The 47 percent

Romney’s 47 percent remark reminds me of something I wrote before the great crash of 2008, in September, 2007, to be precise, about the lifestyles of the high and low as a great cultural fact. I wrote this in Austin, never dreaming that my future was so close to the radical changes I have undergone. But it does witness to something larger than my own little scrambly destiny.

“I read the papers. Everybody reads the papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was enough to send the market up 65 points.

American capitalism is infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe. In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.

Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on, churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002 is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?

In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.

Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which, it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict. No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism, and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in – are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final displacement of Rust belt America.

That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…

The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent, taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like. Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of economics.

All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.

…So much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run. I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.

As a writer, it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the American economy, the bottom 20 percent. Fuck the money, the problem for me as a writer is that I seem to be deprived of the tacit knowledge of how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of whatever? No.

However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards. Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living, as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me, because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income strata in the U.S.

Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.

writing: 3 a.m.

It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel, even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room, its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be carrying the revolution too far.

And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis, a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door – does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in Hollywood – tend to hang around it.

As for me – oh, I’ve written for decades now. I’ve written since I was sixteen. True, the juvenilia is long trashed; the writing of the 80s is mostly lost, as is that of most of the nineties – my breadcrumbs, in which I had Hansel’s confidence that I could follow them back to all the projects I left behind me, have been eaten by indifference, lost boxes, weather, moves, and broken computers. Oh the world’s indifference – and my own! And yet, when I gather up the work that’s left, that I can get my hands on, what does it amount to?

Doors and windows.

In the writer’s world, this is the thing that drives one to suicide. Oh, besides the contingent things – sickness, poverty, a broken heart, the dimming of one’s wits. But I am speaking of suicide from vocational reasons – or perhaps I should say, suicide from within a vocation. Despair is what happens when one understands, fully, that the door is for the house, and the window is for the room – and yet one feels all too intensely the boredom of the room, of putting up the walls, of the work of kitchens and bedrooms. Yes, even if it is a burrow, the tedium of this jigsawed, continuous space.

That space can make me sick. And soon, very soon, after  I embark upon a project, I have to fight the urge to put in another door or window. Glorious ingress, glorious egress, glorious panes of glass.

Yes, to punch out a space for a window that is high enough, commandingly high, so that I can jump out of it into the arms of a cremating eternity. 

the symbolic and the utilitarian

There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so simple.

The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian. The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain, and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance.To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.

Best murder of the summer

The best murder of the summer waited until the vacation was almost over. On September 5, an RAF cyclist, Brett Martin, was biking in the Haute-Savoie, near Lake Annecy, when he came upon a car and a cyclist who, he thought at first, had collided with each other. The cyclist was named Sylvain Mollier. He’d been shot with a 7.65mm pistol, as police later established. He was dead. The cyclist then looked in the car, and saw vaguely what the police later discovered in more depth – the three adults in the car had also been shot with the pistol, at point blank range. A girl lay sprawled outside the car, severely beaten. She survived. When the police finally opened the car completely, they discovered another survivor, a four year old girl who hid in the footwell at the foot of her mother’s corpse. The family, it turned out, were emigrés from Iraq to Britain, where they had citizenship. Saad al-Hilli, the driver, “computer-assisted design for the firm Su
rrey Satellites, which is owned by the large defence and engineering contractor EADS”, according to the Guardian. His mother in law, a Swede who also came from Iraq, was also shot.

A compelling story, with all the elements that would make any aficionado of true crime buy papers to read about ongoing developments. All those developments are about the al-Hillis. The papers are full of theories that naturally focus on the spectacular deaths in the car, while the bicyclist, evidently a witness, gets an also ran mention…

All of which has the detective novel gears in my brain turning. It is an interesting fact that the media has already decided, as though a reporter was on the spot, who was the target here. Surely the family of Iraqis, with the father in some funny business.

But why assume this? As Machiavelli and Raymond Chandler have taught us, one crime can cover another. Why do we assume that the cyclist was the on-looker – and not the family? Why do we assume that the focus on the al-Hilli’s, which has turned up the grotesque enigmas that arise whenever one turns a microscope on the private lives of ordinary citizens, is the correct focus? Did Sylvain Mollier have enemies? Was this his regular bicycling route? Simple questions that are utterly lost as the police, arbitrarily, chose to follow the trail of the other victims in this murder.

