The query letter gag: an American tale

 

The “sell your novel tool-kit.” The “How to write Irresistable Query Letters”. The “50 Successful Query Letters”.

The flourishing subgenre of advice books for writers is flourishing. It is flourishing way out of sight of literary scholars, even those, like Mark McGurl, who have noticed that this is the Amazon era in his book, Everything and Less.

I have a difficult relationship, an impassioned relationship, a nightmare relationship with the query letter. I feel about it much as Romeo and Juliet felt about arranged marriages – I want to eliminate the middle man, the annoying and deadly dud and dummy that gets in the way between my hot little texts and the functionaries of magazines, newspapers and publishing houses.

At the moment, I am arranging six of my real unreal stories in a book form, and pondering sending them out to some small press. It is migraine work – and like a migraine, it is an obsessive pain.

As a therapy, I have thought about the query letter as a historic artifact. One that somehow emerged, in early capitalism, from the wreck of the patronage system. At one time, among the Atlantic hopping bourgeoisie, there was such a thing as a letter of introduction. The spritely Yankee, released into the Old World, would be supplied with them. The young English earl’s son would have them in his trunk as he crossed the Channel and hazarded the Continent.

This is the distant genealogy, no doubt, of the query letter. Myself, I would begin such a genealogy in America with the year 1920 and the founding of the magazine, Successful Writing, in the most ur-Midwestern of towns, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1921, it changed to “Writer’s Digest”. The 1920s were in many ways a jump-scare decade – the jump was into a mass consumer society unleashed by the great credit pools that underlay WWI. The radical expansion of media – with movies and radio in the mix – presented a great opportunity for the writer, with whole staffs being stocked with them in Hollywood and Madison Ave.

Zachary Petit, who works at Writer’s Digest, began publishing bits of articles from its archives, beginning here: https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/vintage-quotes-from-f-scott-fitzgerald. Unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the model of “successful writing” in the early twenties. He was a symbol of the mobility and ‘can-do’ that aligned the writer with the inventor and the entrepreneur. Fitzgerald utilized the  binary that was in place from the beginning – advice/rejection. The potential writer was always seeking advice (which is the kind of thing sought by readers of the love lorn columns as well: advice was an ambiguous economic editing, being a thing that was “given” even as its utility was measured by the market, which was dominated by sales), and due to his celebrity – here’s a man whose stories in Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair were going straight into Hollywood production! – he was pursued by queries for advice.

“A letter from Robert L. Terry, of Revere, Massachusetts, was received by F. Scott Fitgerald, author of the Saturday Evening Post story which is to be done in pictures as “The Chorus Girl’s Romance.” Mr. Terry, a story writer, appealed to Mr. Fitgerald for assistance in the construction of a plot. Mr. Fitgerald replied: Dear Mr. Terry. Your letter was very vague as to what you wanted to know. Study Kipling and O’Henry, and work like Hell! I had 122 rejections slips before I sold a story.”

This banality of this exchange does not debar it from a much greater significance – it is like a founding document for a whole industry. For there are many Robert L. Terrys out there. We all have put down our words on paper, or on screen, and we all want advice from those who have sold their Chorus Girl’s Romance to the studio. Or advice from those who have surveyed the successful writer and have called up or emailed the mass of publishers and agents and know just what they want under the mythical transom. Putting advice giving on a paying basis is as natural, in the circumstances, as industrializing agriculture or installing networks of cut and paste machinery and calling it Artificial Intelligence.

We are all herded. And we have to “work like Hell!” for our meager pickings. Such is life among the  flubs and perpetual false starts of us functionaries in the sphere of circulation. No surplus value for you!

 

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nart, a former officer with the DST, French Counter-intelligence. Commentaire, in the past, had published articles in praise of Kojève and even articles by Kojève. Kojève, after WWII, declared himself a “Sunday philosopher”, and had proceeded to devote most of his time to reconstructing France’s economy as an subminister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this post, Kojève became one of the great behind-the-scenes architects of France’s thirty glorious years, that experiment in dirigiste capitalism under the Bretton Woods system which finally came a header in the period of rampant inflation and the Oil crisis of the seventies. Notably, he helping to lay the foundation of the Common Market.

