Losing the plot

 

In Adam’s school, some enterprising publisher has given away a bunch of new kid’s books and the teacher has assigned the task of reviewing them to the kids. To help the kids figure out what “review” means, they have a helpful sheet that asks questions about the plot, the pictures, and even what the parents think of the book – clever, that one.

These are all fictional books. The question about the plot is: in a few sentences, describe the story  in the book – Resume l’histoire dans quelques lignes. The story – here  l’histoire – is, I take it, a proxy for plot. In the very convenient Dictionary of Untranslateables, the section on plot is under the entry “erzaehlen”.  The entry, like all of the entries, goes muchly into the etymology and philology of key words, and sorts out the diegesis from narration:

“If diegesis is the recounted world as it appears in a fiction, narration is the universe in which one recounts, that is, the set of acts and narrative procedures that give rise to and govern this fictive universe. This distinction, analytic in nature, requires that we do not confuse the different instances and levels of a narrative fiction…”

This quietly imposes a set theoretical imprint on the analysis of composition, and is handy, although, as the entry emphasizes, language dependent – and dependent on the historical epoch. The Greeks, the standard philological reference, have many words related to telling a story, but lack the set theoretical bias: “In addition, récit is one of the possible translations of a certain number of Greek words, in particular muthos [μῦθος], which, when distinguished from logos [λόγος] ( rational language ), can also be rendered in French by mythe; when distinguished from ergon [ἔϱγον] ( act ), by parole; when distinguished from diêgêsis [διήγησις] ( simple narration ), by récit dialogué; when distinguished from êthos [ἦθος] ( character ), by fable; when distinguished from historia [ἱστοϱία] ( narrativeof facts ), by fiction.”

Now that we have made things clear as mud, these are, in effect, the concepts set in motion when you ask a child – or anybody else – to give in shortened form an account of a story. Myself, I had to do this often when I wrote small reviews for Publishers Weekly (the rule was make the review between 260 and 300 words, as I remember it – with 300 being discouraged. In that space we were supposed to give an account of the muthos, the logos, the diegesis, the ethos, and tell the reader if it was thumbs up or down). I had difficulty with all those elements, partly because it is hard to cover all the twists and turns in most novels or short story collections, partly because thumbs up or down doesn’t really cut it – I could dislike a book that I thought was good, for instance.

In 1980, Penelope Fitzgerald, who knew more about writing for a living than most people, wrote an essay, “Following the plot” for the London Review of Books. It is a fascinating essay, beginning with a recit about her trip to Mexico – a trip that has puzzled her biographers (Lucy Scholes wrote a nice piece about this for Granta: https://granta.com/peripatetic-penelope-fitzgerald/). At the end of this fascinating digression (etymologically, a stepping away from the path – which is precisely not “following”), Fitzgerald reflects on the reason that she did not use this material for a story: “I take it that the novel proceeds from truth and re-creates truth, but my story, even at this stage, gives me the impression of turning fiction into fiction. Is it the legacy, or the silver, or the Latin American background, testing ground of so many 20th-century writers? I know that in any case I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel. Reality has proved treacherous. ‘Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.’

Reality, here, has quietly parted company with belief, respectability and the probable. Who is the believer here who turns atheist at this potential novel?

Fitzgerald, who fell through the class system like a stone, and bounced back because she was not a stone, knew very well that what is probable for one set is improbable for another – for instance, the set that actually lives and writes in Mexico, as opposed to London. The treacherousness of reality cannot be sieved out of the novel, but it can be domesticated.

The last paragraph of Fitzgerald’s essay is, I believe, a brilliant piece of English prose that wraps up the problem of the plot in terms of family class and money – which is always what it is about.

“In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or, at least, to confine themselves to satire, fantasy and dream. Picaresque novels, however, both Old and new, are a kind of gesture towards them, acknowledging that although you can easily spend your whole life wandering about, you can’t do so in a book without recurrent coincidences and, after all, a return. And the readers of books like plots. That, too, is worth consideration.”

