himself out of these prisonhouses, we will find out that what our everyday life experience and common sense prompt us to call the nonsense of administration is, in fact, an outcome of the dark heart of the human self. No-sense as the heart of human highly complicated and structured sense making operations. In a letter to Oskar Baum in June 1922 Kafka begins a description of his experience of having to queue for about two hours, “in a crowd on a stairway,”34 to receive his passport with a praise of the bureaucratic machinery. The new procedures 33

W. Mommsen, “Rationalisierung und Mythos bei Max Weber,” in: Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Franfurt: Suhrkamp 1983), p. 398. 34 Quoted in R.Heinemann, “Kafka's Oath of Service: 'Der Bau' and the Dialectic of Bureaucratic Mind,” in: PMLA, March 1996, pp. 256-270.

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

195

are seen as wunderbar, and bureaucracy itself is a subject to an evolution which produces ever more perfect forms of regulations which Kafka does not hesitate to call “refinements” (Steigerungen). What is most interesting is the fact that the writer places the bureaucratic outside the domain of our rational comprehension: “our fumbling interpretations are powerless to deal with the refinements of which bureaucracy is capable.” To be more precise, the meaning or the sense of the refinements (die Deutung die Steigerungen) of administration is unavailable, out of reach of human understanding, simply, in a word – unerreichbar. Before such an agency one can only tremble in respect, which is exactly how Kafka finishes this fragment when he says that he answered “a trivial question” of an official and “trembled in truly profound respect.” The spirit of bureaucracy seems to operate in the rare atmosphere of the border territory between the sense of sociability the human world projects and the realm of regulations and actions which by centering upon itself subvert this social sense. Thus Richard Heinemann rightly describes the Beamtengeist as “confrontation between a longing for social solidarity and a solipsistic obsession with order and security.”35 This provides us with a chance to enhance the scope and range of what Beamtengeist is and does, i.e. it not only refers to the sphere of administration itself but names a certain well-marked tendency towards insistent and recurrent attempts at bending the unpredictable reality to the secure measures of understanding regulated by generally accepted terms. In this respect Beamtengeist designates a kind of historical thinking which conceives of the present and future in terms of the past. In this reading “no-sense” refers to the double experience of (1) helplessness with regard to what-is-coming, and (2) its stubborn neutralization by a return to the burrows of administrative regulations. Bureaucracy disempowers the coming on behalf of, and in the name of, what has already come. In other words, instead of acknowledging its powerlessness, instead of plunging into the nonrationality of the real, the Beamtengeist of administrative, scholarly, and political expertise automatically tries to draw the real into the net of the no-sense world of regulations and “refinements.” Nowhere has it been more striking than in vain efforts of historians to explain the rationality of the September 11 tragedy. Beamtengeist takes it for granted that recognizable patterns will always allow us to “make sense” of events,

35

Heinemann, “Kafka’s Oath of Service”, p. 257.

196

Chapter Sixteen

whereas “September 11 should have taught us that we cannot assume, for the foreseeable future, that tomorrow will be like today.”36 We must particularly accentuate that these developments and refinements of administration in front of which we have to remain speechless because they transcend our interpretations are worked out by administration itself, but the Beamtengeist is grounded in the very nature of the human. Kafka says explicitly that these refinements spring “straight out of the origins of human nature, to which, bureaucracy is closer than any other social institution.” This signifies two things: first, that what lies beyond human rationality constitutes the very centre of Menschennatur, and, second, that this dark “something” which is unreachable for us, which remains permanently outside the scope of our rational thinking, energizes administration and its most logical and law-regulated procedures. Bureaucracy is where the essential human nonrationality and its no-sense (a sense which has to remain an unrevealed secret) emerges in a most rational form endowed, we suppose, with sense. We do not quite understand ourselves, and this excess of sense we are not able to grasp surfaces as the bureaucratic structure, or – in more general terms – as an institutional organization of our social life. Thus man's social existence is always predicated upon the tension between sense and no-sense, i.e. between what we control and master and what defies this mastery although still has to be somehow articulated. “Nosense” is not where the sense is absent from but where sense as we know it, a solidified, crystallized sense, decomposes. No-sense names a process of a decomposition of senses, their de- and re-formation without ultimate formation. Formation becomes indistinguishable from re- and deformation, construction from de-construction. It is a “formation” because words assume some form, but, at the same time, it is re- and de-formation because this form cancels itself out not so much by erasure but by piling up. This process perforates in a nearly parodic way the concept of accumulation as a characteristic manner of a production of reality in a Western culture. Things add one to another, but there is no sum general of this addition because concepts cancel one another and therefore addition becomes attrition, a building up which simultaneously reduces the construction that is being built. It follows then that to study humanity we need to turn towards moments of hesitation and uncertainty, not where meaning is fixed but where it is diluted, not where it solidifies, but where it melts and begins to 36

K. Booth and T. Dunne quoted in: S. Lévesque, Thinking Historically. Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 4.

The Labyrinth of Uncertainty: No-sense and the Tragicomic

197

disintegrate although, as is the case with administration, it manifests this melting through operations of most sophisticated juridical and administrative machineries. The moments of refinement, of Steigerung, are not the moments when we understand, but when we understand that we have left behind what we have understood before, the moments when we realize that there is something to understand which “something” however is unerreichbar to our “fumbling interpretations.” This is why one ought not to dismiss bureaucracy as an important lesson of humanity provided we manage to think the places of its deconstruction where reality, as Pascal would say it, “slips away” from its hold. Maria Zambrano, an important contemporary Spanish philosopher and theologian, calls this experience desmoronamiento, a “falling apart of what is texture,” and a disclosing of “Nothingness [which] is like the shadow of an All that cannot come into understanding, the void of such a compact fullness that it becomes its equivalent, the mute, unarticulated negation of all revelation.”37

37

A. Moreiras, “The Last God: Maria Zambrano’s Life without Texture,” in: C. Strathausen (ed.), A Leftist Ontology. Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 183.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LIMINAL BEAUTY: THE AESTHETICS OF NONSENSE IN KANT AND THE EARLY ROMANTICS ALINA MITEK-DZIEMBA

The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. —Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

Does it indeed take impiety to claim the ubiquity of nonsense in the library of human intellectual effort? Judging from the perspective of philosophical history, Borges’s description must qualify as an overstatement. For most serious thinkers in the European tradition it is both a platitude and a necessary starting point to indicate that verbal nonsense is as notorious as it is universal, human thought and speech being riddled with empty senses and in dire need of sanitization. And yet, Borges seems to be right in identifying the pursuit of nonsense within the hexagonal galleries of Babel as requiring courage, and even more, a certain dose of irreverence and blasphemy. To most professional philosophers, I have learned, nonsense, the usual content of the blah-blah of everyday talking and thinking, is so obvious in its banality that it has ceased to hold their attention. Nonsense does not bother philosophers much. The label itself is however useful. Whatever under analysis is found radically deficient in meaning, “unable to carry sense,” due to incomprehensible, that is to say, illogical through and through, formulation, is destined to end up in the dustbin of un-philosophical nonsense. Interestingly enough, this “sweep” is what must perforce inaugurate philosophical meditation even if it is forgotten immediately after. Whether the object of philosophy’s pursuit is defined as the oldfashioned value of truth and fullness of meaning or as the logical test of

200

Chapter Seventeen

true versus false, one embarks upon philosophizing by telling meaningful propositions from meaningless ones, by drawing the borderline between where sense is present and where it is somehow missing. Even blatantly false and self-contradictory sentences are still full of meaning; by contrast, nonsense is an impenetrable wall of incoherence that does not allow for any scrutiny. It remains coldly indifferent to any attempt at understanding it not because its message is mystically cryptic but merely because there is no message whatsoever, nothing to be known and grasped.1 The nonsensical, unsinnig, says an analytical philosopher with a dismissive shrug, is what one finds literally thought-less. Having said that, and marking off the realm of speculation in no uncertain terms, one starts feeling uneasy about this dismissal. How can one proceed to ponder on the aspects of propositional meaning if the very limit and condition of sense, the mysterious threshold determining what is “in” and what is “out,” separating but also mediating between them, is marginalized and left off as inscrutable? The position of liminality, as cultural anthropologists have long noticed,2 is deeply ambivalent: it is less a fixed system of reference than a process of contrasting and dissolving of the opposites between which one moves before the desirable end of crystallized and stable sense is reached. Nonsense, notwithstanding its nonsensicality, is also unavoidably metareflexive:3 it brings us to the point where the generation of meaning in and through the processes of understanding and ordering of experience becomes itself a focal centre of interest. An impenetrable wall, an unwieldy mass of incoherent speech turns out to be painstakingly designed to offer an interesting perspective. And, needless to say, to perceive Unsinn as what presides over the whole scene of production of sense is to locate it at the heart of every 1

This understanding of philosophical nonsense is thoroughly and convincingly discussed in E. GrodziĔski, Zarys teorii nonsensu (Wrocław-Warszawa-KrakówGdaĔsk-ŁódĨ: IFiS PAN, Ossolineum, 1981). 2 Cf. Arnold van Gennep’s notion of the liminality (from Latin limen ‘a threshold’) describing the crisis and recreation of identity during the transition to a new stage in human life (in The Rites of Passage, 1909). The experience of a liminal phase is marked by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy, blurring of normal limits and suspension of regular laws. The concept, relevant to the study of tribal communities and their ways of celebrating passage was further elaborated by V. Turner in relation to industrial societies. For references, see the essay by Anna Brzozowska-Krajka, “LiminalnoĞü / liminoidycznoĞü a postmodernistyczna bajka magiczna o szczĊĞciu / nieszczĊĞciu (przypadek Girl Guide),” Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska, vol. XX-XXI (2002/2003), p. 3. 3 J.-J. Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense. The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.

Liminal Beauty

201

philosophical undertaking as both authoritative and potentially explosive, threatening to subvert the latter’s claim to logicality and reasonableness. Even though regularly banished from the realm of meaning, nonsense is very soon back, furtively making its way to most rigorous doctrines. The obvious example here is the much quoted case of Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus posits itself as a serious logical analysis debunking metaphysical pretensions and calling traditional attempts at a coherent world-view misguided and confused (if not downright nonsensical): “Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense [einfach Unsinn].”4 Yet regardless of the delimitation which clearly locates the Tractarian philosophy on the thinkable / expressible pole, the book ends up in a spectacular selfdestructive gesture, dismissing (and urging the reader to discard like a useless ladder) its own contents as sheer nonsense. This famous act of selfundermining critique has for ever complicated matters by making it impossible to determine whether there is anything in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre that actually makes sense (if you cling to the statement that all he said is nonsense you should not be able to make sense of the sentence in the first place, which invalidates the argument). Without much effort one can show the logical consequences of the claim to be still more devastating: if the whole account of sense and nonsense in the Tractatus is taken to be nonsensical, then what meaning of nonsense does the final verdict employ? To a nonplussed reader it may seem that the author’s ironic intention was to make nonsense of the whole activity of making sense, which boils down to ironizing philosophy’s prime occupation and aim. That, obviously and much to deconstructionists’ delight, is philosophically suicidal.5 Leaving aside the much troubled question what insights (ethical insights in particular, as Wittgenstein himself insisted) may be contained in the book of self-conscious nonsense, let us proceed to examine some 4 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3-4. 5 My discussion here only sketches the problem. The intentions behind the Tractarian use of nonsense may in fact be much more complex, as is evidenced by countless commentaries on the topic. For the critical examination of interpretative proposals, see Michael Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” Noûs 35:1 (2001), pp. 39-73.

202

Chapter Seventeen

less obvious instances of courting the discursive disaster which comes with the opening of Pandora’s box of Unsinn. That this box has been opened is what I take for granted and wish to illustrate – avoiding, however, the all-too-negative depiction of the scene as unleashing all evils on erring humans. My argument is rather to uncover and demonstrate a peculiar aesthetic quality a philosophy acquires when it strives to accommodate nonsense within its conceptual edifice: liminal beauty, bizarre and confusing, yet all the more (sublimely) attractive. Since I am going to deliberate on what one critic usefully called “the liminal region, the margin where sense and nonsense collide and pass into each other,”6 referring the notion to a specific and historically anchored set of views, it wouldn’t be off the mark to start by remarking that the borders in question are nothing fixed and stable. Sense has the tendency to dehistoricize and absoluticize itself, yet it is attached to a conception of what at a given time counts as understandable, communicative and meaningful. Nonsense is a term of abuse whose meaning shifts accordingly; the borderline between the two is constantly blurred, erased and finally redrawn, not necessarily in the same place. That is why the inquiry into the historically determined senses of nonsense appears to be philosophically rewarding; the condemnation of anything as nonsensical tells much about the established notions of sense, common sense and related standards of interpretation. It is therefore no coincidence that the difference between meaningful and meaningless, unsinnig, also in the sense of deviant and idiosyncratic talk (the Polish word niedorzeczny which derives from the phrase mówiü do vs. od rzeczy [literally “to talk to / talk away from the thing”] beautifully captures all historically relevant connotations here) emerges as vitally important in the world of declining Enlightenment and dawning Romanticism. Still less is it surprising to find nonsense as one of the leading, though certainly downplayed, concepts in the philosophical magnum opus of the time, Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790). And, not unexpectedly, it is what reverberates through the literature and decorative art of the period, spawning some notable forms and genres. To define nonsense as what indicates and at the same time questions the limits of the hermeneutical field is to aptly characterize its function in the Kantian aesthetics. The word itself is not easy to spot in the text; indeed, Kant carefully refrains from using it as if he stood by the Wittgensteinian verdict that it be placed beyond the realm of legitimate reasoning. It is only in the influential discussion of the notion of genius 6 W. Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense. Kant and Bluebeard, trans. H. Pickford (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 4.

