duellum

Deux guerriers ont couru l'un sur l'autre...

For those interested in such things, the long promised duel between LCC and Jackie Derrida is finally commencing in earnest. Yours truly is in attendence as J.D.'s second.

PS - We are still dueling over there, though we are a little off topic - not too much, I hope. Entertaining stuff for those who enjoy liberal-Marxist dialog - and let's face it, who doesn't?

In this duel, LCC overlooks my sometimes off topic meandering - as, for instance, that I have signally failed to really reference Derrida yet. And I overlook LCC's mimicry of Jacques Derrida as a sort of malevolent Punch, starring in a remake of the Exorcist underwritten by Encounter Magazine.

barthes, the perfect storm, and business bullshit

Groupies of Barthes principle of mythology, that “false nature”, have been having a field day lately with business news. You’ll remember the lyrics to the famous Nature/Culture divide – of course you do:

The point of departure for this reflection was most often a sentiment of impatience before the “natural’ in which the press, art, common sense ceaselessly array a reality which, even as it is the one in which we live, is nevertheless perfectly historic: in a word, I am pained to see, at every moment, how in the story of our actuality, Nature and History are confounded, and I wanted to tighten my grasp, in the decorative exposition of the “it-goes-without-saying”, [ce-qui-va-de-soi] of the ideological abuse which, in my sense, is found hidden in it.” – Mythologies.

With this in mind, LI has been thinking of the “perfect storm.”

In 1997, Sebastian Junger published his story that, as they say, soared to the top of the best selling lists. Finally, a story for the testosteroned among us – brave men and their ships! It proved especially popular among the yacht set.
But what interests me is not so much 1997, but 1998. Oh, if Barthes had only had google and Factiva! For with these simple tools, one can observe the leaping of the memes. In September of 1998, three things happened – the Russian’s defaulted on their loans, the Asian tiger cubs – Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea – suddenly started bailing capital, and Long Term Capital Investment, our favorite hedge fund, started by John Meriwether and co-starring too hard right libertarian Nobel prize winning economists, went belly up. It was a model flop – a model for the current age of flops, with Greenspan timidly managing a bail out that presaged the massive bail outs being effected, at this very moment, by the Fed – who, to the vast indifference of the American public, is making the financial sector all happy by loaning out money at below par rates, so those banks can buy U.S. government debt at par rates and rake in the money, and we can pretend that we aren’t giving it to them. This is called capitalism, my friends. In any case, it was in the golden autumn of 1998 that this started happening:

From Business Week
21 September 1998

Why did rocket science backfire? Sure, the models do take into consideration the possibilities of some failures occurring in the market system that upset normal historical relationships. Indeed, that's why these bets usually involve a series of hedges. What occurred, however, was the financial world's equivalent of a ''perfect storm''--everything went wrong at once. Interest rates moved the wrong way, stocks and bond prices that were supposed to converge diverged, and liquidity dried up in some crucial markets. As Long-Term's Meriwether told his shareholders in a Sept. 3 letter: ''We expected that sooner or later...we as a firm would be tested. I did not anticipate, however, how severe the test would be.''

That is one of the first mentions of the perfect storm to explain a financial disaster. Notice the beauty of it. First, the bilocation – on the one hand, who is more “part” of the financial weather system than a hedge fund? And on the other hand, you have the almost peasant like hedge funders, hunkering down as the rain comes pouring upon them – surely no fault of their own! Although we shouldn’t pursue that thought to far – for if the hedge funders aren’t responsible for the “perfect storm”, why should we hold them responsible for the golden sunshine? Why do we say they make those profits? Why pay them those premiums if it is all weather?
But those who ask such questions are obviously losers and dipshits, and have no place sticking their nose into the Fed’s wonderful equity bubble machine.

The perfect storm of “perfect storms” grew all that autumn. Here’s a sample:

“CNN Interview with Jeff Davis, State Street Global Advisors:
25 September 1998
DAVIS: Well, I think there are -- certainly there potentially could be. I mean, it's been a big -- a big couple of years for hedge fund investing. And investors are looking for protection during crises like this. But we call the August fall the perfect storm where there is a combination of crises around the world that were, you know, one of those once-in-a-lifetime events that keep arriving every three years, to quote a friend of mine. And so we really are nervous about where the risks are right now. And it's difficult, again, for the transparency in the marketplace to let us know where those risks are.”

