digression

 “Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not cabbage; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks licking; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from fields, herds reindeer, guards cattle and sheep from wild animals, holds lions in check, rustles up game, locates ducks, lies in wait before pouncing on the net, retrieves a hunter’s kill without partaking of it, rotates a skewer in France, pulls carts in Siberia. Begs for scraps at the table; after stealing it timidly hides its tail; feeds greedily. Lords it over its home; is the enemy of beggars, attacks strangers without being provoked. Heals wounds, gout and cancers with tongue. Howls to music, bites stones thrown its way; depressed and foul-smelling before a storm. Afflicted by tapeworm. Spreads rabies. Eventually goes blind and gnaws at itself.”

 

This is a quotation from Linneaus, contained in one of Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts, True Stories of Dogs. The broadcast was directed at children – that is, the kind of children that Walter Benjamin might imagine, who seem an even stranger tribe than Linneaus’s dogs.  Benjamin adds:

“After a description like that, most of the stories frequently told about dogs seem rather boring and run-of-the-mill. In any case, they can’t rival this passage in terms of peculiarity or flair, even those told by people out to prove how clever dogs are. Is it not an insult to dogs that the only stories about them are told in order to prove something? As if they’re only interesting as a species? Doesn’t each individual dog have its own special character?

No single dog is physically or temperamentally like another. Each has its own good and bad tendencies, which are often in stark contradiction, giving dog owners precious conversation material. Everyone’s dog is cleverer than his neighbor’s! When an owner recounts his dog’s silly tricks, he is illuminating its character, and when the dog experiences some remarkable fate, it becomes something greater, part of a life story. It is special even in its death.”

It is a bit surprising to hear Benjamin go on like this about dogs – he is associated rather more with the angel of history than the good collie Lassie. But Benjamin, the ultimate freelancer, took all things into his ken. And leaves his mark – here, as elsewhere, it is the description as estrangement that fascinates him. After Linnaeus’s description, Benjamin imagines the dog stories he has read – which most probably tend towards Jack London – with the substitution of the word “dog” by Linnaeus’ description of dog.

It is the fine confusions that result from the substitution of a description for a noun that we begin to wonder about how substitution works at all, and then how noun’s work, and then how we ever convey a meaning in language at all. We are, momentarily, reduced to a muteness.  In Pierre Bayard’s book, Le hors-sujet : Proust et la digression, Bayard begins by asking a simple reader’s question: why is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time so long? He quotes from readers of publishers who rejected the first volume – notably the reader from Fasquelle: “The author concedes that his first volume could have stopped at page 633. But no problem, going forward, for there is almost 80 pages more from that number!

But it could also have been reduced by half, three quarters, nine tenths. On the other hand, there is no reason the author couldn’t have doubled it, or even multiplied it by ten. Given the procedure he employs, writing twenty volumes is as normal as stopping at one or two.”

Here we hear the same exasperation that Johnson felt about Tristan Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristan Shandy did not last.” This is the eminent classical judgement, which continues in the common sense philosophy to which English philosophers always return. Grice’s rules on implicature, which are beautiful things in their way, tell us that the conditions for perspicacity are the conditions for relaying content – for, in fact, truth itself. Whereas the idea of the digression, the “outside” of the subject – even as the outside moves inside the subject, inside the description – is something too alienating and “odd” to last long.

Proust was one of Benjamin’s sacred authors. It is interesting to think that Proust’s own sacred authors rather skip around the eighteenth century – Saint-Simon’s memoires are rooted in the late seventeeth century of La Bruyere, and Baudelaire is in full revolt against the “stupidity” of Voltaire.

Digression is a great instrument – it puts pressure on the “links” of discourse, as Bayard, who was writing in 1993, saw clearly. And we live and die among the links, us Internet cohorts, now.