Dickens, Woolf and the child

In the twenties, according to V.S. Pritchett, it was fashionable to disparage Charles Dickens, at least among the modernist set. Two disparate writers from that period, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf, seem to bear Pritchett out. Waugh, famously, employed Dickens work as a tool of torture in Handful of Dust, when the hapless Tony Last is captured by an Amazonian eccentric and forced to read to him from Dickens’ collected works, an unhappy end if there ever was one. In Waugh’s one extended essay on Dickens, a review of the large Life of Dickens published by Edgar Johnson, he had a lot of fun shooting spitballs at the “disgusting hypocrite”. Dickens wishy washy liberalism and complete absense of a sense of original sin put him outside Waugh’s ultramontane disposition. No man is a hero to his letter readers – especially Dickens, whose hypocrisies can be tracked with cruel accuracy. Even in the 1870s, when the first collection of Dickens letters were published, an anonymous writer at the Spectator commented that Dickens’ vaunted radicalism never amounted to much, and certainly didn’t prevent him from supporting the South over the North in the American Civil war, nor from sympathizing ardently with Governer Eyre, the crown’s ruler in Jamaica, who put down a rebellion by randomly hanging black people. For this crime, John Stuart Mill tried ardently to have him imprisoned, and Dickens and some other brightlights sought to have him lauded.

Mill failed. Hanging innocent black people made as little difference to Victorian Englanders as bombing Gazan children makes to today's heirs of Victorian Englanders, Democratic party poobahs and donors.

Mill not only failed, but his outraged white constituents voted him out of office.

To return to our Man, though. This is Dickens the public figure – and private man.

But we care about him as a writer.

Even Waugh admits that Dickens is a “mesmerist” as a writer – which had become, by the time, a great cliché of Dickens criticism. It is rooted in some fact: Dickens fancied himself a mesmerist, and even attempted a mesmeric cure on one Madame de la Rue, an acquaintance from Genoa. After Dickens took to spending the nights with her, giving her the benefit of his “visual ray”, Dickens’ wife made him break off his ‘cure’ – which Dickens held forever against her. He was a miserable husband. The list of things Dickens held against his wife could fill a three decker novel. Their domestic scene is not a pretty picture.

Virginia Woolf, who is, in most ways, a much more intelligent critic than Evelyn Waugh, was also uneasy with Dickens. Her family had extensive acquaintance with Thackeray, and this may have made set her tribally against Dickens – there was no love lost between the two Victorian novelists. However, one of the best essays about Dickens, Virginia Woolf’s reflections on David Copperfield, is a critical lodestone for me – it so exactly describes my own varied reaction to Dickens writing. She begins the essay with references to seasonal occurences, to the ripening of fruit and to sunshine, as if Dickens were not a writer but a phenomenon of the same sort – which is just what he seems to be, Woolf implies, when read in childhood. But can a Dickens novel survive a second reading? Or are his characters – for Woolf’s idea, ultimately, is that Dickens novels are crowds of characters, that he keeps going in his novels by “throwing another character on the pyre” – “been attacked by the parching wind which blows about books and, without our reading them, remodelsm them and changes their features while we sleep?” Again, we note the confusion of culture and nature – the kind of thing Roland Barthes loved to disentangle. That parching wind and our sleep are definitely social phenomena, although they do take on the authoritative, irresistable shape of natural forces at play. The closed book does seem to sleep – or we seem to close ourselves up like a book when we sleep. The parallel is inexhaustible, and rediscoveries aspects of both sleeping and books – or trivializes them.

The next two lines of the essay are often quoted as though they reflected Woolf’s opinion, rather than the opinion of the fashion of her time, to which she is responding: “The rumor about Dickens is to the effect that his sentiment is disgusting and his style commonplace; that in reading him every refinement must be hidden and every sensibility kept under glass; but that with these precaustions and reservations, he is of course Shakespearean; like Scott a born creator; like Balzac prodigious in his fecundity; but, rumor adds, it is strange that while one reads Shakespeare and one reads Scott, the precise moment for reading Dickens seldom comes our way.”

I think we would substitute Austin for Scott now, but with this qualification, what rumor has whispered into Woolf’s ear does not seem far fetched to me. It is against that rumor that Woolf makes – in an act of culture over nature – the choice to take up Dickens, to make this the precise moment for re-reading David Copperfield.

Woolf provides an interesting reading of the ‘rumor’ – Dickens, in her version, has pre-eminently the virtues of the male writer, and also the vices. He has humor, but curiously fumbles the emotional; he has description, but is curiously unable or unwilling to plumb the interior. He is, Woolf thinks, a genius when it comes to movement, but a failure when we need to slow down and reflect. She puts her finger on something that exactly reproduces my experience of Dickens: “Then, indeed, he fails grotesquely, and the pages in which he describes what, to our convention, are the peaks and pinnacles of human life, the explanation of Mrs. Strong, the despair of Mrs. Steerforth, or the anguish of Ham, are of an indescribable unreality – of that uncompfortable complexion which, if we heard Dickens talking so in real life, would either make us blush to the roots of our hair, or dash out of the room to conceal our laughter.”