Liminal Beauty

203

that Unsinn finally crops up, and its basic function is, not surprisingly, to draw the line at the former’s imaginative excesses. Let us quote at length: To ask whether more stress should be laid in matters of fine art upon the presence of genius or upon that of taste, is equivalent to asking whether more turns upon imagination or upon judgment. Now, imagination rather entitles an art to be called an inspired than a fine art. It is only in respect of judgement that the name of fine art is deserved. (…) So far as beauty is concerned, to be fertile and original in ideas is not such an imperative requirement as it is that the imagination in its freedom should be in accordance with the understanding’s conformity to law. For in lawless freedom imagination, with all its wealth, produces nothing but nonsense (…).7

The passage is difficult to interpret without referring to the whole of Kant’s tortuous argumentation. The Critique of Judgement is primarily concerned with discovering a priori principles at work in the act of aesthetic evaluation which would ground the beautiful as that which inspires necessary and universal satisfaction. This aesthetic assessment takes the form of the “pure judgment of taste” which refers an idea of a beautiful object to the subjective feeling of pleasure or dislike (pleasure being the result, in Kant’s words, of the spontaneous and free interplay of mental faculties, imagination and reason, that are supposed to remain in perfect accord). The main task of philosophical aesthetics is to formulate the conditions of possibility of such judgments; yet, as Kant well realizes, the native interest of the discipline lies in the terrain of fine arts and their applications of the theory of taste and beauty.8 That is why the third Critique seeks also to describe the way aesthetic ideas originate in the mind of the great artist, activated by genius. It may seem at first that the importance of the latter cannot be overstated: it is through genius that “nature gives the rule to art,” and it is genius as the ability to produce something “for which no determinate rule can be given” that ensures artistic originality and uniqueness; thus, “fine art is only possible as a product of genius.”9 However, as we learn from Kant’s lecture, it is not always recommendable to allow genius’s unrestrained flow of 7 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.C. Meredith (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), § 50, p. 148. 8 Alongside Alexander Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetics” but focused largely on the origin of taste and beauty in the senses, Kant is considered to be a founding father of the discipline, elaborating on the connection between sensory perception, imagination and intellect, notions of beauty and art. 9 Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 46, pp. 136-137.

204

Chapter Seventeen

imagination. Genius must be curbed at the very moment the mechanism of sense production starts so that it does not go astray. How is one to account for the paradox? Good art, we are told, does not go with richly original ideas; at least, the wealth of imagination is not its necessary and sufficient condition. Without the guidance of taste as the capability of passing proper aesthetic judgments genius would not be able to differentiate between meaningful and meaningless products of its activity, with imagination running wild as it likes. The “lawless freedom” that involuntarily produces nonsense (the movements of genius are, as Kant well realizes, quite capricious10) is what clashes with the soundness and discipline of understanding, and inevitably calls for a corrective. To enter the realm of fine art, genius must have its wings clipped; it is the control of taste that makes its ideas acceptable (or, as Kant says, “orderly,” “clear” and “polished”). The progress of culture is ensured not so much by the free development of original ideas, as by a series of sacrifices and compromises on the part of genius which has to submit to the power of judgment. Hence the constitution of art is a question of achieving a proper balance between sense and nonsense: “The productive ground of possibility of fine – and hermeneutically endlessly engaging – art is the tendency toward nonsense and simultaneously the curtailment or circumcision of this tendency. (…) In other words, infinite sense is itself an effect of nonsense restrained rather than a multiplication of various determinate meanings.”11 The account of nonsense as a site of no meaning reached through the excesses of creative imagination is however not Kant’s last word on the condition of meaninglessness. I follow the interpretation of the third Critique by Winfried Menninghaus in enumerating other cases of the “collapse of the hermeneutical process” that involve a dissipation of sense and thus do not conform to art’s basic task of infinite aesthetic expression. Non-representation is for instance the main reason behind Kant’s apparent discontentment with music: as it speaks the language of evanescent sensations, it does not “leave behind any food for reflection,” which is why “it possesses less worth in the eyes of reason than any other of the fine arts.”12 As opposed to poetry whose imaginative use of words gives rise to an abundance of aesthetic ideas, music is vacuous in that it does not carry determinate content and lets the mind wander aimlessly from association to association. Its play with affections aroused by tones is 10

Caprice is another term Kant analyzes and redeems as aesthetically positive in the Critique of Judgment. 11 Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, p. 18. 12 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 53, pp. 156-157.

Liminal Beauty

205

arbitrary and contingent, indeed capricious in its lack of rational motivation. Like nonsense, it is a void of negativity in the universe of artistic representation and its imperative of infinite meaning; and, by analogy, it works as a frame or shell for the kernel of Kant’s argument. The question of liminal or borderline position that arose with counterbalancing sense by nonsense can thus be further elaborated with reference to the other instances of a failure of signification that Kant discusses throughout his work. Curiously enough, these phenomena are not characterized downright negatively: in the first part of the Analytic of the Beautiful, while examining the conditions for aesthetic autonomy (disinterested, unmotivated contemplation that yields a pure judgment of taste), the philosopher indicates the same qualities of lack of purpose and meaning as securing in objects their absolute, uncontaminated beauty. Here is a passage contrasting two kinds of judgments whose degree of purity depends on whether they involve conceptualization and interest in the material existence of the object: There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), or beauty which is merely dependent (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object should be; the second does presuppose such a concept and, with it, an answering perfection of the object. Those of the first kind are said to be (self-subsisting) beauties of this thing or that thing; the other kind of beauty, being attached to a concept (conditioned beauty), is ascribed to objects which come under the concept of a particular end. Flowers are free beauties of nature. (…) Many birds (the parrot, the humming-bird, the bird of paradise), and a number of marine crustacea, are self-subsisting beauties which are not appurtenant to any object defined with respect to its end, but please freely and on their own account. So designs à la grecque, foliage for framework or on wall-papers, etc., have no intrinsic meaning; they represent nothing – no object under a definite concept – and are free beauties. We may also rank in the same class what in music are called fantasias (without a theme), and, indeed, all music that is not set to words.13

It is only in evaluating free beauty for its form that one can obtain a pure (thoroughly disinterested) judgment of taste. Thus, the proper field of aesthetic contemplation is displaced away from representational arts like poetry or painting to marginal decorative phenomena that include 1) the least dignified and meaningful of fine arts, music, particularly when it is not supported by an accompanying text, 2) minor ornamental designs like frames or wallpaper, and 3) living creatures whose sole purpose is the 13

Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 16, p. 160.

206

Chapter Seventeen

embellishment of nature (they do not, for example, play a significant part in the economy of human consumption). Obviously, this act of displacement is one among many that point to the well-known dialectic of the border and centre, parergon and ergon Jacques Derrida explores and dismantles in The Truth in Painting. The whole of the Kantian Analytic proceeds on the assumption, Derrida claims, that it is possible to make a clear distinction between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to an artwork and the assessment of its beauty (the distinction being then used to assert aesthetic independence of art as well as Kant’s much celebrated division of philosophical labour).14 Yet, as the above discussion well attests, the intrinsic (a pure judgment of taste) can only be defined by means of the extrinsic, a merely ornamental addition to what constitutes the proper locus of artistic meaning. The critical importance of the border and frame which are customarily defined as thought-less and meaningless, devoid of theme, purpose and signification, purely incidental, leads thus to a positive reworking of no-sense (nonsense) as the basis for formalist and, by extension, early Romantic aesthetics. Liminal or parergonal beauty is best exemplified by the marginal art of ornamentation. Winfried Menninghaus quotes the genre of the arabesque as especially relevant to the context of the pre-Romantic tendency to suspend the hermeneutics of sense which begins with Kant and continues in the writing of German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck in the closing years of the century. If Kant talks about “designs à la grecque, the foliage for frameworks or wall-paper” as non-representative and thus apt for pure contemplation, he clearly marks a paradigm shift by voicing the desire to reverse an Enlightenment critique of the “senseless” vision and idle enjoyment these symmetrical ornaments were thought to offer. The arabesque, though invoked here only indirectly, seems to be particularly well suited to the task of illustrating aesthetic autonomy as it is commonly linked with the Islamic prohibition of images, an iconoclastic ban on representing living beings, which has made leaf- and floralwork a main current in the Muslim art of decoration. Obviously, the name itself needs to be read as an Orientalist formula, a convenient umbrella term covering a variety of artistic motifs indigenous to the East in the eyes of the West;15 in its broader art-historical use, it is a clear misnomer, referring to an ancient decorative tradition traceable to Greek, Roman and Byzantine architecture which became all the rage in Europe after being 14

J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 45, 63. 15 S. Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetic of Repetition in the 1001 Nights (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 111.

Liminal Beauty

207

rediscovered and reproduced in the Italian cinquecento. Misleadingly indicated as the arabesque, the design was a variant of the classical grotesque which featured blending and entwining objects such as human faces, birds, beasts, vines or flowers; a very different style, frequently designated Moresque, was developed by the Byzantine Greeks after the Mohammedan conquest, to be adopted around the ninth century by Muslim artisans who removed representational elements for religious reasons.16 The latter, characteristically Arabian design made use of geometrical combinations and interlacings, highlighting vegetal and floral elements in place of figuration and introducing Arabic inscriptions, often as sacred texts. The “Western” arabesque, however, developing from the Renaissance to mid-nineteenth century, was a broad category drawing on the repertoire of the grotesque, with its principal forms of scrolls and tendrils, its extravagant, almost aesthetically offensive composition and hybrid forms. What Kant alludes to here is a style of decoration that recalls both the Islamic tradition of semi-abstract ornamenting (even though it is not reducible to a marginally decorative function), the Renaissance penchant for fanciful images and patterns found on classical murals, and the late Baroque vogue for highly adorned framing which emancipated itself from the subservience to an image to become an aesthetic object in its own right (rocaille). In order to fully appreciate the radicalism of Kant’s gesture reevaluating parerga by placing them at the centre of his aesthetic theory, one needs to hark back to the reputation such ornamental patterns earned in Western art history. From the very beginning, we learn from Vitruvius, Horace and Pliny, the arabesque-grotesque genre was deemed decadent, mad, irresponsible and tasteless.17 Most commentators, disconcerted by its combinations, would call it mindless and nonsensical, a monstrous offspring of unbridled imagination. Admittedly, during the Renaissance the freshly excavated art of ancient decoration became hugely popular and prized for its lack of restraint and exuberance, prompting attempts at imitation (such as those by Raphael and his followers). The taste for the grotesque spanned most of the sixteenth century, with the characteristic 16

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago / London / New Delhi / Paris / Seoul / Sydney / Taipei / Tokyo: 2002 (15th edition), vol. 1, p. 505-506. 17 Cf. Patricia C. Smith, “Poe's Arabesque,” Poe Studies, vol. VII, no. 2 (December 1974), pp. 42-45. See also a comment on Vitruvius’ and Horace’s views on the grotesque in the recently published, comprehensive work on the subsequent revivals of the classical grotesque style in Europe: A. Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque. Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008), pp. 15-20.

208

Chapter Seventeen

design of a freakish face incorporating more and more vegetal elements such as leaves and fruit (this tendency would later find its culmination in Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s bizarre pictures of fruit- and vegetable-composed heads). In the late Baroque decoration, a stylized human face was replaced by highly ornamental and in fact increasingly abstract shell- and leafwork known as rocaille. This form of the arabesque-grotesque became again a source of controversy as the rationalist-minded precursors of the Enlightenment found it a space filler, whimsical and empty of thought.18 Seen against this background, the Kantian pre-Romantic struggle to redeem framing ornaments by indicating their role in demarcation of art and constitution of aesthetic autonomy seems both daring and unprecedented. Even more so as the treatment of the arabesque in terms of absolute art seems to be restricted to the last decade of the eighteenth century, the years of turbulent transition where new currents in literature and art started to gain momentum. In the full-blown Romanticism the arabesque already functioned differently, with a new significance imposed on it through allegorical reading. The ornament became part of the secret code, a series of hieroglyphics the artist used to disguise his symbolic message (the arabesque in particular being associated with the seemingly tangled, but deeply harmonious, life of nature, as in Philipp Otto Runge’s cycle Tageszeiten19). It is thus only in the German Romanticism before 1800 that the arabesque as the distinct art of the border, not included yet in the main image, and still retaining the earlier connotations of a meaningless play, was central to the aesthetic definition. It underlay for instance some of Friedrich Schlegel’s and Ludwig Tieck’s early literary experiments which were accordingly called “fantasies about nothing”: books or poems “without any coherence,” spectacularly nonsensical. The arabesque was in particular highly valued by Schlegel who referred to it as “the embryo of all of modern painting” and based his own novel Lucinde on its pattern.20

18

Rocaille is not, strictly speaking, a variant of arabesque, yet its use of ornamental leaf and shell forms may suggest itself as the link between the Kantian notion of the parergon (adorned frame or background, capable of fulfilling the requirements of aesthetic autonomy), and the arabesque proper, a specimen of nonrepresentational art. See W. Menninghas, In Praise of Nonsense, pp. 73-75. 19 P. Betthausen, Philip Otto Runge (Leipzig: Veb E.A. Seemann Verlag, 1980). 20 Quoted in W. Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, pp. 85-86. See also Schlegel’s musings on Tieck’s novels, which he calls “poetical arabesques (…) fabricated out of old fairy tales,” and which he credits with particular “fantastic richness and facility,” “sense of irony,” and “intentional variety and uniformity of

