1.
The First Letter
Rejection letters are rarely memorable. The writer who
receives one, outside of certain masochistic or indignant cases, certainly does
not want it hanging around, and the person who writes it writes it, in part, in
order to cut the tie with the writer – to forget the writer while moving on to
other business. It is, in other words, a sub-genre (like the suicide note) that
rarely rises above its occasion. Even so, there are always exceptions to the
rule in the larger world of politics, aesthetics and risky business. Take, for
example, Adorno’s rejection of Walter Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire in 1938.
Adorno is operating as the editor of the Journal of Social Research. It’s a
good gig. After all, it was by showing that he had a contract with the
Institute for Social Research that Adorno got his visa for the United States.
Thus, we get the perhaps most famous rejection letter of all
time. Famous enough to be translated into English and thrust into various
anthologies devoted to “critical theory”. Famous enough to be taught, itself,
in the classroom – though oddly enough hardly ever in terms of its genre as a
rejection letter.
Here’s the most, to my mind, jazzy part of the letter, even
as it is emitted by Mr. Unjazz himself:
“This sort of immediate - and I would almost say again
‘anthropological’ - materialism harbours a profoundly romantic element, and the
more abruptly and crudely you confront the Baudelairean world of forms with the
harsh necessities of life, the more clearly I detect it. The ‘mediation’ which
I miss and find obscured by materialistic-historiographical evocation, is
simply the theory which your study has omitted. But the omission of theory
affects the empirical material itself. On the one hand, this omission lends the
material a deceptively epic character, and on the other it deprives the
phenomena, which are experienced merely subjectively, of their real
historico-philosophical weight. To express this another way: the theological
motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed
presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one
could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic
and positivism. This spot is bewitched.”
Others, with more jazz in their soul, might want to lead
everything to that crossroads. Far from being bewitched, it is the best spot in
the house, the one from which you get the best view of the revolution to come –
or the reaction, depending on what is on the schedule for tonight.
2.
Benjamin, of course, was trying to learn his instrument in
those Baudelaire essays, and in the vast assemblage of notes for the Arcades
project. The instrument was the inferential juxtaposition, which had been
hoisted up by the surrealists as the only guide to the city of yesterday and
tomorrow. It was dialectical materialism sieved through the obsessive
compulsion disorder of the collector: kinda Marx, kinda Eduard Fuchs. And this
duo were not, it turns out, the odd couple, in as much as Marx was, himself, a
collector, a massive collector of reports on Industrial processes and working
class disorders, with the collection eventually toppling over into three
volumes (two of them sewed together by Engels after Marx’s death) meant to
exhaustively map the possibilities at play in the political economy of the post-Malthusian
world.
3.
I myself like the image of magic and positivism at the
voodoo crossroads. Jazz is at the bottom of it. Adorno’s scorn for magic is part of the
package of his own high modern provincialism. Benjamin’s method, or madness, is
a high calling – methods are high callings – which Benjamin’s Arcades project,
in its final state of gigantic ruin, map and mopes over. It is a kit full of
routes of escape that all turn out to be blocked. Which is a metaphor that can
bite you in the ass when the geopolitical reality is all about finding an
escape route.
I’ve been reading some of the fragments contained in volume
6 of the GW, and it is an interesting, rather vertiginous experience, as is any
experience in which one finds oneself continually stumbling, continually
knocking against the cracks. For instance, the fragment entitle On Marriage,
which begins with a wonderful juxtaposition of the mythical and the tabloid:
"Eros, love moves in a single direction towards the
mutual death of the lovers. It unwinds from there, like the thread in a
labyrinth that has its center in the “death chamber”. Only there does love
enter into the reality of sex, where the deathstruggle itself becomes the
lovestruggle. The sexual itself, in response, flees its own death as its own
life, and blindly calls out for the other’s death and the other’s life in this
flight. It takes the path into nothingness, into that misery where life
is only not-death and death is only a not-life. And this is how the boat of
love pulls forward between the Scylla of Death and the Charybdis of misery and
would never escape if it weren’t that God, at this point in its voyage,
transformed it into something indestructible. Because as the sexuality of love
in first bloom is completely alien, so must it become enduringly wholly
non-alien, its very own. It is never the condition of its being and always that
of its earthly endurance. God, however, makes for love the sacrament of
marriage against the danger of sexuality as against that of love.”
One has to pause here. First, to listen to what Benjamin is
doing – juxtaposing the prose of the “death chamber”, which comes from Police
Magazines and tabloid newspapers of the 20s and 30s - photographically adoring
the rooms where the bloody corpse of some victim was found and, as well,
the gas chamber or electric chair where the murderer was murdered by the
state – to Greek myth, and then to a very Biblical God. And then one has to ask
whether, indeed, death more often befalls lovers than befalls wives and
husbands. Here a bit of positivism, a bit more tabloid knowledge, would
relegate the Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde to the margin, and the more common
family murder to the front. For the marriage that “God” gives us against the
unleashed forces of death and sexuality is all too often a scene of violence.