Myself, I am not fooled. But then again, I’ve always thought Lee Harvey Oswald held some mysterious grudge against Governor John Connolly, but – being a bad shot – actually hit the other guy, an obscure politician who happened to be president of the U.S., except for the miracle bullet. But of course, nobody asked John Connolly any questions in the aftermath.

Gullivered

I finally read James Meek's article in the LRB. The article has a terrible title, and begins with the least gripping lead in journalistic history- but after this worrisome tedium, it begins to rip along nicely. The account he gives of Free Market capitalism in the power market, set loose by Thatcher's ideologues who wanted to strip away the power of the state (at one point he quotes the mastermind behind privatizing the production and selling of electricity in England saying, about another government monopoly: what the post office needs is an imaginative asset stripper) and ended up with a national grid owned almost entirely by foreign companies, among which figures France's ... state owned energy monopoly, EDF. Meek, smartly, looks beyond the image of privatisation to see how the British version became such a disaster for the customer. It turns out that the Thatcherites were disgusted with the American way of privatizing energy. In the U.S., the regulation of private energy providers turns around limits on their profitability: Rate of return regulation meant that,in effect, in the U.S., local monopolies on energy were tolerated. In Britain, this was considered a horrible error, an intrusion of the state on the wonderous workings of the market - the Brits developed regulation based on prices. However, it turned out that this regulation never actually returned the lower costs due to 'efficiencies' to the customer. As the cost of electricity went down,, the profits went up, and all that money went to shareholders and management. So much for the justification that privatizing the power market would be good for the end user. As usual, the end user was screwed. More interestingly, competition in the British market led to vertical integration, as power makers bought power distributers, and then to takeovers of the industry by foreign companies - which, irony of ironies, then get bailed out by the government when they run into trouble, since the electricity has to keep flowing at all times. The image of Britain that comes through in Meek's article is of a Gulliver that carefully weaves the lilliputian web that imprisons it. Swift would have loved the utter ridiculousness of the Thatcherites and their New Labour heirs: like Houyhnhnms, they nasally, Oxbridgianly screw the country and reward themselves, or, if they are true believers, make up incredibly silly stories about the wonders of free trade and comparative advantage. The tory that came up with the privatisation scheme, a man named Littlewood, is interviewed by Meek, and he tells him (incredibly!) that takeover of the British electricity market is a good thing, cause britain could then move resources into where it had a competitive advantage, financial services. Yep, those power plant engineers were just hungering to create multi-tranche CDOs, and they finally got a chance to do so.

Although this point in history does seem troubling from many points of view, it does reliably provide farce on a grand scale.

Character in French classic drama

…characters are of three types: superior, middling and inferior.” Although this hierarchy is generally true, mixed types are also possible: “Maid servants and the liker are characters of a mixed nature. A hermaphrodite is also a mixed character, but of an inferior kind. O the best of Brahmins, the Skaara, and the Vita and others [like them] in a drama are also known as characters of mixed nature.” - Natya Shastra

The world here is not unlike the world of French classical drama, as interpreted by Eric Auerbach in Mimesis. In Auerbach’s chapter, Le faux devot, the focus moves from Moliere’s “character types” to Racine’s personages, a movement that is part of the ambition that fills the entire book: the principle of realism in literature, properly understood, reverses Coleridge’s famous dictum about the suspension of disbelief necessary to fiction by taking realism as a changing cast of thought, a set of beliefs about the real that is not coincident with an unchanging  common sense about the reality of the world. Auerbach’s idea is that we can  look through art – especially literature – to belief about reality. From the copy to the thing copied, this is our direction. Rather than the suspension of all belief, for Auerbach, literature is its embodiment. The historical import of literature is, then,  that style, plot, and figures, properly analyzed, will help us understand deeply how a certain society stood in relation to the real.

This, evidently, makes shakes off the grip of 19^th century realism on the aesthetic principle of mimesis, and allows Auerbach to apply it to literary universes that seem alien to the realistic impulse. One of those universes is made up of French classical theater. Racine’s dramas, as Auerbach notices, seem to systematically defy the real rather than attempt to picture it. To reconcile the mimetic impulse and the obvious aesthetic power of French classical drama, Auerbach notes about Racine:

 “His characters are completely and exemplarily natural and human-only their emotion-charged and exemplarily human lives are lived on an exalted level, which to them has become normal. And indeed, at times it occurs that their very exaltation yields the most enchanting and profoundly human effects.”

The exalted level is the level of rank – impressed, as it were, on the being of the world. In the force field of Louis XIV’s court, what is grotesque or trivial – what falls below the standard of “gloire” – is subtracted from the picture of the tragic world, the world in which reality is treated seriously. Auerbach notes that Racine would carefully eliminate from his sources – the Bible, or Greek drama – those elements that would shock the court’s norms. Those shocks which must be present to set the drama in motion are often relegated to ‘base” personages – in a turn that is reminiscent of the order of rank determining the aesthetic of the Natya Shastra. In the preface to Phedre, Racine draws the reader’s attention to his greater delicacy in putting the accusations against Hippolytus in the mouth of a base character, rather than Phedre:

I have even been careful to make her [Phedre] a little less odious than she is in the tragedies of the ancients, where she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus. I considered that calumny had something too base and too dark about it for me to put it  in the mouth of a princess who elsewhere has such noble and virtuous feelings. This baseness appeared to me more suitable to a nurse, whose inclinations could be more servile.”

Thus, Auerbach is able to see how both Moliere’s ‘character types” and Racine’s “personages” give us the continuity upon which we have a duality: the court’s understanding of the world, and the city’s understanding of the court. Racine’s universe uses subtraction, or in alchemical terms, distilliation, to isolate the real at its most extreme. The dramatic revelation of nature – of the essence of Racine’s figures – requires a certain imperial cocooning, requires the most exalted rank, and requires the minimalizing of action.

VI. Cette indigne moitié d'une si belle histoire !

Auerbach is not unaware of the limits of his method and object. After all, how much we can infer, from the norms of classical French drama, to the total pattern of the representation of reality in the France of Louis XIV? Or, to be less ambitious, at least the common pattern of representation, the kind of representation everyone would accept, base and notable, cop and king. The channels of representation are deep and wide, and not exhausted by theater or official poetry. And even then, even granting that through literature we understand an aspect of the stylization of the real, how are we to know whether this stylization is simply a fact about literature, or a broader fact about the society in which certain writers produced that literature?

Let’s come at this from another angle.

In 1901, A.W. Ward reviewed Le drame des poisons in the English Historical Review, and praised its author, F. Funck-Brentano, for his treatment of his subject matter: “F. Funck-Brentano is an accomplished writer besides being a specially trained historical scholar; and it is well that such should be the case, for never were tact and good taste more necessary for the achievement of a difficult historical task.”

Tact and good taste were the traits more usually associated, in 1901, with suppressing a scandal involving respectable people, rather than throwing light upon an historical episode that had occurred two hundred thirty years before. Ward’s wording, however, points us to a continuity between a certain view of elite image management and a certain historiography. One can see that historiography as a massive gesture that parallels Racine’s displacement of Phedre’s accusation from the Queen to a ‘base’ personage. Similarly, in the history of the Classic Age in France, and in the general account of the history of the “West”, there is a structure that translates from the universal Christian history of Bossuet to the positivist history that prevailed in 1901, in which an educated upper class represents progress and demystification, and a base class represents resistance and superstition. Progress begins at the top, and penetrates to the lower strata.

Funck-Brentano’s book is about the “affair of poisons”, a scandal that has two historic sites. The first site we can date to 1676-1682, when the affair proper was investigated by the police; the second site we can date to 1873, when Francois Ravaisson published the fifth volume of the Archives of the Bastille, which contained the previously unpublished transcripts of and letters around the police investigation. In the nearly two hundred years between those sites, an official history of the era of Louis XIV had hardened into historic fact. It was an image of monumental grandeur, where strict norms of bienseance ruled a court that turned around the king as the planets round the sun. In the school room textbook, it will be earnestly noted tht much progress was made in the arts and sciences. It was an image compounded of the innumerable structures left behind by the era – Versailles, the triumphal arcs that one finds in so many French cities, the statues – and of a canonized literature. This image, however, is nowhere in existence in the transcript of the police investigation dug up by Ravaisson. Instead, the educated class here is as apt to turn to astrology and magic and it is to piety and alexandrines, and such myths as infant sacrifice and black mass turn up on the menu of services proferred by a number of ‘base’ brokers, dealers in the shadow zone between the profane and the Luciferian.  

Auerbach most likely knew of Funck-Brentano’s history of the “affair of the poisons,” which was widely reviewed, although he doesn’t cite it. He probably also knew that the archives revealed that an arrest had been issued for Racine that was never served. This news went through the literary community of the late 19^th century and probably made the old classicist a bit sexier. By the thirties the affair had sunk to the level of an idée recue.

