Uriah heep's party

“Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spent all his time in consideration of sad and pitiful things. Let us suppose that he knew they are imaginary fables so that though they drew tears from his eyes and moved his imagination they did not touch his intellect at all. I think that this alone would be enough to gradually close up his heart and to make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be delayed and slowed down…”

Thus Descartes, quoted in Stephen Gaukroger’s marvelous Descartes: an intellectual biography. Descartes imaginary person is in much the same situation as LI – we have our eyes full of the newspapers, we understand that the tragical events depicted in them are such as to be skewed almost to the point of sheer fiction, and yet they draw tears from our eyes. Surely a headline like this one can only delay and slow down the circulation of your blood – a sure cause of melancholia:

Blair in secret Saudi mission

Expulsions link to £40bn arms deal

We must distinguish between passions raised by the president of the U.S. and the prime minister of the U.K. The former arouses contempt, but how can the latter not arouse something worse? This newspaper fable, this Uriah Heep voice full of the most ludicrously hypocritical sentiments attached to a bloody, dead end war full of atrocity and powerlust really is something out of Dickens. Let’s collate the fables, shall we? This is from the report of Blair’s speech today:

“Today, of course, we face a new challenge: global terrorism. Let us state one thing: these terrorists do not, never have and never will represent the decent, humane and principled faith of Islam.Muslims, like all of us, abhor terrorism; like all of us, are its victims. It is, as ever, only fringe fanatics we face.”

This is from the article:

“Tony Blair and John Reid, the defence secretary, have been holding secret talks with Saudi Arabia in pursuit of a huge arms deal worth up to £40bn, according to diplomatic sources.

Mr Blair went to Riyadh on July 2, en route to Singapore, where Britain was bidding for the 2012 Olympics. Three weeks later, Mr Reid made a two-day visit, when he sought to persuade Prince Sultan, the crown prince, to re-equip his air force with the Typhoon, the European fighter plane of which the British arms company BAE has the lion's share of manufacturing.”

This is from the speech:

“But we need to make it clear: when people come to our country they have and should have the full rights we believe in. There should be no second-class citizens in Britain. But citizenship comes with a duty: to give loyalty to our nation, its values and our way of life.”

This is from the article:

“Defence, diplomatic and legal sources say negotiations are stalling because the Saudis are demanding three favours. These are that Britain should expel two anti-Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Masari; that British Airways should resume flights to Riyadh, currently cancelled through terrorism fears; and that a corruption investigation implicating the Saudi ruling family and BAE should be dropped. Crown prince Sultan's son-in-law, Prince Turki bin Nasr, is at the centre of a "slush fund" investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.”

This is from the speech:

“This is a global struggle. Today it is at its fiercest in Iraq. It has allied itself there with every reactionary element in the Middle East. Their aim: to wreck this December's first ever direct election for the government of Iraq.”

This is from the article:

“The Typhoon, currently entering service with the RAF, has a price of more than £45m a plane. Saudi Arabia previously bought a fleet of its predecessor Tornados from Britain in the Al Yamamah arms deal. Mike Turner, the chief executive of BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, was quoted in Flight International magazine on June 21, just before Mr Blair's Riyadh trip, saying: "The objective is to get the Typhoon into Saudi Arabia. We've had £43bn from Al Yamamah over the last 20 years and there could be another £40bn."

This is from the speech:

“And the way to stop the innocent dying is not to retreat, to withdraw, to hand these people over to the mercy of religious fanatics or relics of Saddam, but to stand up for their right to decide their government in the same democratic way the British people do.”

