betrayal

It is an interesting affair – the affair one has with certain authors, those you read compulsively, and then can’t read. Can’t. Favorite authors. When I was a kid in high school, for instance, I read all the Kurt Vonnegut I could find in great satisfying gulps. God Bless you mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan, etc., etc. I thought that this was how to write. I imitated him.

And then one day I couldn ‘t read him.

This moment of turning away – what is it but a betrayal? As with a love affair, it is a moment of heavy psychodrama, with  a whole lot of projection going on. That projection is covered, at least in my case, by a critical language, which finds the fault in Vonnegut and the burden of betrayal is unconsciously shifted to him.  It is the author’s betrayal, not my own! He led me on. He took advantage of my teen naivete! And it isn’t even that the critical language is false, the negativity misplaced – but there is a fundamental bad faith behind it all.

Anton Chekhov, in a letter to a friend written in 1891, gave an elegant description of this moment of betrayal. In his case, the writer was  Tolstoy:

“Perhaps because of my no longer smoking, the Tolstoyan morality has stopped stirring me, and in the depths of my soul I feel badly disposed toward it, which is, of course, unjust. Peasant blood flows in my veins, and you cannot astound me with the virtues of the peasantry. From childhood I have believed in progress and cannot help believing, as the differerence between the time when I got whipped and the time when the whippings ceased was terrific. … But the Tolstoyan philosophy had a pwerful effect on me, governed my life for a period of six or seven years; it was not the basic premises, of which I had been previously aware, but the Tolstoyan manner of expression, its good sense and probably a sort of hypnotic quality. Now something within me protests: prudence and justice tell me there is more love in natural phenomena than in chastity and abstinence from meat. War is evil and the court system is evil, but it does not therefore follow that I have to walk around in straw slippers and sleep on a stove besides a workman and his wife, etc. This howevver is not the crux of the matter, not the “pro and contra”; it is that somehow or other Tolstoy has already passed out of my life, is no longer in my heart: he has gone away saying, behold, your house is left unto you desolate. I have freed myself from lodging his ideas in my brain.”

Tolstoy is, of course, a much larger mass than Vonnegut, but Chekhov’s outburst applies to all the betrayals: first comes the rationalization, which indeed contains a spiritual truth, a truth of authenticity; then comes the desacralization, an energy that goes beyond mere argument; and then comes a more accurate description of what it means to be in love with a writer and then fall out of love.

The authenticity of the experience is rooted in Chekhov’s claim to be of peasant blood, and more vividly, to know the experience of the whip growing up – although this is not the serfowner’s knout, but papa’s belt, apparently. Then comes a sort of mockery of the Tolstoyan agenda, which is easy to cook up – the idea of sleeping with the working man and his wife on the stove is a comic image. Then comes the real reason, and here, it isn’t progress or rationality that dominates, but possession and exorcism.

This corresponds to my experience exactly. The hypnotism affected by a writer, a writer one falls in love with, is an act of possession. It could even be an act of angelic possession. But Chekhov, the Chekhov who claims his peasant blood here, wrote in another letter that he had tried to drain the slave from his blood to the last drop, and this purge counts for beloved writers too.

These thoughts were crystallized by a Hudson Review essay onDavid Foster Wallace’s conservatism. The author, James Santel, guides his essayinto port using three facts about Wallace – that he voted for Reagan in 1980,that he voted for Ross Perot in 1992, and that he wrote a shamefullyhagiographic article about John McCain in 2000. Santel ignores DFW’s campaigning for Kerry in 2004 and the interview he gave to the WSJ in 2008, where he says:

“ You write that John McCain, in 2000, had become "the great populist hope of American politics." What parallels do you see between McCain in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008?

Mr. Wallace: There are some similarities; the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing;a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who's not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs. But there's a bigger [reason]. The truth -;as I see it -is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.”

However, I think Santel has a point about Wallace, even if the point keeps shuffling away from him. It isn’t that Wallace is conservative because he thinks “the individual is alone”. What lefty would disagree? And what lefty wouldn’t say that “alone” is an attitude that emerges in the social whole. It is a social construct, which does not mean it is somehow not real, but that it gains its entire value as such a construct. Santel I think confuses methodological individualism with existential individualism. But I think that Wallace did too. From the Ayn Rand fan-dom of his teenage years through the entire body of his non-fiction, and to a certain extent his fiction, he lacked that sense of the contemporary – of the historic moment, and the forces engaged within it – that a novelist like Mann, or Bellow, or Updike – to name some other conservative novelists – had.