I think that one can be embarrassed by Dickens in exactly this way. It is why one resists the re-reading. Remembering the almost sickly sweetness of Esther Summerson in Bleak House makes me wary of reading the novel one more time. And Esther is probably his most developed female figure. There are, of course, self suppressing, virtuous women in Balzac, but they show themselves capable of robbery and murder if their passions are lit. They have a sexual life, even if it is on hold, and one feels that they like to have it.

However, what is strange, to me, about Woolf’s assessment of Dickens is that she never comments on what must surely have struck her, especially in David Copperfield: the theme of extreme cruelty to children.

I re-read David Copperfield a couple of years ago, in an imitation Woolf phase, and found it, as always, a striking novel, a remarkable novel, a nightmarish novel, a disappointing novel. All the stages on the pilgrim reader’s way. Like those bridges that are supposedly alluded to in London Bridge is falling down, at the beginning of it we find a sacrificed child. Dickens was a master of the story of cruelty to children, but I think David Copperfield’s betrayal by his mother and his beating and expulsion by the Murdstones is the culminating episode in the series. The equation of the family and the cult is seen all too often in the news. Cults often seem to develop around an initial separation of the child from the family and his or her subjection to extreme violence of one type or another. These are not separate moments, or need not be. In Copperfield’s case, Mr. Murdstone’s control and humiliation of the child, leading up to the scene of David being beaten with a cane and retaliating by biting Murdstone’s hand, is doublesided: it is also a process in which Mrs. Copperfield, now Murdstone’s bride, is completely dominated. Mrs. Copperfield is one of those unfortunate Dickens women. In a conversation with Steerforth – Copperfield’s schoolmate and hero, with whom he accepts a relationship much like that of his mother to Murdstone – there’s a perfect expression of all that is wrong, genderwise, with Dickens:

'Good night, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth. 'I'll take care of you.' 'You're very kind,' I gratefully returned. 'I am very much obliged to you.'

'You haven't got a sister, have you?' said Steerforth, yawning.

'No,' I answered.

'That's a pity,' said Steerforth. 'If you had had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.'

Although Dickens is warning us about Steerforth’s character, through his mouth we get Dickens own compulsively presented heroine. Unlike, say, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens could never conceive of a woman with a real intellectual life,

Dickens is an artist of exaggeration, and this spirit even visits his restraint. The key to the first part of the book is David Copperfield’s feeling of betrayal by his mother – and the hatred that it generates. That hatred is not expressed in words, but instead, in a strained attempt to continue to love this woman.

But to continue with the cultic undertext: it is interesting that Copperfield’s expulsion from his house is accompanied by a comically treated fasting as the boy makes his way to London. Though he begins with a meal, he doesn’t eat it – the waiter does, keeping up a standard kind of Dickens waiter patter. In fact, he doesn’t eat until he reaches London, right before he is taken to Salem, the deserted school – which, as we will learn, is presided over by the sadistic Creakle – and fitted with a banner: TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES. This is the end of the initiatory period in Copperfield’s life.

This violence and its suppression create such a profound disequilibrium in the story that it becomes political – Copperfield’s sense of Murdstone and Creakle as tyrants tells us something very dirty about the formation of the political father, or the boss. The child and the “timid, bright woman” are brought together as exemplary victims – their vulnerability is their attraction. But, of course, children are not women – in that neurotic equation, the chance to overthrow the political father is lost.

It is this, I think, which makes Dickens sentimentality so disheartening. He comes so far, and then he falls so short.

DEMOCRATS FOR THE SQUID GAMES BILL - or why American democracy is falling apart

 Dems are very arms akimbo upset about Trump being bribed by Qatar - but not to worry, they are also very sympatico with Trump simply being a corrupt creep issuing bogus meme coins, and so a group of D senators voted for the "GENIUS" act to make it all legal. Money money money! You can't expect Dem senators to ignore that! Besides, such other Dem contributors, like Sam Bankman Fried, have made the case that crypto is legit. A legit way to skim

money from desperate people.

Democrat senators voting for the GENIUS act - otherwise known as the SQUID GAMES bill - are the following:

Alsobrooks (MD), Blunt Rochester (DE), Booker (NJ), Cortez Masto (NV), Fetterman (PA), Gallego (AZ), Gillibrand (NY), Hassan (NH), Heinrich (NM), Lujan (NM), Ossoff (GA), Padilla (CA), Rosen (NV), Schiff (CA), Slotkin (MI), Warner (VA)

Which makes me ask: why did I vote for Ossoff?

The signifying fly

LE PÉDAGOGUE. – Qu'est-ce que les mouches ont à faire là

dedans?

