a metaphor from Shklovsky

 

In the book of interviews that Serena Vitale  conducted with Viktor Shklovksy, he says a wonderful thing about poetry, quoting Mandelstam: “…poetry is the “deep joy of recognition.” That’s it. The poet searches, gropes in the dark, and my dear contemporaries, so prolific in words, the structuralists, who filled the world with terminology . . . You see, they don’t know this thing, this affliction of the presentiment of art and the joy of recognition. Only the great poets do. They know they’re going to write. They don’t know what will come out, whether it will be a boy or a girl, they only know that it will be poetry. Only the poet knows this tortuous search for the word, the physical joy of “recognition,” and sometimes, also the anguish of defeat. Again, take Mandelstam: “I have forgotten the word I wanted to say. A blind swallow returns to the palace of shadows . . .” I knew Mandelstam, I remember him rushing down the stairs of the House of Arts declaiming these verses. You see, a poem is born from struggle. A rhythm, a word, like an echo, then a word with a different meaning, in the dark you only see individual, separate things, but then, little by little, your eyes adjust to the change in the light, they can see, and it’s poetry.”
 
I like the registers of this remark, from birth to physical joy. It has a long history, this male mimicry of birth – art’s competition with the mother. A competition that is won each time by the mother, of course – try as the poet may, the words that come out are of a different substance and nature to the naked human being. The words are promised the chance at “immortality” – to be passed on for an insignificant geological time in books or by word of mouth. The child, meanwhile, is at the center of a crisis of recognition  – hence the supplement of the name. Poetry is never changed in the cradle with the child, and out of the breakdown of that metaphor – which re-presents itself, neurotically – we find other metaphors, murkier ones – for instance of poetry as a struggle for recognition  in the Manichean dark. A dark that, one finds, is actually simply a change of light, not its annulation. Who struggles, here?
 
 
Later in the interview, Shklovsky says: You should be afraid of the books you agree with, not the ones you disagree with.
 
I figure it is the same thing with metaphors.

two cheers for the inventor of the underground: Constance Garnett!

 

Monroe Beardsley wrote a long and rather brilliant essay about the Underground metaphor in Dostoevsky in which he acknowledges, as an aside, that Doestoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was actually named something like Notes from under the Floorboards, or from a Mousehole.

I bow down to Dostoevsky, but sometimes a translator should be her due. It was Constant Garnett who “mistranslated” that title. I believe Nabokov somewhere takes a shot at Garnett. Frankly, Garnett’s title is an improvement. Dostoevsky’s reputation worldwide depends, in part, on the fact that the “Underground” is a much more powerful image than “the Mousehole.” True, one of Kafka’s great short stories is called “The Burrow”, but it is not one of Kafka’s most known short stories, I think.

How did Constance Garnett bring the Underground to Dostoevsky – a pairing that seems absolutely appropriate?

I imagine – I have no letter or diary entry about this – but I imagine this is a case of cross-pollination. Constance Garnett learned Russian under the tutelage of a man named Sergei Stepniak, who had escaped from Russia and written a memoir, of sorts, about his career as a nihilist and agitator: Underground Russia. This was translated from Italian into English in 1882. It was not until 1893, however, that the Garnetts, who had all become Stepniak’s supporters, learned the real reason he fled Russia. In December, 1893, the New Review published an article from on Ivanoff, a pseudonym, detailing the moment that Stepniak – then under his own name, S. M. Kravchinskii – cut the cord, so to speak.  To quote Thomas Moser on the Stepniak affair from his article of 1992:

“On August 4, 1878, this man [Stepniak] acquired a kitchen knife.. At 9 a.m., “sneaking on tiptoe”, he plunged the knife into [General Mezentsev, the Russian police chief’s] abdomen, turned it round in the wound, jumped into the victoria (carriage) and rode out of St. Petersburg.”