Nart’s article was entitled, ominously, Alexandre Kojevnikov dit Kojève. Scholars of the great Cold War Communist hunts will be delighted to learn that the old rhetorical maneuver of tearing away the legal name to reveal the old, Russian name spying behind it still lives. Nart has nothing new to say about Kojève’s famous Introduction to Reading Hegel, a series of lectures that he gave between 1933-1939 which were edited and published by Raymond Queneau in 1947. Nart’s attention, instead, is all on the Kojève who was giving the Soviets microfilm and packages of documents. What was in those documents, Nart regrets, we can only guess. But they must have been of value! Nart relies for his story on other documents, files that come from now defunct Eastern European and Soviet espionage agencies. Nart has used these sources before, in the 1990s, to claim that Charles Hernu, Mitterand’s first war minister, spied for the Soviets in the fifties. Nart is of the walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be a duck school of thought. His conclusion is that the philosopher was a spy.

To the calmer mind, though, that a duck and a platypus both have a bill doesn’t make them cousin creatures. Or, less allegorically, Nart’s proof is far from convincing. As Kojève was helping build the framework for the Common Market, he would have every reason to establish a backchannel to the Soviets. Stepping back from the narrow image of Kojève Nart presents, we might consider the mores of French ministries that enacted long term policies that were often indifferent to the political figures heading the governments, a sort of background hum of the machinery keeping it all going. Constantine Melnik, a counter-intelligence expert who has worked at Rand, has already pointed out before in the matter of previous of Nart’s “revelations” – for instance, that Charles Hernu, the Minister of Defense under Mitterand, was a Soviet agent – that this reading of files from Secret Police agencies in Communist countries should not be accorded a blind trust. There is all the difference in the world between between having a backchannel relationship with the Soviets – or with the Americans - and spying. Using Nart’s method, one could as well say that Henry Kissinger, the emblematic back-channel man, was a Soviet spy.

Yet Nart’s story is not the first time Kojève’s loyalties have been suspected. This is the White Russian who proclaimed that Stalin was the philosopher-king, the end of history, in the Popular Front Paris of the 30s. He was a man who had a talent for both entrancing and mystifying, and an audience that went out and changed French intellectual culture in the 50s and 60s. He was, as it were, a back-channel philosopher.

It would be nice to have an English language biography of Kojève. I thought I’d found one when I picked up Jeff Love’s The Black Circle: a Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia University Press, 2018), but it turned out that the sub-title belonged to a book in some other parallel universe, for this book is as little like a life of Kojève as a donut is like a spare tire. Love, a professor of German and Russian literature at Clemson, is after the life of the mind, not the intrigue of the exile. Love has given us a reading of Kojève that is now fascinating, now plodding, now insightful – especially about the last sections of Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, which have mostly not been translated into English – and too often lengthy paraphrase.

An American might not be tempted to read the book at all. In France, at least, Kojève is a second level intellectual celebrity: but in the United States, it has been his fate to owe his fame, what there is of it, to the Straussians, who are ideologically his opposites. One of them, Francis Fukuyama, referenced him directly in his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This prompted the NYT reviewer of Fukuyama’s book, the historian William H. McNeill, to confess that the name was utterly unknown to him. But Americans who are concerned with the broader intellectual culture of the 20th century should really know their Kojève.

