Impersonality and identity

 

Proust’s idea for a contre-Sainte Beuve criticism was part of a larger movement, within modernism, to escape from the criticism of the portrait, or the biography, and to approach the linguistic object with a certain formalism.

Paul Valery, in 1937, wrote an essay with a very old fashioned, Saint-Beuvian title: Villon and Verlaine. But the first thing he wants to establish is his formalist cred, in rather Nietzschian terms:

« Even in the most favorable cases, it is not in being humans that gives authors their value and endurance, it is in what they have that is a little more than human [Même dans les cas les plus favorables, ce n’est pas ce en quoi les auteurs sont hommes qui leur donne valeur et durée, c’est ce en quoi ils sont un peu plus qu’hommes.] And if I say that biographical curiosity can be harmful, it is because it too often procures an occasion, pretext or means to not confront the precise and organic study of poetry.”

In my time, the whole formalist-modernist apparatus of impersonality has been overthrown by an identity ethos. One used to learn that, precisely, we approach the poem as the thing in itself, or at least the classroom thing in itself. Yet, that was always a game based on a fundamentally contradictory position, for we learned the poem as Shelley’s poem, or Eliot’s – X’s. To attach a name to a poem or novel or essay was already to organize the work, behind the classroom’s back, according to a historic fact, namely, the fact of the author. If, for instance, we attributed The Wasteland to Dostoevsky, we would, frankly, not understand it at all. Biography can be thrown out the window, but it creeps back in through the keyhole.

Hence it is that Valery honors the Contre Saint-Beuve principle in the breach. Somehow, it is necessary, to read Villon, to know something of the life of Villon. In fact, Marcel Schwob, who did a lot of research on the historical facts around Villon, was one of Valery’s friends. In fact, Schwob was an inveterate portrait maker, even though he was not centered, as Sainte Beuve was, on the, as it were, royal family of French writers, the classics – he was more interested in the crazies, the marginals – in this, taking his cues from Nerval, who, crazy himself, insisted on the Illuminés who preceded him.

Villon is a liminal case. He is a royal, in as much as French poetry can’t really be understood, historically, without him. But he was a user of argot, a thief, swindler and perhaps a murderer. And not the good kind of murderer who, under orders as a soldier, butchers for the state. Eventually, it seems, Villon was hung.

On the other hand, Villon’s biography – which Valery sees in parallel with Verlaine, a man who also knew jail and bedbugs – does point to the more than human in the human life. By a certain paradox, what the identity ethos liquidates is the particular, the all too human and the more than human in the poet.

I love this bit about Verlaine. Valery, whose master was Mallarme and certainly not Rimbaud, still pays hommage:

“Verlaine !… How many times I saw him pass by my door, furious, laughing, swearing, striking the ground with his great sickman’s cane – or that of a threatening vagabond! How could one ever imagine that this beaten tramp, sometimes so brutal looking, sordid in word, at the same time anxiety making and inspiring compassion, was however the author of poetic music of the most delicate kind, verbal melodies that are some of the most touching and novel in our language? All the possible vices respected, perhaps seeded, or developed in him that power of suave invention, that expression of sweetness, of fervour, of tender welcome that noone gave like him, for nobody else knew how to dissimulate it like him or could forge the like power of consummate artistry, breaking with all the subtleties of the most skilled poets, in works that appear easy, with a naïve tone, almost childlike.”

This is how I think of the great pop musician-songwriters: the children of Villon and Verlaine.

Blues for M. Joachim du Bellay

 

“I was born for the muse, and they made me a manager.”

I can imagine this complaint issuing from the mouth of some proto-beat in NYC in 1952, but as a matter of fact it issued from the mouth of Joachim du Bellay in a letter written from Rome in the 1550s. Du Bellay came to Rome as a secretary to his uncle, the Cardinal Jean du Bellay, who was one of those legendary Renaissance prelates, a combo of humanist, Christian and pirate. The Cardinal was one of Rabelais’s patrons. Joachim du Bellay was at the center of the literary world in France. It was a small world: he met Ronsard, his companion in the revolution in poetic language he planned to bring about, at an inn at which he stopped on the way back from Poitiers to Paris. He was, typically, on a mission for his boss.

I think it is the urbanism of du Bellay that really impresses me. In the poems collected in the Antiquites, when he was in Rome, there are flashes that are surely on the same spiritual event horizon as Baudelaire’s in Paris.

Here’s the key poem in French. I like the conversational lilt and tilt of the poem, which at the same time takes up high themes from Italian and Latin poets. It is built so well that it stands as a sort of rebuke to the buildings, the remains, the relics of that city famous for building.  It is all paradox – existential paradox.

 

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n'aperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.

Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine : et comme
Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois,
Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois,
Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme.

Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit,

Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.

 

Which I’m gonna freely translate:

 

A newcomer who looks for Rome in Rome

Will find  of Rome in Rome nothing spared:

These old arcs and mansions at which you’ve stared

And these old walls  - this is what they call Rome.

 

Behold what pride, what ruin!  In spite

Of being that which governed the world with its laws

Conquering  - but conquered itself. Because

Time, swallowing all, has, claimed its right.

 

Rome is of Rome its sole monument

Its self-conquering fallen tegument.

The Tiber fleeing to the sea, only

 

Remains of Rome. Oh universal inconstancy!

The  solid is demolished temporally

While what flows remains – remains solely.

Rafael Schermann: a life in letters

 
 
1.
Adolf Loos, Sergei Eisenstein, Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokashka, and Bela Balazs, exemplary modernists all, all consulted Rafael Schermann, the clairvoyant graphologist. He was written about by all the feuilletonists as well – Robert Scheu, Alfred Polgar, Anton Kuh (Musil’s friend).
But he has largely been erased from history. Just as, in 1940, a Polish Jew, caught on the Soviet side of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement, he was disappeared into some Soviet labor camp and no doubt starved to death, or was beaten to death, or succumbed to the many illnesses awaiting a sixty some year old man breaking rocks with a pick in subzero weather.
Recently, the German novelist Steffan Mensching published a novel about him: Schermanns Augen. I haven’t had a chance to read it; I’ve only read a few interviews with Mensching. But I became aware of it after, and not before,  I ran into Schermann’s name in an article in Figaro, circa 1948. The author  referenced Schermann in an essay on Nerval and the controversy about the manner of his death.  The author argued that Nerval’s signature contained a loop that resembled a noose – and thus proved that Nerval was destined to, and did, hang himself. This was Schermann's method, the author wrote.
A bizarre but intriguing argument. So I looked around for Schermann, and discovered that he was a trans-Atlantic figure of some celebrity in the 1920s. Newspapers from the Prester Lloyd in Budapest to the New York Times worked up copy about him. He had what it took to make a good color piece: always willing to answer questions, never claiming that he understood his own powers, and exercising those powers like clockwork once he was given a piece of handwriting – written by some celebrated author or politico or musician. Of course, Schermann would not know this in advance. That was the thrill of it.
The 20s was the decade in which “Madam Sosostris” with a “wicked pack of cards” pops up naturally enough in Eliot’s Wasteland. And this is not the only reference to the tarot in his poetry from that period. At the same time, he wrote very disparagingly about Yeats’ esoterism. For Eliot, Yeats’ occult tendency trivialized the transcendent – which eventually Eliot would identify with Christianity. Always the tradition and the institutions with Eliot, from the 30s onward.  In his essay about Yeats, “A foreign mind”, Eliot goes on about heresy and the occult rather like a character in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall:

Every reader of Gibbon is acquainted with the existence of one heretical sect, among the several which disturbed the fifth century, which the historian names the fantastic, condemned by the orthodox as well as by the Nestorians and Monophysites. This party of philosophers held that the
visible Jesus, who grew to manhood and mixed with mankind, was a phantasm;
at a certain moment the son of God assumed by the banks of Jordan
full-grown the similitude of humanity. He was not really incarnate, but
divinely deceived the world; and controversy foamed about the question
whether such a doctrine did not impeach divinity with the sin of lying.”

 
The heresy of the fantastic ran rampant in the bare ruined choirs of the 1920s. Along with drugs and sex. Blavatsky and Gurdjeff have been explored to an extent for their relation to the modern attitude – for a good time, I’d really have to recommend Madame Blavatsky's Baboon by Peter Washington, who mines the mystics for their absurdities. In fact, what was absurd to the “English” mind about the “Foreign mind” – was the call upon forces that, inserted in a tradition of faith and given a bishop’s mitre, were taken to be the kind of miracles that justified the traditional credo of “Western man”.  Dante, what. Eliot definitely had the philosophical training to counter the scientific image of the world. However one might feel about that.
So did Ouspensky.
2
 
Robert Scheu was what the Germans call a Publizist – which means journalist as well as publicist. Perhaps the contemporary American term is “influencer”. Whatever. Scheu was a member of the fin de siècle coffeehouse set in Vienna, and this is where he met Rafael Schermann. This meeting was probably a little after Scheu published his book on Karl Kraus – perhaps the first book on K.K. Scheu had written for Der Fackel – and went on to write for any paper that paid, which would normally have put him on Kraus’s enemy list. But they somehow remained friends.
Was it Scheu who introduced Schermann to Kraus?
Scheu wrote extensively about Schermann – he acted, in a way, as his impresario, arranging for his big talk in Berlin in 1916, which was scandalous enough that Schermann emerged from the provincial shell of Viennese celebrity into the full glare of a Continental wide fame. In 1916, he wrote an article for the “Pester Lloyd”, the German language Budapest paper, where he introduced Schermann like this:
“Approximately a year ago the general public became aware of Rafael Schermann. “Have you heard” – the buzz went – “that there is an employee at an insurance firm in Vienna who, out of the facial features of a person, can guess his handwriting to the point that, without having seen it, he can imitate it on paper, with all its initials, abbreviations and particularities.” In some papers they reproduced the tests of such “reconstructions” – to use the technical term – that were astounding. “
Graphology itself, at this time, was not considered a marginal science in the German language sphere. It has always had a certain non-serious, drugstore science air around it in the Anglosphere, but the Germans, from physicists to Walter Benjamin, took it seriously. What made graphology acceptable was that it had rules. In a literature that goes back to a French graphologist, Jean-Hyppolite Michon, graphologists had tried to codify handwriting patterns and make correspondences to thumb nail psychological sketches. Schermann was not one of these guys. He had a few rules, but they were extremely elastic. For instance, he saw objects of note in signatures – lines resembling a knife in the signature of a knifer, for instance, or of a pistol in the signature of someone who will either shoot or be shot. It was, according to his autobiographical excursus in the book, Handwriting doesn’t lie, an “instinct” that he became aware of at a very early age. This instinct could be aroused by other things than handwriting itself – a face, or an object which he held, could often tell him a story. The story would be about the past and the future. It would not just be a note about character types, but would be very specific about the person’s circumstances and even the circumstances – the time, the emotional state – that conditioned the written example he examined.
The first time Eisenstein met Schermann, in Schermann’s Berlin apartment in 1929, Schermann imitated Eisenstein’s handwriting. He did this after passing a mere scrap of conversation with the film director. Eisenstein, who sought transcendence of a materialist kind everywhere, was suitably impressed.
3.
Schermann’s “intuition” as he called it, made him a different kind of hermeneut of the letter – a Schriftdeuter, as one of his biographers called him.
From Scheu: “For example, when he would say: this letter was written at 3 o’clock in the morning, or, after looking at an envelope: “the letter inside this consists only of a few lines, written painfully in obedience to the express command of someone else, who had asked the writer for his cooperation.”
4.
 
As the years went on and the lectures and the interviews and the famous acquaintances piled up, one notices that Schermann, whatever his instincts, was a Central European of a distinctly Dostoevskian tendency. He is never reported as saying of some signature, “this points to a man of well regulated habits, happily married, with three darling children.” It is, perhaps, due to the sensationalizing nature of the newspapers as well as to his times that Schermann more normally sees and foresees suicides, tragic adulteries, and murders. The drama owes something, of course, to Schermann’s position as a consultant. Like Sherlock Holmes, he was consulted about eccentricities and unusual events, not about who made off with the silverware. His “act”, so to speak, was to be given writing samples that did not have names attached, from famous people, living or dead. He would give character sketches from what he saw in the writing. Sometimes, reading these sketches now, one thinks: these are generalizations that could fit any number of people. Sometimes, though, the cases are all too particular.
For instance, he is given a piece of writing and he says: “the woman who wrote this is a painter.” “Nothing too extraordinary about this, but after he has considered the writing at hand more deeply, he explains: ‘the woman has recently painted an exalted figure of a woman. There I see, in the shadowy background, blood and a male corpse.’ Yes. That matches! We reply, the writer of this letter has recently painted a picture of Salome!”
Such scenes are so indelibly continental, of the time, symptomatic. The Viennese themes: the femme fatale, the sado-masochism, the blood, the expressionistic painter. We can easily imagine this scene playing out in Musil’s Man without Qualities. Although Musil was more aware of that graphological philosopher, Ludwig Klages, he must have read about Schermann. He captures the intellectual mood of the time in an essay, Among the writers and the thinkers, from 1926:

“This is not to say how many Romes there are out there, in each of which sits a pope. Not only do I mean the circle around George, the ring around Blüher, the school of Klages, but the countless sects which await the liberation of the mind through eating cherries, or the theatre, or garden suburbs, or rhythmic gymnastics, or Feng Shui, or Eubiotics, or the reading of the hilldwelling hermits, or a thousand other particulars.  And in the middle of these sects sits some great So and So, a man, whose name the uninitiated have never heard, but in whose circle enjoys the reputation of a world redeemer.”

Although Schermann never possessed a moral authority, like that of George or Klages, the fact of his intuition did heat up some Schermann-centered prose. In fact, the best essay about Schermann was written by Musil’s friend, Anton Kuh, who found his duality – a rather banal figure whose past as an insurance man was all too explicable, and a medium whose intuitions have no scientific explanation -  a sort of metaphysical clue. And Kuh was personally acquainted with another strange insurance man: Franz Kafka.

Kuh: “I like the stumpy man from Krakow, whether you call him a clairvoyant, a graphologist, or a psychologist. He has an artist’s nature. His mouth twitches, when he is feeling out a fate, nervously, on a perhaps superstitious lightning stroke, when he suddenly begins to roll his tongue over his gums and it is obvious that he is working something out. His intonations are entirely familiarly Jewish, pleasantly east Prussian. Two character types cross in him: the Hassidic rabbinic, with the star of David, and the jolly merchant, his accounting books spread before him.”

Kuh, a Prague habitue, thought of Gustave Meyrink’s protagonists, with their "mixture of Walpurgasnacht and the daily stock market report".

However, it was not simply the character of Schermann that struck Kuh, but his situation, the pleas that, day after day, year after year, Schermann lived among. The desperate tones of those who asked for help made one think that “the whole of life was like a panic on a shipwreck.” And just as, when the ship is going down, certain people reveal a desire to survive at any cost, Kuh plugged into the “greed for life”, greed as life, with its cultural meaning in the 20s in Eastern Europe.

In 1929 in Germany, there were good reasons to think that the culture's temperamental key was notched to a higher frequency, that the greed for life was revealing a panic yawning beneath it. Schermann’s is a side story, but Kuh’s essay could be matched up with, say, Elias Canetti’s description of the premier of the Three Penny Opera, which he attended in Berlin.

“It was the most accurate expression of Berlin. The people cheered [jubelt] for themselves. This was them, and they liked themselves. First you feed your face, they you spoke of right and wrong. They took these words literally… The shrill and naked self-complacency that this performance emanated can be believed only by the people who witnessed it.”

Kuh portrays Schermann as an empath whose sympathies were being stretched too tight. A sort of paranormally gifted Miss Lonelyhearts. Here’s a letter from a man who is tormented by the idea that his wife, who died two years ago, might have cheated on him. He has hired a detective, and on the off chance, he is sending Schermann a sample of her writing. “Every second letter mentions suicide.” Kuh, in the end, vows to stay away from this unsettling scene: “It is all a mess: the letter writers want to breathe as human beings, but they want to live as bourgeois.” The unbearable, which is how Marx characterized the alienation of the prole, has ascended, socially, to the middle class.

5.
Schermann wrote many articles and two books, one of which – Writing doesn’t lie – was translated into English and into French, the latter by the German-French poet, Ivan Goll. In the 1920s, there were at least two films, made in Vienna, in which he was featured as “The man with x-ray eyes”. There were three biographies of him written between 1920 and 1932: one by the German journalist Max Hayek (murdered in Auschwitz, later, in 1944); by Dr. Oskar Fischer (murdered in Theresienstadt, 1942); and by an American journalist, Eugene S. Bagger.

Schermann was also “inducted” into various novelistic feuilleton. There he figured, in the stories written by Jean Baptiste Morel, as a sort of paranormal Sherlock Holmes.

During this decade, Schermann went to the United States and was consulted by New York City’s police commissioner, Enright, about some of his difficult cases. For instance, the mysterious murder of the bridge-playing millionaire, Joseph Browne Elwell (unsolved to this very day!). He lectured with Professor Fischer in the Urania hall in Prague, “dressed in a frock coat and a white tie.” He was invited to the tables of the high and mighty, and was expected to, and did, relay anecdotes. There, he sat next to royal princesses and fashionable artists. Occasionally he would predict their futures.

In Zurich, the police give him the letter of a woman who is suspected of poisoning her second husband. Schermann feels the letter: yes, she poisoned her husband! But the letter is eight years old, written while she was married to her first husband. Meanwhile, the woman breaks down under questioning. She admits to poisoning her second husband. And, she adds, she poisoned her first.

6.
After 1933, Schermann avoids Germany. His intuition becomes shakier, more routinized. He lectures in Paris. He continues to live in Vienna. But life for Jews is filled with menace now.
He makes a move that is a curious one for a man who can see the future – at least in a limited number of cases. He moves back to Poland. He had connections, but he moves himself and his family to Poland.
There’s no letter big enough, with curves and hyphens bloody and barbed enough, to reveal his fate. Or his family’s fate. Or the fate of the millions caught in those nation state traps, in those trains, in those cities, in those fields, fleeing on those roads, carrying what possessions they could gather in old valises or backpacks, torn up letters in a trail winding behind them, private disasters that were always supposed to be contained in houses and hotels and salons, and never supposed to be so grossly, so apocalyptically spilled into the street, as Schermann’s friends, his dinner companions, the journalists who interviewed him, the Sunday supplement photographers, all of them went down down down the chute.  
 
 

Penny-ante neoliberal coups: the story of Honduras and Prospera

 I got around to the highly ill-making article about Prospera in the August 27 NYT Magazine.

I recommend reading it. And then reading the petition of the Progressive economists, here.

Prospera is one of those libertarian-fascist off shore wet dreams, birthed by the usual suspects: corrupt far right politicos and ethically deficient Nobel Prize winning “economists”. It is located on the Honduran coast, within Honduran territory – but of course, does not obey Honduran law.

The story of its making begins, of course, with a military coup. Nothing as grandiose as Pinochet – rather, more neo-liberal feel-good skulduggery of the pack the court and pop the president variety. The Honduran military, in 2009, with a little assistance from the Pentagon’s Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies [see this story] ousted the leftist president of Honduras and installed a creature named Porfirio Lobo (hark at the name: Porfirio!). As a far right president, Lobo had, of course, some alert little Harvard biz school-niks on his staff, and one of them had seen a lecture by Paul Romer. Romer gave a corporate shill TED talk all about helping the third world through corporations – much like Shell helping helping helping Nigeria.

Romer is, of course, a perfect corpo-tool, which is sort of required for getting the Nobel prize in Economics. Like the first getter of that prize, Fred Hayek, he came running when called by some rightwing generalissimo to help bury socialism. Between 2009 to 2013, Romer helped the Honduran government hammer out the terms of the laughably named Economic Development Zone – ZEDE – law. It was hurried along even after the Honduran Supreme court ruled against it – merely a matter of restocking the court.

Well, the Prospero corp, the starter fund for which was – via the magical laws of poetic injustice- put together by, Patri Friedman, Milton’s grandchild – started buying a chunk of Honduras’s coast and planning their slave plantation/utopia.

Everything was running as smoothly as a crypto-currency fraud when, suddenly, the rightwing government fell. Hernandez, Lobo’s successor, lost to the wife of the former leftwing president. Hernandez went on to a few other probs – he is under a 45 year sentence in the US for drugdealing – but he had, during his reign, done his best to insure the legal standing of Prospera.

This came to an end under the new Honduran government, which has pulled the plug on Romer’s ZEDEs. Naturally, the libertarians turned to one of those offshore legal entities foisted upon the global south by the inglorious Norrth: the World Bank’s International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes – a “court” which is as far as the mock Florida courts set up in the 2009s to railroad homeowners unfortunate enough to have bank mortgages, and banks fortunate enough to have courts overlook such technicalities as a paper trail, proper documents, and the like.

Honduras has withdrawn from the ICSID. But Prospera is persevering. If the sentence comes down, as it probs will, that Honduras owes them 11 billion dollars, everything will depend on the powers that be – basically the U.S. – treating this as a legitimate outcome.

We know how that will go under Trump. Don’t think that the Harris regime will do anything radically different. Unless they are forced to by public outcry.

Interesting sidenote: Prospera can sue Honduras. But can the Honduran government sue the U.S. for the help it gave to the generals who performed the military coup? Oh child, what earth are you living on! That is never going to happen.

TWO VIEWS OF THE MURDER ON BOULEVARD POISSONNIERE, 1929

 

It all started when Andrée Maryse and her partner came back from her tour of the Orient. in 1929

Maryse, whose real name was Marthe Lebrun, formerly of the  Folies Bergère, had formed an act with an ex-boxer named Young Francis, whose real name was Francis Gaillard, which seemed to consist, from the newspaper accounts, of both of them showing their splendid physiques in various acrobatic poses.

Young Francis dropped his wife and his child for Maryse; however, he was a brute, or at least that was what came out at the trial. Jealous, violent, a hitter.  Still, they worked together, toured the Orient, and apparently agreed to find a third splendid and acrobatic physique for their act, which they did: a former dancer at the Opera and an ex-boxer named Jean Torrini, whose real name was Alfred Jean-Jacques Bouisseren. As one newspaper said, Young Francis was male vigor, Jean Torrini was male grace.

Their relations were somewhat aggravated by a fact stated by Torrini at the trial:

“Each time we rehearsed in the theatre at Rue de Douai, nude, both of us, he wanted to throw his mistress out of the window.”

The nudity was of interest to the papers, the reading public, and the jury, who surveyed the photographs of their rehearsals with attention.

Andrée Maryse (“blonde and gracious in her black and white tailored suit”) decided in the end that Young Francis must go. But she was still fond of Torrini. They may or may not have been a romantic couple. In any case, it was as a couple that they went out to eat with another couple, M. and Madame Souque, at a table at the Café Brebant on Blv. Poissonniere on May 4, 1929.

At around seven o’clock, Young Francis turned up at Café Brebant. He made with the rough stuff, or threatened to. Maryse fled the establishment, followed by Young Francis, followed by Torrini. Young Francis apparently threw himself in front of a taxi, a suicidal gesture. The taxi braked. Torrini took out a revolver. He fired at the ex-boxer. Six shots, according to some newspapers.

Young Francis was hit. He was mortally wounded. The crowd in the street that witnessed this was near panic, when the cops arrived.

A faits divers, this.

In the crowd that saw the last moments in the life of Young Francis was the recent editor of the NRF, Jean Paulhan. He, like many of the NRF crew – notably Gide – was fascinated by the form of the faits divers. In fact, Gide’s column for the NRF was titled “Faits divers” and was precisely about that – the scandals, crimes, adulteries, gangland doings, and various low-life events that came into the papers and the courts and formed one of the great subtexts of the twenties. Paulhan mentioned the event in “Treatise on metaphysics for the New Year, 1930”.

Paulhan’s metaphysics was semi-Kantian, and semi-esoteric.  The Kantianism was based on Paulhan’s notion that the subject, when human instead of some abstract substance in an abstract retort, was subject to illusions about the real that effected us on the individual and collective level.

Paulhan in 1929 was still under the impress of his friend, André Breton, and Breton’s idea that the fantastic was abroad, in the streets of Paris – one had merely to tear off the bourgeois conventions on not seeing and look, look hard. In the Treatise (a mock-heroic name for an article of four printed pages), In the interval between the object looked at and the looker, Paulhan was impressed by our tendency, our hopeless tendency, to convention. In that tendency, Paulhan saw the flaw of the surrealist program. A test case was the Torrini shooting.

In the Treatise, Paulhan states that he was in the crowd on Blvd. Poissonniere “by chance”. I wonder. He does not say he was going to Café Brebant himself. I wonder about that, too. At this time, Paulhan was living with Germaine Pascal in a suburb of Paris, Le Plessis-Robinson. When he was in Paris, he camped at his office on Rue Madame, on the Left Bank. One supposes, then, that he was walking in the in the quarter of the Grands Boulevards on the evening of May 4, 1929, for some reason. Perhaps he was walking to café de la Nouvelle France, 92, rue La Fayette, which was one of Breton’s hangouts.

I like to think he might have been out to enjoy Café Brebant. At one time, at the end of the Second Empire, Café Brebant was a literary center. Founded in 1805, it had been a favorite of Heine’s in the 1850s – and was also a hangout for Georges Sand (who wrote letters to the owner, requesting, for instance, a box of her favorite cigarettes) – and of the incorrigibly bitchy Brother Goncourt. Monet used to drop by for a drink, and no doubt nursed it sitting on one of the famous red sofas.

Time passes. The Café Brebant was hopelessly outmoded in 1929. The sofas were spongy, the service was so so, the food nothing to get excited about. It was on the way out – its doors closed in June, 1930, which evoked a number of nostalgic obituaries in the Parisian press.

So, Paulhan, who witnesses the killing: “Torrini pursued Francis into the road across a traffic jame and killed him with two shots from a revolver. We learned afterwards that Francis, desperate, tried, in that moment, to commit suicide by throwing himself under a taxi.”

How would Paulhan have learned this if not from the papers?  The rustle of language was already there in the street, reality was being reshaped even as it shaped itself.

Paulhan’s sympathy for the brutal boxer might have something to do with his own situation that night. His legal wife was battling him in the divorce courts. He wanted to marry his lover, Germaine, but his wife, for her own reasons, wanted to prevent that.