JUPITER. – Oh ! c'est un symbole.

1.

In the late art historian Daniel Arasse’s book, Detail: for a close up history of art (I recommend the Flammarion edition with the beautiful illustrations), we find ourself, suddenly, among the flies.

Noticing how many flies there are in Quattrocentro and Cinquecentro paintings.

Flies on pillars, flies on bodies, flies on counters, most of them a little bigger in proportion to the other figures in the painting than in normal life, flies of the M. domestica variety, or horse flies, or green flies, or gad flies.

There’s a story, here, to which Arasse refers.

Giotto was a student of Cimabue. One day, according to Vasari, for a joke, he painted a fly on the nose of a figure that Cimabue was working on. When Cimabue returned to the painting, he tried several times to shoo the fly. A prank in the classic mimetic tradition – the curtains of Parhasios, Zeuxis’s painting of grapes that was so lifelike birds came out of the air to peck at it.

Can we just substitute, among these emblems, the fly? Is the fly bereft of its own symbolic weight?

For Arasse, with his eyes on the detail (rather than on the canonical story of perspective and realism), the fly represents not only the emblematic result of an increasingly successful representational painterly project, but it takes on various symbolic burdens: it is a detail. And not just any detail – rather, in the nature/pictorial divide, it is a detail that brings up the nature of the detail in creation. Creation: how nature was thought. And, among the Volk, how nature is still thought.

One might think of the detail as having a relation to the whole like the atom does to matter. But details are not atomic, in Arasse’s reading. They are not at a fundamental level of reduction. A detail is not a straightforward constructional element.

Example: the portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus, a Flemish painter, from 1446. The portrait shows a man in a white robe, the hood folded back, his face turned to the viewer, against a velvety, shadowed backdrop of red. Directly on the front of the portrait, where the painting is framed, P. Christus painted a large fly. The fly seems to be perched on the frame. Furthermore, the fly “constitutes the figurative redoubling of the painters signature. “Situated very exactly between his first and his family name, it signs the savoir-faire of an artist who is particularly engaged by the problems of geometric perspective, being one of the first of the Flemish painters to discover, on a “purely empirical” basis, as Panofksy shows, the unique line of flight for a perspective construction, and to have applied it around 1450.” Arasse speculates that the fly, on the framework of the portrait of a Carthusian, might also be a scholastic reference – an in-joke of a sort:

Yet, if, as tradition says, this model is Denys the Carthusian, a second meaning superposes on the first : the fly could become an allusion to De venustate mundi in which Denys the Carthusian describes the beauty of the world as a hierarchy of beauties in which the most humble degree is represented by the insects. Far from being a memento mori, the fly is witness to the universal beauty of the created world, such as is described by the model that the painting represents.”

The signifying fly. Oh, I love that passage of Arasse’s far beyond the reach of any number of exclamation marks. And before I leave Arasse here: an anecdote from a Critique article about him.

“On June 8, 2005, around 9 :40 a.m., in the auditorium of the INHA, a fly came and sat on the projection screen. The colloquium was dedicated to Daniel Arasse (who died in2003). The papers were to be published under the title Daniel Arasse, historien de l’art. Karim Ressouni-Demigneux had just started to speak of a detail in the representation of Saint Sébastien, the object of two articles by Arasse and a chapter in his book The Detail. It was at that moment that the speaker projected on the screen the painting of Antonello da Messina and evoked the arassienne “vision” of an eye in the place of the bellybutton of Sebastion. Blinded by the light, the fly stood on the belly button of the martyr. Was this a wink by Daniel Arasse, who was so attentive to the rôle of the fly in trompe-l’œil, in his history of the close ups of painting? From that singular coïncidence, lets say, rather, that it underlined ironically the difficulty one feels in speaking methodologically of Arasses’s method as elaborated in his writings.”

2.

Memento Mori, or an early standin for the beauty of the world, these are the Renaissance thematics on the fly’s shoulders. But I see a thematic from the classical period that Arasse may not have attended to – at least in the detail book.

Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the seasons. The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.’ This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible.

The mouths of the many. The signifying fly. This is an archaic, Eastern Mediterranean couple.

If in one direction, pheme/kleos moves towards the universal knowledge vested within the people – towards common sense – in another direction, it moves towards rumor, the “angel of ruin”, the fama of Virgil’s Aeneid, the beast perched on the gates of the city. A bird, a flying thing, but with attributes that are fatally fly-like.

“Furth she quicklye gallons, with wingflight swallolyke hastning,

A foule fog pack paunch: what feathers plumye she heareth,

so manye squint eyeballs shee keeps (a relation uncoth)

So manye tongues clapper, with her ears and lip labor eevened.

In the dead of nighttime to the skyes shee flickereth, howling

Through the earth shade skipping, her sight from slumber amooving.

Whilst the sun is shying the baggage close lodgeth in housroofs,

or tops of turrets, with feare towns loftye she frighteth,

As readye forged fittons, as true tales vayneley toe twattle.”