The placebo routine

 In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious
disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in  a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when
Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to
therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”     
The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today. Western medicine as therapy was largely either fraudulent or depended on the placebo effect. The latter is a real effect, of course.
“But the fact that there was no progress––far too little to have any systematic impact on life expectancy––and the fact that medical intervention did more harm than good, does not mean that doctors
did not cure patients. Modern studies of the placebo effect show that it is a mistake to think that there are some therapies that are effective and others which though ineffective work on those who respond
to the placebo effect. Even effective medicine works partly by mobilizing the body’s own resources, by invoking the placebo effect: one estimate is that a third of the good done by modern medicine is
attributable to the placebo effect.
When patients believe that a therapy will work, their belief is capable of rendering it surprisingly efficacious; when doctors believe a therapy will work their confidence is consistently transferred
to the patient. There are all sorts of studies that show this in practice. Thus if a new and better drug comes out, the drug it replaces begins to perform consistently less well in tests, merely
because doctors have lost confidence in it.”
Ah, transference! Surely this is a fact about human nature that goes beyond pharmacopeia.  

sacrificing the baby for the sculpture: on a modern theme

 

In his 1910 tome, The Individual and Human Existence, Josef Popper-Lynkeus asks a question:

“If for example we were in Paris in the Louvre and a great fire broke out while the gallery was full of visitors, who would we try to save? The art collection or the people, to the very last one of them? It would not occur to the firemen or the volunteer helpers to save the pictures by Raphael, Leonardo, the Venus de Milo and other such irreplaceable artworks before all the human existences were secured. And if someone tried to do otherwise, he would be greeted with universal condemnation and even punishment.”

Josef Popper’s way of stating the problem of the value of art in terms of the value of people is part of a tradition in modernism, bringing together the “irreplaceable” art work and the irreplaceable human individual. This tradition exists in some uneasy relationship with the justification of war, or the sacrifice of irreplaceable human existences to the protection of the state – or the ideals of the state, such as freedom.

Popper, unlike his nephew, Karl Popper, is not a much quoted man anymore. He was an engineer and an inventor as much as a philosopher and ideologue, and his book has a certain engineer’s way of looking at problems in terms of affordances – how to design a gimmick to achieve a certain objective or function within an overarching structure or machine. And for an engineer, Popper’s thesis produces an interesting social design. Not art, not anything is equal to the value of an individual human life. If that part is the most intrinsically important thing in the social machine, how should the machine be designed to make sure that the part is protected?

His question, in a different form – substituting medieval Italy for the Louvre -  was answered by Harold Nicholson, who, in 1944, said he was prepared to sacrifice his own self – to be shot against a wall – to save a Giotto fresco. Perhaps the British upper class, coming from a line of very cold blooded collectors, have made the calculation. Bertrand Russell once said that if he were given the choice between saving a Ming Vase and a Chinese man (I am not sure what the ethnicity has to do with this, except I am pretty sure what the ethnicity has to do with this), he did not know what he would do.

Nicholson’s statement of the case has entered into the literature on the protection of cultural heritage, an aspect of international law that, like so much other elements in the architecture, arose from the Nuremberg Trials. Alfred Rosenberg was hung for, among other things, looting cultural treasures – “irreplaceable” objects of art. The Allied armies, as historians have noted in an aside, showed a rather spotty adherence themselves to irreplaceable cultural treasures In the casuistic literature of international law, questions are posed like: say the Chartres cathedral was occupied by a hostile force taking potshots at the American army. Would the American army be within its rights to call in a strike and obliterate the thing?  Popper would no doubt not have approved of the whole attitude of these questions, in which individual lives are divided up in value according to sides, after which you get to using your own cultural heritage, ie bombs, bombers, drones and the lot.  The notion that one would never sacrifice a human life for an art object must have seemed a bit archaic to Popper himself in the decade after he posed his question, for, as is well known, between 1914 and 1918 twenty million people were sacrificed to make sure the Austrians didn’t invade the territory of the Serbians after a crown prince was assassinated in Sarajevo.  After World War II, where the free peoples of the world and their counterparts, the nasty totalitarian communists, had agreed to raise the stakes to nuclear annihilation, it would seem that the problem of who to sacrifice at the Louvre, or on a trolley track, should take back seat to the question of why our systems were based, literally, on sacrificing everybody. The latter is a problem that is still unsorted out, hence the voices in D.C. calling for a nuclear exchange who are also bitching that gas has gone up by 50 cents a gallon. The apocalypse will be trivial.

Another way of asking the question is: if the Athenians and the Spartans had had forty thousand nuclear bombs between them, should they have let go to defend their various principles, and would we, looking back, decide nothing in human history was as important as their dispute?