From the Financial Times, 12 December 1998
12 December 1998
“Allen Wheat, chairman and chief executive officer of Credit Suisse First Boston, made no forecasts when he spoke at a gathering of the investment bank's managing directors in Florida in November.

He said A Perfect Storm, the title of a recent best-seller about a catastrophe off the coast of New England, reminded him of this year's market.
The only difference, he said, was that nobody knew whether it could get no worse or whether they were simply enjoying a brief lull while resting in the centre of it.”

The Economist, 5 December 1998

“Academic financial economists, unsurprisingly, still stand up for the science. Rene Stulz, who edits the profession's top research publication, the Journal of Finance, says, in a new book he is writing, that LTCM's only impact will be as "a nice case study". Most academics hint that LTCM's downfall had nothing to do with the financial models of the two Nobel laureates (an argument that rather irks those Wall Street firms persuaded to invest in the hedge fund precisely because it was using their models).

Their consensus view is that, at worst, the two Nobel winners were guilty of hubris. At best, they were the victims of a "perfect storm" in the markets: several extremely unusual events took place at once, with consequences that could not reasonably have been foreseen, and are unlikely ever to be repeated. And if even the cleverest academics lose money, doesn't that prove their point? The deepest insight of financial economics is that markets are fairly "efficient", meaning that you can earn high returns only by taking big risks. There really is no free lunch.

Yet there is no denying that the recent market turmoil confounded existing financial-economic models.”


By the end of the year, “perfect storm” was in like flint. It was the perfect excuse. It sounded manly. It took responsibility out of the hands of the responsible, and turned it over to the weather – and as all we biliously banal Americans know, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Ha ha! Nature, you see. And as storms interrupt your train of thought – you who think about these things, in the commercial time right before we find out what Celebrity Dancer will win the big prize tonigth! So, too, we don’t throw a thought at what the metaphor implies about paying people to experience weather. Oh, paying them a billion here or there. Because they are geniuses. Rocket scientists. Who just happen to contribute less to the productive life of this society than a puppy with diarrhea.

So, being connoisseurs of biz bull shit, we were delighted with the incredible interview in the NYT with Robert Rubin, Citi’s consiglieri, who has one message for you and me – Citi might have dropped 20 billion lately, but it isn’t his fault! No sir. Guess what happened? Come on, guess. Begins with P. Ends with m. Two words.

“By the time I finished at Treasury, I decided I never wanted operating responsibility again,” Mr. Rubin, 69, said during a two-hour interview in his office. Sitting in a red-cloth chair and propped against a thick book to support a bad back, he made it plain that responsibility for Citigroup’s staggering losses can’t be laid at his feet.
“People know I was concerned about the markets,” he says. “Clearly, there were things wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who foresaw a perfect storm, and that’s what we’ve had here.”
“I don’t feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role,” he adds.
But did he make mistakes?
“I’ve thought a lot about that,” he responds. “I honestly don’t know. In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.”

As we peons know, nowadays, when you go through that ritual in humiliation called a job interview, one of the standard questions is, describe one of your mistakes. The idea is that, as a peon, you are surely just the kind of drooling idiot to smoke around the gas pumps, so lay it out on the table. Give them reasons to pay you less. Luckily, as we get higher and higher, mistakes magically vanish. Weather intervenes. Perfect storms.

Of course, a people who were not utterly servile might rise up in revolt at being served a continuous mixture of the ripest bullshit ever known to man as their pockets were picked.

I can’t wait to meet such a people. I wonder where they live?

Interview with Amanda Marcotte

My interview with Amanda Marcotte is here. As this interview was conducted for my paper, I couldn't really supply a lot of the hilarious bits from Marcotte's book. This had to be edited out, but it gives a concise feel for the book:

On the evidence of her new book, It’s a Jungle Out There, she is a Fight Club Feminist. As in the famous scene in Fight Club in which Brad Pitt announces the rules, Marcotte’s prefaces her book with her own rules:

“Why are people so mean to feminists? Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule of understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit.”