Yet the impact of the archive never shook the marble from the image of the “classical age”. Partly this is because, even with the transcripts of numerous interrogations, it is hard to know what to make of the testimony of the witnesses, who are all subject to torture – the sellette, the brodequin. They contradict each other; and they accuse each other, and various people – on up to Louis XIV’s official mistress, Madame de Montespan - of an array of amazing behaviors, including participation in des messes sur le ventre - black masses held over a naked woman lying on an altar in a church, over whom children were sometimes sacrificed.

These testimonies are all the more perplexing as we know this story of nude women and sacrificed children. It  is a story traced by Norman Cohn in a series of influential books written in the 60s and 70s, culminating in Europe’s Inner Demons. These books employ a nominalist method that takes certain recurring stories from the time of the Roman Empire down to the witch hunts of the 17^th century and, comparing them, shows their structural similarity while at the same time casting radical doubt on their footing in reality. The story type goes as follows : a group gathers together in a hidden place – a cave, a ruin – and  after blowing out a candle, hold an orgy in which they transgress sexually (for instance, committing incest) and finally achieve solidarity through blood sacrifice of a child. It is a blood libel directed,  in Roman times, at Christians, and during the medieval and early modern period, at Jews. The witch, given this system, is a floating signifier – attached to an Other by a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances. Michelet and others after him thought the alienation fell upon women especially. However, the witch trials show a larger variety of types than that of women alone. The corollary to Cohn’s nominalism about such events as Sabbats or child sacrifice ever happening is that the belief that these things happened created a hermeneutic for defining the “Other” in Europe. It is an other that is not the savage enemy, but is the enemy within. The other is metaphorically a poison in the system – counterworking the body’s function in the body’s own tissues.

Cohn’s nominalism was coincident with the cool logicism of  Oxford and Cambridge philosophy in the fifties and sixties, where the weapons of a anti-systematic logic were fabricated -  in line with the Cold War pattern of opposing the totalizing theory of Marxism. From this demystifying angle, all conspiratorial societies looked doubtful: for instance, it became questionable whether something called the  Mafia could exist – that is, an organization that centered around certain secret rituals, continuous over time. 

Certainly the record of the police interrogations in the Affair of Poisons give us a messy  picture of specific events. Historians can deal with a battle without raising ontological questions having to do with its credibility: we know so well that strangers will meet up en masse and murder each, given other circumstances, that we don’t question the fact that battles occur, or question the rationality and motives of their witnesses and participants.  But that infants will be bled to death in rituals designed to evoke the devil does raise high the bar to  credibility. It isn’t that these stories aren’t common; rather, they circulate as though taken from a catalogue of dreams, seized in moments of panic, and sworn off in the post-panic dawn. Le Reynie, the police lieutenant general who was in charge of the star chamber investigation, had trouble believing the accounts of his prisoners.  He was not naïve about confession. Confession to these acts, whether under torture or not, does not lead automatically to the fact that they were committed. Le Reynie had reason, however, to believe that the streets of Paris could produce monsters. He knew one of them:  an aristocrat, Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, who was tried and convicted for an astonishing campaign of poison that had liquidated her father and two brothers, and perhaps some random inmates in a hospital on which she had practiced her potions. She failed to get rid of her sister and her daughter, who were roused, perhaps, by the deaths of the males in the family. She was beheaded in the place de Greve – about five blocks from where I am writing this – on July 17, 1676. 

It was after this scandal that La Reynie began to gather evidence from a Parisian subworld of mad and bad priests, fortune tellers known to all by their slang tags, abortionists and projectors. The link that held the investigation together was poison – Brinvilliers crime revealed a group of enablers who dealt in  poisons, and this was the first batch to be arrested and taken into the Bastille. On March 12, 1679, the police arrested Catherine Deshayes, the wife of Antoine Monvoisin, and nicknamed La Voisin, as she was coming out of mass from Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle, in what is now the second arrondissement of Paris. La Voisin was perhaps the most interesting of La Reynie’s catches. That she should be both a fortuneteller, abortionist and supplier of poison, on the one side, and a devout Catholic, on the other side, makes sorting out her ‘character’ a difficult historical task. But she only reflects, here, in exaggerated terms, the same diffuse amalgam of traits that made her exalted clients both churchgoers and buyers of “powders of succession” – arsenic to get rid of cumbersome heirs or husbands. There is an indelible image of her left in the police transcripts that is a sort of parody of the French classical idea of the queen. She had a garden in which she sat on something like a throne, garbed in a crimson dress decorated with double headed eagles in gold thread that she had tailor made (at a cost that was excessive enough to cause rumors – this being an era in which sumptuary laws still had some effect on the appearance of the ‘base’), she received her clients. Behind her throne there was a stove. It was there she burned the fetuses from her abortion business – although the testimony is a little unclear as to weather they were all fetuses. She may have let her clients have a little leaway, she may have committed a few infanticides. At one point in prison she got drunk and bragged that she’d made away with 2,500 fetuses – a goodly number for an “angelmaker”.  The garden of le Voisin was a parody of the aristocratic court, an exalted dream staged by an outcast.

Between Racine and this woman there was, evidently, an acquaintance, sealed through Racine’s mistress, a beauty named Thérèse Du Parc. Du Parc was the daughter of a theater crazed toothpuller in Lyon, who encouraged her to go on stage. It was there that she had been by Moliere, who was passing through with his troupe. It was her fate to have had as lovers, or suitors, Moliere, Corneille and finally Racine. Racine stole her away from Moliere; after that, at a certain point in their relationship, Du Parc was supposedly the object of a marriage proposal from a noble. 

La Voisin, this neighborhood mahatma, bad news in her own little sphere, with acquaintances up and down the social ladder – from the hangman of Paris, one of her lovers, to various Versailles nobles and servants, for whom she told fortunes and sold philters - claimed a fifteen year friendship with the actress. La Voisin also testified that Racine didn’t like her. What could Racine have made of this gaudy negative to his ravished queens and princesses? She was not even like Phédre’s nurse, Oenone, a servant. Although were any servants really servants outside of the ideology of rank in which all characters clanked in their chains? But the claim that caused a stir when it was published in 1873 was that Racine had her poisoned.  In the papers in the Archives there is proof that the police took this accusation seriously: a letter from one of the officials involved in the investigation who assures another that “the king’s orders necessary for the arrest of Racine will be sent to you as soon as you ask for them…”

Reading la Voisin’s testimony, it is clear that she has no evidence that Racine poisoned his mistress, although there are papers from the official inquiry into the affair that confirm that officials did think Du Parc was poisoned. This conclusion is echoed by contemporary historians, but what is significant is that there was no physical evidence of this. Rather, the evidence was circumstantial – a comparatively young woman, a sudden death. The accusation against Racine was, essentially, that as she lay sick, he refused to let Du Parc’s normal sage-femme see her, and kept away her step-mother. Du Parc’s illness is a mystery: it has been speculated that she died as a consequence of an abortion. It is known that, unlike Moliere, she was buried in a consecrated cemetery, meaning that she must have had extreme unction, which might be a point against the abortion story. However, given the number of bad priests rounded  up by La Reynie, it wouldn’t have been very difficult, no matter what the circumstances, to get the sanction of a priest. In any case, among the set that Du Parc seems to have run in, sudden illness was assessed with a shrewdly professional eye. But why would Racine have poisoned her? The only motive la Voisin mentions is jealousy. 

We know where jealousy led Phedre. Auerbach’s perception that French classical drama purges the court tragedy – as though by a drug –of the grosser materiality of the town becomes clearer once one brings that grosser materiality back in – once la Voisin’s oven is juxtaposed to Madame Maintenon’s Maison Royal de Saint Louis girls putting on Esther – the play Racine wrote after his official retirement for the school. To go back, as I am trying to, to the moment in which  “character” finally becomes broad enough to fill its role in the numerous semantic fields in which it began to appear in the eighteenth century means going through literature to reality; but as well, understanding literature on a broader basis as well. Character does haunt the intersection of the plausible and the poetic, but the poetic is not self contained. The poetic has to be seen in a more inspired sense, it must be seen poetically, where it dodges about outside the institution of literature. Auerbach is well aware of the fact that mimesis leads literature outside of itself and its own institutions. Logically, it is in the interface between the poetics of ordinary life – a world in which a drunken old woman sits on a parody throne, wrapped in a crimson velvet robe, stitched with double headed eagles - and literature – in which Phédre’s shameful desire is expressed, at last, to her nurse, Oenone - that we can understand, for instance, the vast trouble that the institution of literature attempts to control. Among the other intersection points for the plausible, there is this: Le Voisin, screaming in prison as she was strung up on a mattress by her inquisitors, remembering the news that by this time must have struck her as being from a world outside the prison that was long ago lost, brought by women from the court whose names she cannot recall.  