The Garnett’s faced up to the knowledge that their friend was not just a revolutionary in theory, but a man who turned a knife in the abdomen of another man in fact, with a rather admirable tolerance. The General was no innocent. The deed had been committed in retaliation for the torture and capital punishment being meted out by the Czarist regime to revolutionaries. Death for death – as the pamphlet penned latter by Stepniak was entitled.

David Garnett, Constance Garnett’s son, wrote: "I had been brought up to accept acts of political murder and violence with sympathy bordering on admiration; I had known and respected at least two eminent assassins".  Probably Stepniak was one of them. Constance herself was a Fabian and 2^nd International socialist. She knew that the people who shunned Stepniak would shake the hands of torturers and murderers, as long as the latter were in uniform or had an aristocratic title. Although it became fashionable for a while, especially in the wake of Nabokov, to criticize Garnett for “bowdlerizing” Russian literature, the accusation is really this: she was a woman of the Edwardian era. Or, more simply: she was a woman. 

And she did things that few women do today. In 1904, she left her husband and 2 year old son in England and went to Russia, ostensibly to help with famine relief there, and - as a side project - to deliver letters from an exile Russian revolutionary community to revolutionaries inside Russia. 

But she is ever the "Victorian woman", just as Dostoevsky -  whose entire mature life coincides with the Victorian age - is always the modern novelist. This point made well by Claire Davidson-Pignon in the essay: “No Smoke without fire? Mrs Garnett and the Russian Connection.” Garnett’s politics – this was a woman who translated one of the first pamphlets about the Potemkin revolt into English, after returning from Russia in 1905 – is consistently neglected, in favor of terms like “gentility” and “Victorian.” I do wonder how many of her critics would be so “Victorian” as to mingle with an assassin who, according to the press, was a terrorist.

She was very much not a Victorian. She was very much an Edwardian, like Conrad. And as an Edwardian, she was more attracted to “Undergrounds” than mouseholes. In this, she was like H.G. Wells, who also wrote about undergrounds, and even Jules Verne. The ghost of Dostoevsky owes her.

 

 

 

Our little crew of relativists and scoundrels

 

I am among the crew of nominalists, relativists and other scoundrels, who think that universals are made, not given. This crew is often accused of being insufficiently condemnatory of the Holocaust and the Gulag – although the people who make these accusations often shuffle their feet when it comes to the genocide in the Trans-Atlantic slavery trade and the wholesale mass slaughter of indigenous people and the theft of their territory. The latter group often wants us to remember the good things about, say, Thomas Jefferson, and not the fact that he lived on a kidnapped and enslaved work force, and chose his mistress, aka raped, among that work force. The idea is you absolutely condemn Hitler and Stalin, on the one hand, and eyeroll about giving America back to the Indian nations, on the other.

Nominalists can be as excited in their denunciations of Auschwitz as anyone else. It is just that they don’t see the invocation of the absolute, here, as doing any real moral work. Not that the vocabulary of absolute denunciation is useless – it might help create a real institutional response to mass murder. So, from the point of view of universal-making, it would be a great idea for there to be some international go-to court to try all torturers, from Saddam Hussein to George Bush. But so far, in spite of the spirit of absolute moral law promoted proudly by the anti-relativist, the real law goes on rewarding the strong and punishing the weak.

In the name of what or who, that is the question.

An Italian politician and  historian, Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, delivered a remark, quoted in an essay by Sciascia, that rather sums up the Hegelian point of view: “If history is universal, referring to humanity as a total ideal, its vital center is still squeezed into a determined point: this would be, from epoch to epoch, a little territory like Mesopotamia or the Nile Delta, or a city like Athens, Jerusalem or Rome.”

We know by heart the catalogue of cities and territories, and we know that it is not going to include, say, Khanbaliq, or Tenochtitlan, or the longhouses of the Penans. Instead, the standard catalogue is of places where, gradually, the total ideal of humanity developed, although always with the codicil that the grander form was embodied in the smaller scale of a particular story, according to the teller.