Liminal Beauty

209

At the same time, the genre became linked with the early Romantic notion of irony as an unending process of reflection constitutive of a text and mediating its meaning. In the Athenäum aphorisms, examples of the playful or ironic treatment of the literary form and philosophical discourse were linked with both the grotesque and arabesque traditions.21 Four of the stories in Ludwig Tieck’s second edition of the 1797 Fairytales, marked by the intent to violate narrative illusion by means of stylistic devices such as a distancing metanarrative “frame,” were assigned an “arabesque” subtitle.22 Thus, the arabesque may be thought of as paradigmatic for the newly established poetics that cherished its features of playfulness and purposelessness and aimed at similar “abuses of imagination.” It seems that, for the very first time, nonsense, the scandalous frame of the hermeneutics of sense, has found its positive determination.

coloration.” Cf. F. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. P. Firchow (Minneapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 1991), p. 84. 21 For more detail, see Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque prior to Romanticism,” The German Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Nov., 1969), pp. 665-685. 22 Interestingly, one of the fairytales boasts a (fictitious) Oriental place of publication (“Instanbul by Heraklius Murusi, Court Bookseller of High Gate; in the Year of the Hedschrah 1212”), perhaps in this way pointing to the Eastern origins of the ironic and digressive genre. See Menninghas, In Praise of Nonsense, p. 7273.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “GYRING TO THE ANCIENT TOWER OF GOD” – OF POETIC SURPLUS AND CYCLICAL “VICISSITUDES” OF THE POET EWA BORKOWSKA

Only purity can’t be seen, and evening, when both light and shadow forget us for a moment, busily shuffling mysteries. —A. Zagajewski, “Chinese Poem”

One of the most inspiring compositional structures that can be found in both choreography and music is rondo with the characteristic motifs which keep recurring in a pure or modified form. The choreographic realization is often based on a form either unique to the artist’s perception or that of a life cycle which serves as a pattern or the subject matter for a dance. During one of his walks in Northern Wales, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) faced a breath-taking vision of a falcon gliding in the air, circling in an apparently effortless flight which showed itself as a masterpiece of navigational achievements. In his most famous sonnet “The Windhover” Hopkins provides us with an amazing inscape (“inscape” is compared with the melody in music) of the bird gyring in the air which can compare only with the dance of a solo dancer whose virtuosity makes the audience dumbfounded with astonishment at the view of an impressive choreographic acrobatics. The scene is reminiscent of a “towering” falcon in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (II,4) or the majestically-performed horseriding of Henry V in the tragedy of the eponymous title. What is the momentary motionlessness alternates with the dynamic winnowing of the wings, the physical power mingles with intellectual dexterity as the unique Falcon-dancer controls the force of the wind and rebuffs the resistance of the air. It is the bird’s circling in the air that reminds the poet of the

212

Chapter Eighteen

dancing skater, with little loops or jigjags performed along the path of the movement, with the change of plane, the chasse passe as the dancer-birdskater slides his feet with the heel firmly fixed to the ground with the body bow-bent as if he hurled and glided on the ice rink. The dynamics of circling in the octet of “The Windhover” is majestically choreographed in a single dance of the most rhythmical of Hopkins’s sonnets. The movements or instants of the bird can be longer or shorter, stronger or weaker as if manipulated by a divine choreographer, himself impressed by “the mastery of the thing” in motion. The end of the circling movement marks a finale of a developmental progression which peaks to a climax of a sudden fermata of the concluding “buckle,” a resolution of the rhythmic crescendo, creating a sense of cyclical closure. The sestet of the sonnet presents the philosophical/theological aspect (instress) of the surplus of visual spectacle. The poetic performance is choreographically enacted, the bird’s dancing (wind-hovering) looks like a text in space that uses figures and schemas to convey the meaning (or hermetic symbolism) by way of visual effects. The sonnet is a pantomime of the gyring bird which demonstrates the poet’s ability to control nature through art, “a ritualistic re-ordering of reality”1, as in dance, an action rendered by expressive gestures, dictated by emotional inspiration and ordered by the rhythm of music. In Camille Paglia’s words: Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature.[...] Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis, fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act.2

The sequence of the bird’s riding, striding, swinging, hurling and gliding is suspended by a choreographic halt of the “buckle” that is preceded by the series of alliterative sounds which enact the bird’s high-pitched calls, made during its swooping, flying up and dropping down in the air. The pantomimic gestures of the dancing bird, reinforced by the re-circling beats of the Sprung Rhythm, reinforce the sense of suffering and Christ’s passion the sestet enacts. The drama of Passion and Crucifixion is metaphorically presented in the sestet of the sonnet, as in the medieval 1

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefretiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 29. 2 Paglia, Sexual Personae, p. 29.

“Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”

213

pageantry which the sonnet seems to miniaturize. The poetic performance is effected by means of Sprung Rhythm, a repetitive and therefore, cyclical pattern of the recurring isochronous feet, stressed and unstressed syllables, the use of “rove-over” lines (as in enjambment), musical rests, “outrides” (extrametrical syllables), the proliferation of alliteration, assonance and a variety of accentuations that come back in patterns. The sonnet is “a perfect theatrical act destined to portray emotion persuasively”, as in the ballet dance which shows “the consonance of the soul and body”, with the falcon, like a pendulum, in the centre, his wings similar to “the limbs of a dancer which follow mechanically of their own accord”3, flying up and dropping down in arcs. The imagined dancer is the kestrel-knight in his chivalric costume, with “beauty, pride, plume”, the recurring inscape of medieval iconography (in ballet it is a Kunstfigur) motivated by the repeated pulsation of instress, the inner energy, the “grandeur of God” that marks the essence of the deity-driven teleology of the Middle Ages. In Hopkins’s Judeo-Christian belief, the history should be linear, nonrepetitive in its eschatologically-oriented progression which will signal the end of time. However, in his poems, this Christian view has often been challenged for the sake of the aesthetic purpose which combines the cyclical with the linear. In his “May Maginificat” as well as in other poems the deep feeling of the yearly cycles is buckled with the belief in a history that is eschatological, theologically oriented and unfolding under the direction of God. “The Windhover” is a re-enactment of the liturgy of the Eucharist, of the “real presence of God,” epiphanically invoked in an aesthetic gesture of the poetic art. Hopkins composes his poetry in the glory of God (“ad majorem Dei gloriam”) and suggests that neither circularity nor cyclical vicissitudes of man can disturb his reflection on God’s presence in the cycle of man’s history. “The Windhover” is a poetic celebration of the history of salvation with the sense of “cyclical renewal” that recurs each time the sacramental liturgy re-enacts the mystery of resurrection. The first part of the sonnet seems to metaphorically enact the cyclical “vicissitudes” of time, the ever changing course of history, the terrestrial chiming of the clock, the terrain of mutability, change and decay. The change, however, is seen as a possibility of progress which finds its finale in the poet’s conversion into Roman Catholic religion, a sign of refinement and an important advancement of man who ascends to the higher levels of perfection. The greatness of the past, the mystery of 3

Mark Franco, Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 147. All phrases in inverted commas are quotations from this page.

214

Chapter Eighteen

redemption, the medieval glory and the chivalric splendor re-cycle in the present that seems to advance beyond the accomplishments of the past. The presence (in Hopkins the “real presence of God”) of the bird/the Other/the divine awakens the “I” that remains in the state of the phenomenological rest/sleep/repose, as is the initial “I” in “The Windhover”. In the sonnet, the subject gets exempt from his self, becomes selfoblivious, gives up himself wholeheartedly to Otherness (the important subtitle of the poem is “to Christ our Lord” which cannot be over-looked) that awakens in him admiration and a celebratory ecstasy of the divine “mastery of the thing”. The “I” of the poem is no longer object-conscious but one that has been liberated from one’s own self-imprisonment as if, paradoxically, blinded by the intense resurrecting light of Christ’s glory (“The Windhover”). The drowning of the initial “I” in the text of the poem, the disappearance of the experiencing consciousness, can be diagnosed as the finale of the ontological adventure which is thus no longer relevant as the source of meaning. The change of address is marked in the sonnet by the word “Buckle!,” a sudden break or hold, which is simultaneously a kind of suspension (as in the musical fermata, the longest but optional in duration rest in music) when the dancing bird experiences a rest, an interruption of mobility (fantasmata) by the posa, as it is choreographically termed.4 It is the moment when the bird-dancer experiences a confrontation with the mysterious (the divine? Otherness? Surplus?), that is, when he gets involved in the dance as “an unreflective physical action.”5 This transition from stasis to motion which is marked by the word “buckle” contributes to the aesthetics of suspension as it “facilitates the public’s captivation”6 and enhances the feeling of amazement and the power of spectacle. The kestrel’s pirouetting in the air affects hypnotically the poet’s attention to the bird’s dancing, reminiscent of the musical rondo which is punctuated by the rhythm of gliding in what may be defined as the intimate act of choreography. The poet’s (his self’s) or the bird’s subject-ion to the divine assumes a new form of dedication which is expressed in the gesture of addressing “thee” as a “chevalier” or, even more friendly, “oh, my dear,” different from the formerly used forms of reference such as “minion” or “king (dom).” The turning and gyring of the kestrel is magical, mystical as in trance dances. The dance of circling is also illuminated with light effects as it starts with the sunrise and comes to an end, symbolically, as the light 4

Franko, Dance as Text, pp. 27-28. The reference is to Domenico da Piazenca, a 15th century dance theorist. 5 Franko, Dance as Text, p. 28. 6 Franko, Dance as Text, p. 28.

“Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”

215

slowly fades, which is marked by the twilight of the falling “blue-bleak embers” in the stove at dusk. The choreographic spectacle of the sonnet recalls D.H. Lawrence’s essay “The Dance” (from his The Twilight in Italy collection) in which the rhythm of the prose mimes that of the dance performed by the village women dancers taken “by the transport of repeated ecstasy.” The hypnotic effect of the dance is intensified by “the very rhythm of delight”, violence in passion, the women’s shifting, flying, drifting and palpitating “as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that was subtly rushing upon them, through them.” Lawrence’s rhythmic description, an enactment of the dance in the language of narration compares well with the enactment of the kestrel’s gliding and reeling in the air as shown in Hopkins’s sonnet. One of Lawrence’s most effective choreographic descriptions can be found in the following passage: the dance passed into a possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth, leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, oh, exquisite delight in every inter-related movement, a rhythm within a rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer, till, oh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the woman’s body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave of man’s body, perfect for a moment, and then once more the slow, intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer, always to a more perfect climax.7

The passage is more sensual and erotic than Hopkins’s sonnet, but at points combined also with the spiritual, especially when the writer expresses the women’s rapture and the polarity between the sexes typical of Italian culture. When they are “flung, borne away, lifted like a boat on a supreme wave, into the zenith and nave of the heavens, consummate”, the women remain in ecstasy, which is reinforced by the daring song at the end of the essay. Part of the fascination with the choreographic act is achieved by a long succession of rolling pirouettes as in pas de bourée (gliding along on one’s toes, so rapid that the spectator sees only spinning), gliding, swinging, hurling, “turns, contours and detours” (that is inscapes or figuras as in the ballet dancing) in which Hopkins’s windhover recalls the figures of the 17th century court ballet (esp. in geometrical dance). In its circling the 7

D.H. Lawrence, “The Dance” in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 168. All passages marked as quotations in this paragraph come from Lawrence’s story.

216

Chapter Eighteen

bird-dancer uses all three planes, horizontal, vertical and saggital8, the latter plane especially characteristic for the hunting kestrel which dives swiftly on to its prey. The dance enacted by the kestrel seems as well to incorporate all other elements of the choreographic performance such as body designs (inscapes which are often addressed as forms, shapes and outlines in Hopkins), shapes, twisting, changes of speed (from riding to gliding), size (striding and riding differs from gliding considerably) and other variations. To reach the high level includes elevation, leaps and jumps and the kestrel seems to “achieve the mastery” of the dancing technique. In the scenario inspired by Hopkins’ sonnet it is impossible to overlook the French royalty and chivalry context, with the first line reference to the dauphin and minion, the members of French courtly culture. The imagery of chivalry harkens back to the medieval court iconography reinforced by such words as “beauty, valour and pride”, the attributes of the knight or the French nobleman. The presence of “dauphin”, the apparent heir to the French throne, often the oldest son of the royal family, is also not fortuitous. The French aristocrat’s penchant for self-display, a kind of physical theatricality was often a consequence of social restraints in the seventeenth century. The 17th century French court ballet with its conspicuous arena of self-display and transformation can also lie at the heart of the theatrical metaphor that Hopkins’s aesthetically employs in his sonnet. In French baroque, male dancers personified knights or heavenly bodies and the poet’s reference to chivalric valour and pride of the falcon can only support the idea that the 17th century dancer portrayed an elevated being.

The Other as Inter-locutor in Rilke and Hopkins Unlike Hopkins’s belief in time which is often of a cyclical pattern and that of “progression” with its finale in eternity, Rilke’s (1875-1926, a Bohemian-Austrian poet writing in German) philosophy of time is more concerned with the idea of decay and a degenerative pattern though sometimes, surprisingly, also with the belief in progress and regeneration. As such, Rilke’s ideal of decay is often associated with a reverence for antiquity and the achievements of the ancients, hence perhaps the worship of the metaphorical “ancient tower of God.”

8

See the book by Lynne Anne Bloom and L. Tarin Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography (London: Cecil Court, Dance Books, 1989), pp. 47-49.

“Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”

217

Both Hopkins and Rilke struggle with language and both seek their God/gods in different ways, Rilke more in an allegorical way of constructing baroque conceits and Hopkins by trying to express in words the real presence of divinity. The three poems, two by Hopkins, “The Windhover” and “Let me be to Thee as a circling bird…” and one by Rilke “I live my life in various rings…” seem to render similar tones in what may be called the poetic liturgy of gestures. One poet addresses God (or Other(ness) as in Rilke) as the ultimate Love and the other as the “ancient tower [of God]” that constantly overlooks the world as if to protect it from above. In both poems, the idea of a circling, windhovering and gyring movement around God as the centre/focus of the universe seems to lurk in the background as the most inspiring metaphor and a cause of the poet’s metamorphosis; as we read in Hopkins’s poem (Poems, 28): Let me be to Thee as the circling bird, Or bat with tender and air-crisping wings That shapes in half-light his departing rings From both of whom a changeless note is heard. I have found my music in a common word, Trying each pleasurable throat that sings And every praisèd sequence of sweet strings, And know infallibly which I preferred. The authentic cadence was discovered late Which ends those only strains that I approve, And other science all gone out of date And minor sweetness scarce made mention of: I have found the dominant of my range and state Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.9

To which Rilke’s antiphonic response will be: I live my life in growing orbits (expanding rings) which move out over the things of the world Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, And I have been circling for a thousand years, And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm or a great song. 10 9

W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie, ed., The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Fourth Edition (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 10 Robert Bly, trans., Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Perennial Library, 1981), pp. 12-13. Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen, die sich

218

Chapter Eighteen

Rilke seems to think in terms of life cycles, the continuity of life in the rings of transformation since in his existential belief “staying is nowhere” or, as is expressed in the jubilant conclusion of his sonnets, “staying is everywhere”. The poet’s song is not “das Lied” but “der Gesang” (the neutral “das” turns into the masculine “der”) which bears the overtones of something more sublime as in the hymnal singing to celebrate the divine. The tower always bears a symbolic value in Rilke’s poetry (cf. Hölderlin’s residence in the tower in TĦbingen) since elsewhere, for instance in the poem “Der Turm”, the reference is to the interior of the labyrinthine stairway. The experience of climbing up the dark stairway symbolizes man’s finding his way out of a maze, which may be akin to the myth of Dedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book VIII). The failure to attain God’s ideal is often caused by man’s getting involved in numerous cyclical vicissitudes on his way to perfection. Hopkins, however, finally discovers that the way to perfection is through the Love of God whereas Rilke, like a falcon, never stops circling in search of his identity, be it his alter ego, the other self, the substitute for his voice (Gesang) or the thing to which he dedicated all his life in the never-ending poetic worship. Rilke’s penchant for the circular movement is also a preference for that which is unlimited and has no end, much in the sense Roger Bacon once defined a “circular motion [which] is interminable and for its own sake”.11 In his predilection for Greek (or Roman) mythology and the Greek model of life, Rilke does not think of returning to the prelapsarian state of bliss where the circle began but of ascending or, rather, descending to ancient gods who were more attached to humanity than the distant God of Christianity. The cyclical view of the history of the Roman empire was often presented not only to show the times of splendour and grandeur but also to account for the process of decay in which Rome was involved (later on confirmed by history), with the people ruled by appetites rather than reason. Such a cyclical pattern of time’s vicissitudes becomes a frequent image in Rilke’s poem in which life is presented as progression and the poet recalls a fortune-hunter who witnesses the revolution of his fortune’s wheel. At one point, Rilke’s man is subject to the various vicissitudes in which he can be involved (falcon, storm) and at another über die Dinge ziehen. Ich werde den Letzten villeicht nicht vollbringen, aber versuchen will ich ihn./ Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm und ich kreise für jahrtausendelang; und ich weiss noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm oder ein grosser Gesang. 11 Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 58. All quotations in this paragraph come from this book.

“Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”

219

point he follows the cycle of fortune’s wheel as a Greek statue towering over the world’s history (Gesang which is the “greater song”). The stability of the “ancient tower of God” that overlooks the world contrasts with the continual fluctuation of the poet’s cyclical vicissitudes marked in the poem discussed by ever expanding rings of his life. The metaphor of the expanding circles the poet lives by can bring an association with Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (La Misteriosa Flamma della Regina Loana) which presents the whole cycle of the antiquarian Giambattista [Jambo] Bodoni’s trachycardias (rapid heartbeats) of memory, the memory which was lost in the car accident and is miraculously restored at the moment of entering the house of his childhood. When back in the attic of the house with the archive of old books and documents, in the alchemist’s tower which is the Chapel of the past, the Temple of Time, Jambo’s memory becomes regenerated, which is the process both painful and healing. After being seized by each new flutter of trachycardia and “since reawakening into memory’s favour”12, Jambo experiences sudden epiphanies, like those in James Joyce’s poetic experiences, which are inspired by his intellectual versatility and the “mysterious flames” of the books he read in the past. Jambo’s climbing to the attic recalls Rilke’s imaginative gyring to “the ancient tower of God” or to a “towering nave” that man keeps ascending in order to see better from the top (cf. also William Golding’s novel The Spire where the father, Jocelin keeps climbing the spire, the work of his life, pride and ambition). The poet can discern, however, only the contour of God in a vague and growing shape, the image different from that of Hopkins in whose vision the contour of Christ (inscape) is outlined (drawn) by a gyring kestrel. Rilke’s imagination of God is often anthropomorphic, the matter of immanence rather than transcendence, the way of searching one’s own identity through art in order to reconcile with the divine. The analogy to William Butler Yeats’ metaphor of “turning in the widening gyre” and the falconer’s loss of contact with his bird in the poem “The Second Coming” can also come to mind. The imagery that Rilke uses is more similar to that of Yeats’ than Hopkins’, though the reference to the falcon and its circling ascent to the sky seems to link the poems in question. In Hopkins’s sonnet the “mystery” of meaning seems to “ooze out” from the event of in-scaping the text, enacted by the choreographic incarnation of the divine. The meaning of the poem oozes out in the course 12

Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, trans. from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock (Orlando Austin New York: Harcourt, Inc, 2004), p. 408.

220

Chapter Eighteen

of a cyclical process which starts in medieval history of chivalry and comes to a climax in the Christian mystery of resurrection. The “blue bleak embers” of meaning gash with “gold vermilion” of Christian sense, which seems to aspire to what Gadamer defines later on as true structure of the hermeneutic circle, the one that is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition.13

Watching the poet’s choreographic performance we participate in the hermeneutic spectacle in which the historical/Christian background of the text is buckled with that of our own experience. The meaning of the poem is the “fire that breaks from thee” (“The Windhover”), no longer the fruit of the act of seeing (“I caught this morning morning’s minion.....”) but the result of the creative process in which the “I” recedes for the sake of the artwork that emerges for the higher glory of the divine. The meaning is that which is instressed, no longer the subject’s own intentionality but the sub-mission (“under-standing”, as Hopkins hyphenates the verb in his other poem “The Wreck of the Deutchland”) to the divine whose (real) presence fore-shadowed (pre-understanding) the poetic act of creation (his circling in the air of meaning). *** The emergence of meaning in Hopkins’ sonnet is a result of an intimate act of choreography based on circling which recalls the gesture of “improvisation,” defined as a way of tapping the stream of the subconscious without intellectual censorship, allowing spontaneous and simultaneous exploring, creating, and performing. Improvisation emerges as an inner-directed movement response to an image, an idea, or a sensory stimulus.[...] The improvising spirit allows itself to be carried along ready to indulge in (and take advantage of) whatever visions present themselves; ready too, to follow the “road less taken.” The choreographing spirit sees the fleeting images, the

13

Hans H. Kögler, The Power of Dialogue. Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault trans. H. Hendrickson (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 293.

“Gyring to the Ancient Tower of God”

221

barely noticed motions, imprinting them internally as it continues on its way.14

What is most inspiring in this gesture is its spontaneity and the way it always becomes a response (inscape?) to the external stimulus (instress?), a response to a challenge (of the Other? the ungraspable because of a “fleeting image”?) which was its inspiration and of which it is an aesthetic execution. Hopkins’s sonnet “The Windhover” seems to inscape “the intimate act of choreography” which is performed as an “inner process, begun in a creative encounter with movement and pursued and refined with aesthetic sensibility.”15 “The Windhover” becomes a scenario of the poet-choreographer whose intention was to delight his own eye and that of the seer, to elicit emotional or kinesthetic responses and express the joy of moving (the dialogue of a choreographer with a dancer is imminent). The performance of a gyring bird is “a pagan cult/worship of the eye” (“I”), a modernist (pagan) ritual still present in Catholic religion whose aesthetic roots are deeply embedded in the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome. However, there is always something unplanned, something that is latent in the labyrinth of the choreographer’s unconscious (“without intellectual censorship”) that may be later on discovered by the viewer for whom the whole spectacle is like the aesthetic feast to be digested (or ingested, as in George Steiner’s terms, for further reflection). As the intimate choreographic act is charged with improvisation, the dance is not only a cooperative effort of the choreographer and the performer but, first of all, a work of art which is as specific as it is universal; it points from the known to the unknown or deepens that which is already understood. As artist, the choreographer’s restlessness and sense of urgency about sentience takes him beyond craft, ideally to create a unique statement that will involve the perceiver in some meaningful way: a moment of perspective, of recognition, of skittishness or serenity.16

The ritual of metamorphosis (as in Hopkins’ conversion into Roman Catholic religion) from the visible to the mysterious is, then, enacted by a work of art which is to seduce the viewer/reader by affecting his sensuality 14

Lynne Anne Blom, L. Tarin Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography (London: Dance Books, Cecil Court, 1989), pp. 6-7. 15 Blom and Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography, p. 7. 16 Blom and Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography, p. 10.

222

Chapter Eighteen

(and dancing can be most seductive at this point) which can never be achieved by the obedience to the rules of craft (cf. Hopkins dismisses the rules for the sake of the recognition of the “real presence” of God, which attracts him to Roman Catholic religion). Poetry is an imitation and interpretation of the game of an analogy which is likeness, prompted, as always in Hopkins, by the “current language spoken”, by the rhythm of natural life of which dancing remains the most appropriate execution. The dance is never for oneself but for the other, be it a co-partner (interlocutor) or a viewer, which calls for sensual apprehension and a heightened sensitivity of oneself, the partner and the relationship of the two in the gesture of co-creating of the intimate act of (poetic) choreography. Compared with Hopkins, Rilke’s is not a desire for portraying a linear choreographic movement, but an act of “gyring” as of a dancer tiptoeing and circulating around the same focus which provides a source of reference always addressed and referenced to in the poet’s creative gesture. Rilke’s dancer wishes to see God/gods from the top of the “ancient tower” which is the best vantage point to look at the past things and enjoy their (e)motional stability.

CHAPTER NINETEEN THE SURPLUS OF STRUCTURE: TOWARDS THE MORPHOGENETIC APPROACH TO CULTURAL STUDIES TOMASZ BURZYēSKI

If contemporary post-structural and post-modern tendencies implicit in methodologies of cultural studies are structured by any universal principles rendering order to the otherwise chaotic nature of the discipline, this is a feeling of uneasiness with reference to the concept of the Cartesian subjectivity.1 This intellectual incredulity towards the notion of coherent and essential Self is best rendered by structural methodologies which tend to perceive the constitution of subjects in terms of their relationships with the Other. Consequently, human subjectivity becomes determined and constructed by the formative impact of the external which may be conceptualised in terms of language systems, ideologies or social structures. Historically speaking, theories of social and cultural determinism were conceived as remedies for idiosyncrasies of the Husserlian and Weberian interpretative humanisms. The main line of criticism postulated that interpretative theories were not in a position to provide an objective explanation of social and cultural structures as long as the systems themselves were conceptualised as intended and constructed by agents driven by subjective motivations. In this sense, the invention of structuralism was devised as a project aiming to provide objective methodological foundations of a new cultural theory perceived as a nomothetic discipline sensu stricto.2 1

See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999). 2 Cf. Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. With Two Retrospective Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

224

Chapter Nineteen

The main aim of this article is to criticise the methodology of researching into human agency from the perspectives of structural and systemic determinants of subjectivity. The objective, however, is not to postulate another revival of the Cartesian subjectivity but, contrariwise, to suggest a new, middle-of-the-road cultural ontology which is founded upon the duality of agency and structure conceived as dialectically intertwined aspects of cultural reproduction. Hence, the outlined methodology is based upon the premise of morphogenesis, an assumption indicating processes of elaborating socio-cultural structures by means of human action. The focal postulate suggests that cultural processes assume a form dramaturgic events fusing determining influence of structures with the creativity of actors performing on inter-subjective and interpersonal stages of society.

The Surplus of Structure. Structural Determinism and Cultural Studies The idea of structural determinism as a coherent methodological claim can be traced as far back as to Durkheim’s functional-structural methodology suggesting that “the determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts proceeding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.”3 The legacy of Durkheimian proto-structuralism indicates that culture should be conceptualised as a structure sui generis, a complex system whose internal coherence is achieved due to the principle of selfreference. In this respect, Durkheim’s insights antedate and theoretically prefigure de Saussure’s structural linguistics not only in the general concept of structure seen as a self-referential entity, but also in the very idea of structural determinism: Society was not simply a model which classificatory thought followed […]. The first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men, into which these things were integrated. […] Thus logical hierarchy is only another aspect of social hierarchy, and the unity of knowledge is nothing else than the very unity of collectivity, extended to the universe.4

3 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. S.A. Solovay and J.H. Mueller (New York: Free Press, 1938), p. 110. 4 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, ”Primitive Classification and Social Knowledge,” in Social Theory. The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), pp. 87-88.