But this is an unprofitable discussion, since the people who control the bombs will do what they do. Don’t we all gag at gnats and swallow camels, to quote the savior? And the value of an art piece has always posed a certain conundrum. In 1910, Popper could depend on his readers thinking that art works are invaluable, meaning unexchangeable – being unique -  in some idealistic sense. Now, our sense of the artmarket has long trumped our sense of art. If Russell was asked if he’d save 85 million dollars – the price of a Van Gogh, say – or a baby, it would make for an easier answer, philosophically, even if every bank robbery movie tells you that some people’s answer would be unphilosophical, and those people draw an audience. However, even if the price put on the art work destroys, or at least erodes, the idea of the irreplaceability of the art work, so that the higher the price, the higher the triviality – there are still those – even me I’d say – who believe in that woozy superiority and irreplaceability of the Louvre’s treasures. I leave the artmarket and its monkey shines behind,  since the one thing we know about those prices is that they are not paid by expert art lovers, but by sad sack billionaires. The Bill Gates, the Elon Musk – they have the trustworthy art judgment of your average clerk in the adult video place. Or I should say, their judgment will probably be below the clerk’s. No, the human scale that counts here is still, I’d like to say, the scale Popper started out with.

The motif of the value of the artwork versus that of the human being, though dented by the general discredit that accompanies trading the sacred aura of the artwork for a price tag, is still a topic … among those, mostly, who care about art. In my favourite of John Banville’s novels, The Book of Evidence, the narrator does kill a person for a painting. Freddie Montgomery steals the painting for a gang that has his wife more or less hostage. But the killing – of a servant girl with a hammer – is not a matter of sacrificing a person for a Vermeer.  Rather, it is the final event in a life that has spun out of control – Montgomery’s – and his crime is an ethical carelessness that extends to all parts of his life. I read that novel at a time when I was feeling that I had been living a life of extreme ethical negligence in the deepest sense, and it hit me hard. One of the paradoxes of selfishness is that it blinds the self, since the self, in us social monkeys, is rooted from the beginning in others. To disconnect is to float in another medium, one that dissolves the self in its selfishness. The bloat is fatal.

Perhaps Banville inherits his plot not from Beckett, the model he often holds up, but from Yeats, whose lifelong pondering of the sacrifice of life for the work keeps coming back again and again, especially in the late poems. Life, for Yeats, is a fire of long duration in the Louvre, threatening to destroy everything, as it destroyed Byzantium, and his solution is to harness that fire to the work – but it is a solution he could never be happy with.

 

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Musings on the bunny

First, there was the dread. An invasion loomed on the horizon. We were absolutely disarmed, and went grimly to our fate. Or at least we figured it was our turn to keep the bunny.

In Adam’s class, there is a class pet, a bunny named Bonnie. Each weekend, it is the privilege of some volunteer to keep the little cuniculus domesticus, meaning find a place for its cage, feed it, let it hop out and cause whatever unimaginable chaos in our neat little apartment.

So Friday we were given our orders and paraphernalia: a bunny carrying case, a cage, and a bag with oats or roughage of some kind, snacks – pellets – and litter. And we set course bravely for home. The bunny was upon us. It was not for us to underrate the gravity of the task which lay before us or the temerity of the ordeal, to which we hoped not be found unequal.

Basically we hoped that we would not be the parents to kill the bunny.

We are not, much to Adam’s disappointment, a pet keeping household. It is not that I have any problem with pets, as long as they are the pets of others. I, in fact, just dogsat for a diabetic dog for two weeks, giving her shots, so I like to think I have some cred in the “keeping mammals” department. But the only pet rabbits I have known were fierce, huge things in hutches that ferociously gobbled up their carrots and stared at their guards with POW glares.

So, we got Bonnie home, and put her cage down in Adam’s room. I had previously laid down paper all over the room, and once the cage was down, we unleashed the beast.

Bonnie, it turned out, was smaller than the average cat, and softer then one, and more docile than one. It was a very respectful guest, not at all the menace we had imagined. She immediately captured Adam’s heart, even as, in classic bunny fashion, she hopped around the room, leaving a trail of rabbit pellets behind her.

The weekend passed quite pleasantly. I don’t know what Bonnie wrote about it on her Instagram – doesn’t everybody have an Instagram nowadays? And surely Bonnie is a bunny influencer. But from my end, the bunny neither darted out onto the terrace and jumped to her death – our crazy fear before we picked her up – nor did she bite us or gnaw some electric cord to bits or any of that. She liked carrots – I had laid in a stock – but Adam kept me from giving her too much, invoking the holy authority of the Internet, which said that carrots had mucho sugars which could cause a little five to ten pound critter problems in the long run. The long run, I said to Adam. She’s here for a weekend, I said. As Keynes once said, in the long run we are all dead.