The interview was done before the flame wars, and before Seal purged the book of the racist imagery in the cartoons that were used to divide the sections of the book. That's a long story, especially for those of you not following it. In brief, I like Marcotte, I like her work, I like her temper - but in the controversy about her, BFP, and the appropriation of the work of WoC bloggers, her temper has lead her to uncharacteristically underestimate her own bullshit as a white woman. That said, I am particularly pissed off at the shit stirrers who seem to think Marcotte bears the burden for the racism of the whole power structure in America, when she has always tried to reveal it when she sees it. For instance, she was out front in the 'victimization' controversy when Clinton's supporters took to making invidious comparisons between the mild 'victimization' of blacks and the truly awful victimization of women in America - as if one should really feel that Scarlet O'Hara was the victim of Tara - and she has always been vocal about it. Instead of the use of gentle persuasion - to say, look, you are missing the point here - it all became immediate denunciation of Marcotte. On my paranoid days, I think this is because Marcotte's been pretty clear about her preference for Obama, and this is payback by the Clinton people. But on consideration, that isn't right. The exaggerated response is about a silent and amplifying wrong - the lack, in the liberal/left press, of people of color - there are investment firms that hire more African Americans and Hispanics than you find writing for, say, the Nation -and it came out against Marcotte.

More news from the Kingdom of the Great Fly

One of the amusing things about dancing on the precipice in the era of the Great Fly is that every paranoid vision gains a foothold in reality. Take the food crisis. Let’s see, you combine phenomenal growth in former LDCs, climate changes the fact of which are resisted by the moronic inferno, and the richest country in the world making its primo manufacturing objective the export of packaged debt. And whaddya get? Oh, famine and war, war and famine.

Norman Borlaug has an opinion piece that is sure to be unread and unheeded until, say, next year, when bread is five dollars a loaf. Borlaug is the great Green Revolution agronomist. Let’s just say that the Green Revolution gave us ambiguous results – while the Soviets collectivized their farms, the capitalist world treated its agricultural sector to a form of shock therapy, agroteching their way to global corporate farming monstrosities, and the resulting flight from the peasant pea patch to the barrio and bidonville is going to rule our world for a long time. But that is the way the world food supply went. So, if you are going to ruthlessly exterminate varieties and promote monoculture through the length and breadth of the planet, you better be prepared for the consequences – blights that can quickly wipe out the vulnerable predominant strand. This is where the fun stops in the evolution debate, which isn’t just about whether we should create even dumber American yokels than we are wont to mill out of our schools – natural selection as a fact about the relationship between species and environment can come gunning for you, hypocrite lecteur.

First, a little history:

“WITH food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection.

The looming catastrophe can be avoided if the world’s wheat scientists pull together to develop a new generation of stem-rust-resistant varieties of wheat. But scientists must quickly turn their attention to replacing almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today. This will require a commitment from many nations, especially the United States, which has lately neglected its role as a leader in agricultural science.

Stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America, huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to ’54.”

Then a little natural history:

“Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.
In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.”

And then, of course, the natural history of our Great Fly, that glorious combination of cretinism and short term advantage that we’ve all grown to know and love:

“The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.”

Imagine that – the U.S. breaking a promise!

Meanwhile, back in the the District of Columbian Ass-licking, the Washington Post article about the food riots is, of course, larded with the usual praise of the Great Fly – I am rather surprised that the Post hasn’t yet started calling him The Father of the People:

But administration officials and legislative aides acknowledge that they have only recently begun to focus on the severity of the problem, and humanitarian groups fear that assistance from the United States, which already supplies about half of the world's total food aid, may come too late to provide much benefit in the near term.

The mounting crisis, which has unseated Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Édouard Alexis and prompted riots throughout the developing world, provides a particular challenge for President Bush during his final months in office. Although Bush has received many positive reviews for his initiatives to combat HIV-AIDS and malaria, he is hobbled by dismal approval ratings and bitter relations with a Democratic Congress during a presidential election year.”