The Surplus of Structure

225

The theory postulates that the extra-personal organisation of social facts orchestrates the intra-personal universe of human cognition. In other words, individuals are perceived as running in a treadmill of structural determinism. Since their cognitive capabilities constitute a mere reflection of the pre-existent status quo, resultant actions, consequently, have no other conceivable impact upon the reality than reproducing pre-established structures. From the Durkheimian perspective, the separation of structure and action gives rise to the supremacy of synchronic analysis in which the problem of change is excluded from conceptualisations of social ontology. At this point, the main shortcoming of structuralism springs from ignoring the fact that cultural production belongs to the domain of, to use de Saussure’s terminology, parole. Hence, to speak of empirically verifiable cultural activities is to deal with the idiosyncratic and constantly changing sphere of human actions. In other words, purely structural methodologies tend to forget that culture is a living, changeable phenomenon, a process in statu nascendi. As Anthony Giddens observes: The ‘structure’ of an organism exists ‘independently’ of its functioning in a certain specific sense: the parts of the body can be studied when the organism dies, that is, when it has stopped ‘functioning’. But such is not the case with social systems, which cease to be when they cease to function: ‘patterns’ of social relationships only exist in so far as the latter are organised as systems, reproduced over the course of time.5

The surplus of structure is, in the context of structural methodologies, a negative added value that hinders the observation that culture is a living matrix of practices in the process of becoming due to the constructive element of human agency.6 Culture, as Chris Jenks declares, “emerges from the noun ‘process’, in the sense of nurture, growth and bringing into being.”7 It is a constantly changing network of socially constructed phenomena which are being constituted by means of communication as well as interaction processes undertaken by knowledgeable agents. Culture, to put it otherwise, is in the constant process of reproduction. 5 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 61-62. 6 See Piotr Sztompka, Society in Action. The Theory of Social Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 95. 7 Chris Jenks, “The Analytic Bases of Cultural Reproduction Theory,” in Cultural Reproduction, ed. Chris Jenks (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 3.

226

Chapter Nineteen

Cultural Reproduction. The Morphogenetic Approach The morphogenetic perspective on cultural theory is greatly indebted to Weber’s interpretative sociology which aims to delineate a coherent social ontology by means of taking the category of individual action as a point of departure.8 Since elements of culture, as we learn from Weber, are intersubjective constructs, cultural reality becomes a province of human action and interpretation. As a result, culture is conceptualised as a result of societal activities. It is a realm of social practice through which knowledgeable agents construct history.9 In the context of cultural studies, the Weberian perspective on society and culture is best represented by the “culturalist paradigm” in which culture is regarded as a manifestation of human agency actualising itself in the process of deploying signs in order to make sense out of the external reality. In its different ways, it conceptualises culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history. […] The experiential pull in this paradigm, and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes the two elements of humanism of the position outlined.10

The culturalist paradigm paves the way for a conceptualisation of culture conceived as a process of constant reproduction powered by the involvement of individual and collective social actors performing their roles on the basis of encountered structural conditions which may facilitate, or restrain, undertaken actions. The aforementioned standpoint becomes indicative of the “morphogenetic approach” in which processes of structural elaboration and change are perceived from the vantage point of organised social

8

See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. T. Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1997). 9 Alain Touraine uses the term “historiocity” to denote the process of morphogenesis by means of using history to make history. See Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye. An Analysis of Social Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 9. 10 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” in Media, Culture and Society. A Critical Reader, eds. Richard Collins et. al. (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), p. 39. emphasis added.

The Surplus of Structure

227

actions.11 The perspective seeks to reconcile the antithetical dimensions of agency and structure by postulating the temporal character of social realities. Society is, therefore, seen as a dynamic realm of action in which “structure necessarily predates the action(s) which transform it; and […] structural elaboration necessarily postdates those actions”.12 Consequently, the ontology of social and cultural realities is experienced as the dialectic of continuity and change occurring within the systemic character of norms, values and signs of culture. Archer’s morphogenetic perspective seems to be in league with theories of cultural reproduction stressing that “culture, as a process, is emergent, it is forthcoming, it is continuous in the way of reproducing, and as all social practices it provides the grounds and the parallel context of social action itself.”13 Archer’s morphogenetic perspective is related to methodologies enabling the overcoming of agency and structure dichotomy by means of postulating the “duality of structure”.14 From the latter perspective, agents are regarded as individuals whose actions produce cultural structures and are simultaneously structured by the very act of human participation in socio-cultural reality. This twofold character of cultural reality springs from the dialectic of individual and society conceived as the “duality of culture”. The notion postulates that subjectively constructed meanings may produce inter-subjectively experienced consequences which, in turn, recursively structure our ways of participating in cultural reality. As Piotr Sztompka sees it: […] it may be said that from the vantage point of action there exists a parallel “duality of culture.” On the one hand culture provides a pool of resources of action that draws from it the values to set its goals, the norms to specify the means, the symbols to furnish it with meaning, the codes to express its cognitive content, the frames to order its components, the rituals to provide it with continuity and sequence and so forth. In brief, culture supplies action with axiological, normative and cognitive orientation. In this way it becomes a strong determining force, releasing, facilitating, enabling, or, as the case might be, arresting, constraining, or preventing action. On the other hand, action is at the same time creatively shaping and reshaping culture, which is not a God-given constant, but rather must be 11 Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 166. 12 Archer, Realist Social Theory, p. 76. 13 Jenks “The Analytic Bases…,” p. 3. 14 See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 25-28.

228

Chapter Nineteen seen as an accumulated product, or preserved sediment of earlier individual and collective actions.15

Consequently, processes of structural elaboration become, as it were, detained between the subjectivity of one’s actions and the objectivity of their consequences, or, to put it otherwise, between the intra-personality of action and motivation as well as the inter-personality of social structures. Such a dialectic theory, to put it the nomenclature of Giddens’ structuration theory, proclaims the duality of structures. Structural phenomena constitute both external determinants of individually undertaken activities as well as results of agents’ actions.16 By the same token, individuals are also regarded in a twofold manner: they are both actors entangled in social and cultural structures as well as agents participating in the reproduction of the socio-cultural environment. As a result, structures become deprived of their external and objective nature. Social practices, as Giddens teaches us, “do not have ‘structures’ but only exhibit ‘structural properties’ and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents.”17 In other words, systemic circumstances of action become incorporated in the incessant flow of an individual’s interpretative processes in the course of which the recollected past (structural properties) is knowledgeably reproduced in order to provide further conditioning for agency.

The Morphogenetic Approach Revisited. Cultural Reproduction as a Theatrical Performance The dramaturgic perspective on the ontology of cultural reproduction is based upon the morphogenetic approach postulating the premise of temporal continuity between structures (discourses, ideologies, religions) as well as actions performed by individual and collective social actors. Cultural reality remains in the process of reproduction which means that the dialectic interplay between structure and agency manifests itself as a flow of cultural practices assuming a form of iterative dramaturgic performances.

15

Piotr Sztompka, Trust. A Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3-4. 16 Giddens, The Constitution of Society, pp. 25-27. 17 Giddens, The Constitution of Society, p. 17.

The Surplus of Structure

229

The ontology of cultural reproduction could be represented in terms of dramaturgic events fusing the structural and discursive hegemony as well as individuals’ interpretative autonomy. Culture becomes, consequently, conceptualised as a model of cultural reproduction comprising, the text (structural devices from which actors draw during the performance), the stage (spatial and temporal dimensions of interpersonal interaction), the principal actors granted dominant roles in the process of cultural reproduction and, last but not least, the audience assuming a role of the Other. An individual’s interpretative horizon remains deeply anchored in the pre-given hegemony of cultural texts stating the perimeter of knowledge conceived as a natural foundation of daily experience. The egocentric autonomy of the Cartesian Self is as untenable as squaring of the circle: actors are compelled to articulate pre-given lines, to perform preestablished gestures. This compulsion of textual repetition becomes a crucial element of the theatrical role. Hence, it is the repetitive character of roles that implies an ability to remember cultural texts, to recollect past memory traces and inscribe one’s self in the matrix of bygone experiences. Texts, to put it otherwise, provide an actor with a secure harbour, a haven of ontological security.18 In this sense, the influence of acquired texts facilitates the continuous routine of phenomenological reduction disguised as the common-sense cognition: The notion of ontological security ties in closely to the tacit character of practical consciousness – or, in phenomenological terms, to the ‘bracketings’ presumed by the ‘natural attitude’ in everyday life. On the other side of what might be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action and discourse, chaos lurks.19

Texts offer a shared framework of reality rendering mutual understanding and reciprocity. In this sense, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s nomenclature, textual resources constitute an actor’s cultural capital, the totality of cultural assets acquired by means of socialization and education from which individuals draw throughout their lives.20 Much formative as it may sound, the text cannot establish the complete hegemony over the actuality of the present day and the potentiality of the 18 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 36. 19 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 36. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 124-125.

230

Chapter Nineteen

future. An actor does not resemble a passive entity which is completely moulded by the structures of society and culture. Consequently, human subjectivity does not resemble a mirror image of texts that have paved the way for its constitution. The agential character of actors is anchored in the hermeneutic potential of the homo textualis representing an actor whose performance is a mixture of creative interpretation and compliance to the imperative of textual repetition. As Wojciech Kalaga puts it: By interpreting both the exterior and itself – and as a sign it cannot escape self-interpretation – the subject as much constitutes (or constructs itself) as it is constituted (or constructed) by discourses; it is as much offered subject positions as it co-creates those positions via appropriation and interpretation.21

Actors are not compelled to repeat the lines unreflectively, without an element of creative interpretation. An actor’s memory cannot be conceived as a mode of pure representation, but rather a means of alternation of the past. This agential aspect of remembering, as Robert Lowell teaches us, situates a cultural actor within a nebular field of fluidity in which “the past changes more than the present.”22 As a consequence, the faculty of remembering implies a continuity between reconstructive and constructive imagination; the fusion of mere repetition and alternative interpretation which constitutes cultural roles. The alternation of past in the process of acting gestures to the second element of the dramaturgic perspective, namely the stage. The stage is a locale on which actors compete in the process of winning hegemony over cultural reproduction. It is an arena of public debate where dissimilar viewpoints, economic and political interests become intertwined with the pre-existing elements of culture. Thus, the concept of the stage indicates a site of cultural convergence in which knowledgeable actors enter dialogic relations. The inter-subjective and interpersonal nature of the stage renders its dialogical conceptualisation as a kind of, to use Paul Ricoeur’s notion, “discordant concordance”, a nebular field of cognitive and axiological 21

Wojciech Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 179. 22 See Allan Johnston, “Modes of Return; Memory and Remembering in the Poetry of Robert Lowell,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 36, no. 1 (1990), p. 73. Cited After: Ewa Borkowska, “Memory as a Mode of Return,” in Memory and Forgetfulness. Essays in Cultural Practice, eds. Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego, 1999), p. 34.

The Surplus of Structure

231

constructs shared and disseminated by means of symbolic exchange.23 In this peculiar context, the stage is an essentially moral construct subsuming an axiology of interpersonal discourse. We make the difference between reasonable agreement and intractable disagreement. A common or identical history cannot be reached – and should not be attempted – because it is a part of life that there are conflicts. The challenge is to bring conflicts to the level of discourse and not let them degenerate into violence […].24

This axiology of interaction becomes a cultural foundation of social order: existing in the reality structured by the formative presence of the Other depends on faith that the underlying moral framework of reality will not crumble. In this context, trust emerges as a cultural mechanism rendering the moral construction of stages as realms of reciprocity and dialogue. Moreover, it seems that the notion of trust transgresses the polysemic nature of cultural realities represented by the excess of signs and the multiplicity of discourses. At this point, trust could be related to a belief that, despite the proliferation of signs, interacting social actors may depend on the common signifying practices, on the shared patterns of interpretation. Second of all, the notion of the stage suggests that dramaturgic events may be spatially and temporarily located within a distinct time-space continuity. The stage is not a fixed geographical entity or an objective organizational system. It rather represents a symbolic location which assumes a form of the societal arena of interpersonal relations. The stage, consequently, becomes conceived as a spatial and temporal entity in a cultural meaning of the term. It constitutes an intangible field of interaction assuming both the interplay of actors’ presence and absence as well as the continuous flow of time linking the present with the past and the potentiality of the future. The spatial aspect of the stage gestures towards globalisation processes: performed actions are not only embedded in local, familiar circumstances of action, but are also re-shaped by the phantasmagorical presence of distant Others.25 The idea of the stage, secondly, subsumes purely temporal relationships which may be 23

Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself and Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 142. 24 Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination, Testimony and Trust. A Dialogue with Paul Ricoeur,” in Questioning Ethics. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 12. 25 See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 18-19.