Alexandre Kojève was born in Russia, to a wealthy family of bankers and merchants. His cousin was the painter Kandinsky. When the Revolution came, much of that wealth disappeared. Kojève, who was merely a teen in 1918, got into the trouble with the Bolsheviks for operating on the black market in 1920. He was released from prison due to pull – that handy cousin of his, Kandinsky, was working with the Soviets at the time - and fled to Germany in 1921. There he studied philosophy and wrote a dissertation on the Russian philosopher and mystic, Soloviev. He met fellow exile Alexandre Koyre through a circumstance that usually would produce lifelong enmity: Kojève seduced Koyre’s sister-in-law, and Koyre went to talk him out of continuing the affair. In a story that adds lustre to the Kojève legend, Koyre was bowled over by the brilliance of the scoundrel he had made an appointment to meet. It was Koyre who helped Kojève get the gig giving lectures about Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études, then located in apparently cavernous quarters at the Sorbonne. Among Kojève’s colleagues were Marcel Mauss, the great anthropologist, and Emile Beneviste, the great linguist. Kojève was only 31 years old. But of the lectures that were given in 1933, it was Kojève’s that made him a star – although an underground star.

Hegel was not a well known figure in France at this time. Rather, he was considered to be most important for influencing the French positivist philosopher Victor Cousins. His chief works – the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic – had not even been completely translated into French. It was Kojève who brought Hegel to France. His lectures were attended by Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, and Raymond Aron, among others. Mimeographs of them were read by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. None of these people, it seems, had read Hegel in German (save perhaps Aron). Kojève claimed, later, that he did not prepare his lectures in advance, but that he would typically come in, translate a passage of Hegel, and see where the passage led him. We will come back later to the soundness or lack thereof of this method.

In 1979, Vincent Descombes, in his survey of contemporary French philosophy, wrote that Hegel became a touchstone both for the existentialist generation (who were for) and for the structuralist and post-structuralist generation (who were against). In both cases, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel and his philosophical anthropology had a long lasting and major effect. Not that Descombes is praising the man: writing during the time when France was taking a neo-liberal and anti-Marxist term, Descombes claimed that Kojève had a “terrorist conception of history”. There is some truth to this: after all, in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, it is clear that Kojève finds a bond of blood between the Hegel who heard the cannons roaring at the battle of Jena and the Napoleon who won that battle. Making serious history, in Kojève’s opinion, was a matter of bloodshed, and the philosopher king would not be afraid of spilling buckets of the stuff.

This is where the Straussians come in, for they, too, have ideas about history and its closure. Kojève translated a book of Leo Strauss’s on tyranny, and wrote an essay about it, to which Strauss replied. Strauss’s disciple, Allan Bloom, wrote the introduction to the partial English translation of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in which he claimed that Kojève’s book was one of the few great philosophy texts of the twentieth century. The Straussians substitute a knowledgeable elite for the tyrant. It is all about soft power and esoteric writing, and small seminars about the Great Books. Love’s book probably requires some knowledge of this background, if only to appreciate the novelty of his approach.

Love is concerned with three things: first, to bring out more clearly the Russian background of Kojève’s philosophy.Second, to give a closer reading of the notorious theme of the “end of history”, bringing into play the rather enigmatic sections of the Introduction devoted to the Sage and the Book; and finally, to ask about the status of finality today – or, more generally, why does our current cultural moment lack a “sense of an ending”?

Love’s knowledge of the Russian intellectual climate that impinged on Kojève in his formative years is helpful. Following in the footsteps of Boris Groys, he brings to the fore Vladimir Soloviev, the Russian mystic, who hypothesized an end of history that would be a compact of universal love among divinized humans, Godmen. But he also brings into focus another Russian thinker Nicolai Fedorov, who proposed that humanity’s purpose was, literally, resurrection, or the overcoming of death; and finally Dostoevsky, who through the Underground Man makes a strong and emblematic claim for the partial against the whole, the toothache against the Eureka moment, the man against the godman; and who displays, in the ideas and fate of Kirillov in The Possessed, the logical outcome of making the apocalypse one’s personal destiny – Kirillov has proven by argument that he,as the superior man, must commit suicide. These varieties of self-annihilation put Kojève’s own case, via Hegel, for the death of man in context.