Engels definitely knew this. Benjamin surely, in part of himself, knew this
too. The criminologists, who now call it “intimate partner homicide”, were on
the case in the 20s and 30s. The mythological correlative is not Homeric, but
rather the Maerchen of Grimm, where intimate partner violence is a constant
companion of princesses and peasants.
So here I am, Adorno-like, dispuing the point from the
positivist, statistical viewpoint, and then here I am, in thrall to the motion
of the fragment, to the evocation the forces of sexuality and death, from the
magical viewpoint, or the surrealist genius of seeing the “death chamber” –
where the corpse lies, where the blood spatters, on the one end, and where the
convicted murderer is beheaded, or as the Americans do it, fried, on the other
end, and superimposing over this the myth of the labyrinth. In the end, we get
the palimpsest subject, in the best high modernist tradition, the archaic
imposed on the modern which imposes on the archaic, the synchronicity of
newspaper stories creating that new and alien temporal modality of the contemporary
in which we all wiggle. Critical theory – oh, so critically – is discovering
the political texture of allochronism – that long colonial time – posits the
stone age and the modern on an objectively flat time line.
But to rescue the archaic by turning to the God of our
Fathers means succumbing to a fundamentally reactionary impulse, which fails
the test of historicity, and locks marriage into a form that it can’t sustain.
All of this in one fragment. Is there ever going to be a
reader rich enough in time and reference to go through it all?
4.
The second letter
In 1944, George Orwell submitted his novel, Animal House, to
T.S. Eliot’s publisher, Faber and Faber.
Orwell wanted a quick response. Eliot wrote him one, rejecting the novel
as being too completely out of synch with the public mood in Britain. It was
rather transparently anti-Soviet. And, as the Soviet Union, in alliance with
the British and the Americans, were fighting the Axis on the Eastern front at
enormous cost in men and materials, ill-timed.
However, Eliot’s objection was more than a matter of bad market
timing.
“I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that
the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with
what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something:
and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not
convincing,” wrote Eliot to Orwell. “And after all, your pigs are far more
intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the
farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so
that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more
public-spirited pigs.”
Eliot’s rejection letter does not bear the weight, as Adorno’s
letter to Benjamin does, of a massive secondary literature. When it was
released by Eliot’s estate in 2009, there were a flurry of articles
highlighting Eliot’s “bad judgment” in rejecting a “classic”. There is, for the
newspaper reader, something heartwarming about the thought that the great
mandarins in the publishing houses also make mistakes. It was a schadenfreude story,
made all the richer by the fact that many a middle school student of the
generation that grew up during the Cold War has dutifully written an assigned
essay, or a book report, or a class presentation on Animal Farm, marked by the
words “allegory” (define) and “totalitarianism” (define) and “Orwellian”
(define).
Orwell, of course, did find a publisher for Animal Farm,
Secker and Warburg. It was published two weeks after the U.S. dropped an atom
bomb on Hiroshima. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the alliance
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union rapidly unravelled, and the Free
World resumed their efforts from the 20s and 30s of defeating Communism on all
fronts. Orwell’s Animal Farm was as great a help to the anti-Communist battle
as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had been to the cause of anti-Catholicism.
Looking back, one can see a certain dialogue between Eliot
and Orwell, with the rejection letter and Eliot’s advocacy for the Pigs being
taken up, in a way, by Orwell’s 1948 review of Eliot’s book, Notes Towards a
Definition of Culture. Both Eliot’s letter and Orwell’s review can be seen as aspects
of the proto-history of meritocracy – that is, rule by the best trained pigs.
Orwell begins his review of Eliot’s
book on a characteristic note:
In his new book, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Mr T.S.
Eliot argues that a truly civilised society needs a class system as part
of its basis. He is, of course, only speaking negatively. He does not
claim that there is any method by which a high civilisation can be
created. He maintains merely that such a civilisation is not likely to
flourish in the absence of certain conditions, of which class distinctions
are one.
This opens up a gloomy prospect, for on the one hand it is almost
certain that class distinctions of the old kind are moribund, and on
the other hand Mr Eliot has at the least a strong prima facie case.