232

Chapter Nineteen

conceptualised as an interplay of modernisation and tradition. Dramaturgic performances, to put it otherwise, are localised in a temporal continuity between ideologies of progress as well as the conservative awe towards the past that cannot be undone. The central, spot-lighted place on the stage is occupied by principal actors who seek to influence cultural production as well as cultural policy. These actors are individuals – scholars and intellectual provocateurs, politicians or gurus – whose work provides us with new insights into the nature of cultural (re)production. Yet, cultural agency may be embodied also in collective actors who are formal and institutionalised (political parties, grassroots organisations) as well as informal and noninstitutionalised (subcultures and other social movements). Actors, furthermore, cannot be seen as being endowed with equal possibilities or capabilities to influence policies. This, in turn, gestures towards a role of the audience. In this theoretical framework, the audience represents those actors who at a given time remain silent (or silenced) during the cultural debate. In deliberative democracy, however, their voice is formative as far as the principal actors’ performances are concerned. Since the construction of human subjectivity and identity presupposes an existence of significant relations with a great number of distant Others, actors are perceived as being constituted by a multiplicity of cultural stages.26 From this perspective, actors create themselves as divergent and multi-layered personalities. As George Herbert Mead postulates: We carry on a whole series of different relationships to different people. We are one thing to one man and another thing to another. There are parts of the self which exist only for the self in relation to itself. We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances. […] There are all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions. […] A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal, as I have just pointed out.27

Mead seems to suggest that the complexity of interpersonal relations paves the way for the self-constitution of “multiple personalities” and gives rise 26

Tomasz BurzyĔski, “The Self in the Looking-Glass of the Other. Intersubjectivity, Friendship and Trust in the Discourse of Modernity,” in “Zobaczyü Ğwiat w ziarenku piasku…” O przyjaĨni. pamiĊci i wyobraĨni. Tom jubileuszowy dla Profesora Tadeusza Sławka, eds. Ewa Borkowska and Małgorzata Nitka (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego, 2006), pp. 122-123. 27 George Herbert Mead, “The Self, the I and the Me,” in Social Theory. The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), p. 223.

The Surplus of Structure

233

to a new regime of interpersonal interaction in which an actor deals with the Other not as a wholly structured and complete personality but, contrariwise, a collection of personal development potentialities.28 An individual may be regarded in terms of a wanderer whose fate entails the necessity to roam from one cultural stage to another. The three components of the proposed framework – the text, the stage and actors – cannot exist independently and are joined together as the dramaturgic event. Texts are performed by knowledgeable actors who retain the ability to interpret and reproduce textual resources from the perspective of the performed roles. Actors, in turn, reflexively refer to themselves as being placed within the multiplicity of other agents embodied within distinct spatial and temporal relations constituting stages. Therefore, an actor is not only rooted in the potentiality of textual references, but also in the actuality of the gaze of the Other whose presence confirms their roles. When perceived from a more practical perspective, the theatrical metaphor may constitute an attempt to conceptualise cultural underpinnings of policymaking. The framework delineates cultural mechanisms of societal mobilisation, negotiation of norms and values as well as conflict resolution. It may be, therefore, regarded as a conceptual tool facilitating our understanding of contemporary multicultural societies in which cultural reproduction assumes a form of a societal dialogue among diverse social groups equipped with their own distinct political, cultural and economic agendas. The central claim is that participants in cultural performances (individual and collective actors representing different class, gender and political affiliations) compete in order to gain cultural hegemony conceived as an ability to legitimise existing elements of symbolic culture, such as representations, norms and, above all, values. Cultural stages resemble institutionalised arenas of societal construction of knowledge comprising actors engaged in organised cultural practices. Consequently, culture remains neither subjective nor objective; it denotes a sphere of constructs which are deeply rooted in the inter-subjectivity of everyday praxis assuming a form of the dialectic of subjective intensions and objective consequences of action.

28

The fragmentation of the Self is best rendered by the idea of “terminal identity” denoting an interactive subjectivity which cannot be coherent and transparent since from the onset is mediated by networks of on-line communication. See Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 22.

CHAPTER TWENTY PRAISE OF FROLIC: TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF NONSENSE MACIEJ NOWAK

Why have I appeared today in this unaccustomed garb? Well, you shall hear the reason if you have no objection to lending me your ears – no not the ones you use for preachers of sermons, but the ears you usually prick up for mountebanks, clowns, and fools, the sort of ears that once upon a time our friend Nidas listened to Pan.1

One of the biggest entertainers of all time to instruct her readers on very serious issues is Moira, the feminized allegory and the speaker of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. As we learn from the quote, Moira, or Folly, does not expect her listeners to take her words seriously. Assuming that a person like Erasmus would have never come up with a work which does not mean to communicate something substantial to its readers, we also assume that Moira’s apostrophe, being at once her statement of intent, must be insincere or ironic. We also feel that one of the chief objects of Praise of Folly will have to perform a Socratic task of suggestively insinuating at some point that what Folly really means is very often not at all that foolish. There are at least three conspicuous aspects of the Erasmian method by which he furthers his ethically-sensitive epistemology of nonsense. The first is the choice of satire for its formal literary form. As a satire, the Praise is not restricted to one particular form of expression, neither does it operate with a uniform diction which could be clearly defined as serious or humorous. Also, a satire, although providing a clear basis for a socially-engaged critique, is not expected to yield a univocal 1

Erasmus of Rotterdam, Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp 1515, trans. Betty Radice with an Introduction and Notes by A.H.T. Levi, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 10. Quotations from this books are marked within the text by initials PF, followed by the number of the page.

236

Chapter Twenty

teaching.2 The second distinctive feature of Erasmus is his using of a feminized allegory designed to offset the more rigid masculine outlook which predominates in all areas of life. As a woman, Folly possesses the natural propensity of “dynamic adaptability”, to use a politically correct term, which could be considered either as a weakness or a strength depending on the worldview and, the always biased, judgment of the readers. Most importantly, the third instrument of Erasmus’s satirical workshop is irony read here in the sense of being both a rhetorical device and a sophisticated strategy of playing with meanings, images and representations. Irony is the most capacious of all the three terms mentioned here, which, naturally, involves a refined interaction of all structural components used in the work. Erasmian irony could be defined as a state of mind which overlooks the complex contradictions and stations of human condition, a fact which cannot be ignored if we wish to get the whole picture of mankind. “The perspective Erasmus seeks is the one that encompasses these contradictions and paradoxes and thus contains a “higher truth” and a higher commitment. That perspective is still an ironic one because it arises from a sense of contradiction.”3 In my paper I should like to discuss briefly these three aspects of Erasmus’s satirical letter, and put an emphasis on its ironic perspective as contributing mostly to its creative valours as well as its, very serious as it seems, reflexive merits. As a satire, The Praise can be said to be advancing its “higher commitments” in two directions. The first could be called metaphysical. In literary criticism Erasmus’s monologue has been defined as a complex work “split between incarnational and eschatological satire.”4 This “incarnational” aspect refers to Folly’s Christ-like mission to teach people to be happy by advocating a simple model of a pious life. The “eschatological” moment, in turn, deals with Christianity as a doctrine 2 The various layers of senses conveyed by Erasmus’ irony which clearly mocks the medieval convention of “unilinear allegory” – in the logic of the poetics satire – are not to be read as excluding each other. C.f. Pavlovskis-Petit, Zoja. "Irony and Satire." Blackwell Reference, Online 04 June 2007 3 James W. Fernández, Mary Taylor Huber, Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), p. 99. 4 Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 23. One of the unique assets of satire is that it wants to be ambivalent and therefore urge the intelligent reader to work out positive solutions to the ethically-sensitive controversies discussed in it. Having reached a clearly ambivalent point in her discussion: “Folly foolishly and mysteriously breaks off; she has forgotten what she has said and hence can reach no conclusion.”(Ibid.)

Praise of Frolic: Toward an Epistemology of Nonsense

237

discussed in more formal, scholastic terms. The second direction, by far the more sophisticated one, advocates a standpoint firmly ingrained in commonsense, which sets up a base for a more flexible evaluation of things. An outlook based on commonsense also pleads the cause of a more liberal conception of going through life enjoying its pleasures. What would this life be, or would it seem worth calling life at all, if its pleasures was taken away?” (PF/21). Most of the passages of Erasmus’s text, but also a letter and an essay, adduces a variation of the main theme of humanity as a “condition” which does not fit in with any of the ideal patterns it sets for itself. The obvious divergence between the two directions mentioned here could be accounted for by the ironic perspective assumed by Erasmus’s wit, but also by the nature inherent to satire as a liberated, “salad” genre. The etymologies of satire (satura) are associated with a number of imageries – dish of diverse fruit, food offering, farcimen, as well as the mythological satyrs, of course. Most importantly, satire is not expected to produce a clear one-sided, didactic instruction. “Satire often proposes apparently hard-edged contrast to reveal the absurdity of human pretension, but flaws and uncertainties appear in the contrasts themselves.”5 As a literary genre satire also encompasses many modes and styles of poetical and prosaic expression. Juvenile‘s satires are philosophical and serious, for instance, while Horace prefers to entertain us focusing on details of life. His Satire II on frugality (the Second Book of Satires), for example, describes the effect the sweet juice obtained from mixed boiled and roast thrushes and shell-fish has on one’s stomach. Lucian’s satires, in turn, are parodic dialogues of gods hilariously afflicted by mundane grievances and very human needs. Parody is an important, and a more particular, implement of satirical authors, but more importantly satire, for what it is, owes most to this generic “unspecifiedness.” Hence its expressive, and also tactical rhetorical possibilities are enhanced by a playful deployment of artistic mannerisms of expression mixed up with less formal registers. A Roman satire for example, would be produced as a loose combination of verse and prose likely to involve a descriptive sequence of historical examples and anecdotes. Before it was refined by classicists, the satirical form had always been freer; its argumentation had been less precise (John Donne), and its linguistic form less elegant. Thought in its more argumentative passages was often spiced with interjections of direct speech. In the case of The Praise of Folly, the liberation of styles and registers proper to satire permits a wide overview of the folly of all stations of 5

Knight, The Literature of Satire, p. 31.

238

Chapter Twenty

mankind. It is conspicuous though that most of Erasmus’s attention is paid to the many controversies of scholasticism, seen both as a cognitive practice and as a vivid culture of a certain type of people. Interestingly, anyway we look at it, the mode of satirical representation plays an extremely important socio-critical role in that it is one of the few forms of address which can publicize boldly serious social problems practically never spoken of in official, serious registers. Erasmus makes it clear that the scholastic and theological discourse and the elites which produce it are not included in the hub of human concerns. In practice, the scholars and their theories rather appear to be completely alienated from what to most people is true-to-life experience. “These subtle refinements of subtleties are made still more subtle by all the different lines of scholastic argument, so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists and Scotists and I’ve not mentioned all the sects, only the main ones.” (PF/88) The serious satirical intimation is whether the secular, that is, an unspecialised point of view should not actually count as the common denominator of human judgement. The scale commonsense deploys to measure the merit of human action must take into account the usefulness of things, in the most mundane understanding of the word. But frolicsome disproving of the obscurities of Thomists or Scotists is but one facet of the critical versatility imputable to satire. The chief object of Erasmus’s satire is to radically humanize the world in which the production of, most of the time, abstract and impractical knowledge takes place. The question is to focus on those proud people whose outlook would have gladly done without corporeal existence and its quotidian matters. As the satirical narrator animates the realistic backstage of the scholarly life, the effect is simply speaking amusing. “But the funniest thing of all is when there’s an exchange of compliments and appreciation, a mutual back-scratching. Yet, if someone else slips up on a single word and his sharper-eyed fellows happens on it, ‘Hercules’, what dramas, what fights to the death, accusations, and abuse!” (PF/79) Yet, as one smirks at the picture which one strongly believes to be the reality of a certain social circle in all epochs, one feels that Erasmus’s intimation is serious. If selfcongratulatory attitudes predominate in members of the establishment of knowledge, it is not unimportant that a substantial part of the so called achievements of this privileged social group is meaningless and useless. Man aspires to ideas and ideals but what matters most at the end of the day is will to power as Nietzsche would put it, or, to put it less philosophically, an extremely egoistical at heart, pursuit of social prestige.