And this from the article:

“There is concern within the Foreign Office at the apparent partiality of No 10 to BAE's commercial interests. Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair's chief of staff, and his brother Charles, Lady Thatcher's former adviser and now a BAE consultant, are believed to be in favour of the deal.”

rwg communications

I received some feedback from readers on the RWG Communications letter that I am sending out. However, editing jobs have stopped. You know what this means, gentle readers – I will have to go out and try to get reviewing jobs. And that means nervous breakdown and starvation. In fact, at the moment I have agreed to write entries for a reader’s guide to novels for ten dollars an entry – which is desperation indeed. You try describing The Man Who Loved Children in one hundred words or less…

Anyway, every week I am going to include, in one of my posts, my solicitation letter. Floating it out into cyberspace, who knows? It might reach someone who needs editing, ghostwriting, proofreading or translating – my four strengths. As I’ve been going through academic journals, sending off to editors, I’ve also been collecting paragraphs of bad English culled from the articles in said journals. I have an impulse to use this material somehow. For instance, to append examples of wildly incorrect grammar or of disorganized discursive prose to my solicitation letter in order to hammer home my point: you need my service, or some editing service. But I’m not sure this won’t simply offend my potential clients. Readers, tell me what you think.

I'm also trying to figure out how to contact business consultants. This summer, I worked with a consultant and realized, these people need ghostwriters. Any suggestions about this will be really, really appreciated.

Here’s the letter.

Dear X,

I am writing to inform you of an editorial service especially designed for the needs of faculty and graduate students.

I have talked to editors of academic journals and have been told that many journals do not have off site editors to whom to refer authors of those papers that are in need of revision. At the same time, the rate of submissions is increasing. Editors and readers at journals are straining to keep up. As a consequence, the likelihood of mistakes in grammar and organization in published papers has gone up dramatically. My service addresses this problem.

I charge a competitive rate for editing. I specialize in humanities and social sciences. In the past year, RWG Communications projects have included:

substantive editing of an article on macroeconomics;
substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism;
substantive editing of a book on supply chain management;
a partial translation from the German of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.


I translate from German and French into English. I have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics, as well as graduate students requiring translation work for their various research projects and advice about their papers. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider my editorial service. RWG Communications delivers ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters. You can find the link to the RWG Communications site here:

http://www.geocities.com/rogerwgathman/roger_gathman.html. Look for our new site, under construction, at http://www.rwgcom.net.


If this sounds of interest to your book series and/or department, I hope that you will post this announcement and keep these email addresses in mind for your future needs.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Gathman
RWG Communications

rwg communications

I received some feedback from readers on the RWG Communications letter that I am sending out. However, editing jobs have stopped. You know what this means, gentle readers – I will have to go out and try to get reviewing jobs. And that means nervous breakdown and starvation. In fact, at the moment I have agreed to write entries for a reader’s guide to novels for ten dollars an entry – which is desperation indeed. You try describing The Man Who Loved Children in one hundred words or less…

Anyway, every week I am going to include, in one of my posts, my solicitation letter. Floating it out into cyberspace, who knows? It might reach someone who needs editing, ghostwriting, proofreading or translating – my four strengths. As I’ve been going through academic journals, sending off to editors, I’ve also been collecting paragraphs of bad English culled from the articles in said journals. I have an impulse to use this material somehow. For instance, to append examples of wildly incorrect grammar or of disorganized discursive prose to my solicitation letter in order to hammer home my point: you need my service, or some editing service. But I’m not sure this won’t simply offend my potential clients. Readers, tell me what you think.

I'm also trying to figure out how to contact business consultants. This summer, I worked with a consultant and realized, these people need ghostwriters. Any suggestions about this will be really, really appreciated.

Here’s the letter.

Dear X,

I am writing to inform you of an editorial service especially designed for the needs of faculty and graduate students.

I have talked to editors of academic journals and have been told that many journals do not have off site editors to whom to refer authors of those papers that are in need of revision. At the same time, the rate of submissions is increasing. Editors and readers at journals are straining to keep up. As a consequence, the likelihood of mistakes in grammar and organization in published papers has gone up dramatically. My service addresses this problem.

I charge a competitive rate for editing. I specialize in humanities and social sciences. In the past year, RWG Communications projects have included:

substantive editing of an article on macroeconomics;
substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism;
substantive editing of a book on supply chain management;
a partial translation from the German of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.