Sceptics have long roamed, like dogs - -cynics by nature – outside the walls of this idea. Voltaire’s Micromegas  is a comic expression of the cynic’s doubt, while Blake’s bird with its “world of delight” which we can’t penetrate is a romantic expression of it. The Saturnian in Micromegas complains of having merely 72 senses, but converses very well with otherwise differently constructed beings, while Blake’s bird converses with other birds.   Neither the Saturnian nor the bird, however, claim to embody the universal.

In a sense, I am not opposed to universal-making. In the name of what or who would I oppose it? However, as the universal comes to earth and becomes this or that project, I find my tongue and oppose it now because of a principle of justice, now because of my own moral feelings, now as a member and on behalf of a collective, etc. Human rights, good taste – the nominalist doesn’t doubt that these things hold power, and function as rules. In practical terms, the absolute works the way any superlative works. It is just that the nominalist, Blake’s bird, and Micromegas’s Saturnian are concerned with the way absolutes tend to go wrong. When they go wrong, they are merciless.

That’s when the dogs outside the city begin to howl.  

Notes on Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Marcel Schwob, in his essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, makes a claim that may not be true, but is charmingly suggestive:

“One could characterize the difference of the old regime in literature and that of our modern times by the inverse movements of style and orthography. It seems to us that all the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century were practitioners of an admirable language, while they wrote the word each in each’s own manner, without worrying about their form. Today, now that the words are fixed and rigid, dressed up in all their correct and polite letters, immutable in their orthography, like the guests at a soiree, they have lost their individualism of color. Those people dressed themselves differently: now the words, like the people, are dressed in black. And they are not very distinguishable. But they are correctly spelled. Languages, like peoples, have been organized in refined society where we have banished all clashing colors.”

It is interesting what a difference a Channel makes. Certain British writers come through, but often in a canon which is disproportionate to the canon’s of the Island’s own canon-makers. The French preferred the clashing colors – DeQuincy to Coleridge, Ruskin to Matthew Arnold, and Stevenson to Henry James. The line that runs through French poetry and prose from Baudelaire to Schwob to Proust was influenced by a line that is considered “minor” in the Great Books tradition. Stevenson, who is as Scots as Scots (his greatest novel, in my view, is The Master of the Ballantrae, and there the Scots tongue is allowed some leaway), became a boy’s writer because he was never a writer of what he called “drama”:  “Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.” Of course, the poetry of conduct includes women – the great exclues of Stevenson’s novels. This is why, much as I like Stevenson, I feel the missing link when I read a lot of him.

Especially on vacation, one feels the truth in Stevenson’s abiding aesthetic creed, which is that stories arise from places:

“The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.”

 

Notes on Nervi 1

 

We were swimming into the sea, passing the rocks, when Luca was stung by a medusa.

I am liking it here on the Ligurian coast. We are renting a couple of rooms in the E. condominiums in Nervi, which is a small town that got conglomerated into the greater town of Genova after the war.

It is hot. It is, I read, a climate emergency in England. It is also a climate emergency in Paris. If we were there, we’d stay inside during the brunt of the day. But we haven’t rented this place in Nervi to stay inside. We mean to swim, to walk the passagiata, to go get our pesto at the pesto specialty store, to eat pizza at the pizzeria downtown. There’s a large pool at the place where we are renting. Around it, retirees organize themselves on chaises longues and absorb sunlight. So much sunlight. Some are baked so deep it is hard to look at. Other guests have kids. There’s a diving board, but not too high. I impressed Adam by doing a jack knife. Then he worked up the courage to dive, and now it is no big deal.

We started out with our pasty white skins. And now we are getting suitably browned. We liberally splatter sun block on each other. We swim, and then we liberally splatter post sun cream on each other.

I do not wear shorts as a normal thing. I’m way past forty. I have tried to play the dignified older gentleman for a while. My innate goofiness comes through, but I believe in the role. However, I did go out and buy some pastel blue shorts, and now I walk down to the beach or to the pool with those on.