Love wrestles with how much we should consider Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel a real commentary on Hegel and how much we should take it as Kojève projecting on Hegel his own philosophical conclusions. In the latter case, all of the Russian writers Love deals with are of paramount important. Still, it is curious that the strong 19th century tradition of Hegel commentary is left to the side. In particular, I wondered whether Kojève should not be juxtaposed with Herzen, who of all the Russian thinkers seems to be the one who learned the most from Hegel, while ultimately rejecting any schema that inserted logical necessity into history.

Reading the Introduction, one sometimes feels that Hegel is being victimized as much as he is being explained. Like John Slade, the American poet in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, whose autobiographical poem is absorbed in his commentor’s own autobiographic obsessions, Hegel is read in a way that wrenches out of certain of his 1806 concepts – for instance, the concept of Science, or Wissenschaft – products of Kojève’s own 1936 theories – most importantly, in the emblematic figure of the Sage, the self-annihilating last man, and the Book, the zombie-like totality that comes after man. Love’s comparison of Kojève and Heidegger is a good one: both were creators of a new genre of reading, founded on the notion of a sort of readerly violence. The text, here, is much like a musical score, which a musician of genius makes her own by a subtle and systematic recasting of its cues, its tone, its emphases, its essential rhythm. Kojève set the example for the reading practices of Deleuze and Derrida – in fact, Derrida’s famous defense of this kind of reading in his essay on Nietzsche, where Derrida asks about the force and origin of a certain decorum in interpretation that distributes certain texts for interpretation under certain genres, is very pertinent to, even inspired by, the way Kojève, before an audience that was generally ignorant of the Phenomenology, would shore up his interpretations by, as it were, scanning Hegel’s corpus for favoring pointers.

And yet, it is fair to note that Hegel, like Kojève, was notoriously quick with the ‘off’ button – as for instance Hegel’s idea, expressed in his lectures on Aesthetics, that art was now “over”. That whole areas of intellectual practice can be pronounced “over” creates a certain competition among mandarins that we have witnessed in our own day, where the ‘off’ button is insistently clicked on everything from history to sit-coms. That the off button doesn’t, in the end, turn these things off, leads of course to another channel changer, where everything is “post”. It is an oddly provincial way of doing history, perhaps more forgivable in a figure who actually witnessed the collapse of a whole social order than in thinkers who are witnessing the radical expansion of our intellectual horizons as Eurocentrism loses its grip. Love’s most interesting chapters, to me, were about Kojève’s less studied latter lectures, in which the figure of the Sage and the Book figure the end of “man”. I’d recommend Love’s chapter 6, “the book of the dead”, and chapter 9, which takes up the decline in the prestige of teleological explanations, in particular.

Kojève’s notion that the Book would replace man seems, perhaps, less curious now, when we discuss the same event in terms of the book’s successor, Artificial Intelligence. However, Kojève’s claim that meaning requires finality is a more puzzling feature of his work than, I think, Love makes out. Kojève was well acquainted with the physics and mathematics of his time. He surely knew of, at least, Gödel’s work. The incompleteness theorem was published in 1931, two years before the start of the lectures. Surely in Love’s discussion of the decline of a “sense of ending” in contemporary thought, the incompleteness theory deserves a place, since it seems to aim at the heart of making a Book into a set in which it is itself a member. It would seem, via Gödel, that Kojève’s entire project was doomed to failure. We know how Wittgenstein resisted Gödel, even as, posthumously, Wittgenstein’s writings have been drawn into the circle of pragmatism that accepts incompleteness as the (non)final word. It is perhaps one of the costs of Love’s concentration on the eschatological project and its Russian roots casts some light on the self-annihilation of man, but it casts into the shade a very important part of Kojève’s thought as it explored the intersection of philosophy and science, a field that was dominated by his colleague Koyre.