Such an image – the squinty, many eyed, flying creature - could as well be recognized in the “rumor panics” in Borneo in 1979, as reported by anthropologist Richard Allan Drake. In the longhouse of the village of Sungai Mulae, he was told that the government was building a bridge nearby, and that of course, they would send out kidnappers to snatch somebody and sacrifice them to the bridge. The village was, ostensibly, Christianized, yet rumors like these “flew” about often; in fact, Drake establishes that the form of this rumor was recurrent in Borneo. It was recorded on the North coast of Borneo as early as 1910; it was recorded in Sandong River region in 1949; and in 1981, it was recorded in the Meratus mountains. In fact, if we extend our search from Borneo to other regions of the world, we find that, for instance, in pre-Revolutionary France, there were rumors about the kidnapping of children and women by the government of King Louis XV; and there was the persistent rumor in Czarist Russia of Jews kidnapping Christian children to use their blood.

Although the circumstances and meanings of these rumors are different, their reappearence is typologically significant. L.A. Bysow, a Russian sociologist who wrote a seminal analysis of rumors that appeared in the twenties, based his morphological distinctions between three types of rumors by their manner of spreading. The darker, secretive, bad news announcing type, which have a “creeping and slow character”, the more hurrying rumors, which produce a social shock; and the ones that appear and disappear on the surface of public opinion, which Bysow compared to divers, going under the surface and coming up.

The late nineteenth century notion of contagion models rumors according to an epidemiology, thus continuing a very old analogy between logos and seed. But there is another analogy between a flying beast – a fly – and pheme. The invisible microbe that replaced the miasma model fit comfortably with the word as organic – and indeed, the word is the product of an organism. In fact, the analogy between sickness and rumor is encoded even in Virgil’s image, for this monstrous bird of ill or true fame conveys the word from mouth to ear in the city bears a visible likeness to the winged demons who shoot the arrows of sickness in the city. Both sickness and rumor “fly”. And both are mass phenomena, often leading to panic. And, in a quiet division between true fame and false, rumors have, over time, been associated exclusively with distortion. The rumor is often treated by the sociologist as though, by definition, it must be false. As often happens, the sociologist is simply following the cop, here – for the justification of using police action against rumor is precisely that it falsifies, as though there were some connection between hegemonic power and the truth

Rumor is the illegitimate sibling – at least mythopoetically – of public opinion. Drake connects rumor in Borneo is connected to the dominance of the “oral” in Borneo society. The logic of evidence here feeds on itself – unlike the written, which requires a process of mediation that engages the body as scriptor, the medium as the object inscribed, and the eye as reader, rumor, like the word itself, springs directly from the tongue and flies to the ear. Bysow speaks of its chain-like characteristic – depending on face to face communication, it creates a public of a sort out of haptic space – the kind of public that Gabriel Tarde, writing in the late nineteenth century, classified as essentially the primitive form of the public: the crowd.

In the early modern period in France, as Arlette Farge shows in Dire et Mal Dire, the word on the street was as much a vehicle of news as any official chronicle. Indeed, news was subdivided between the official histories, the private journals, and the gazetins of the police – police reports composed from the reports of the mouchards, the spies, that the police planted in the population. Louis XV enjoyed having these gazetins read to him. The relation of those in power to those underneath is mediated by a concern, on the part of both parties, with what is thought by the other – a concern in which the police can act as brokers. In World War II, there devolved upon some sub-officers the duty of filling out rumor reports – for officers and the upper management of the security apparatus were obsessed with the damage rumor could do. It was during the war that Allport and Postman studied rumors through a series of experiments, in which an image, seen by some subject, was then described by that subject to someone who couldn’t see the image. Then a chain of accounts is produced as the second person tells a third person (who also can’t see the image) about it, and so on. The sadistic element in the experiment (for psychology experiments almost always contain some element that displays the gratuitous power of the experimenter) is that these accounts are made in front of an audience that can see the slide on the screen, while those describing the image have to keep their backs turned to the screen.

Notice two things about Allport and Postman’s experiments. The first is the idea, which forms the whole basis of the experiment, that the story communicated by the rumor is – in contradiction to that reported by, say, the experimenter – essentially distorted. The distortion here is given to us in the frame of the report – although we who read the report cannot ourselves examine the slides, we are told, without any shadow of a doubt, what they depict by the researchers. In fact, of course, these descriptions often carry with them descriptors that are not “contained” in the images. In an experiment made in Britain following Allport’s line after the war, for instance, we are told that one slide is of “students throwing eggs” – which depends for its truth value on, among other things, describing the thrower as a student. But can true and false fama be so easily separated? Does distortion really mean untruth? Whose protocols are in play, here?

The second thing to notice about the Allport/Postman experiments is that they impose an identity on the group of subjects by giving them certain functions, in opposition to another group.