Oh, the positive reviews on issues having nothing whatsoever to do with food! Surely they could have larded it with better ass licking than that, however. I would have suggested something like: “Although Bush has received many positive reviews on the massive size of his dick, a priapus that promises plentiful rainfall and prosperity for all Christian Americans…”

We live in Great Times, times of the fulfilment of prophecy, when the ludicrous and the murderous have merged into one soul destroying blob. So excellent!

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we
had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in
desolate places as dead men. Isaiah 59:10

Beauty tips

LI is very interested in beauty. We are a beauty maven. The whole thing, the aesthetic, the striving for it, the failing, the study of it. Hell, at the moment we are working part time copyediting the fashion issue of a magazine, so we are rubbing our nose in the manufacture of it, right down to the ColorU blush in Lilac. Yet, whenever we see calls to bring beauty back into the study of literature or art, it seems like the machine starts out all over again. First, the lament that somehow – through theory or through identity politics – they’ve guillotined beauty and are cavorting in her shambles. Then of course there is the appeal to the canonical and emotional power of beauty. That it soothes the wild beasts and the undergraduate at the same time. And then the whole train of associations are dragged into it – as we see in this article on teaching beauty by Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan at Inside Higher Education. It begins with an anecdote about the idiosyncratic veneration all readers give to certain of their favorite texts.

“When his turn came to speak at Norman Mailer’s recent memorial service in New York, the novelist Don DeLillo began by simply holding up his creased and worn 50-year-old copy of Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead.

All lovers of literature understand the nature of DeLillo’s gesture; they understand that behind the little paperback that he lifted for the audience to see lay years of private aesthetic pleasure in its pages — from the college student marveling at its prose to the venerated author of Underworld marveling at the same thumbed passages. That’s the sort of writer Mailer was, DeLillo meant to say: He wrote novels you’re never finished with; and the scuffs and scratches and stains you put in them over the years add up to the archaeology of your own literary life.”

This isn’t a bad start. Unfortunately, instead of asking about that contrast between scuffs and scratches and the glamorous spell cast by immersion in a work, by which the work becomes immersed in the reader – the praying mantis work of reading – we are, instead, taken by steps from attentiveness to the soul – and then the soul becomes the launching pad for the usual, quasi-religious complaint:

Who would ever enter a classroom and invite their students to consider the beauty of a work because, as Nicolas Malebranche puts it, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul"? The word “soul” doesn’t get much exercise in English departments any more, and neither do concepts associated with it — inspiration, consolation, communality, transcendence, love. What do these have to do nowadays with the study of literature? In our public neglect of such concepts in favor of the political and the material, our answer is clear: nothing.
“Of course, literature professors who graduated from English departments in the past 30 years can defend their neglect of matters related to the soul, since in their studies no one talked much about these things either. An English professor recalls the facile “contingency” arguments of her day, which did so much to undermine judgments of aesthetic value: “I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about ‘what sustains people’ — my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful.... I was writing about [James] Joyce’s insights into the touching human need to bury, burn, or otherwise take care of the bodies of the dead — an impulse that is universal, however differently loss and the communal response to it are experienced across cultures. I was afraid I’d be attacked for ‘essentializing’ — for supposing that there are features, shared across cultures, that constitute the essence of being human.”

Surely “essentializing” — a poor choice of word for an acknowledgment of shared humanity — is necessary in the imaginative work involved in recognizing the existence of someone else. As Iris Murdoch argues, that recognition is difficult and demands a leap into the sort of empathy which the imaginative demands of literature encourage. When Murdoch expresses her admiration for T.E. Lawrence because he “let the agonizing complexities of situations twist [his] heart instead of tying his hands,” she reminds us that the real-world value of great and complex art can accustom us to the intricate and often painful ambiguities of the world.”