Love starts his book with an observation that seems at least arguable:

“Kojève’s insistence on finality and repetition is untimely. It reveals the way in which Kojève’s thought is deeply hostile to the governing dogma of our time, a dogma anticipated trenchantly by Dostoevsky’s underground man: that freedom is continuous striving without limits; that, in a pregnant phrase, error is freedom. The praise of error or errancy is everywhere in evidence; it is virtually the rallying cry of modern emancipatory French philosophy, with several notable exceptions, largely from the Marxist camp. The truth as truth has become tyrannical, terrifying. One seeks “infinite play,” polysemy, différance, the free creation of concepts, or various kinds of transgression that satisfy our demand for freedom from hegemonic narratives. Finality is to be rejected in favor of lasting openness, nonfinality, a horizon of possibility that beckons, seduces us to what might be rather than what must be.”

I see a different ideological dominant than Love does: a period in which the neo-liberal dictum, “there is no alternative”, continues to restrain our politics and our imagination. It has been a long time since the graffiti that lit up the walls of the 1968 Paris revolt had a hold on the public imagination – or the philosophical one. The end of hegemonic narratives, proclaimed in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, responded to the end of one hegemonic narrative: the orthodox Marxist version of history. One could argue that what Kojève called “history” was identical with the long Cold War that pitted the left against the right in Europe, beginning in the French Revolution, and that reached a certain point of exhaustion in the 80s. However, the ordinary economic realities on the ground, the structures of exploitation and profit, are still basically of the same form. Until capitalism goes, the fortune of the sides in the battle of Jena is still uncertain.

The Great American Novel - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

1.

The black out man, the white out man

All the muses of the Company

Busy

 

Forgetting the nation’s memory

In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:

who was who and who was where

When the torturer took the stair

To the top of the tower with the cash in his

Pocket

 

And assassinated the president

(name redacted) of the country

(name blacked out).

This, too, is happening .

Oh oblivion my darling

Principle Researcher: (name blacked out)

“he also prepared a paper on the magician’s art

and the covert communication of information (mind-reading).”

 

2.

When your electronic veils all come undone

and nobody’s left for your kinda fun

take a (redacted) pill in the noonday sun

your mind to stun.

 

3.

“I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a defiance only”

He sez, speaking for me, me, me

Though I look like a million bucks today

And have the coat to prove it.

I put my calmness in a cute little Benz and drove it over

The bones over the bones of the road

Built on an old Indian hunting trail:

As per Uncle Dunny’s table conversation.

 

“The liquor laden car he was driving

Plunged from the road” - and into the gnatter

of insect splatter

on the windshield of our family memory.

4.

I was born too late to be a poet who writes “all”

And means it through sermon and circumstance

Until I’m mummified among grasshopper and vine

 

- My all’s a smaller thing, all mine

and has its America, its hurricane glass

Its anecdotes of life in 1999.

It thinks that driving across the country will be

An exercise in all-creating liberty

 

signed and sealed by polaroid

like Ed Ruschka’s or Warhol’s

of the whiteline insignificant that haunts

every all with its tics and taunts.

 

My all is out of whack today

My all has drizzled quite away

My all is in drops and droops its head

My all is the lights out of the dead.

On Kissing

 

Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, 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.

“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 pretence of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. … 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 am not sure I find the “desperate groping” and the “clawing fingers” of the beringed femmes fatales as joyless as does Harris. Desperation and joy are not enemies. But I like it that Harris throws himself into a matter that has long fascinated anthropologists: the culture and cult of the kiss.

An Italian semiotician, Marcel Danesi, in his History of the Kiss! (the exclamation mark strangely kissing the sober title, in effect raking its back with clawing fingers), makes the immodest claim that kissing today is an artifact of the literature of the middle ages. Or, perhaps, the literature of the middle ages, like a seismograph, recorded the surge of kissing as the patriarchal household, where women were the chattel that sealed alliances, started to collapse. Along the way he gives us such fascinating facts as this: that there is a science of kissing and it is called philematology. This is crossword puzzle knowledge gold. Plus, now, when I am asked what I do for a living, I will reply, serenely, philematologist, and give the questioner a daredevil look while I glide away like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth.

In actuality, to return to the subject of desperate kisses, the Legion of Decency permitted only three seconds. I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” Was Hitchcock breaking the rule? 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, with the camera lingering on Rita’s lovely unkissed lips.