Allport and Postman were not concerned with the function of rumor in maintaining the group so much as they were concerned with the transmission of rumor, which meant studying how a distortion generates a story pattern. A distortion in a sociology paper on rumor that misspells L.A. Bysow’s name (and this has happened in the literature I’ve read) does not generate a story. But it leads, much like the mutation of a gene, to further misspellings in other papers.

This is a minor thing in the subset of sociology devoted to rumor; but assumes an altogether more significant place when it occurs in newspapers and print media. These “ripples” in events bring the researcher up against “soft” matters of fact, which in turn generates a rumor like proving mechanism – a famous instance being the events in Dallas on November 21, 1963 that we call, simplifyingly, the assassination of JFK.

It is worth asking, then, whether rumors can be, among other things, attempts to wrest away that identity power by those upon whom it has been imposed. It is one of the surprises of literature it is shown such respect by the powers that be that they are continually trying to police rumor, or in other words, stories, narratives. The history of the policing of rumor shows a surprising sensitivity by those in power to the view of the ordinary outcasts and non-entities over whom they rule.

Which seems to get us far from the signifying fly. Yet it is perched there, on the frame, I think.

3.

But lets get back to the mouchard.

Flies, as the people in ancient cultures notice, perch both on food and feces. They seem to cross over the boundaries that transgression, reverence, and health draw. There is no sacrifice without the fly.

The mouchards of the Ancien Regime lead us, etymologically – that science that tracks the rumor of sound and sense behind the current word – to this totemic animal, who presides over the contagion and the contagious rumor: the fly. According to an etymological dictionary of 1856 (Noel, Carpentier), the word mouchard “is not an old one in our language, [it] … derives from the word mouche [housefly], flies going out to search their food everywhere, changing places in the wink of an eye; and what appears to confirm this opinion is that one said and one says still moucher for spy, mouche for a spy.

However, there is another story about the word in question here – for the housefly is not, according to Greenburg and Kunich, at the root of musca. Musca derives from the Sanskrit, mukshika, which describes something more like a gnat – the eye fly, musca sorbens, which feeds on secretions of the eye. The fly is shown in lists kept in Mesopotamia, and the gods are compared to flies when they gather around a sacrifice, or fly through the streets. In Lucian’s Praise of the Fly, the connection between the fly and gossip is made part of an origin story:

“Legend tells how Myia (the fly's ancient name) was once a maiden, exceeding fair, but over-given to talk and chatter and song, Selene's rival for the love of Endymion. When the young man slept, she was for ever waking him with her gossip and tunes and merriment, till he lost patience, and Selene in wrath turned her to what she now is. And therefore it is that she still, in memory of Endymion, grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her very bite and bloodthirst tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, and sipping beauty.”

In Steve Connor’s Fly, there is a wealth of associations culled from literature and life – the life, for instance, that is recorded in the trials of witches - between the fly and devils. The fly as a familiar possesses a number of qualities – its metamorphosis from the worm, its feeding on excrement, its omnipresence as a camp follower of human habitations, its quickness, its flight, its prominent eyes, its buzz – that go into the notion of Fama as well. Oddly, Connor doesn’t touch on the subject of the spy as fly, perhaps because the spy in English is free from the fly’s taint which pairs with the French expression.

4.

Is the signifying fly a theme, a motif? Or just a beast, just another human familiar as we make our way and lay our wastes, with its own multiplex way of seeing its opportunities.

Or does the mouth to feces connection point to some more libidinally primal, unconscious thing: a death drive, for instance?

There are some famous instances of flies in modernist literature. For instance, the essay by Robert Musil, Flypaper, which he wrote in 1913 and published in 1914 under a different title. This is a sort of emblematic essay among Robert Musil heads. Ben Marcus has posted the whole thing in English translation here: https://benmarcus.com/smallwork/flypaper/

“Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it—not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there—it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight.”

Notice that Musil unashamedly anthropomorphizes the fly experience. But in as much as the signifying fly is a marker of flighty liminality, the on again off again presence of boundaries – for instance the one between “man” and “animal” – I find that confluence of the human essence and the fly’s footprint nightmarishly correct. Tanglefoot is, after all, devised precisely to hold the fly in place until it dies in place. A strangely insidious weapon against the fly’s essence, speaking to other inventions that might be turned against the human essence in human form – say, in concentration camps. In 1913, the British construction of concentration camps in the Boer war was the product of a past decade, which “liberal” Europe had supposedly left behind. But as 1914 showed, that liberal Europe was dead.