Orwell, in the late forties,
always begins by conceding the gloomiest view. Nuclear war was in the near
future. Either Soviet totalitarianism or American barbarism was going to
dominate the world. The capitalist economy, stuck in the Great Depression,
would never recover. And so on. The Orwellian gloom coexisted with a surprisingly
optimistic socialism, in which the problems of working class oppression and
colonialism were going to be dissolved, once and for all. This was officially a
case to rejoice over, yet Orwell saw that dissolution as involving the
liquidation of everything he was “for” in the aesthetic sphere. The plebes
would break the Sevres vases for sure. Yeats’ verse comes to mind:
“Many ingenious lovely things
are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.”
Orwell wants to say: good
riddance to the rubbish! But he can’t quite, because he has to admit, they were
ingenious lovely things.
Class, for Orwell and for Eliot,
meant something very English: the division of society into the aristocrats, the
middle class, and the working class. By shorthand, Eliot’s defence of class
meant the defence of the upper class. Which, by a codicil that Eliot did not
spell out, particularly, meant the class of patrons. Patrons operate outside
the laws of monetary gain and loss, although of course they are the massive
beneficiaries of the laws of monetary gain and loss in terms of investments in
land, stocks and bonds.
Orwell points out something that
has been all too overlooked in the history of Western institutions, which is
that the Church from the beginning has played the role of being a silo for upward
social mobility.
“Hereditary
institutions—as Mr Eliot might have argued—have the
virtue of
being unstable. They must be so, because power is constantly
devolving on
people who are either incapable of holding it, or
use it for
purposes not intended by their forefathers. It is impossible
to imagine any
hereditary body lasting so long, and with so little
change, as an
adoptive organisation like the Catholic Church. And
it is at least
thinkable that another adoptive and authoritarian
organisation,
the Russian Communist Party, will have a similar
history. If it
hardens into a class, as some observers believe it is
already doing,
then it will change and develop as classes always do.
But if it
continues to co-opt its members from all strata of society,
and then train
them into the desired mentality, it might keep its shape
almost
unaltered from generation to generation. In aristocratic
societies the
eccentric aristocrat is a familiar figure, but the eccentric
commissar is
almost a contradiction in terms.”
Eliot didn’t, however, argue
this. Orwell scores a distinct hit here, it seems to me. Including the idea of
the eccentric commissar – we know now that commissar’s came in all types, not just
the pigs of Orwell’s imaginary, and some of them believed in tantric sex, and others
believed in poetry. Stalin himself made Pasternak dance, but kept him from the
Gulag – acted, in fact, as a patron. The Communist Party in the Soviet Union
did function as a silo for upward social movement. Orwell didn’t have any
special knowledge of the Catholic Church or the Communist Party in the Soviet
Union to see this: he could see it in the forms of their organization. He could
imply these things from his own experience of English public schools and the
social forms that developed in the British colonies. He could infer.
Back, however, to the topic of
public spirited pigs. Eliot’s book gives them another name: elites. And it is
here that Orwell zeros in:
“He would like, he says, to see in existence both
classes and elites.
It should be normal for the average human
being to go through life at his predestined
social level, but on the other hand the right man
must be
able to find his way into the right job. In saying
this he seems almost
to give away his whole case. For if class
distinctions are desirable in
themselves, then wastage of talent, or
inefficiency in high places, are
comparatively unimportant. The social misfit,
instead of being
directed upwards or downwards, should learn to be
contented in his
own station.
Mr Eliot does not say this: indeed, very few
people in our time
would say it. It would seem morally offensive.
Probably, therefore,
Mr Eliot does not believe in class distinctions as
our grandfathers
believed in them. His approval of them is only
negative. That is to
say, he cannot see how any civilisation worth
having can survive in a
society where the differences arising from social
background or geographical
origin have been ironed out.”
Reading Eliot’s rejection letter and this review casts an interesting
light on the postwar state of intellectual life in Great Britain, which was
confronting a vast change in the social conditions ushered in by the war and
the Labour government. The order that was set, then, still holds, to a degree. But
the intellectual legitimation of that order, its assimilation of the “culture”
of the past, has never been untroubled; in particular, public spirited pigs, it
turns out, have their own ideas about who should own what, and how the rest of
the animals on the farm should be educated, given health care, and all the rest
of it. As one pig generation dies out and another succeeds, nepo pig to nepo
pig, we seem closer to having both a rigid class defined society and one with
an animus against culture at the very top. Patrons and patronage, which are
motivated by an obscure sense of duty and glory, have become, as it were, digested
into a pig ethos of maximizing present opportunities for short term gain.
Which gets us far, very far, from Eliot’s wan hope for public spirited
pigs, and Orwell’s hope for a society in which class distinctions disappear. We
sit, “privileged” in the Free World, with the uneasy feeling that something has
gone seriously wrong. This dialogue, as it were, between Eliot and Orwell casts
a bigger shadow than was realized by the writers of articles under their schadenfreude
headlines when the Eliot’s rejection letter was published.
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