Before Luca got stung, as we were swimming, he told me that he liked Nervi’s combination of resort town and popularism – a clientele that was distinctly middle or working class. He told me he loved the faded resort buildings. Behind us was one – a white structure with a patio on which tables with  blue and white striped umbrellas abounded. It reminded me of the seacoast town scenes in Fellini’s Amorcord. I think Amorcord is my favorite Fellini film. I love the collective life in it, the absurdities.

Luca remembers playing among the craggy boulders here that stick out into the sea. He was a kid. He’d jump from one to another, while his parents walked the passagiata. It looks dangerous to me, jumping around on the boulders.

Still, there are people who spread towels on the boulders, who jump from them into the sea. Umbrellas are put up. A jaunty air becomes general. In the distance, a mountainous crag runs down to the sea. It is bluish, reflecting the water.

Luxury and vulgarity, these are the two cardinal points of the beach utopia.

song for the bankrupt yachtsman - Karen Chamisso

 

Song for the Bankrupt Yachtsman

 

What did you do in the deluge, Daddy

When the floods breathed together

What did you do in the deluge, Daddy

That you alone survived.

 

After forty days, insistently salt

We huddled in the mouth of the moneyless wind

Daddy at the wheel was faceless

More than usually blind.

 

A seawrack strewn island before us

A paradise of second chances!

But why was Dad chosen and not I?

I wondered, shaking out my kicks.

A good hater: canetti on eliot

 

A good hater – this is what Hazlitt called Cobbett. It is a wonderful phrase, worthy of a Pre-socratic sage – a good hater. The good is inimical, in any real system of the good, to hate. And yet if we admit hate as a motive – and how can we not – then we are enmeshed in a logic that distinguishes between the better and the worse. God, in Revelations, spits out the lukewarm. “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Now, I am not the man to recommend Revelations. It is written in a bitter anti-Jesus spirit, and its acceptance by the Early Fathers as a canonical text was a dreadful mistake. I do admit, however, that it has its own poetry. In fact, in Western culture, it is perhaps the father of hatred literature, which tends to go grandly overboard and, if pursued with sufficient genius, rouses one up.

This is how I understand certain uncomfortable figures, like Elias Canetti.

In a great rant in Party in the Blitz, Canetti “spues out of his mouth”, for reasons similar to the Deity’s, T.S. Eliot himself. Eliot, in Canetti’s telling, is a veritable Fisher King, and his rise to fame and influence is a measure of the absolute decline of English culture.

I’m a great fan of Eliot’s poetry, and keep my distance from his criticism. But I also like to hear the other side rant. Canetti is a rare ranter:

“I was living in England as its intellect decayed. I was a

witness to the fame of a T. S . Eliot. Is it possible for people ever

to repent sufficiently of that? An American brings over a

Frenchman from Paris, someone who died young (Lafargue) ,

drools his self-loathing over him, lives quite literally a s a bank

clerk, while at the same time he criticises and diminishes

anything that was before, anything that has more stamina and

sap than himself, permits himself to receive presents from his

prodigal compatriot, who has the greatness and tenseness of a

lunatic, and comes up with the end result: an impotency which

he shares around with the whole country; he kowtows to any

order that's sufficiently venerable; tries to stifle any elan; a

libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante

(to which Circle would Dante have banished him?); thin

lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old, unworthy of Blake or of

Goethe or of anything volcanic-his own lava cooled before it

ever warmed-neither cat nor bird nor beetle, much less mole,

godly, dispatched to England (as if I had been delegated back

to Spain) , armed with critical points instead of teeth,

tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife-that was his only

excuse-tormented to such a degree that my Auto da Fe would

have shrivelled up if he had gone near it, drawing-room

manners in Bloomsbury, countenanced and invited by the precious Virginia, and escaped from all those who rightly chid

him, and finally exalted by a prize that-with the exception of

Yeats-was bestowed upon none of those who would have

deserved it-not Virginia, not Pound, not Dylan.

 

And I witnessed the fame of this miserable creature.”

Captain Ahab has nothing on Elias Canetti. But what music!

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.”

What is literature but power seeking its purest, untrammeled state? Politics is nothing to it but detail work.