In the interwar period, another Austrian writer, Joseph Roth, wrote an article about visiting Astrakhan that was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926. This article becomes a curious poem about flies. It is evident that Roth has read Musil’s flypaper piece:

„But the people in Astrakhan are not bothered about them [flies]. They don’t feel the flies at all. They look on as these murderous insects gnaw on their meat, their bread, their fruits, and don’t raise a hand. Yes, even in their beards, up their noses, on their foreheads, while the flies walk around, they go on speaking with an even temper and laugh. In the Cafeteria-Café they have given up fighting against the flies, and they don’t even shut up the food in the glass containers: the flies nourish themselves grossly on sugar and chocolate, and we are all used to it. Flypaper is an American discovery that I usually hate more than all the other blessings of culture seems to me a work of the noblest humanity in Astrakhan. But there is not a single strip of this valuable yellow material in all of Astrakhan! I asked in the Café: why don’t you have any flypaper? People shrug and say, Alas, if you had only seen Astrakhan before the war, even two months before the revolution!” The restaurant owner says it, and the merchants. Out of passive resistance, they are supporting the reactionary flies. One day these small beasts will simply swallow great Astrakhan, and with it all the fish and the caviar.”

5.

Hop hop hop. Not the knight’s move, but the signifying fly’s zigzag. The political unconscious in the representation of flies brings us to it above ground, conscious moment in June, 1943, when the Theatre de la cite opened with a new play: Les Mouches, by Jean Paul Sartre. A play that quickly became part of the post-war repertoire, but is performed, first, in occupied Paris.

Because the french term mouchard is basically fink, in English, one doesn’t get the whole semiotic shiver in a play name Les Mouches in occupied Paris – which pairs with a film named Le Courbeau, released that same year and directed by Henri-George Clouzet. Corbeau is a slang term for an anonymous writer of poison letters, long a French custom. To inform, to fink, to stir up rumors, to slander – this concatenation of signifiers were being materially acted out in the city and countryside as the Nazi and Vichy malice disappeared resistors, Jews, Roma and other suspects.

A familiar situation.

The reactionary flies in Sartre’s play are overtly “symbolized” – as Jupiter points out. Leiris, in an essay on the play, remarks on Sartre’s concern with returning, by symbolic means, French “virility” – which was returned, a year later, by mobbing certain woman and shaving their heads and throwing crap on them. The tondues. However, Leiris’ lifelong concern with virility might not exactly be Sartre’s. The play was roasted in the collabo papers. In particular, Alain Labreaux, a French ultra-right anti-semite who was once publicly slapped by Robert Desnos (Labreaux got his revenge by having Desnos arrested by the Gestapo and by insisting they take him on the next convoy out of France – Desnos was murdered at Theresienstadt in 1944), called it a tired emission of the “arriere-garde”. A great compliment from such a collabo writer.

Nowadays, however, we forget what collabo writers could do in Occupied France, and worry about their freedom of speech. Because, well, the flies won.

The Flies was first put on in America in an off broadway production produced by Erwin Piscator in 1947. The NYT review was the usual gum of wisecracks and admissions that, well, the thing was pretty good: “Even to those who regard the Frenchman’s work as good cause to revive the old custom of feeding hemlock to philosophers, the staging of “The Flies” under Erwin Piscator’s supervision must offer an exciting change-of-pace from conventional productions.”

Thinking about flies, I went back and re-read the play. It still works, I think.

Jean Francois Louette has recounted an anecdote told by Piscator’s widow, which is – to return to our Arasse – about framing.

« When the curtain rose » - in Piscator’s 1947 version of the play – « the public which came to see a Greek tragedy saw firstly a documentary film showing the entry of the German army into Paris. It was like a revolver shot : the conquerors passed under the Arc of Triumph smiling, while the population suffered in silence. However, Piscator struck against a lot of opposition vis-à-vis the introduction of the documentary, which was supposed to underline the contemporary political nature of the tragedy. Some people were shocked. Sartre sent his emissary, Simone de Beauvoir, to New York a few days later. After long discussions, Piscator proposed to Simone de Beauvoir a solution. The play would be performed with her in the audience in two version, one with, one without the documentary. She could judge herself, as well as according to the reactions of the audience. The performance of Sartre’s play without the introductory film was an honorable success, but a modest one. The public came to see a play inspired by greek mythology, a classical play: they saw it. In the course of the second evening, the documentary was played showing the Germans entering Paris. The audience felt immediately that The Flies was not just telling the story of Orestes, and that the murder he enacted had another function. They understood that Sartre’s greek tragedy reflected the truth abouty actual events. The experience was so decisive that henceforce the play was represented with this prologue of Piscator’s to his satisfaction… and to Simone de Beauvoir’s.”

I think Piscator’s idea was rather brilliant. It would be nice to show, a la Fahrenheit 9/11, the Flies with a documentary showing Trump coming to D.C. this January, with a bit beginning with January 6, 2021. In B and W, and silent.

The signifying fly making his move.

Zig Zag.

JUPITER. – Ce n'est rien. Un petit talent de société. Je suis charmeur de mouches, à mes heures.

Her doubts - Karen Chamisso

Her doubts

The Angels go in, the Angels go out

The Angels pass through every needle’s eye

But here’s the question – here’s my doubt

Do even the Angels know why?