In 1945, when Paulhan published his Entretien sur des faits divers, he did not mention the Torrini case. The 1945 book is a curious text: in exploring “cognitive illusions” (illusions de l’esprit), one feels that there is a politics underneath this, tugging at the reader.

The illusion that concerned Paulhan the most was anachronism: the projection into some past moment of facts, circumstances and motives that “we” only know looking back on that past – which have been accrued in the interval. The example he uses is the classic robbery. A woman is killed by a robber, who only gains 20 francs in the business. Thus, the headline: Robber kills woman for twenty francs. But at the time of the robbery and the killing, it was not necessarily known to the robber or even the woman that she had only 20 francs on her. The excitements of the moment were of a different order.

Anachronism makes it hard to base an ethics of responsibility on our acts of the moment, given our lack of any total knowledge of any moment. Paulhan is responding as much to the cultural politics of the end of the war as he is advancing his metaphysics of morals. The great purge of collaborators caught  many of Paulhan’s friends and collegues, and even Paulhan had articles published in suspect journals. That fact definitely has some sway over his larger argument, resisting the "responsibility" ethos of the existentialists. 

In 1929 the Occupation was a future nobody was reckoning on. Tugging at Paulhan in this moment was what he would later called “terrorism” – the idea that literature could somehow cleanse us of our illusions – elect us, remove us from the bourgeois chain.

In 1929, in Breton’s Second Manifesto, he had famously written that the first surrealist act would be to fire a gun into a crowd. Paulhan had witnessed a revolver being fired in a crowd, although not exactly at random. If the newspaper account that claimed that six shots were fired, then in fact it was, to an extent, at random. Did Breton read the papers on May 5, 1929, when the Young Francis shooting was on the front page? Did he hear about it from Paulhan?

In the Treatise, this is Paulhan’s account: “My first sentiment was to have been witness to a sort of stunt, or crime. Of course, I had never before seen something that had the nature of being, outside of myself, evil or criminal: this was only to apply to these indifferent events the shape of the idea I had of evil or good. If I thought of assassination as an art, I would have been struck, on the other hand,  by either the beauty of Torrini’s gestures, or even by their ugliness. Thus, what did I receive here? Just the sentiment that Torrini was on top, that he won over Francis – even though by an irregular means – which held to a certain opinion I had about life. If I thought, as many a person has thought, that life is not worth the pain of being lived, was a dupe’s game and a torture, I would have seen Francis winning over Torrini. The whole scene would have unrolled as a slow triumph towards death, cleverly spreading itself out through the suicide to the murder of Young Francis.”

The twenties motif, according to Sartre, was “Letting go”. “Let go, drop out, leave the orders, coordinates, find yourself naked and alone, strange to yourself, like Philoctetes when he gave up his bow, like Dmitri Karamazov in prison, like an addict who takes drugs for fun, like a young man who abandons his class, his family, his house, to put himself alone and naked into the hands of the Party.” Paulhan was a twenties personality, in the Sartrean sense. The first Surrealist act is not, in the manifesto, called a positive good – to shoot at random in a crowd is simply to shatter the reality the individuals in the crowd have assumed will be, somehow, always there to protect them.

In the event, the trial of Torrini went well. A waiter testified that Young Francis screamed at Maryse that night that he was going to kill her.  Andrée Maryse herself, gracious and supple, as one reporter put it, testified that she had gone to Young Francis’s funeral because she owed him that, but that he was a threat to both her life and Torrini’s. M. Robert Lazurik, Torrini’s lawyer, was much lauded: while the judge was evidently hostile to Torrini, Lazurik transformed the atmosphere in the courtroom to one sympathetic to the man who shot Young Francis.

Torrini was acquitted by reason of self-defense.

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.” – Andre Breton.

 

 

 

Routines, rituals and the post-identity moment

 

The early twentieth century was the heyday of both colonialism and the anthropological obsession  with ritual, with observations of “native peoples” flooding into the metropoles. Rituals seemed both omnipresent and irrational; thus, they provided a tempting form and object for the modernist author.

But what was a ritual? And how was it different from any other step by step organization of activity? Marcel Mauss, in an essay on prayer, puts the onus on the organizing irrationality of the ritual:

“It isn’t after the nature of acts and their real effects that it is possible to distinguish the two orders of fact. From this point of view, all that it is possible to say about rituals is that they cannot produce the results one attributes to them. According to this way of judging, one can’t distinguish rituals from erroneous practices. One knows, however, that an erroneous practice is not a ritual. Thus, it is not in considering the efficacity in itself, but the manner in which the efficacity is conceived that we can discover the specific difference. Thus, in the case of technique, the effect produced is supposed to arise entirely from the effective mechanical labor. And this besides has right on its side (a bon droit), for the effort of civilization has precisely consisted in reserving to industrial techniques and the science on which they repose that useful value that one attributed in the past to rituals and religious notions. On the contrary, in the case of a ritual practice, other causes completely are supposed to intervene, to which is wholly imputed the expected result. Between the movements that constitute the sacrifice and those that solidly construct the house that the former is supposed to insure, there is not even from the point of view of the sacrificer any mechanical link. The efficacity lent to the ritual has nothing in common with the efficacity proper to the acts which are materially accomplished. It is represented mentally as completely sui generis, for one consideres that it comes entirely from special forces that the ritual has the property of putting in play. Thus even if the effect actually produced would result in fact in executed movements, there would be a ritual if the believer attributed it to other causes. Thus the absorption of toxic substances produces physiologically a state of ecstasy, and yet it is a ritual for those who impute this state not to its true causes, but to special influences.”

The notion of efficiency, here, silently displaces an older notion of necessity – of the play of necessity and chance. The efficiency of the mechanical acts (if we can, for a moment, separate out the mechanical from the efficient) consists in the fact that the first step in the routine is necessary for and necessitates the second step. The measure of its efficiency is in the narrowing or the elimination of alternatives and options for the second step, and so on. Putting together the pieces that make an Ikea table, we follow instructions that spatialize the temporal arrangement and unroll it as a series of attachments and adjustments of the various (but sorted) bits and parts. Even so, it is not uncommon to find the term ritual attached to certain routines, as for instance in sales, or in driving, or making a meal. What this shows, to the anthropologist trying to make sense of ritual, is that it can attach itself, parasitically, to the technical acts that produce a given commodity or service.

Victor Turner, in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, returns to the ritual as it was conceived by the turn of the century anthropologists – and in particular, Van Genep’s notion of a rite de passage:

“Van Gennep demonstrated that many types of rituals, notably initiation rites, have three distinguishable stages, of varying relative duration within and among cultures, which he described as (1) separation, (2) margin or limen, and (3) reaggregation. Sometimes he simply called these: “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal.” He had noticed that rituals are often performed, in societies at all levels of social complexity, when individuals or groups are culturally defined as undergoing a change of state or status.”

Is this three stage process a sort of routine within the ritual? Or is it that within every routine, from the assembly line to the salesman’s coffee break, the subject, that sensitive object, tends towards ritual? Tends, that is, as something earlier, something primitive.

Did I mention the colonial shadow that falls over this discussion?

Turner’s first interest, as a college student, was literature. He changed to anthropology, and did field work with his wife, Edith, in Africa, and observed ritual there – then began to theorize about comparative symbology during the Cold War period of the fifties and sixties, when ritualism as a universal dissolvent was past its fad expiration date. What Turner got from Genep was a way of talking about the symbolic structure of ritual without grounding it in some appeal to our lost pieties – the reactionary move of a certain group of modernists. That use of ritual was timely – it was absorbed into the fascination with identity that came out of the civil rights movements.  It carried into identity remnants of a rhetoric that was once about the sacred.

We are entering, I think, in what I would call, ludicrously and awkwardly, a post-identity moment. I wonder how ritual and routine will be reconfigured within those parameters.

 

 

The ambiguities of Patriotism

 There is a note in the OED appended to the etymology of “patriot” that sez: “Ancient Greek πατριώτης is used of barbarians, who had a common πατρίς (as opposed to Greeks who were called πολῖται, having a common πόλις); in this sense it derives from πάτριος. It is also used of members of a clan, in which case it derives from πατριά.”

Ah, poisonous binary! Patriot, which like patriarchy is derived from the father, or family, as opposed to polis, or community. In the liberal tradition, the social form of the clan, the family, must be subordinate to the state. Banditism and all the barbarian customs so adhering go back to the clan; the mafia goes back to the clan; and the state goes back to the city, the capital, the court.

Of course, this binary structure founds and is unfounded. The wealthy, for instance, go back to the family, or clan; the corporation goes back, often, to the clan, the family trust, the investors, inherited wealth. While the community, or state, tends fatally to the clan as well – the monarch, the political family.

In its connotative sweep, patriotism has inherited the uneasiness of the city dweller before the barbarian, the metropolitan before the “clown” (colonnus, dweller in the fields). As a city dweller myself, I have an ambiguous relationship to the Patria. I want to be “for” the Barbaric Yawp, but is the barbarian mouth open to issue the purest stream of poetry – or to eat me?