“-De Gorle told her that Racine, having secretly married Du Parc, was jealous of everyone and particularly of her, Voisin, at whom he took umbrage, and that he got out of his relation with her by poison, because of his extreme jealousy, and that during the sickness of Du Parc he sat by the head of her bed and that he took from her finger a valuable diamond,  and also stole the jewelry, and the principle properties of Du Parc, for which he made a lot of money; and that he didn’t even want her to talk to Manon, he femme de chamber, who is a mid-wife, although she asked for Manon and had her [Voisin] write to her to come to Paris to see her, as well as Voisin.

-Did de Gorle tell her in what manner the poisoning was done, and what one had used to do it?

-No.”

 

perversion and topic grammar

The divide between what is written and what is drawn is often passed over rather hastily in the history of the invention of writing. In Tim Ingold’s Lines, he quotes from an anthropologist in Australia:

“Both men and women among the Walbiri routinely draw designs in the sand with their fingers, as they talk and tell stories. This drawing is as normal and as integral a part of

conversation as are speech and gesture. The markings themselves are standardized

to the extent that they add up to a kind of vocabulary of graphic elements whose precise meanings, however, are heavily dependent on the conversational or storytelling contexts in which they appear. Thus a simple straight line can be (among other things) a spear, a fighting or digging stick, or a person or animal lying stretched out; a circle can be a nest, water hole, tree, hill, billy can or egg. As the story proceeds, marks are assembled into little scenes, each of which is then wiped out to make way for the next.” [125]

What is happening here, one wants to say, is not writing, but illustrating. Yet it seems very much to be the secret sharer of writing. In birth, the creature bursts the shell – but in the birth of a device, the creature often carries the shell with it.

This is a backdoor way into talking about a characteristic of Montaigne’s essays that either enchants or irritates the reader: Montaigne’s inveterate habit of drifting from the topic. Why, for instance, would Montaigne entitle an essay, On the lame (Des Boiteux), in which the topics are fact and cause, reasoning, popular delusions, witchcraft, and an Italian proverb about lame women?

Topic organization in a text is at a level superior to the semantic contents of the text. Those contents have an order of appearance – like the pictures produced by the Walbiri – but in writing, they pass beyond the threshold of erasure, so to speak, and must be managed. In oral speech, there are topic markers too, but they are of a different nature – they are ultimately collaborative, existing in conversation. As we drift to soliloquy, internal monologue, we drift closer to the rigidity of the written – but we gain that rigidity through repetition. There’s an obsessiveness about internal monologue. When I am angry at someone, I often rehearse speeches to that person in my head. But what is interesting is that I don’t simply create one speech – I reiterate it. I rehearse it. I chip away at it, I add to it. I return to it. I seek to dominate, in that speech, the space that could be potentially taken up by my counterpart, my conversational object – the person I am mad at. When I give directions to a person, which is a very strongly topic-directed speech act, I often find myself remembering, afterwards, that I forgot some important point. This is because I am being very consciously on topic – I want my words to correspond to a precise set of behaviors, coordinate with the world.

Contrary to Moliere’s M. Jourdain, who, discovering what prose is from his rhetoric teacher, is amazed that he has been speaking it all his life – in fact, we rarely do. The key to prose is the rigidifying of the topic level. We speak a mixed genre, a hip hop/poetic/prose mash-up. If you have ever transcribed an interview, you will find that loose ends proliferate, and the level of the topic is now weak, now strong.

The empowering of topic cues comes into the writing system at the very beginning of writing, in Mesopotamia, where the archaeologist finds tablet after tablet filled with lists, orders, transfers of property. Michel de Montaigne entered the Parlement de Bourdeaux in 1557, and followed a career path that led him to being elected mayor, unanimously, in 1581. by the council. He was very familiar with administrative forms. The Essais, however, are composed as a long raid on those forms. It is part of their enigma: the essays are pervaded with the sense of Montaigne’s power, his ability to, if he wishes, keep on topic. This is the lawyer’s edge. And to this he adds the power of going cannily off topic – this is the cop’s edge.