It has been a while since I read Wallace like I used to in the nineties and 00s. I’ve never even considered reading Pale King. I do remember thinking Interviews with Hideous Men was a huge comedown from Infinite Jest. But I also remember thinking that  the essays – on the AVA awards, on a LA talk radio jock, on whatever – were genius.

Recently, though, picking up A Supposedly Fun thing I’ll Never do Again (ah, that supposedly!) I found myself reacting allergically to the whole of it. The wisecracks, the footnotes, the mix of hesitation and arrogance, of erudition and self-mockery – it seemed so wrong.

Was it wrong? One of my great reading experiences was lounging in my high bed in New Haven and, as the snow fell endlessly outside the window on Mansfield Street, reading hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest at a stretch. It seemed then that finally the novel had come back, after a long sleep in the eighties – with few exceptions. The novel as I loved it – the paranoid codex. Gravity’s Rainbow, J.R., Lookout Cartridge – these were my household spirits.

Now, of course, I think back to things like the schtick with Joelle Van Dyne, the PGOAT (prettiest girl of all time) and wonder whether this was a tell – a crack in the Golden Bowl, a mark of an essential falseness. Rather like Vonnegut’s catch phrases.

However, I know that this is all about betraying DFW, and the reason that I want to betray him isn’t entirely clear to me. The truths of disaffection obscure the truths of infatuation – that is how betrayal is.

Who knows, though. Maybe I should go back and read The Sirens of Titan.

a slogan for the new revolution

One of the most durable of the Western – or perhaps I should say Axial – metaphors associates waking with enlightenment, with spiritual vision, and sleeping with everydayness, with existential blindness – sleeping through life.

Like  many of these Axial metaphors, in the capitalist world, there is a certain literalism that takes over and, while destroying the material basis for these metaphors, continues to use them as though our value system were unchanged. In this, it is like what has happened to youth. There are complicated demographic reasons that the material basis of youth (what it connoted, socially) started changing in the seventeenth century. Partly this was due to the end of the family house – in much of Western Europe, sons ceased to live in the family house when they got married, but started their own, a business that required capital that was usually unavailable  to an eighteen or twenty year old, thus opening up a period of suspense, of being neither in nor out of the family, and creating the protoform of youth. But this transformation still did not change so much the Axial value set on youth, always in reference to Age. It signified the time of rebirth, of freshness, of adventure. Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did youth become a mandate – an actual goal in life. Since life is biologically about aging, the imperative of youth – which has resulted in advice about “staying young” given to codgers who are fingering the shroud, so to speak, or posted up on corkboard in old folks homes – destroyed the culture of age, with its ideal of wisdom. The realisation of that ideal was, of course, rare – you are old, Father William – but it has now been put on the kind of reservation the west always uses to manage  aborigines.

Sleeping, too, has been swept into the anti-biological regime of late capitalism. A metaphor for the enemy of enlightenment, it is now targeted for liquidation by the plutocracy and, in an ironic twist, its absense causes enlightenment to become an impossible dream, a relic. To sleep is to escape from the 24/7 world, to refuse – by the most basic of refusals that the consciousness can make – the function of producer and consumer. Jonathan Crary, in 24/7, recounts a research project being funded by the military that is seeking to unlock the biochemical secrets of the white crowned sparrow, which doesn’t sleep during its fall migration. “The aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently. The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier, and the white-corwned sparrow study project is only one small part of a braoder military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.”

The old revivalist and revolutionary cry – wake up people! – is now in the hands of the worst. Strike a blow against the Empire, and oversleep tomorrow.

what the newsman gives us

“The least sophisticated reader, whenever he takes an old book in his hands, knows in advance that he is entering a world where even the most familiar words will not mean quite what they do today. This is the unsophisticated

reader’s historical intuition.” – Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose

The least sophisticated reader has all the advantages against today’s sophisticated news reporter. The news can be described as that discourse that does its best to eliminate the reader’s historical intuition. Some news items really make this clear. Take, for example, this platitudinizing item in the New Yorker today, which begins on a note of unconscious propaganda that it sustains to the last sentence: “On Saturday, Mexican authorities arrested Joaquín (El Chapo)Guzmán Loera, who was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, acriminal organization responsible for violence and drug trafficking."  This seemingly bland announcement ends by associating El Chapo’s “organization” – of which he is supposedly the leader – with violence and drug trafficking – thus distinguishing him from the unnamed Mexican authorities. This is very sweet. Another way of this release could be written is: Mexican authorities, who have been complicit in the violence and drug trafficking associated with so called cartels, arrested the man who they helped escape from prison the last time they arrested him.” In fact, a glance at Anabel Hernandez’s Narcoland, which has an exhaustive chapter about Guzman, his previous arrest, his first confession (which named the people in power he was paying off), and the threat he received from “Mexican authorities” to change it (which he did), and what it means to be a “leader” of a cartel, would actually help the unsophisticated reader to know what is going on – what these words like “criminal” and “violence” really mean.

But that of course is not the point of this little news item.  Its point is to operate as both an establishment mouthpiece, destroying any alternative reading of this event, and to keep the system of selling drugs, putting dirty money into the system (that money, after all, has been truly vital to parts of the American economy – what would Miami be without it?) and police and military arrests going. It benefits everyone except that majority of people.

“Arresting Guzmán was an inarguably worthwhile goal, but there is concern about how much his absence will affect the organization’s operation. “There are a couple of senior guys in the Sinaloa cartel—one called El Mayo and another one called El Azul—who are still functioning,” Finnegan says.”

Yes, one wouldn’t want to call the goal into question. One wouldn’t even want to think that an argument could be made that the goal, that all the goals in this context, are dirty and worthless, from the, well, human point of view. What we need is the elite point of view here, the only point of view that counts, that has “worth” – and from this point of view, guys “function”. We get a nice, faux insider sense from knowing these guys are called El Mayo and El Azul. And faux insiderdom is what the newsman can give us, in exchange for destroying our historic intuition.

It is, inarguably, a shitty exchange. 

the moraliste and the ethicist

Here’s a couple of sentences from Cioran’s Thinking against Oneself: “Assaulted by the malediction attached to actions, the violent man only forces his nature, only goes beyond himself, in order to return furious, as an aggressor, trailed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for his having instigated  them. No work fails to turn against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.”

This is the voice of a moraliste. A moraliste is an expert in generalizations that are rooted in his exacerbated sense of the world as a place where he tests himself, and fails – taking each failure as a mark left by the world on his hide, and worth studying for that reason. The ethicist, on the other hand, is an expert in generalizations that are, ideally, not suppose to make contact with his personality at all. From the ethicist’s point of view, the moraliste is carelessly and unforgiveably unconcerned with the truth of his generalizations, and is thus an untrustworthy and perverse guide to conduct. For the moraliste, the ethicist derives truths from cases that are so thin and so abstract, so lacking human meat and gusto, as to be caricatures. There is no investigative surprise in such work: it has the quality of fables composed by a bureaucracy.

The moraliste’s problem with the truth is that a too close adherence to it – which presumes success in its pursuit and capture – creates mere sententiousness; while a too intense sensitivity to the failure to discover the truth leads to unending paradox. Both sentiousness and a too facile way with paradox lead to tedium – primarily, in the life of the moraliste himself. Cioran, who began his literary career as a partisan of fascism and an admirer of Hitler and apparently changed his mind in 1940, when he managed to migrate from Romania to France, was the violent man whose work turned against him. And in the work he did after that repentence, the work for which he is known, the work in French, the tension is always between the feeling that fascism gave him – which he identified with youth and energy – and the feeling that the repentence gave him – which he identified with old age and nihilism. Thus, his life and work was an endless political cold turkey. The leveling impulse, as he saw it, of the ethicist who dismisses exhilaration and elevates the rules, enraged him, for that way lead to the crippling of high spirits and the impulses, generous or horrible, of life; and at the same time he had visible proof that the only social order he could really live in either had to cage hatred, violence, bigotry, and hysteria or collapse.    