 

Hear me out, now, Mom and Dad

-          Maybe the Angels are just incapable

Of posing the question of good and bad.

My theory is: Angels have no scruples.

 

To wrestle with them in a desert place

Say the  closing time aisles of the liquor store

When its two in the morning and you know your face

Is a ruin, and even your tongue is sore

 

Is to wrestle with the force des choses

-          The world without problems, the world resolved

Everything lit and precisely posed.

But not wingless me. I’ll never be solved.

THE AGE OF THE LICKSPITTLE

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. As likely is the Nephew of Rameau, Diderot’s under the table masterpiece which first appeared not in French, but in a German translation made by Goethe. It was Rameau that impressed Hegel and found a place in the Phenomenology of Spirit. .

There’s a story Rameau’s nephew tells about a rich tax collector who wants to curry favor with a minister of the King’s. The minister has told the tax collector that he admires the latter’s dog. Now, the tax collector loves the dog. But love is subordinate to transaction in the Ancien Regime world. So to give the dog to the Minister, which would curry favor, seems a no-brainer. But the dog doesn’t like the minister. So the tax collector has a mask made of the minister. With that mask on, he feeds and pets the dog. Then, with the mask off, he has the dog beaten. He repeats this day after day until the dog prefers the minister to the tax collector – and then the tax collector present the dog as a gift to the minister.

It is the kind of ugly story that creates a  a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in as a trained and kept concubine.  But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest that we all tell the worst thing we have ever done. It becomes a competition. An odd kind of competition – a competition of lowness.  As a game, of course, it isn’t serious, but like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious. It both makes the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect and gives the hearer of the tale a handle on the teller.

I have been struck, looking at film clips of Trump’s cabinet meetings, that Trump has an innate sense of the game – the game of the ugly story. Power, for Trump, like power for a Russian serf-owner or power for one of the Ancien Regime fuckers that Sade writes about, must be felt to be power.

In Rameau, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem.  And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty, is an admiration that will degrade the admirer. In his first term, Trump was, as it were, haunted by a story that  he had prostitutes piss on a bed the Obamas used when they visited Moscow. Whether this story is true or not, the gist of it is Trumpian. We see him, in those cabinet meetings, receive the insane tributes of his cabinet members very much the way he, a master of the revels of pissing, would watch a luxurious bed being pissed on by paid for minions.

 

Trump knows one thing that Sade’s fuckers also knew: that the  history of those humiliations will rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator, who will justify himself not be revolting against the master of the revels, but by currying to his whims on a level so deep that one can share in the humiliator’s pleasure. And to do that is to effect an imitation Trump: assuage one’s own wounded pride by the abasement of others  in an endless chain of non-being, going back to the Master.

While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most righteous grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next deportation of orphans, the next degradation of journalists, the next kidnapping of college students.

The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour. Giving up the little doggie – Cruz’s wife and father, for instance - just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

Ratfucking: Biden 2.

 Jake Tapper's account of the decline of Joe Biden and the criminal irresponsibility of the Dems, who decided gerontocracy and genocide was just fine with them, makes me angry all over again. I wish we had a movement that could shoulder aside the Dems. But we don't. So we have to take the party of sloppy seconds and make it into the party of social democracy. Precinct by precinct, school board by school board. 

So, I'm re-posting this from January.

Ratfucking all the way around

So, Biden ratfucked Kamala Harris's campaign by pursuing his policy of letting Israel do whatever the fuck it wanted to in Gaza. Biden's long been for Israeli war crimes. In 1982, he defended Israel's Lebanon incursion, including the masscres at the Shaba and Shatila camps. This is what Begin said Biden said: "Begin’s recollections of that meeting were reported at the time in a mainstream Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonot. Some of the details of what Begin recalls Biden telling him are genuinely shocking, but they seem to now be largely forgotten in Israel — especially a hypothetical Biden floated about the United States bombing cities in Canada. “If attacks were launched from Canada into the US,” Biden remarked, “everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

Although Dem fans have a hard time swallowing this, Biden, first by refusing to follow through on his promise to be a one term prez, which basically subverted the primary season for Dems in 2024, then by showing himself to be the senile old geezer he is in a debate, then by sending upwards of 15 billion dollars in armaments to Israel to wipe out Gaza and playing defense for Israel as most of the world expressed its abhorrence of Israel's genocide, basically gave Trump the election. KH did the best she could for a candidate who had one hundred days to run against a former president who has been campaigning for the past four years. Of course, Trump was immeasurably helped by the criminal negligence of the Biden Justice Department, whose last act was to issue a coulda shoulda report about prosecuting Trump for the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2020.

It is easy to go to town on Biden. The propublica report is totally damning. But myself, I think he is only symptomatic, only the public face of a disease that is getting worse and worse: trying to reconcile plutocracy and democracy in our nasty neolib era.