I can’t resist a side note here – Theophile de Viau, in his Apology, uses the pretty funny verb “quintessentializing.” With which I am well pleased. But to proceed…

This notion of the theory mafia that roamed the halls of academe when I was a grad student – yes, I was a member of Derrida’s Hells Angels in the 80s – would be funny. Except that I had a recent communication, with a professor I am editing, who told me that though my suggestions on how to make her argument tighter were excellent, they would involve “theory” – and, she added, anything that smacks of “theory” now gets you sorted into the non-tenure file. I’m not sure that she wasn’t exaggerating a bit. Still, more than one source has confirmed a backlash against theory in the humanities lately. But as Green-Lewis and Soltan’s article shows, without the constant barking of the theoretical guard dogs, there is an intolerable backsliding into quasi-Victorian malarkey. Which, of course, has nothing to do with beauty. One could well find beauty a universal factor in human societies without finding beauty universal – if that means that some set of objects or styles is universally considered beautiful. This is because the discourse of beauty that, for instance, connects it to the universal is easy to trace to historic conditions. And those same conditions tell us that beauty for the modernists, far from being this soul satisfying moment of universal communion, was considered the result of the most extreme contingency and alienation. For a modernist lineage coming out of Baudelaire and running through the Surrealists, Bataille, pop art, etc., beauty is inseparable from alienation. Here is where I, at least, would begin to talk about beauty – how it transmigrated into an art that hungered for alienation the way the fragment hungers for the whole. It is one of the notable things about surrealism, by the way, that it was quickly adapted by an international group of poets, painters and writers. It was seen to express the landscape of the end of the colonialist period – the twenties and thirties – by Chinese, Turkish and Antillaise poets, Spanish film makers, etc., etc. However, to tell this story about beauty would mean telling a story about transformations, losses, and what the individual attention cannot hold. To block this, Green-Lewis and Soltan bring in the soul.

If they had not so composed their piece as to create that local opposition between theory (which is anti-beauty) and appreciation (pro-beauty) which marks a very limited discourse on beauty, their views on teaching beauty would become much sharper:

“Critics of aesthetics tend to dismiss the “better world” orientation that often accompanies a serious interest in beauty as sentimental, religious, and naïve, an indulgent distraction from the hard truths of our time. But they are mistaken in this dismissal. The ability to establish strong personal agency, and then project certain futures, certain human potentialities, as novelists often do, and the ability to enter into and respond emotionally to those projections, as strong readers do, is a realistic and mature way of expressing faith in the possibility of humanity’s capacity to improve itself.

Dmitri Tymocko, in describing Beethoven’s brilliance, evokes precisely this disposition of passion and reason: “[We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly
sublime.”

The display of “passionate maturity” may be in fact the best that we could ever hope for in our teaching of literature. The centrality of aesthetic experience in the struggle toward adaptation to a world forever changed by the particular political traumas of our time, and in the struggle toward the creation of a more humane world, means that professors of literature have in fact a special, even extraordinary, responsibility. In conveying the fullness of powerful aesthetic gestures, they must convey more than the form and content of particular poems, plays, and novels. They must embody in their very mode of teaching the paradox of passionate control which so often characterizes the greatest works of art; and they must embody the moral value for each individual of this dynamic act of balance.”

Are we to think that beauty is delimited by the “better future” that emanates from the ‘form and content of of particular poems, plays, and novels”? This seems to me to seriously understate the nostalgia in beauty. As for the dynamic act of balance, I’m not sure what exactly that means, here, but I think it entails a very narrow kind of aesthetic practice.

Chabert is back

LI is psyched to see that Le Colonel Chabert is back at her post, after one of her mysterious disappearances from the blogging world - no doubt, she was in deep confab with the Illuminati. LCC's last round was a full scale attack on the 68 French philosophes, like LI's patron saint, Derrida - and you might think it curious that I have any affection for that. But, at least in the world of philosophy, Heraclitus's words apply: polemos panton men pater esti, war is the father of all things. Most of the philosophes are dead now, and depend on us for their continued existence. How sad it would be if that existence consisted of tedious and bureaucratic applications of them to fill in, like a sort of all purpose tar, the crevasses in tenure track papers, continually churning! Far better the fierce response, the sortie from out of the underbrush! And not, either, of the dismissive, Brian Leiter variety, which is all about sheer ignorance - that's not a sortie, that's the tax collector.

the apology of Theophile

LI had more fun with our Theophile post than we’ve had in a good while. Thank you, Amie.

Now, let’s place Theophile de Viau in context, and get on to the marvelous public letter he wrote Louis XIII – in a tone, and with a frankness, that would certainly have been unthinkable fifty years later.