I translate from German and French into English. I have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics, as well as graduate students requiring translation work for their various research projects and advice about their papers. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider my editorial service. RWG Communications delivers ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters. You can find the link to the RWG Communications site here.

Look for our new site, under construction, at rwgcom.net.


If this sounds of interest to your book series and/or department, I hope that you will post this announcement and keep these email addresses in mind for your future needs.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Gathman
RWG Communications

after the withdrawal

Sometimes counting beads can be a comfort. Sometimes, returning to facts can also be a comfort. One of the facts about the current government in Iraq seems to me to be consistently underplayed. That fact is that one of the parties with which we are now allied, Daawa, or the Call, once had a much more tolerant view of suicide bombers. In fact, on December 12, 1983, Daawa’s tolerance went so far that members of the group exploded truck bombs in front of the American embassy in Kuwait. At that point, Daawa was linked to the groups that had previously done a pretty thorough demolition job on the American embassy in Beirut, earlier in the year.

The U.S. turnaround on terrorism, here, is both amazing and a sign that there is a way out of the present impasse in the Middle East. It is one of the multiple inversions covered by the “war on terrorism” – a war that is constituted by scrupulously avoiding warring on terrorists per se, in order to war on the big picture. Thus, one allows OBL to devise little explosions here and there, while American soldiers in Afghanistan guard highways to make sure that opium can get on the world market. Hence the invasion in Iraq, and hence the current paradox that American soldiers are dying so that a man implicated in the suicide bombings of Americans can safely sleep at night.

The impasse, here, has been created by a situation over the last two years that has made the U.S. both much too heavily present in Iraq and irrelevant to the real history that is being made in the region. This is dangerous for all parties. LI would like to see an immediate U.S. withdrawal of troops, but we realize that, given U.S. power and interests, there is no way to keep the Americans out of the Middle East forever.

To us, this means that the U.S. has to reconcile itself with the real configuration of power in the Middle East – meaning the rise of the swathe of Shi’a states. The first step towards doing this, after the withdrawal of the troops, is simple: détente with Iran. In the murky discussions about the steps leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there has been a surprisingly blind acceptance of the constraint that made that invasion at least plausible to the D.C. cliques, for without cooperation with Iran, it proved impossible to support the successful removal of Saddam Hussein by the Iraqis. The policy of dual containment was the embodiment of foreign policy neuroses. It was senseless, it was ideologically driven, and it fed on every problem that came near its horizon.

Détente with Iran doesn’t mean approval of the horrible Iranian human rights record – and nor does it mean, on Iran’s side, approval of the horrible American human rights record. It does mean that improvement in human rights is going to occur under the real forms of governance that are in place today, rather than their violent replacement via American invasion. Nor should the democracy deficit that put in place a president who did not win the election in 2000 in the U.S. instill a false confidence in the Iranian government that the U.S. will somehow assimilate that coup and return to normal.

As a practical matter, the Americans have already tacitly conceded Iraq to the Iranian sphere of influence. In fact, the American eagerness to disarm Iraq and to keep it disarmed – for notwithstanding the pledge to “Iraqify” the war in Iraq, the Americans have so far shown a consistent reluctance to really create a modern, well equipped Iraqi army, relying instead on second hand weapons, corrupt Defense department officials, and paramilitaries – has, as its objective correlate, this subordination of Iraq to its more powerful neighbor. We don’t believe this was the intention. The intention was a one two step, with the first one being weakening Iraq, and the second one being a weak Iraq accepting a permanent system of U.S. bases. That, of course, didn’t work. Eventually, Iraq will not accept subordination to Iran, either.