Barthes and the paragraph

To read Barthes properly, one must be equipped with a pen and a piece of paper, a notebook, have them at hand, cite and dissect. There’s a reason for this besides the difficult theoretical terms and arguments in the text – that reason being that the texts tend to be disconnected in subtle ways, and one needs to have some record to chart the gaps. We know that his method of composition was to write on index cards and arrange them – which he did not only in his study of Michelet, but, according to his colleagues, also in his other work, throughout his life. Thus, Barthes’ text offer not the forward flow of a text that moves over a notebook, or over the loose pages of a typewriter, but instead in short bursts. Barthes once wrote an essay entitle Flaubert and the phrase. It seems natural to associate Flaubert with phrases, since he made so much of them. A similar essay could be written about Barthes and the paragraph.
The paragraph is eminently prosaic. Poetry – save for prose poems – does not settle into a paragraph. The poem must ultimately remain in touch with the vatic, the riddle, the omen – and the paragraph is antithetic to these presumptions and devices.
And yet – it isn’t precisely correct to speak of the product of these cards as paragraphs. Barthes entitle his perhaps most popular work Fragments of a lover’s discourse, and surely there is something to that ‘fragments’. The fragment is closer to the poetic line, it possesses a certain rawness that is groomed out of the properly constructed paragraph. The fragment extrudes its unity, which becomes the number that marks it from the outside – think of Wittgenstein – or the date, or some other indexical sign. It is as if here the paragraph is either too exhausted or too indignant to do its job – to pull itself together and express its topic organically. The topic thus becomes a sort of title or caption outside of it, names the fragment rather than being the interior connector that keeps it together.

walking, magic, moral failure

Magical realism is, as a term, a real drag. That is, in as much as it is applied to a certain kind of Latin American literature. However, the implied integration of the fantastic into the ordinary does work when you are describing your baby learning how to walk. Because this happens in plain old secular time in which you bump into things, you need a shave, the third drink makes you drunk, and dreamtime, in which you are being chased by robbers again, there is a flood coming, it turns out your dead relatives aren’t dead, etc. Such are the lacunae in the chronicle that I don’t remember when Adam developed his crawl, which was not your traditional four on the floor ambulation, with both legs providing the body motion, but the three wheeler model, viz, tucking one leg up and extending the other leg behind him. It was surprisingly speedy, due to his ability to pivot with that tucked up leg. We worried, though. Was there some reason he seemed to be nursing that front leg? Somehow, though, I recognized this crawl. That’s because it resembles something I do when I am in the position (which I very rarely am) of having to crawl across a roof four stories over the ground. I once spent a summer working at an apartment complex, and occassionally I was ordered to clean out the gutters, so I would mount up to the roof on a long ladder and making it down the peak to the side, where of course the abyss called to me. Or hissed. In any case, I would not walk to the edge in a crouch, as a man does, but would crouch crawl there, and tucking one leg up under my chest, I’d lean out tentatively with my little spade and dig into the leafs and sticks and crap clogging the gutters, tossing it down to the ground. After a while, of course, the ground didn’t seem that far down, but I still kept my tripod-al attitude. And here is Adam, whose instinct is to take the same stance. A meaningless coincidence, but parenthood is all about the semiotics of meaningless coincidences.

Anyway, for a while, now, he has been rising up to clutch at the wall, or the chair, or the table, or the sofa, unsteadily tottering there; and every day he had been doing more and more moving on his pins this way. Two weeks ago, he even launched out and made a few brave steps, a balletic leap that always ended in him either falling back to the floor or sliding back to it. We said, he’s going to walk any day now.

We thought we were expecting this.

But this Monday, we come back from an expedition and there is our sitter, and she says we’ve been walking! And there is Adam. He no longer walks like the newborn foal, but like the gazelle! Or if not the gazelle, not in fact at all like the gazelle, then like Charlie Chaplin, wobbling a bit but able to cross the entire room. If Adam had sprouted wings and was flying around the room, it wouldn’t have astonished me more. It was a moment of gestalt – the whole thing of walking like that, I just hadn’t quite thought it through.

I’m sure I will forget this eventually. I once thought that having a baby would teach me to see the baby in adults – I’d look at the balding, badly shaven man with the gut and I’d see the bald headed toddler he was, somehow. I’d have this magic insight. In fact, however, I only see the badly shaven man with the gut. It is a great disappointment – I was sure that I would become morally exalted and exude compassion like a super-Buddha. And I am sure that Adam’s walk, in two or three months, will just seem normal to me. The experience will melt in my hand.