Adam, however, is not a child to be bullied by Keynes.

This morning, we brought her back. The kids crowded round, and we had our moment of minor celebrity. The last I saw of Bonnies carrying case, it was being taken off Adam by an adult.

techniques of the body: a kiss is not just a kiss

 In Marcel Mauss’s Techniques of the Body, he begins his discourse with a few references and a few anecdotes. This is one of the anecdotes:

 

"A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris ; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.”

 

We are familiar with the idea that tv and movie violence provokes violence in the general mob. The more subtle notion that many of our basic traits have been folded, spindled and mutilated by various dream factories – this is something more, a surplus.

 

INn Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, Daniel Harris made the surprising argument – or rather, exhibited the  surprising implication – that the Production Code, the Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded a device that pornographers now generally use, and that also may have moved from the reel to the real.

 

“During the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors' mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels, raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws, full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the winds, abandoned her shallow pretense of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. And then, after the ten fleeting seconds allotted by the Legion of Decency had passed, the inopportune entrance of another character often sent them dashing to opposite corners of the room where, their clothing rumpled, their hair a mess, their faces infused with fear and suspicion, they fiddled with tchotchkes on the mantel or stared pensively at spots in the carpet, retreating into the solipsistic isolation of their guilty consciences. The stiff choreography of this asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by indiscreet maids.”

 

I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” But there is something to Harris’s vision in the kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband, which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit longings indeed.

 

Even if I don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration of a kiss.

“Hollywood kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretense of solitude, of barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of penetration alone.”

 

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Plus, of course, for pornographers, too, the ravishing kiss was more of an interfering preface than a moment of… ravishment.  Bataille’s insight, which was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the perversions it spends its times blotting out.

 

Disappointingly, after this promising start, Harris anchors his insight in a realistic ideology that has no historical basis whatsoever:

 

“The exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking, morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional representations are drifting further apart.” In fact, of course, this account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated animal – with their “daily experiences” is entirely bogus. It was the aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – that encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused of being childish and non-productive, with being, basically, wankers. Curling up with the book and curling within the womb – same story. The confessional is a really a bow to the puritanical edict that art must teach us something, that dedication to the aesthetic in itself was frivolous, not to say vicious.  Nor is the dip into daily experience something that was encouraged by realism in the classical sense, which was, contra Harris, a matter of showing that daily experiences are always drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand. Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for existence – accumulation.

 

That ideology blights Harris’s essay, but I like to think about the way the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema accidentally gave birth to the loops of porno films, which, although seemingly all about unending coupling are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss.  Once one begins mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance, Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.

 

How this influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question that, unfortunately, Mauss did not answer. I think though that kissing was definitely impacted by the movies. In spite of the code, it was part of the general enlightenment brought to the population, in which the lineaments of gratified desire are the endpoint of the revolution.

 

Which, given these years of gloomier endpoints, is an endpoint I’m positive about.

death of a political animal

 

… il avait tué la marionette. – Paul Valery

So often in the past twenty years – the bla bla era – I imagine myself, a political animal, in the figure of a fly dying at the base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350 million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

I am not dying of pesticide intoxication, exactly, but of that subset called “news intoxication”. And as the dying fly figured out, there’s no Cold Turkey option.  

November 12, 1859: at the Cirque Napoléon - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Léotard “qui tenait le spectateur

sous l’empire d’un Plaisir

indefinissible »

 

did not die on the flying trapeze

in some circus tragedy.

He died of smallpox

 

after inventing a new thrill altogether

at the same time Baudelaire changed the weather

of the modern.

 

Baudelaire doesn’t mention him at all

-          while his “memoirs”, an illiterate scrawl

bring out a snide remark from the Goncourts.

 

“… la hardiesse des sauts périlleux

L’imprévu des case-cou”

-an alexandrine arrested in mid-motion

 

a caesura crossed, from one bar to the other.

His suit, which showed the effortless bother

of the muscular ripple of his too mortal flesh

 

was named for him. In the brief spasm

of his flip and grab, orgasm

washed across the faces of the gaslit crowd.

 

Did Emma B. in outtake carry home some sense

of the sex in this suspense

a syncopation lost?