All of which should drive the nations involved to some kind of cooperative framework of coexistence.

part two

Flaubert said that the artist in the work was like God – everywhere and nowhere. For the novelist around 1900, this phrase was rather like the gate to the Law in Kafka’s The Trial. It was a phrase to sit before, while one waited for it to open. Surely the God in question was the Jansenist god, the deus absconditus, the god who elaborately creates the conditions that seal his vanishing act, and not the god of the prophets, who communicates angry messages and speaks in a still small voice in the wind. A novel, if Flaubert was right, was not a confession. Even a confession wasn’t a confession. Art was made out of stuff, descriptions, and not of sentiments. So you couldn’t understand a novel or a poem – to confine this to verbal art – better by knowing about the artist. That seemed like the conclusion to which Flaubert’s phrase moved you. Sitting before the sentence, it seemed to reveal a great and obscure truth. But if you considered it more telescopically – if you looked at what novels have done over the centuries – the phrase didn’t seem wholly credible. The division between matter and sentiment, for instance, couldn’t be right. Even the story that is built on an obvious attempt to arouse pity and terror on a low scale has to use matter, and even a novel that is built on an attempt to trace the foundations of modern stupidity, like Bouvard et Pechucet, uses the sentiments released by description to legitimize its sequence of events. It was much more credible to think that Flaubert had put himself into Madame Bovary, as he said himself. It was much more satisfying.

The heirs of this dilemma, the new critics of the fifties, resolved it by making it a rule that, in a novel or poem, the author who speaks can never be identified with the living person who wrote the novel or poem. This Gordian judgment has become the basis for teaching literature and composition as though texts derived, ultimately, from axioms. The problem with the great concordant, teased out in the sixties by Derrida and his school, has not been resolved. It has merely gelled into an orthodoxy. This orthodoxy separates readings outside the classroom – Oprah readings, you could call them – that are curious about authors, that look for sentiment, that think of a text as an annex to that much more interesting thing, the life experience of a celebrity, and look for lessons to be derived therefrom, from those inside the classroom, where the author’s godlike disappearance has produced the miracle that we still group together novels in terms of authors names: here are the novels of James, here are the novels of Joyce, etc.

When Proust set out to write a series of essays that would become a sort of novel, his theme was to elaborate on Flaubert’s notion, in a way. He aimed at Sainte-Beuve, the critic. He aimed at debunking Sainte-Beuve’s notion that the judgment of the personality of the artist is what the art leads us to. What it is for. On this principle, Sainte-Beuve could allow himself to expatiate more on some wretched book penned by some countess than on all of the works of Stendhal. Sainte-Beuve’s principle is the same principle that lies behind Vanity Fair magazine and the like. Everything is about getting a glamorous name and a confession. Everything is about the agony and the ecstasy of a certain class in beautiful poses.

Perhaps Sainte-Beuve so irritated Proust because Proust recognized his own weakness for countesses. In any case, when he came to write about Sainte-Beuve and Balzac, he came to repair an injustice. The injustice was not only Sainte-Beuve’s patronizing and in the end dismissive view of Balzac, but the echo of that view since – the notion that Balzac wrote before the God of the prophets became the God of the philosophers. Instead of being everywhere and nowhere, he was simply everywhere. He was simply busy.

Proust wrote his defense of Balzac as though he were talking, in fact, to a countess. That is why he begins with a “tu” – a you. “Tu fronces le sourcil. Je sais que tu ne l'aimes pas.” (You make a face. I know that you don’t love him) immediately interjects the fictional into the essay – just as in Wilde’s The Decay of Lying. But the “I” here does not possess the degree of alienation Wilde threw into his essay. The I does stand, until further notice, for Proust.

The sticking point with Balzac – why a true princess makes a face at his name – is his vulgarity. As Proust writes,

“It isn’t only that at the age when Rastignac debuts, he gave for the goal in life the satisfaction of the grossest ambitions, or, at least, the most noble so mixed up with the base that it is impossible to separate them.”

I am not going to go through Proust’s essay sentence by sentence – I urge LI’s readers to do so, either in translation or here http://www.tierslivre.net/litt/Proust_Balzac.html -- but I do want to draw attention to the twists of the argument. Proust quickly throws up Flaubert as a counter-instance to Balzac.

You have sometimes found Flaubert, revealed in certain aspects of his correspondence, vulgar. But of him at least there was one thing completely free from vulgarity, his understanding that the goal of the live of the writer is in his work, and that the remnant only exists “to be used as one more illusion to describe.” Balzac totally puts the triumphs of life and of literature on the same plane.”