So I will put this down instead, and hope that it does not become a dead letter to my imagination.   

paperwork

When, in the 1950s, the American military surveyed the incidence of plane accidents and accidents involving all the surrounding equipment necessary to get a bomber or a missile in the air, they came to an alarming conclusion: over ten years time, the chance of some accident setting off a hydrogen bomb was one in five. These are terrible odds. As with all military problems, this one was turned over to various war intellectuals at Rand. One of them, Fred Iklé, completed a secret report that zeroed in on the real problem here: once the accident happened, people might get mad at the Pentagon. In order to ward off the terrible notion that the Public would lose faith in the generals, Iklé spelled out several responses. The responses simply gave voice to what any old-timer could have told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it was put into print by Iklé. The first and most important thing was to appoint a board of inquiry – not in order to get to the heart of what happened, of course. That way lies suicide! No, what was great about boards of inquiry was they filled the all important function of “temporizing”. After all, wiping out thousands of people arouses unsightly passion, which needs to be channeled and mitigated – and what better way to do it than to fasten upon the incident and draw out the investigation of it until the headlines had moved on.

I found Iklé’s memo in Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, which is a history of nuclear near misses. But it made me think of another book, a wonderful book, about paperwork: Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and failures of paperwork. This book I’ve been urging upon my friends, partly because it gives us a novel perspective on power, and partly because it is wonderfully written, with an exact balance of microhistories and big names –  for instance, the story of a bureaucrat in the…, L, who, legend has it, made spitballs out of the orders passed down to his department to arrest and execute various people during the Terror, precedes Kafka’s presentation of  Tocqueville, whose  sense of the real accomplishment of the French Revolution was that it introduce a new administrative mechanism into the art of government, viz., bureaucracy, and in so doing changed everything. Tocqueville, by the way, deplores the lack of paperwork in America in his Big D. in America (as I sorta freely translate it), a theme that I never noticed before reading The Demon of Writing.

Kafka does not set out to praise paperwork – but, in spite of his title, he does seek to understand it, rather than simply demonizing it. Myself, I find many of his microhistories leading us back to Iklé’s rule: temporize. This, I think, is one of the a very important functions fullfilled by paperwork. Yet whether this is an accident of other functions, or a real function, is a question that traverses Kafka’s book, which is informed with a psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious. Some will groan, of course, at the idea of anything being informed by a psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious, since the times are against the psychoanalytic. Myself, I am convinced that, on the contrary, the relapse into analysing all human events solely in terms of consciousness is naïve and fundamentally wrong, a sign of these woeful times. But to get back to what I was saying before I became enamored with saying something else… I am a little bemused by the lack of analysis of this temporizing function. For surely here we are approaching neurosis not just as a condition, but as an instrument. The neurosis afflicting power becomes, through the daily exercise of power, a means of afflicting the powerless.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. Kafka’s insight into what he argues is the beginning of a qualitative change in paperwork – which he locates in the French Revolution, lining up with Tocqueville to this extent – is that paperwork arises out of a liberatory impulse. The revolutionaries sought a form of government in which the governors could be held responsible for what they did. In order to achieve this goal, what they do must be transparent. That transparency is the meeting notes, memo, slip, report, form. There’s a scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of La Carré’s Smiley novels, where a spy discovers that a crucial record of phone calls on a certain night has been excised from the book in which all phone calls are noted at HQ, an absence – a purloined letter – that operates as the key clue in the development of the plot.  Transparency and responsibility are ruined when the records are messed with or missing.

What happens, however, when an administration pursues the goal of transparency is that records generate records, memos memos. This unintended consequence soon becomes an exploitable resource – it provides both an excuse for the bureaucrat and a means of temporizing that robs the client of his or her time. Indeed, the time is felt as something stolen. At the same time, the client can do nothing about the robbery – the client is robbed for his or her own sake.

In other words, the bureaucratic text, paperwork, presents itself as a text wholly without pleasure, the negation of Barthes’ pleasure of the text.

However, we should be suspicious of an activity that reproduces itself through the absense of pleasure. We should wonder if, indeed, pleasure has simply gone into hiding, or metamorphosed itself, as in one of those legends of gods coming to earth in the guise of mortals.   Kafka has an eye on the rage, the blind anger, that can be provoked in the citizen who waits for the paperwork to be done, who begs for the proper forms, who is always being scolded for failing to assemble them properly. But as to the correlate of that rage, the circumlocutory pleasure of the bureaucrat – that is a story still to be told.