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 pretence 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.”

Harris has, I think, definitely read his Robert Coover.

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! 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.

However, Harris’s promising start on the kiss as spectacle devolves into a romantic view of realism that seems to me to have 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.”

They seem to have been drifting apart since Moses was a pup. 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” curiously trashes the idea of the imagination. The aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – 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. At a same time, a response to this notion of authenticity formed, under the slogan: eat the document. Thus mixing our sensual and ideological categories.

But let us not kiss off the kiss like this. Danesi quotes the evidence that is often used to claim that there is something unique about the Western cult of the kiss. For instance: Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for ‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff ’ and ‘smell,’ and also has connotations of touch.” I find the deduction from the lack of a word a little suspicious, since a “word” is not the only designator of a “thing”. A phrase can obviously have the same weight as a word. In the Kama Sutra, there is a chapter on kissing that is much more extensive than any comparable text in the West.

“The text goes on to describe four methods of kissing—moderate, contracted,

pressed, and soft—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin: nominal kiss (the girl touches lips with her lover but does not herself do anything), throbbing kiss (the girl, setting aside her bashfulness a little, responds with her lower but

not upper lip), touching kiss (the girl touches her lover’s lips with her tongue, closes her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands).”

This is not the letter of the Code, but it is the spirit – directives that choreograph kissing.

Danensi quotes enough evidence from the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans to cast doubt on his thesis. But I find the thesis interesting anyway:

“Because the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal order in medieval Europe, it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced through narratives, poetry, and visual art.”

Although this might be overstating the case, the idea that our set of romantic behaviors is transmitted through narratives, poetry and visual art has a lot of appeal for me, getting us outside the notion that “experience” and these aesthetic forms can be usefully reified as antitheses.

This is, I think, where the moment of realism comes in. Contra Harris, the ideology of realism is always 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.

Still, outside of this detour through my pet peeves (and the image of art and experience as kissers caught in the moment of separation, lips coming off of lips), I have to give kudos to Harris for seeing that the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema could accidentally give rise to 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 I leave to all of you philematologists out there.

 

The high modernist zen masters

 

There’s an anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:

“… one day he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ca. II commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ilss la portaient alternativement.' 'Alternativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since there are three bearers.”

 

Oh that High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent. What Joyce does to Flaubert here is what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.

Masters. Zen masters, really. Who could hear the sound of one hand, clapping.

The implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. A word Robert Musil liked too. Soul and precision. It is like a sailing ship, where every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist the elements.

Yet put this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?

Of course, Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing. Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and chapters, among the parts, and denotation, sound, connotation and history, among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter in alternativement. It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too. But for the novel to work, one hand must clap, I think. Impossible to the secular ear, but not to the ear inside the ear.

Still: the ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. But that resistance must not be so great that it doesn’t move. Joyce might correct Flaubert’s French, but recognizes that these corrections grow out of the spirit of Flaubert’s scruples.

But I don’t want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:

“Le vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo

A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form. This ship Argo is highly useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-

tion (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”

Argo is, ultimately, a variable.

I think Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would have quite agreed with it. Make Argo too much of a variable and you will forget what you are doing with it: going to find the very specific Golden Fleece.

And yet, couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to Barthes conclusion? There, in a dream language precision driven crazy by the latin roots of alternitivement, movement is always back to where movement started.

 

Untitled - Karen Chamisso

 

In the deadpan of poetry

Like any other mutant in the American grain

“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”

But let it all sink to the bottom.

Bottom’s up! Such is the burden of the song.

And sometimes this can go on all night long

 

When the pills don’t kick in and the street noise interferes

With the dreams that are buzzing around my ears.  

Horror: genre and politics

 

 

“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal, bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs.

The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died, although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet – see, for example, the Maitron site (https://maitron.fr/). Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained – turn to horror for our sublime.

This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously, banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in the grotesque and the horrid.

A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked, so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”, which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity. It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime.