the stone age: classification and ideology

We have the stone age. The iron age. The information age. What is today the age of?

I seem, in that question, to be talking about time. But it is actually a peculiar view of time I have in mind. The stone age and iron age have a function in the historical timeline of archaeology, marking the discovery and use of materials and giving us a kind of linear sequence. You can’t go from the stone age, in this sequence, to say the age of steel. First, you have to discover how to forge things with iron.

This view of historical time presumes a community between the person who uses it and the person who hears it. The “today” of my question is not, in actuality, a dated time. If it were, that dated time would extend across the Amazonian tribe and the Manhattan hedgefunder. They coexist in the same planetary time.

I have been thinking about this since I started reading a book that the Pulitzer prize committee thought highly enough of to short for its prize in 2011 – S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Park and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.  Gwynne, as the reviewers like to say, is a master story teller – or at least he has a master story to tell. At the same time, he brings to the topic of the Comanches an attitude that I am all too familiar with among white Western historians: a continuation of the same nineteenth century ideology that justified wiping out the Indians and snatching their land in the first place. To this end, Gwynne writes some astonishing things about the moral retardedness of the Comanches, and of their lack of vocabulary (being primitive people, they have a impoverished list of names for things), and their generally small swarthy and bowlegged appearance. It is all rather astonishing. Gwynne goes back to the roots of the West to explain how we all evolved a great morality and ironwork and such, while the Comanche were stone age people who thought nothing of committing barbarous infanticides, rapes and tortures. This is done, of course, without any statistical comparison of infanticides, rapes and tortures between the “West” and the Comanches – and with a giant blind eye, one with a giant stye in it, turned to that peculiar institution called slavery.

However, I’d rather concentrate on the notion of the stone age as it is used here. This is such a peculiarly misleading way to speak of the Comanches that it misses what they were about. It is not only an instance of what anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls allochrony – the production of a hierarchized time in a present in which, in actuality, societies are coeval. This is certainly true, but what is missed here are the important technologies that are generated within and structure a society. In the case of the Comanches, from what we – we inheritors of Western knowledge – know about the pre-horse Comanches, they were not huge users of stone as much as bone – and thread, and hide. As with American society in the nineteenth century, much depended on fabric.  The cotton thread was the great material of the South, and in the American economy. The hides of buffalo and dear were the great materials of pre-horse Comanche society.

However, it was the horse, and the influx of iron, that changed everything. The Comanches did not use stone implements to meet the forward advance of the American freebooters – they used spears topped with iron blades, for which they traded. They used firearms, when they could get them. And most especially they used horses, which they raised and trained and rode in an exemplary fashion.

They were, in other words, a dependent society – dependent on technologies they could not replicate. At the same time, they had absorbed certain elements of the changing character of the Great Plain and the Southwest – notably the horse – and in doing so, had utterly changed their internal social patterns and relations.  To speak of them, then, in terms that make more sense when doing archaeological digs in Asia minor is a sort of classificatory obfuscation. It misleads more than explains.

And this is what comes of not seeking one’s classificatory measures with reference to one’s object – it is as if we were to measure the wing length of the homo sapiens and find the species to be a very primitive bird.

Moi, francais comme un autre

We assembled, your typical Gaulois family – we got our warcarts, our cattle, our dyepots and our spears together – and made it down to Roquette, where I was to be interviewed, examined, and finally issued my visa for a year. First, I watched a film that told some white lies about liberty, equality, and fraternity (illustrating the latter, to the sound of Robespierre turning in his grave, with scenes from a football match), and then was called out to have my lungs xrayed, my eyes examined (the examination card, in a nice touch, contained, in its small print section, what seemed to be a prose poem about beauty), and my personal history and that of my family extracted: I claimed that there was no inherited schizophrenia, hebephrenia, pyromania, nymphomania, or anthropophagous warts in my family tree, and that I had never had a serious illness, never drank alcohol (except when I could find it – I added this silent codicil in my own mind), and was as healthy as a horse.After which, I was called into the office of the nicest case officer ever, who said that my record showed that I could skip the classes on logement, typing, woodwork, sheepherding, and abbatoir science, but that I would have to assist on a program on French civics, including the dread explanation of how the French elect the senate. In preparation for the latter, the case officer gave me a textbook on logarithms and another on non-Euclidean geometry. We were about to rise in our chairs and sing Ca ira when she noticed that I had made a gross blunder on my application sheet. Normally, I would have been quartered for this mistake, but instead, I was showered with such courtesy and understanding that I swore to make encore un autre effort and like rillettes, or die trying. An excellent day. I  am in!

if truth is stranger than fiction, what is a truism stranger than?

“Truth is stranger than fiction” – such is the truism. About truisms, one never says that they are stranger than fiction – on the contrary, a truism banalizes truth. It brings out, so to speak, the truth’s unconscious lie, in bringing out the system in which the truth is placed.

However, what I want to know is: why? By what measure is the truth stranger than fiction? In fact, the formalists say that making strange, estrangement, is one of the great devices of art. Skhlovskii defines that strangeness as a form of de-routinization. A part of the world – a tree, say – is given a presence that seems to depart from the routines to which trees in the human world are subject – chopping them down, planting them in groves or along streets, cooling ourselves in their shade, etc. The tree in Tolstoy’s short piece, Three deaths, for instance, is given a more tragic and meaningful death than the two human beings, even though the tree is in no way anthropomorphized.