Having built this dichotomy, Proust goes on to show that Balzac embodies a principle of truth that, to return to Wilde and Zola, can only be denied by one who is vulgar enough to find the vices and virtues of tedious people tedious – which may well be Vivian’s fault, in The Decay of Lying, the shadow that crosses between Vivian and Wilde.

“There is nothing here to separate his [Balzac’s] letters from his novels. If we have heard perhaps too much that his characters were real for him, and that he seriously discussed if such and such a move was better for Mlle de Grandlieu, for Eugénie Grandet, one can say that his life was a novel that he constructed in absolutely the same manner. There is no line of demarcation between the real life (that which is in fact not so real in our opinion) and the life of his novels (the only true one for the writer).”

The exchange between the realities of experience and the realities encoded in art has been one way out of the conundrum expressed in Flaubert dictum. Surely the god that is everywhere and nowhere in the novel might be, by the same logic, everywhere and nowhere in the life.

Well, we are not going to keep developing this chain of reasoning, because we want to get to the point: Proust’s mention of Wilde’s opinion of Lucien de Rubempre. This occurs near the end of his essay, when he is examining Balzac’s style, which he considers strikingly explicative in the large and in the small. This brings him to consider Balzac’s treatment of p.o.v. – how does one make the explicative, which depends on the generalization, into an illustration of a perspective, which depends on the singularities of the personality? And from this topic he turns to Vautrin, whose point of view is a sort of raw parody of Balzac’s own ambition, ambition running in a world in which all values tend towards zero. This is where Wilde comes in. I’ll give you the French, and then the English:

." Et de fait, Vautrin n'a pas été seul à aimer Lucien de Rubempré. Oscar Wilde, à qui la vie devait hélas apprendre plus tard qu'il est de plus poignantes douleurs que celles que nous donnent les livres, disait dans sa première époque (à l'époque où il disait: "Ce n'est que depuis l'école des lakistes qu'il y a des brouillards sur la Tamise"): "Le plus grand chagrin de ma vie? La mort de Lucien de Rubempré dans Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes." Il y a d'ailleurs quelque chose de particulièrement dramatique dans cette prédilection et cet attendrissement d'Oscar Wilde, au temps de sa vie brillante, pour la mort de Lucien de Rubempré. Sans doute, il s'attendrissait sur elle, comme tous les lecteurs, en se plaçant au point de vue de Vautrin, qui est le point de vue de Balzac. Et à ce point de vue d'ailleurs, il était un lecteur particulièrement choisi et élu pour adopter ce point de vue plus complètement que la plupart des lecteurs. Mais on ne peut s'empêcher de penser que, quelques années plus tard, il devait être Lucien de Rubempré lui-même. Et la fin de Lucien de Rubempré à la Conciergerie, voyant toute sa brillante existence mondaine écroulée sur la preuve qui est faite qu'il vivait dans l'intimité d'un forçat, n'était que l'anticipation - inconnue encore de Wilde, il est vrai - de ce qui devait précisément arriver à Wilde.

“And in fact Vautrin is not the only one to love Lucien de Rubempré. Oscar Wilde, to whom life was to teach later, alas, that there are more poignant griefs than are given by books, said in his first epoch (that epoch in which he remarked, it is only since the school of the lake poets that there have been fogs on the Thames): the greatest sorrow of my life? The death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes." There is something particularly dramatic in this predilection and tenderness of Oscar Wilde, at the brilliant period of his life, for death of Lucien de Rubempré. Without a doubt, he was moved by it, like all readers, by putting himself in the point of view of Vautrin, which is the point of view of Balzac. And from this point of view, besides, he was a reader particularly selected and elected to adopt this point of view, more than most readers. But it is hard to repress the impression that, a few years later, he had to become Lucien de Rubempré himself. And the final hours of Lucien de Rubempré at the Conciergerie, seeing all his brilliant, worldly existence flowing away with the proof of the fact that he lived in the intimacy of a convict, was only an intimation – still unknown to Wilde, it is true, of what must happen precisely to Wilde.”

