Calasso, my antipodes!

I’ve been reading Roberto Calasso’’s Literature and the God’s, and getting that antipodal feeling. So close, and so far, we stand in the invisible community, the third life.

Calasso, at the beginning of his chapter on nymphs, remarks that the “gods manifest themselves intermittently along with the ebb and flow of what Aby Warburg referred to as the mnomic wave.” Later, Calasso points to the position of the eighteenth century on that wave, ‘where the lowest point was probably a moment in eighteenth century France when, with a breezy and derisive self-assurance, the childish fables of the Greeks, the barbaric Shakespear and the sordid biblical tales were all dismissed as no more than the work of an shrewd priesthood determined to suffocate any potentially enlightened minds in the cradle.” (28) Nevermind, for a second, that Shakespeare’s barbarism was derived from Racinian classicism, which took its charisma from the sense of Greek theater given by Aristotle, or so it was thought – that theater obeys certain rules. Still, I want to tussle a bit with this point. In fact, France figures in a special way in Calasso’s book – it was even in France that, in 1802, the God’s returned, when Hölderlin, returning from Bordeau, wrote to his friend Böhlendorff: “As they tell of heros, I can say that Apollo struck me down.” (10)

To dicker with Calasso about the gods is generally a losing proposition, as no contemporary writer is so god-immersed. However, in this tale, it strikes me that Calasso is following a little too closely another tale, a brilliant one woven by Nietzsche, which reduces the gods to Apollo and Dionysus. However, that reduction, however it worked for Nietzsche and for Calasso, does not tell the story of the whole spectrum of the gods. Let me beg a place, for instance, for Hermes. Hermes in the eighteenth century.

Hermes, trickster/writer, who does not leap upon us with the dazzling masculinity of Apollo – or should I say a masculinity so fraught that it is not contained within the mere male. Hermes, on the other hand, appears from the beginning as the god who understands, above all things, the track and how to turn one. For when Hermes is born, according to the Homeric hymn, he jumps out of his mother’s belly and hurries off to steal Apollo’s cattle. Now Apollo, coming out to find his cows gone, investigated the matter, especially after he saw a bird and understood the augury – that the thief was divine. But when he found the tracks of the cows, he cried out: “Oh oh! Truly this is a great marvel that my eyes behold These are indeed the tracks of straight horned oxen, but they are turned backwards towards the flowery meadow. But these others are not the footprints of man or woman or grey wolves or bears or lions, nor do I think they are the tracks of a rough maned Centaur; whoever it be that with swift feet makes such monstrous footprints, wonderful are the tracks on this side of the way but yet more wonderful are those on that.” For Hermes, even as a child, wore the characteristically odd winged sandals.

And as Hermes invented the letter, he put in it, at the very center, the animal track – but it is a track that can be turned. This is always the writer’s first and secret trick, his bit of Houdini. While Voltaire may well have been breezily dismissive of Shakespeare, and of the myths, this was not the grinding, mechanical dismissal of a nineteenth century positivist. Voltaire, that trickseter, was preparing fires and eatthquakes of his own.

But to return to my antipodes – Calasso, while relying on the line of myths that keep coming forward in painting after painting – the while of girls who offer themselves, infinitely, to adorn Rococco landscapes and who surely lie bareassed for Boucher and mount on a swing for Watteau – seems to miss them in the fairy tale.

And yet – it is a strange fact, one that casts a secret shadow, that the moderns, in their struggle with the ancients, opened the door to the fairy tale in European literature. Right at the beginning of the eighteenth century. And surely, here, Calasso misses a trick, for isn’t this the beginning of a fairy tale?