Turning around the phrase, we have another claim: fiction is less strange than truth. Why? Or rather, How? For fiction is not like fruit, something you pick off the routinized tree, or even the paradisial tree in the Garden of Eden. Fiction is eminently made. And like many products of the modern industrial age, it is made to a certain standard.

A good example of the non-strangeness of fiction stuck itsthumb out in yesterday’s New York Times – although this thumb had shed its flesh in crematoria of Auschwitz, or in the mass graves of any number of the satellite camps. The story begins in 1952, in a heavily Catholic Christian Democrat Italy eager to discover the right kind of resistance to fascism – that is, not the communist, or partisan kind. By 1952 the system of the ratlines by which, in 1945 and 1946,  the Vatican hid priests and ecclesiastics involved in the mass extermination of Jews and Serbs in Croatia and helped them escape to Argentina, was a fading memory – or at least, at that moment, an uninvestigated one. In that year, the  Bishop of Campania, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, decided to help out his brother’s family, who were involved in a pension dispute, by describing his nephew, Giovanni Palatucci, as a rescuer of Jews who died at Dachau because of his Christian act. How did he rescue these Jews? According to the original story, Palatucci sent them to a camp in Campagna, where they could be protected by the Bishop.

This story succeeded beyond the Bishop’s wildest dreams. A stream of books and articles attributed a major role to Giovanni Palatucci, who was called the police chief of Fiume. In these books, the number of Jews he saved rocketed to around 5,000. He was designated as one of the “Righteous” by  Yad Vashem. He was honored posthumously by the Italian state, and declared a martyr by Pope John Paul. He was on the way to sainthood…

Well, bets are now off on the sainthood. According to a pretty exhaustive report by the Centro Primo Levi, the Palatucci story is a fiction. However, in this case, again, the truth operates as an estrangement device – the truth, that is, about the way the fiction was made. In fact, Palatucci’s position in Fiume was as a functionary who did census work to identify Jews that were to be shipped off to the camps. Far from rescuing 5,000 Jews by sending them to a “vacation” camp in Campagna, there seems to have been 40 Jews sent to Campagna, and many of those were then shipped to Auschwitz. Fiume itself was remarkable for the efficiency of its Judenrein policies – 80 percent of Fiume’s Jews had vanished – up in smoke – by the war’s end. By the war’s end, too, Palatucci was dead in Dachau – shipped there because he was caught trying to make a deal with the British to save Fiume, presumably from the Communists.

These truths remind me of a particular fiction – Leonard Sciascia’s Candido. It is not, in my opinion, one of his great fictions. It is too tendentious. The story line in Candido concerns the way formerly high ranking and committed fascists under Mussolini radically changed their stories in postwar Italy, becoming Communist politicians, Christian Democrat journalists, and the like – but all remembered themselves as resisting fascism. Candido is a satire about the turncoat history upon which the Cold War Italian order was founded.  Sciascia’s great topic, in fact, was the rottenness of that order. It choked upon the lie that gave it legitimacy. The lie, here, the banal fiction, made Italian reality, as seen through the lens of the official version, much less strange than the Italy Sciascia tried to get at through his fictionalized truths – his fictions about how easily the truth could be subverted by fiction when the desire was for fiction.

It probably never occurred to the little functionary in Fiume, doing his everyday job identifying Jews for their eventual disappearance, that one day he’d be honored throughout the world for his job in rescuing his material. By now, the weight of the fiction that he did so is such that it will surely survive the revelation that it was all wrong. Too much has been invested in this story. But it will be interesting to see how long it will take holocaust memorials that have honored Palatucci to quietly put away the laurels. As for the larger story: according to the Independent, “Regarding plans for Palatucci’s beatification, the Vatican says it has now asked a historian to look into the matter.”

negation of the negation

Ah, the bits that are thrown away by writers in passing! I’m reading an essay collection by Mary McCarthy – yes, I’m one of that phantom audience who reads old essay collections -  and in a review of Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her American tour, I come upon this bit of diamond fit for a sceptre that was, as it were, thrown away in a bit of meat for the periodical grinder:

“On an American leafing through the pages of an old library copy, the book has a strange effect. It is as though an inhabitant of Lilliput or Brobdingnag, coming upon a copy of Gulliver's

Travels, sat down to read, in a foreign tongue, of his own local customs codified by an observer of a different species: everything is at once familiar and distorted. The landmarks are there,

and some of the institutions and personages—Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Harvard, Yale, Vassar, literary celebrities concealed under initials; here are the

drugstores and the cafeterias and the busses and the traffic lights —and yet it is all wrong, schematized, rationalized, like a scale model under glass.”

This is, first of all, a great idea for a short story, say by Borges. Or by Philip Dick. Second of all, I think it exactly hits the sentiments of those whose lives are taken up, stolen as material, by the writer. At the moment there is a silly lawsuit going on between Scarlett Johanssen and some French novelist who used her name and certain biographic facts for the protagonist of one of his novels. Surely Johanssen – if she has read the book, instead of simply listening to a précis presented by one of her handlers – has had that feeling of déjà jamais vu – which is when something happens that you are sure has happened before, but not like it is happening now. McCarthy was right to choose Swift’s book, since its play on perspectives is so thorough that one never thinks of the Lilliputians reading it, or the Brobdignaians getting out their microscopes to trace its print. Reversal does not, in this world, trump reversal – the negation of the negation does not bring us back to equilibrium. This is what consciousness is like.