Scholars would place Theophile de Viau in the French Renaissance period. He’s a contemporary of Robert Herrick – of the Cavalier poets. He started out in life with an excellent education – he learned Greek, Spanish, Italian and English at his school, Saumer, and he gained a smattering of the new sciences – or natural magic, as Bacon referred to them. Being relatively wealthy, when he came to Paris, as he confesses in his letters, he fell into vice. Although nowadays he is celebrated as a Gay litterateur – by people who simply sort through history, look for the assfucking, not literature, and pluck out the assfucker – his debauches were, as far as we know from his own words, with women, although Tallement repeats a story that he seduced a boy he was tutoring, and there are enough rumors about Theophile that the hasty searchers for Gay avatars aren’t wholly wrong. But he was not Marlowe – or at least not in this sense. There is a boldness, a recklessness in Theophile that does remind one of Marlowe, though. As Claire Gaudiami has pointed out, for instance [The Cabaret Poetry of Théophile de Viau: Texts and Traditions, 43-5], an 1618 poem, Elegie de M. de C., contains cosmological speculation about the materiality of the soul – composed of the four elements, governed by the stars – and its finitude, on the lines of Vanini, who was burned at the stake in 1619 in Toulouse. And like Marlowe, the record of his banishments, arrests and connections is a strange one – he certainly had influence with King Louis XIII, and the Duke of Buckingham was instrumental in getting him out of some jams – and we do know, following the sodomite trail, that the Duke of Buckingham was rumored to be not only a sodomite, but a corruptor of Prince Charles, and certainly a favorite of King James, famous for his taste in pretty boys. It was this atmosphere that made the Victorians, always eager to find good protestant martyrs to the intolerance of superstition and the Catholic Church, shy away from him. And, of course, it is what makes him wildly attractive to us. Mad, bad and dangerous to know – isn’t this the stuff of our heroes?

So here he is, poet and backdoor man, courtier, connector, the rich man’s son who flees from his debtors, the cabaret poet, to use Gaudiami’s term, the beaux esprit, to use the sneering phrase of his great accuser, the Jesuit Voisin.

Mon esprit, plein d’amour et plein de liberté
Sans fard et sans respect t’escrit la verité.

So, there you have the man who wrote the poem in my last post, more or less.
Which brings us to one of the odder ‘human documents’ of the seventeenth century, Theophile’s Apologie, a letter he wrote the King about his arrest and trial for – well, it is part of his complaint that it was never quite clear what his crime was.
It is an odd document because it mixes a tone of courtly flattery and servility (worthy of an op ed piece in the Washington Post) with the recounting of incidents in a tone that is recognizably modern. That is, recognizably conscious of its modernity – for that is what is modern. Just that. And so the tone in the letter has an intimacy, breaks down the barriers of politesse, with an unusual assurance, as if the way Theophile was writing was just the way everybody wrote. With all the assumption that intimacy, of a sort that did not exist between a husband and wife or a father and son in the seventeenth century, could exist between the writer and the reader – who is, of course, the King. Less invisible than in Velasquez’ Las Meninas, and yet not wholly visible. Well, here is Theophile’s account of his arrest.

“After the interrogation, which contained no accusation, M. de Conmartin assured me that I was dead. I responded that the king was just and that I was innocent. And then he ordered me to taken to Saint-Quentin, after which he took his leave to join the constable, who he had quit in order to help the priests capture me. They tied great ropes around me all over and put me on a feeble, limping horse, which made me run more risks than all the witnesses of my hearings. The spectacle of the execution of some famous criminal never attracted the crowd that I drew to my imprisonment. All of a sudden I am in the holding area, then thrust into a hole in which the ceiling itself was underground. I lay down, still dressed, and draped with irons so rude and weighty that the marks and pains of them remain in my limbs. The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.”

Theophile’s first play used motifs from Gongora. Although Don Quixotte wasn’t translated into French until after Theophile died, I don’t think it is so unlikely that he might have read the first volume of it. Louis XIII’s wife was Spanish, Theophile could speak the language – am I stretching to see the intrusion of a new prose style, a cross section of the vernacular of the peasant and the new learning, in this image of a man on a limping horse, surrounded by priests, trussed up like a pig? “The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.” It is going to take a long time for English prose to get close to this kind of statement of fact.