To go off topic is to stray, to diverge, to digress. There is, in writing, an implicit structure of following – of directed movement – and straying is a sort of counter-writing, throwing us back upon an oral looseness. One has to remember, of course, that what writing traverses – that discursive space – is not just made up of the verbal, but of mixed elements, physical as well as signifying, sound as well as character, for use as well as for pleasure. To stray is to bump into these sublimated spirits that hover around the text.

“A propos, or out of propos (hors propos) – whatever” This is the odd, jutting fragment of a sentence that marks a turning point  in Des Boyteux. It is with this fragment that Montaigne abruptly shifts from dangerous thoughts evoked by the trial of a witch to a meditation on an Italian proverb. The fragment surges into the focal area of the text as though to testify to its own im-pertinence. By doubting the truth of the fact of witchcraft, Montaigne, theoretically, could be committing an act of heresy. de Lancre, after him, made the case that disbelief in magic was congruent with being on the side of the devil. The thought Montaigne has followed has taken him this close – and then we have a seemingly ribald aside, going from the image of a ‘miserable old woman” who, in Montaigne’s memorable judgment, should be sentence to “hellabore” (a psychoactive drug to  cure mental disorder) rather than “hemlock” – to the lame woman of the proverb: “he does not know the true sweetness of Venus who has not slept with a lame woman”.

Why this “outside of the propos”? Why this deliberate perversity?

The power of the topic level in prose is not only the power to organize an argument, narrative or remarks around an ‘issue’ – it is also the power to shift the topic. That power of shifting – that power of perversity – is sexualized in Montaigne’s digression. What explains the proverb? Montaigne first considers stories about the cause of the particular sexual power of lame women:“… her legs and thighs, not receiving the nourishment that is their due, it comes about that the genital parts above are more full, nourished and vigorous.” The comparison of the social and the human body is a commonplace of humanist rhetoric. In Coriolanus, Menenius Agrippa tells a story in the same vein, about the rebellion of the members of the body against the stomach. In Montaigne’s comment, the perversion of order is literally sexualized. Reading back to the comments on the witch with which Montaigne has been occupied, the implication is, as well, about a perversion in the social order, where the old woman, because of her lesser sexual and social power, may turn to other means to hold her position. In other words, we can find a cause her that made the old woman a witch.

But just as we are about to settle for a naturalization of the witch story, Montaigne switches back to an older topic, the topic that governs the whole of the essay, which is that we should have a rule, in the order of our understanding, to put fact before cause. It is the inversion of this order that is the true perversion he is after: “These examples serve what I said in the beginning, our reasonings often anticipate the effect; be the extension of their juridiction so infinite, aren’t they judging and exercising themselves in inanity, proper, and not in being?”

Perversion crosses perversion, hors propos is shifted by hors propos here. For in losing ourselves in the story of why the woman is a witch, the causes of witchcraft, one has lost the vital first step: are there witches?

The moment in which one can ask, are there witches, is the moment one steps out of the urgencies of the present social scene and retires to a place of thought. This moment is not as facile and unmediated as it appears in a certain rationalist ideology. Just when one wants to congratulate Montaigne as a precursor of the Enlightenment and demystifier of witchcraft, he makes a final move that modifies that congratulations, or, to give it another twist, transforms the “following” within the prose into a kind of “escape”, a flight. Granted, perhaps the belief in witches comes about not because there are witches, but because people say there are witches. The magic of the word is such that it produces the magic of magic. But what does this mean?  “For by the single authority of ancient and public custom of this proverb, I persuaded myself, in the past, that I had received more pleasure from a woman who was not straight, and put this down as one of her graces.” And so it comes to pass that Montaigne’s rule – to first find the fact – crosses another fact – that men are believing beasts, even in heat. “There is nothing as supple and elastic as our understanding.” The suppleness and elasticity, here, stand in contrast to the crookedness of the woman favored by Venus. The high level of the topic instant is itself saturated with sex, here. It is perverted. The essay, it turns out, does not intend to resolve what is  a propos and what is out of propos. And so the essay ends on a note that could either be a straight movement forward, or a limping movement to the side:

“The pride of those who attribute to the human spirit the capacity for all things, causes in others, through spite and emulation, this opinion, that he isn’t capable of any things. The ones holding themselves in ignorance are of the same extremity as those who hold themselves in science. The point is, one cannot deny that man is immoderate in all things: and that he has no stopping point, than that of necessity, and the inability to go on.”