Nymphē means both “girl ready for marriage’ and ‘spring of water’. Each meaning protects and encloses the other. To approach a Nymph is to be seized, possessed by something, to immerse oneself in an element at once soft and unstable, that may be thrilling or may equally well prove fatal.” (31) Change the joke and slip the note, remember that the tracks within the letter may lead you elsewhere. In Hermes’ enlightenment by fairy tale, what is fatal is certainly at play, and there is always a nymph: Barbe bleu, La belle et la bete, Ricdin Ricdon. But seizure, immersion, terror are the elements at play here, and the forest is still near. The woods of the New World, the woods of Normany, the woods into which, as I have been reading, the peasants of Rouen fled when, at the end of a peasant revolt led by a mythical Jean Nupieds a century before – Rouen, that city from which Fontenelle, and Pascal, both emerged – Fontenelle, whose book against the sources, On the Oracles, is balanced against his dialogues for a new generation of nymphs interested in catching l’esprit geometrique.

I think Calasso has turned a blind eye to Hermes because, at the base, he is convinced that materialism killeth, and that the cold hand of the statistical freezes history. He does not want us to further contribute to the decline of the world from the sweetness which was once inherent in it, and for this reason he has, in the end, no use for Marx. But Marx, who could read the tracks from blue book to blue book and out into the industrial wilds, is my Hermes.

Underneath the skull

There’s a story about Georg Büchner. While he went from Darmstadt, where he was born, to Strasbourg when he was eighteen to study medicine, by law he had to return for his third year of study to Darmstadt, which he did. He returned to his parent’s house. His father was a well known doctor, a figure who took the enlightened side in town politics. The kind of father that, as critics in the 80s saw it, was similar to the liberal fathers who raised the children of the sixties generation that joined the RAF. Enlightened self interest was the limit of their enlightenment, the horizon. This is a story about Georg Büchner, who already had thought about political events in Strasbourg, which was recovering, or part of which was recovering, from the last revolution (and part of which was plotting the next one); and, evidently, he was also thinking about writing. Which he had a knack for, a knock for, a knock in the brain for. And so the twenty year old Georg Büchner sat in his father’s house. He sat at a desk and, to his father’s knowledge, studied anatomy. He scanned anatomical drawings. When his father saw him at his desk, he was studying anatomical tableaux, much to his father's satisfaction. Imagine Dad making time to talk to you. To talk about his early days as a doctor. To talk about what we know now. How exciting. What we will know. A century of progress. But when his father left the room, Georg, apparently, took out the materials he was really working with. The materials that went into the play he was writing. Danton’s Death.

A striking image, na? Under the picture of the skeleton, under the Handbuch of surgery, the book - well, what book? about Danton. And certainly this is a story that has been employed in the many stories, essays and poems about Büchner, who has figured as now the committed artist, and now the very image and form, as Karl Krolow put it, of “left melancholia.” The impress of that skeleton, of the skin and bones and what we know now, the heart intestine brain, on the revolution that proposed to free skin, skeleton, brain, heart and guts from the chain of obsolete custom, the oppressions of obsolete masters.

But an image, too, for the Human Limit. The symbols, the intersignes cast up by history, all the cracked looking glasses of all the servant girls, all the Buck Mulligans. I have, evidently, strayed from the true path of drawing on the literature of boredom to cover the report of good doctor Brierre de Boismont, an essay that exists as a predecessor to all the studies of suicide from all the suicide notes, a term that didn’t exist until the twentieth century. And that elbowed its way into conceptual existence by way of the police file and the forensic psychologist.

It is at the point of this written matter that discourse, the discourse upon which Boismont has been looking with a glance that his maitre, Esquirol, would disparage as a moraliste’s – for as Boismont himself points out, Esquirol was very much in favor of segregating the science of psychology from the essays of the moralistes – begins to take on a more satisfactory pathological coloration. It is not that Boismont quite understands how ordinary ennui, which he characterizes now as a modern development, and now as a universal human factor, it is not that he understands, quite, how it becomes malign.

For he can’t quite say that boredom actually causes some suicides. Oh, he takes the notes and letters he has accumulated and extracts causes of suicide, but it is an exercise which begs the question: is the suicide capable of diagnosing himself? And, in fact, even granting that boredom could be a driver of suicide, or mixed in with the chagrin, the repetition, the endless distancing of the realization of expectations, couldn’t it also be the case that boredom keeps one from suicide? For suicide, as an act, plunges the actor, if successful, into death – which the bored person might regard as quite as boring as life.