The importance of being Vivian

In 1889, Oscar Wilde published the Decay of Lying, a dialogue between Cyril and Vivian. Cyril is given the earnest lines, like the cutout in a Socratic dialogue, and Vivian is given the witty and visionary ones. The theme of the dialogue attaches, at points, to the very old theme of mimesis in art. Is an art to be judged on how well it copies reality? And what would it mean for a fiction to copy reality? Vivian explores the problems of mimesis from an angle taken from everyday life: the lie. The lie, after all, is a lie insofar as it doesn’t copy reality. However, it works as a lie insofar as it seems to copy reality. Thus, in the successful lie there must reside some special genius, and for that genius to work, we must look at another standard than that of truth or falsity. We must shift to the field defined by intensity:

“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

There is one modern novelist whose dull facts particularly get under Vivian’s skin: Zola. At first glance, one would have thought that Zola would be on Vivian’s side, or at least on Wilde’s side. Zola was, after all, a scandal and a stumbling block to Victorian proprieties. Since Wilde aspired to be a scandal himself, one looks for some solidarity. Instead, Vivian remarks:

“M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has
not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of L'Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola's characters are much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.”

This rings changes on an old trick in the game of scandal – one trumps the shock of scandal by being resolutely unshocked. In this way, one denies the initial, visceral moment that scandal depends on. The double movement of Vivian’s rhetoric conforms to an old routine: first comes the denigration of the shocked. Thus Zola’s work exposes the Tartuffe, and by implication the Tartuffe are the shocked. Second comes the denigration of the shock. Zola’s characters are dreary in their vices and their virtues. It is dreariness, not purity, that we must judge by. Wrenching the standard by which the copy is judged from the frame defined by veracity to the frame defined by intensity, Vivian finds a new angle from which to disarm Zola’s shock. Since one end of the mimetic spectrum is about sexual arousal, a continually deferred moment that defines art against its erotic use, its pornographic potential, this is a particularly good routine to top Zola. And once Zola is separated from his shock, we see -- or Vivian sees -- that he is without interest.

To Vivian’s remarks, Cyril responds by noting that that Vivian’s two favorite novelists Meredith and Balzac, have reputations for being realists.

Vivian replies by making two epigrams. About Meredith he says,

“Somebody in Shakespeare - Touchstone, I think – talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method.”

But it is about Balzac that the more famous phrases are leveled.

“A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”

This post is about that phrase – or rather, it follows the history of the reputation of that phrase in the footsteps of A.S. Byatt’s brilliant essay about Splendeurs et miseres de Courtisanes – the Balzac novel in which Lucien de Rubempre’s suicide gets played out – in the Winter 2005 Kenyon. Which we urge all LI’s readers to read – it is well worth the price of the magazine.

LI wouldn’t be LI if we didn’t throw in some deconstructive cautions now and then, so we should preface what follows with a little disclaimer. The reputation of these remarks depends on collapsing the distinction between Wilde and Vivian. That Wilde put these remarks in the mouth of a character who is defending a thesis before another character is obliterated in the rush to make these Wilde’s remarks – a rush that is not repeated in, say, making Cyril’s remarks Wilde’s remarks. A philosopher might say that we know, intuitively, that Vivian represents Wilde and Cyril doesn’t. But a philosopher who had read The Importance of Being Earnest would be wise to treat the theme of pseudonyms with some respect. After all the play revolves around Jack Worthing’s habit of assuming the name Earnest in the city and Jack in the country. This becomes evident when Algernon – who we also instinctively identify with Wilde because his opinions are like those of Vivian, who we have assumed represents Wilde – finds Earnest’s cigarette case with a note addressed to Jack:


Algernon. … Besides, your name isn't Jack at all; it is Ernest.

Jack. It isn't Ernest; it's Jack.

Algernon. You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest. It's on your cards. Here is one of them. [Taking it from case.] 'Mr. Ernest Worthing, B. 4, The Albany.' I'll keep this as a proof that your name is Ernest if ever you attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolen, or to any one else.
[Puts the card in his pocket.]