Praise of Frolic: Toward an Epistemology of Nonsense

239

The same can be said of rhetoricians whose chief business is furthering their private interests. “I should copy the rhetoricians of today who fancy themselves practically gods on earth if they can show themselves twintongued, like horse leeches, and think it a splendid feat if they can work a few silly little Greek words, like pieces of mosaic, into their Latin speeches, however out of place they are.” (PF/14) It should be stressed though that the satire is by no means to focus only on the follies of the higher classes or the privileged social groups. Everybody is vulnerable to folly and all walks of life have their sly ways with words and other people. Accordingly, what we share as a human species is not a rationale of ideas, the proud facade of our official, spiritual aspirations, but ignorance which in Erasmus’s discourse achieves a most “cosmic” dimension. Folly’s standpoint, if we recall the point already made, evincing its “eschatological” pretentions, is meritorious exactly because its actual position is anti-eschatological. Moira turns our attention away from the questions of the purposefulness of God’s creation and always considers the matter of God’s creatures having to survive in a reality of hostile contingencies as being the supreme concern of their existence. Most importantly, what is called “Self-love” here, the “folly” predominant in human condition, is not always to be taken as a negative thing. In many ways, turning a blind eye on the obvious flaws and weaknesses of oneself and others has its obvious advantages. “And since for the most happiness consists in being willing to be what you are, my Self-love has provided a short cut to it by ensuring that no one is dissatisfied with his own looks, character, race, position, country, and way of life.” (PF/36) The satire’s biggest merit as a somewhat “alternative” and marginal genre is its being able to open a wider perspective in which abstract knowledge and the official worldview would be boldly impeached by a down-to-earth judgment of a profane outlook. To further her arguments, Folly switches between registers, perspectives, and provides her listeners or readers with vivid bookish and historical examples. But what seems to be a mere frolicsome prattle of a wordy mountebank of human follies, herself a Folly, at the end of the day proves to be a dynamic and graceful, universalist allegory, looking on human matters simultaneously from two incompatible positions. The first one is that of episteme, man’s ideal knowledge extracted from the profane by people highly specialised in discourse production, and the second is that of the more vulgar doxa. The aim of Erasmian satire, actually of satire as such, is to forward a wellsubstantiated claim that the position of doxa is not deprived of a logic and a fully-fledged discourse of its own. One might have to call it a paradiscourse perhaps, a critical position based on an attestation of

240

Chapter Twenty

commonsense whose forms of expression are rarely founded on analytical judgement. Commonsense has to balance between a range of constituents and modes of perception, it has to consider the intuitive and the emotive side of what people usually do as they go about their everyday business. The judgement of commonsense therefore hinges on a balance between episteme and doxa, the later often running on spontaneous opinions and, very often, on wit or Witz (jokes, joking), in the Freudian sense of the term. Freud’s theory of joking and laughter places the mechanisms of these activities in the unconscious. “Laughter is in fact the product of an automatic process which is only made possible by our conscious attention’s being kept away.”6 But joking referred to in German as Witz is one of the few themes in psychoanalysis to discuss an unconscious psychical phenomenon which in order to happen, relies on an exceptionally high degree of sociable openness of participants involved in it. However using epithets like “socialised”, “sociable”, or “pro-social” in this context will not satisfy everybody. If we look at it from today’s gender-sensitive perspectives the ideological and cultural nature of Witz many critics and readers will treat joking in a Freudian sense as an example of a typical masculine, ideological practice. It cannot be denied that all jokes discussed in Freud’s essay sound masculine indeed, and women do tend appear in them as passive victims of various comical situations. The place reserved for woman is usually that of the “second” person of the joke. This is particularly the case in smutty jokes, although it should be borne in mind that the object of sexist allusions in Witz is not to seriously humiliate anybody. Nevertheless, joking, just like Freudian sexuality as such, is the domain supervised by phallic assertiveness and its verbal, cultural codes. Those readers who are prone to treat most representations of the feminine in literatures across the ages as being subject to phallic exploitation, are likely to claim that Praise of Folly is no exception in this respect. But I don’t think the female sex is also foolish as to be angry with me for attributing folly to them, seeing that I am Folly, and a woman myself. If they look at the matter in the right way they must see that it’s entirely due to folly that they are better off than men in many respects. In the first place they have the gift of beauty, which they rightly value above everything else, for it ensures their power to tyrannize over tyrants themselves. (PF/31) 31 6

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 207.

Praise of Frolic: Toward an Epistemology of Nonsense

241

Although a mock self-praise, written by a male author, reveals something of a “sexist” possessiveness dressed up in ironic scornfulness, Erasmus seems to be far from outperforming a massive castigation of the weaker sex. Quite the contrary. Erasmus’s satirical project achieves its universalist object precisely because it has managed to copy successfully the alternative, “feminine” ways of looking at things. Apparently, it occurred to Erasmus that the feminine, cheerful desultoriness of judgement and her miraculous, as many men would see it, adaptability to contingent circumstances wash well with the socio-critical programme of satire as a genre. For this reason, the appeal to the “gift of beauty” seems to be a serious apology of the practical aestheticism so obviously lacking in the empirical reality of the medieval scholars, for example. “Meanwhile the squalor they live in is sheer elegance to them, the stink smells sweet as marjoram, and their pitiful servitude seems like sovereignty, so that they wouldn’t change their tyranny for all the power of phalaris or Dionysus.” (PF/78) Obviously, liberal and civil intelligence of the Erasmian sort is rare in any historical period. Ideologies of all epoch have always known it well how to engage the masses in various sublime, often destructive causes of all kinds. Erasmus position is that of a satirical leveler clearly trying to further a universal, “natural” ethic of commonsense. The aim of the latter would be to counterbalance the places where the official regimes of feudal, scholastic, religious authority come close to what to him is abuse of power or an instance of these regimes’ ignominious resorting to hypocrisy and deceptive practices. This is why “beauty” is earnestly introduced here to compensate for the ugliness of the male world obsessed by religious priorities. But Folly’s perspective and the means of criticism change as the author, impersonating the “every-woman” he slyly created, gives expression to his liberal views, turning against the vitriolic misogyny of Plato. “For Plato’s apparent doubt whether to place woman in the category of rational animal or brute beast is intended to point out the remarkable folly of her sex.” (PF/30) Given this refined “effeminacy” of style and argumentation of Erasmus’s satire, we have little doubt that the author is not serious this time. As it dawns on us that there must be a method to Folly’s stylistic madness, we are also certain that the emphasis on misogyny must also be ironic. It is not the folly of her sex that is truly remarkable here but the discourteous (if not blatantly rude) callousness of the holy fathers in question. The gender trace leads us, therefore, to the subject of Erasmian irony which, in the first place, provides a more philologically orientated justification of what we figuratively referred to as Erasmus’s “feminine” mock-discourse. In other words, the graceful, feminine Folly could be said

242

Chapter Twenty

to be nothing but an original and a rather sophisticated ironic structure which becomes the chief rhetorical strategy of Erasmus’s satire. “Subtle irony that Erasmus employs to entertain us but also to establish his essay on a firm substructure well hidden from the superficial eye but apparent to those who look for it. Hide and seek is one of the favourite games of the ironist.”7 The sole question to preoccupy us here is why Praise of Folly reveals a, very surprising in these circumstances, propensity of structural and argumentative coherence. To achieve this, the answer goes, the author seems to have opened up an elastic space of ironic communication with his “special” kind of audience. “For not only is Folly a comic character invented by the author, who presents the entire essay to us as her monologue, but the audience whom she here addresses is also, in a manner of speaking, fictional, and Folly defines it as she goes along, particularly as she elaborates her numerous mock-analytical catalogues of the followers of Folly.”8 Clearly, this communication is enacted not by a suggestive wink to all receivers who appreciate a good sense of humour but by baffling all of them and excluding the less open-minded ones from the subtler intimations of satirical wisdom. “We are bewildered but also made aware of our bewilderment and its resources. We are caught up in the text but also aware of our struggle in the web.”9 But then we are strongly suggested to overcome bewilderment in order to dismiss the text as either not engaging enough to make the reading of it worthwhile, or to find its lucrative vein of a deep, insinuated meaning, which will make us want to follow the wiser implication of the playful satire. In most cases, Erasmus passes the test, and we really want to read on. Although it may not be very lucid why this is the case at first, we feel his irony is of the Socratic sort and it – to put it, quite purposefully, in a non-Erasmian, didactic manner – it conveys the gospel of wisdom in the sheepskin of stupidity. Our conclusion is that a successful work like Praise of Folly, if it is to convey a humanistic and a universalist message showing concern for people’s realistic needs, is unlikely not to resort to an indirect rhetorical strategy and a range of its distracting devices. One of the most suitable terms to determine the intellectual and creative workshop of Erasmus is irony, a trope, but also a symbol and a strategic principle. “Irony seems to be the trope of tropes, the one that names the term as ‘turning away,’ but

7

Zoja Pavlovskis, The Praise of Folly: Structure and Irony (Leiden: Brill Archive, 1983), p. 14. 8 Pavlovskis, The Praise of Folly, p. 13. 9 Pavlovskis, The Praise of Folly, p. 6.

Praise of Frolic: Toward an Epistemology of Nonsense

243

that notion is so all-encompassing that it would include all tropes.”10 Naturally, there are many examples of irony being abused by a bad party, often serving wrong causes, but in the case of Erasmus of Rotterdam it becomes a highly reflexive instrument of earnest humanism. This relaxed, version of humanism prefers to keep a distance toward the privileged representations of the feudal establishment as well as the didactic triviality of what we might call today the barren rhetoric of noisy democratizaton.

10 Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony” in: Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 165.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE SENSE IN THE MACHINE: BUSTER KEATON AND THE GENERAL SŁAWOMIR MASŁOē

Tom Gunning, concluding an article about Buster Keaton’s silent films and perhaps having in mind the final shot of The General in particular, writes that Keaton’s films suggest that twentieth century “man had to learn not only to work in a new way, but also to move, fall, and make love in a new rhythm in order to keep pace with systems no longer measured to human demands.”1 Doing this, he puts Keaton (and, I guess, himself) in a long line of nineteenth and twentieth century authors denigrating the mechanical at the cost of the flexible, spontaneous and organic, which begins with Coleridge, De Quincey and Ruskin. What is more, if we take into consideration the fact that Keaton is a comedian, this line of romantic critics of technology (and railway!2) intersects with a much longer tradition of treating comedy as a low genre dealing with base body lacking in spirit or at least radically clipping its wings. It is well known that this sensitive intersection is perhaps most forcefully expressed in Bergson’s theorization of laughter where he reduces the essence of comedy to “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,”3 meaning precisely situations in which spontaneity of spirit is compromised by rigidity of matter or habit. So is Keaton unwittingly a Begsonian? We shall look more closely into this matter, but even before that one can say that it 1

Tom Gunning, “Buster Keaton or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Cineaste, vol. 21, no. 3 (1995), p. 17. 2 An interesting account of “aesthetic” dismissal of railway by the 19th century English authors can be found in Małgorzata Nitka, Railway Defamiliarisation: The Rise of Passengerhood in the Nineteenth Century (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego, 2006). 3 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 1999), p. 39.

246

Chapter Twenty-One

would be very strange for a slapstick comedian who “dismissed to the end of his days the idea that he was an artist, curtly dismissing what he called ‘that genius bullshit’”4 and who said that “had he not become a comedian, he would have been a civil engineer.”5 Particularly when considering The General we can legitimately ask: what would be the point of making a feature length film whose main content are the intricacies of driving the steam engine with the purpose of showing it as dehumanising, while it would be enough to have an episode on the madness of machines the way Chaplin has it at the beginning of Modern Times? Clearly Keaton must have had fun making the movie, or at least so it seems. That the body and the machine are in the centre of the narrative of The General goes without saying. But is any of them presented as base, limiting and alien? One can have reasonable doubts about it. If we start with Keaton’s relation with his own body, we can say that as a former vaudeville artist he is definitely proud of it – obviously not the body as an aesthetic (and athletic) thing to be admired but its acrobatic skills, that is, the way it works, not the way it looks. This is emphasised throughout The General (as well as many other Keaton’s films) by means of long shots which are the dominant way of filming the gags involving physical skill (both when the protagonist, Johnnie Gray, succeeds and when he fails). Editing is hardly ever used in such scenes in order to show the audience that the whole (dangerous or demanding) situation presented on the screen was in fact physically performed while shooting it, that it was not “artificially” assembled using close-ups and medium shots involving no visible risk. A well-known scene of Johnnie sitting on the moving driverod of his engine could serve as a good example here. This gag could have been assembled by means of editing without any risk to the performer by showing e. g. a long shot of the entire engine and Johnny sitting on the motionless drive rod, then cutting to a medium shot of him sitting on the moving drive rod without showing the entire engine. This way the driverod could have been moved e. g. manually by somebody outside the frame involving no risk for the actor. By showing us the entire moving engine and forlorn Johnnie going up and down seated on the driverod without noticing his movement, Keaton obviously emphasizes the difficulty and the danger involved the gag as well as his skill.6 4

Alan Dale, Comedy is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 88. 5 Noël Carroll, Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor, and Bodily Coping (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 70. 6 Carroll, Comedy Incarnate, p. 77. As Carroll shows on many examples, this is Keaton’s consistent strategy throughout the film, which gives it its characteristic

Sense in the Machine: Buster Keaton and The General

247

Another quality of Keaton’s body which is emphasized in the film is his specific way of moving, often described as rigid and mechanical. We encounter this almost from the very beginning of the film when Johnnie gets off the engine and walks to Annabelle’s (his sweet-heart’s) place. His movements are even-paced and measured in a mechanical kind of way and he looks rigidly straight on as if he were an engine on rails. What is more, two small boys follow him repeating his gestures so that together they form a kind of human train, which Annabelle, not noticed by either Johnnie or the boys, joins as a third “car”. What we have here is no doubt veritable becoming-engine of Johnnie and a hint at the later inclusion of Annabelle in this becoming, but is this process dehumanizing as has been suggested? This depends on our understanding of what it means to be human. If we take with many others the Bergsonian way, we shall speak of feeling, spontaneity and vividness (always semi-natural) – in short: human interiority, the inner “life of spirit.” But what if one of Keaton’s great accomplishments is precisely creation of the protagonist lacking in such interiority? This lack becomes rather obvious if we compare Keaton’s characters with other famous comedians of the times, especially Chaplin. Unlike Chaplin’s tramp, Keaton never tries to impose predetermined sentiments on his audience or to convince us of his character’s delicate “feelings” and innocence.7 In fact, Luis Buñuel called him “the great specialist against all sentimental infection.”8 This absence of sentimentality is commonly linked to Keaton’s deadpan stone face as his trademark. But is it just a trademark the way Chaplin’s outfit is already the tramp? Commentators often try to save Keaton’s character “humanity” by noting that ultimately his deadpan is not really that dead, that although Keaton does not smile, his face is quite expressive. Yet should not his deadpan bring to our minds a famous theoretical moment in cinematic history also connected with the “neutral” face? The famous Kuleshov experiment in which he spliced a shot of the neutral face expression of an actor with a shot of a plate of soup, a coffin and a girl playing with a toy evoking in audiences the non-existent expressions of hunger, sadness and joy on the

style because long shots are relatively rare (or at least not stylistically dominant) in the works of Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton’s famous contemporaries. 7 This applies especially to Chaplin later shorts and all his feature films where he appears as the tramp. As Dale notes (p. 17), in his early shorts the tramp is still an amoral character, that is, he is not yet sentimentalized into having an innocent interiority. 8 Quoted in Dale, Comedy, p. 64.