Jack. Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette case was given to me in the country.”

Bertrand Russell’s example for the description theory of names, you’ll remember, was the identity between Walter Scott and the Author of Waverly – an identity that could not substitute in all instances. If Russell had wanted to, he could have used the Importance of Being Earnest as the artistic working out of the consequences of his theory. Pity he didn’t. In any case, the deconstructive point is that the chain of instinct that leads us to believe that Vivian is Wilde depends upon substitutions that themselves depend upon our instinct that Wilde is Vivian. So note, before we set off on our chase, that the conditions of the hunt are dodgy to begin with.

The next post will be about Proust.

LI hearts hindsight

Every once in a while, one should engage in the bitterest hindsight. Hindsight is always something that the powers that be disparage, since the critical analysis of the past lays bare the lineaments of present oppressions.

In the week that the President of Afghanistan, Karzai, called for radical American troop retrenchment, that Sheehan’s caravan is stopping in D.C. for an anti-war protest that the mainstream media will ignore and distort in various tired ways, that Basra is revealing the extent to which the “peacefully” occupied areas are peaceful in the sense that Afghanistan in 2000 was peaceful – it might be a good idea to ask about what alternative there was to this particular occupation.

This question is, of course, bound up with the question of the reasons for invasion itself, but there is only one strand of that question that will concern me here: the lack of any counter-force to the Americans in the invading “coalition.”

That lack was designed by the Department of War. It allowed unilateral American control. The Americans, of course, have turned out to be corrupt, on the one hand, and incapable of even achieving their minimal colonialist goals, on the other hand. There’s a nice editorial in Azzaman this week about the billion plus stolen under Allawi:

“As the authorities prepare to issue an arrest warrant against a former defense minister for the alleged theft of $1 billion, the parliament is reported to have been debating embezzlement issues that surpass that figure.

Instead of basking in prosperity, Iraqis are now sunk in an abyss of poverty, organized theft and crime under the banner of an ‘elected’ and ‘legitimate’ system of government.

The theft of public money on such unprecedented scale puts the onus for the suffering of Iraqi people in the shortages of electricity and other amenities squarely on government officials who instead of serving the impoverished country chose to plunder it.”

The writer, Fatih Abdulsalam, makes an important point about the timing of the recent revelations:

“Whenever conditions worsen in the country, those in power and authority report scandals that took place in eras other than their own.”

Money has an attractive quality for hindsight: tracing us give us a good sense of the past's secret patterns.

What did Iraq need after the invasion? Two things were necessary: to confront the political legacy of Saddam, and to confront the economic legacy of Saddam. The former task consisted in reconfiguring the country in such a way that the mechanisms of Ba’athist tyranny would be permanently disabled. The latter task consisted, quite simply, in gaining a moratorium on the debt Saddam had piled up.

The former task could only be achieved by the Iraqis themselves, not the Americans. The latter task did require American cooperation. The tasks were coupled: a legitimate political establishment in Iraq needed to be unencumbered by Saddam’s debt in order to borrow money on Iraq’s vast potential wealth. In essence, this task was no different than the task of any other Middle Eastern nation – for instance, Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War.

The tasks are such that the withdrawal of American troops should have been accomplished, max, by the end of 2003.

From the American anti-war perspective, that would have been unpleasant, since it would have generated the image of a successful intervention/invasion. But however unpleasant the invasion might have been as a precedent, there was, realistically, no need for the occupation and the American intervention in Iraq’s sovereign affairs whatsoever, beyond that minimal framework.