248

Chapter Twenty-One

actor’s face may go a few steps in the direction of explaining the feeling of expressivity some people have while watching Keaton’s character.9 So what is the reason that, although we deal with the character lacking in conventional sentimental interiority, he is not perceived as a puppet? The reason for this is precisely his bodily act. It is his body which makes him “a character,” not his “interior.” The character’s movements are “mechanical” but rather than creating the feeling of dead mechanism, the body paradoxically seems to overflow with some kind of excessive life. Together with the stone face comes a particular (“unattractive,” “shrimpy”) body and a particular way it moves – in fact, the deadpan very much serves to amplify the ingeniously “mechanic” movements.10 These movements and the body are what define Keaton’s character as unique – the specific bodily skill (the skill of this particular body) is here the source of the most personal act (Keaton moves like nobody else) without relying on the bottomless pit of interiority. What is more, the “mechanical” movements of Johnnie’s body are very far from dumb or boring. What we witness in The General is an intricately choreographed “dance” or “ballet” in which the engine (two engines to be precise “General” and “Texas”), not Annabelle, is Keaton’s true partner: they separate, come together, chase after each other, unceasingly changing the lead. Yet such dance is obviously not to the taste of the champions of human spiritual interiority, which “true” dance is supposed to express. But what about the choreography expressing the becoming-engine of Johnnie and, what necessarily goes with it, the becoming-Johnnie of the engine? Or actually not expressing that, because expression is a category of interiority, but simply exquisitely showing that? And doing it in an extremely poetic way, if poetry can be understood (as indeed it must be) without implying the sound of tearful harp or glib piano. Against the Coleridge-Bergson line one has to emphasize that there is no contradiction between the poetic and the mechanic and no wonder that already Walt Whitman was aware of that: Fierce-throated beauty! Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all, 9

Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Wielka kamienna twarz – próba analizy filmu „Generał” Buster Keatona (ŁódĨ: Studio Filmowe N, 1996), p. 62. 10 I have always found Chaplin’s conventional sentimental “faces” to be at odds with his inventive body language.

Sense in the Machine: Buster Keaton and The General

249

Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,) Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d, Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.11

Yet Whitman goes even further – in a flagrant gesture he, without hesitation, connects the mechanism with freedom. Although in the context of the above poem one might be tempted to opt for a clichéd solution of understanding speed as simply giving an illusion of freedom while we are actually on the predetermined railway route, perhaps it is not so easily done in the context of The General where speed, although at the centre of the plot based on the chase (a “mechanical” slapstick strategy!), is not of paramount importance for the development of the graceful dance of becoming-machine and becoming-human. It is therefore time to ask an outrageous question: can becoming-engine of Johnnie make him autonomous? And what could autonomy mean in such a context? Having no interiority Johnnie has no feelings in the sentimental sense. At first sight, this may come as a surprise if we take into consideration that the plot is obviously based on the romantic melodrama of obtaining the object assigned by the sweet-heart (Southern uniform) interwoven with even more melodramatic saving her from the hands of the enemy. Yet, as many commentators noted, although Annabelle assigns the task which constitutes the formal frame of the plot, her role in the film is rather peripheral: chasing the “General” Johnnie does not even know that she is there accidentally kidnapped by the Nothern spies and her absence on the way back would hardly have altered the plot. What is more, unlike e. g. Chaplin who places young women at the centre of his films and treats them accordingly (they appear in lots of close-ups and in streams of heavenly light12), Annabelle is basically treated as parcel to be transported (which she sometimes literary becomes as a bound prisoner on the way to Chattanooga or in a sack emptied of boots carried by Johnnie into a baggage car) and she never gets special “lady” treatment either from Johnnie or Keaton as a director. Additionally, when looked at from a film history perspective, romantic melodrama in slapstick comedy was a matter of rather “inorganic” convention. Early silent comedies, the so-called tworeelers, relied on a succession of loosely connected gags because they were short (about 20 minutes) and therefore could count on the audience’s 11

“To a Locomotive in Winter” in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 359. 12 Carroll, Comedy Incarnate, p. 21.

250

Chapter Twenty-One

interest being captivated by the gags themselves. When it came to making feature films, which were supposed to last more than an hour, a framing story was needed so that it narratively justified the string of gags which nevertheless remained of primary importance. The narrative device most easily available, adaptable and understandable by mass audiences was of course the most rudimentary schema of romantic melodrama forced on slapstick material in most “mechanical” way. Keaton himself summarizes his uses of the romantic plot thus: “There were usually but three principals – the villain, myself and the girl, and she was never important. She was there so the villain and I would have something to fight about.”13 Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the sentimental romantic plot that turns out to be rather lifeless and rigid. If the romantic plot is extraneous, what about the other, parallel strand of narration, that is, the Civil War? It has been often noted that the final battle in The General is a sequence which is artificially appended to the proper narration whose structure is presented to the audience at the beginning of the film in the headquarters of the Northern army as a map Captain Anderson and General Thatcher pore over showing the route form Marietta to Chattanooga. Going there and back is precisely what the “General” does. Moreover, although the film is called The General, the engine is of no importance to the battle scene, while it is of crucial importance to all the others (perhaps excluding the night sequence in the forest to which we shall return). Although Noël Carroll, attempting to save the necessity of the battle scene, suggests an obvious solution writing that the battle scene has to take place because it is precisely the event which allows Johnnie to win the officer uniform and therefore to resolve the framing plot with no threads hanging,14 one may have at least two reservations here. Firstly, although Johnnie saves the day by killing the Northern sniper and blowing up the dam, both these actions are the result of his incompetence and are accomplished accidentally. None of his actions connected with the engine are of this sort – even if he fails to accomplish what he has aimed at, the (failed) result is never the outcome of his clumsiness and incompetence, but of a sort of inertness of matter so characteristic of the slapstick universe. What is more, Johnny has already earned the title to “glory” (and therefore to the uniform) by entering the enemy territory all by himself, saving Annabelle and bringing the news of the planned attack by the Northern army. But perhaps drawing attention to such intricacies of the plot is not of great importance anyway, if we note 13

Buster Keaton with Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1960), p. 131. 14 Carroll, Comedy Incarnate, p. 161.

Sense in the Machine: Buster Keaton and The General

251

that the entire Civil War plot works in a very similar way to the romantic plot: it is simply an extraneous imposition. The beginning (courtship and enlisting sequences) and the end (the battle) are there to rationalize the engine chase for the audience by means of employing two most popular narratives of mass cinema (sentimental and heroic) but are of little consequence for the organization or meaning of the crucial middle part. In both extraneous plots Johnnie is shown as a bumbler – he is clumsy as a soldier (in the battle scene he does not know what to do, the accidents happen because of that) and equally clumsy as a lover (when he visits Annabelle he gives her his photograph with his engine as a gift, sits down on a sofa and has no clue what to do next). He is confused in both situations because he is completely alien to the aims and values of these narratives – what he stands for has no place in them. His narrative task is simply driving of the engine, but not as a means to some end, whether it be war or romance, but as a presentation of the mechanism which is perfect and interesting in itself. Here Keaton – the man who did not consider himself an artist, but an artisan – perhaps not so surprisingly unknowingly finds himself among the most brilliant and rather avant-garde filmmakers of his times such as Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann whose famous films The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) present us with modern city – another “mechanism” which has neither meaning nor interiority but which simply works.15 What is interesting, virtually all commentators on The General do not express this externality of the war plot straightforwardly but in a roundabout way by claiming that the film offers no comment on the sides engaged in the war.16 But is this really the case? Is not what the commentators read as the indifference to the sides of the conflict precisely the effect of the “inorganic” status of the war narrative in the film (any other justification for the train chase would do just as well)? Does such an alienating lack of formal unity necessarily have to go together with the implied “neutrality” of the film? If the film indeed offers some comment 15

Vertov’s and Ruttmann’s films are only the most famous instances of a much wider trend in Europe. Outside Hollywood the popular framing plots used by Keaton could be abandoned. 16 For instance Carroll: “To my knowledge, no one has ever claimed that the theme of The General has anything to do with the War Between the States or, more abstractly, with some contest of values that the North and the South are said to represent. That is, one level of dramatic conflict is social, namely, the Civil War. Yet the film is careful to avoid differentiating the combatants ideologically. The war simply provides a context for and motivates the types of activities that compose the film” (p. 19).

252

Chapter Twenty-One

on the values of the sides, it is obviously not present there in the usual sentimental way as one side being worthless and evil, the other valiant and good. Yet, if we take into consideration the three strands of the plot analysed so far (the war, the romance and the engine) and see the way they are related, the matter of judgment may appear in a different light. We have already pointed to a strange inversion that takes place in The General. On the one hand, the strands usually taken to connote human interiority (the romantic and the heroic) function in the film as external, dumb and mechanical. On the other hand, the engine line of the plot, although dealing with “dehumanising” becoming-machine, turns out to be strangely engaging, sophisticated and poetic. Additionally, only the latter has some cognitive value for the audience: we simply learn a lot about driving the engine and nothing about love and war. Moreover, one has to note that, if we take into consideration discursive universes these three strands come from, love and war belong together and offer resistance to the machine. The sentimental and the heroic are part of the romantic ideology of the organic, which is the aesthetic foundation of the image of the Old South whose founding myths are chivalry and sentimentality and whose rather revolting incarnation in the world of silent cinema is The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith. The machine is pitted against the natural or organic throughout The General from the very beginning. The film starts with a long shot of the “General” which is followed by a medium tracking shot of the engine. In the third shot a frightened horse harnessed to a buggy backs up in the foreground and after a while we see the reason why: in the middle ground Johnnie’s “iron horse” appears from the left and obscures the picturesque Southern cityscape. When Johnnie finds himself with Annabelle in the forest in the enemy territory, nature out of the sudden “goes mad”: lightning hits the tree next to them, a bear attacks, they get caught in a trap, while the rain pours mercilessly. Having become one with the engine, Johnnie has no place in the image belonging to organicist ideology whose hostility we witness – Nature itself or rather the category of “naturalness” shows itself to be a vicious artifice. Politically incarnated in the images of blacks who are happy to be slaves and their chivalric masters courting sentimental women, the ideology of the organic is also the soil which breeds the ideal of perfect work of art as created by sensibility of genius. And here we come full circle to the beginning of this text: the work of genius is the ultimate incarnation of spontaneous human interiority which is the antithesis of anything mechanical. In a famous passage from Biographia Literaria, Coleridge goes as far as dividing the source of human creativity into two

Sense in the Machine: Buster Keaton and The General

253

separate and unequal parts: the spontaneous or organic work of art is the product of imagination, whereas all other creations of human mind are the products of fancy, because they have something contrived (unnatural, mechanic) about them. Although we can be quite sure that Keaton did not study Coleridge, we already know his intuitive rejection of the organic hoax: he’d rather be an engineer than an artist perpetuating “that genius bullshit.” Does all of the above amount to making no comment on the stakes involved in the war? It can, however, be objected that the famous final shot, presenting Johnnie in the officer uniform returning the salutes of the passing soldiers and at the same time kissing Annabelle while they sit on the driverod of the “General,” is precisely a humorous way of representing the final coalescence of the strands of the narrative into an organic whole embracing Johnnie, the army, Annabelle and the engine. That such a vision is problematic can already be seen if one takes into consideration the diverging interpretations of this scene. We started with a “pessimistic” one by Gunning who finds in it an illustration of alienating mechanisation of making love. Carroll, on the other hand, sees it as optimistic – the scene is simply one more example of Johnnie’s skill in solving encountered problems in a workman-like manner.17 Although the interpretations seem to be mutually exclusive, what we can suggest here is that both can add up to some wider perspective, especially if we place them in the context of black humour endings for which Keaton’s films are known.18 Yes, Johnnie’s bodily skill allowed him to find the solution worthy of an engineer but what we see in the last shot is the image of an ordeal of the man who tries to hold on simultaneously to the girl, the army and the engine – perhaps it is not accidental that the scene takes place exactly where we previously witnessed the greatest dejection of Johnnie after he had been rejected by the army and the girl. The very absurdity of the scene emphasises the impossibility of what is accomplished in it.

17

Carroll, Comedy Incarnate, p. 23. For instance in College Keaton’s character succeeds in marrying the girl, then we have two shots showing the disintegration of the relationship, and finally one presenting two separate graves.

18

CONTRIBUTORS

Katarzyna Ancuta, Assumption University of Thailand (Thailand) Anthony Barker, University of Aveiro (Portugal) Stanley S. Bill, Northwestern University (USA) Ewa Borkowska, University of Silesia (Poland) Rafał Borysławski, University of Silesia (Poland) Tomasz BurzyĔski, University of Silesia (Poland) Agnieszka Gołda-Derejczyk, University of Silesia (Poland) Leszek Drong, University of Silesia (Poland) Alina Mitek-Dziemba, University of Silesia (Poland) Wojciech Majka, The Pedagogical University of Cracow (Poland) Sławomir MasłoĔ, University of Silesia (Poland) Rekha G Menon & N Sreekumar, Indian Institute of Technology (India) Jacek Mydla, University of Silesia (Poland) Małgorzata Nitka, University of Silesia (Poland) Jude V. Nixon, Salem State University (USA) Maciej Nowak, University of Silesia (Poland) Marcin Sarnek, University of Silesia (Poland) Janyne Sattler, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) Tadeusz Sławek, University of Silesia (Poland) Itay Snir, Tel Aviv University (Israel) Andrzej Wicher, University of ŁódĨ (Poland)