There are a lot of ironies here. Given the successful attainment of that framework, the Bush administration might well have gone on to their second goal, war with Iran. In this very unfunny sense, the occupation has had the funny effect of making that goal almost unimaginable. It was hard to see this in 2003, because it was hard to see that the Bush people were exactly the warmongering criminals the left made them out to be. Caricature has been vindicated by history. However, the Iraqis have borne the burden of averting the real disaster of a U.S.-Iran war. Lately, the media has decided to respond to the fact that the war is unpopular in this country (and will be extremely hard to finance, come the next supplemental) by posing the rhetorical question, don’t we have the moral responsibility to remain in Iraq? This is a sort of cruel joke question. It is as if Cortes were to justify the conquest of Mexico by saying, don’t we have a responsibility to the Aztecs to remain in Mexico? The answer to the media’s new concern with our moral obligation is that an occupying force that makes promiscuous use of air power on its occupied territory, razes cities Grozny style, and establishes interlocking groups with organized kleptocrats to pump money out of the occupied territory seems to have somehow misread the story of the Good Samaritan. I don’t know how much more American charity Iraq can take.

In hindsight, the most important thing was to give the Iraqi government back control over Iraq’s wealth. To do that required immediate elections, and the progressive withdrawal of American ‘supervision’ so that Iraq, in the summer of 2003, would essentially be in the same position of ownership it was pre-Saddam. Another irony is that if the Americans hadn’t been so greedy, they might actually have achieved one of their goals: Iraqi oil might be on the market today, sending oil prices down. As Michael Klare points out on Tomdispatch, the pooch is being screwed every day in the Iraqi oilfields as the Americans discover that the one reason that they are there requires more manpower than they will ever have. Klare points to the pre-war euphoria about Iraqi oil:

“This sense of optimism about Iraq's future oil output was palpable in Washington in the months leading up to the invasion. In its periodic reports on Iraqi petroleum, the Department of Energy (DoE), for example, confidently reported in late 2002 that, with sufficient outside investment, Iraq could quickly double its production from the then-daily level of 2.5 million barrels to 5 million barrels or more. At the State Department, the Future of Iraq Project set up a Working Group on Oil and Energy to plan the privatization of Iraqi oil assets and the rapid introduction of Western capital and expertise into the local industry. Meanwhile, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi -- then the Pentagon's favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as suzerain of Iraq (and now Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy infrastructure) -- met with top executives of the major U.S. oil companies and promised them a significant role in developing Iraq's vast petroleum reserves. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he insisted in September 2002.”

Klare runs down the stats. Presently, Iraq is generating about 1.9 billion barrels. Moreover, the oil infrastructure has taken some 250 attacks. And there is the pervasive kleptocracy, which is stealing billions of dollars from the infrastructure. No doubt there are American firms that are profiting hugely from these thefts. But more interesting is that the current American urge to pump oil in spite of these problems is nursing future problems:

“The corruption and mismanagement has had another serious consequence for Iraq's long-term oil potential: in order to maximize output now, and thereby keep the dollars rolling in, Iraqi oil executives are employing faulty pumping methods, thus risking permanent damage to underground reservoirs. For example, managers are continuing to pump oil from Iraq's main Rumailia oilfield, one of the world's largest, even though water injection systems (used to maintain underground pressure) have failed; in so doing, they are thought by experts to be causing irreversible damage to the field. "The problem is that [underground] pressure problems could lead to a permanent decline in production," observed one European buyer of Iraqi oil quoted in the Financial Times last June. Even if U.S. companies later were to gain access to Iraqi fields, therefore, they might find yields to be disappointing.”

Hindsight should tell us this: Iraq was able, two years ago, to stand on its own two feet. The American occupation has been aimed at preventing an independent Iraq, not at creating one. The idea of indefinite occupation, ie colonizing Iraq, depended, however, on two factors: that Iraq would eventually be a cash cow, and that the American population would go along with Bush’s plan. The first pillar of the Bush plan has collapsed. The second is collapsing. Iraq is in the hands of Iran’s allies. The cost of continuing the war is unsustainable. Moreover (although the Americans still don’t know this), American has become irrelevant to the ultimate outcome in Iraq. Under the shadow of the American shock troops, the real political fight has been happening, in which the American side is represented by a Kurdish faction – and even that faction is becoming impatient with their ally.

Give me more hindsight is the LI slogan. Let's shed as much light as possible on the the monsters who rule us.