This has failed everywhere. And everywhere, the political elite has benefited enormously from the neoliberal culture and the robust deregulations that unleashed massive amounts of money to those in the political bubbles (DC, Westminister, Paris, same story).

There is no party in America that we can use for a vehicle to make the fundamental changes that will actually resolve our crises. In the absence of those vehicles, and in the capacity of the Dem party to absorb and disarm civil movements, I myself am in a mood of utmost political pessimism. On the other hand, I also think millions of people are so frustrated with things as they are that we do have an environment in which movements can emerge, as they have done before. That's my hope.

Reading angry, writing angry

 

Question of the day: in what ways does anger distort one’s reading?

Followed by the second question of the day: why would a writer want to provoke a reader to anger? Many texts, and I’m not just talking midnight tweets here but the great texts, purposely provoke the reader. There’s a choice here: one either makes the reader an ally in the writer’s anger, or one makes the reader a victim of it.  

Since this is a question about the overlap of two sets, rhetoric and emotions, we should, perhaps, start in the classic way with Aristotle. In the rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger in social and pragmatic terms:

“Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one's friends.”

 According to Aristotle’s definition, then, anger is the felt correspondent of the law of talion – the law of eye for an eye. Its intentional structure is not: I feel hot, I can’t breath, I have to scream, but – I have to strike out to even up the slight I have received. From Aristotle to Ahab, talion and its ways are the same: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.” The law of talion in ordinary life is one of the great figures in American mythology. It is the Western, it is the private eye, it is the gunplay of the heart we all recognize.

There are ways to play this. And the one that seems to make the most sense, at first, is to enlist the reader in your anger. To make the writer’s anger the reader’s, too. To arouse indignation, the etymological launching pad of which is dignus, worthy in Latin. Appropriate. Honorable. The feeling of indignation, then, is that the world in some situation is awry, things are not as they should be. And this is what is communicated to the reader, by various rhetorical sleights.

There is, of course, that other side to making angry –  which is to anger, to insult.  The writer can write to  ‘slight’ the reader.  From teasing to open insult, this, too, is one of the uses to which a text may be put. It is, however, a rather uncanny or at list risky business. To be insulted on the street one can walk away. Or one can be forced to be angry in turn, such as in a car collision. But the collision of the text and the reader is a different kind of encounter. If I feel I am being treated with verbal abuse, my first impulse is to stop reading. Of course, if this abuse is really about me personally, I might keep reading out of curiosity or to defend myself. But if the writer is including me in a larger group, I have to be complicit to the extent that I read his text. I have to remain with the text in order to receive the slight. Benjamin speaks of the storytellers gesture – his touch on the arm of the listener. Here, it is more like a poke in the eye, or a pinch.

So if the angry writer wants to unload on a certain class of readers, he or she will not normally use smooth tones and or assimilating clausal complexity. Rather, the tone should have a a certain mimetic hecticness. It should be jumpy. It should hit discordant notes. The writer, here, is engaged in anger-arousal. The foe must be wounded, know he is wounded, and feel angry about it. That anger is the writer’s triumph, his trophy.  The text must fascinate and slight at the same time. This text must be a certain kind of stand-up, and we can draw the line here from the Underground man to Lenny Bruce.

Marcus Aurelius, from a stoic position, considered anger as one of the fundamental passions that must be disarmed by the sage. It is not, for Aurelius, a matter of being good so much as a matter of health:  “the anger and distress that we feel at such behaviour bring us more suffering than the very things that give rise to that anger and distress.”

However, anger there will be – Aurelius accepts that this, too, is one of the impulses to which we are subject. But he does not accept that subjection absolutely. In the twelfth book of the Meditations, he advocates, as a counter-power to anger, the power of remembering. It is an extraordinary and I think quite beautiful passage:

“Whenever you take exception to something, you have forgotten that all things come to pass in accordance with the nature of the whole, and that the wrong committed is another’s, not your own, and that everything that comes about always did and always will come about in such a way and is doing so everywhere at this present moment; and you have forgotten how close is the kinship which unites each human being to the human race as a whole, for it arises not from blood or seed but from our common share in reason. You have forgotten, moreover, that the intellect of each of us is a god and has flowed from there, and that nothing is our very own, but that our child, our body, our very breath have come to us from there, and that all turns on judgement; and that the life of every one of us is confined to the present moment and this is all that we have.” You have forgotten that the world can’t, really, be awry. If it is awry, that is just how the world is. You can right a wrong, but you cannot right the world. It holds out against you, and you are in it.

The cognitive counterpart to anger, on this reading, is not just ‘forgetting’ your better self, the self that is above the eternal wrangle for privilege – it is a cosmic forgetting, or forgetting the cosmos: forgetting the eternal return of the same, forgetting who you are related to, forgetting reason itself.

From the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions, then, we would expect that the angry reader is the defective reader, and that the writer who tries to make his reader angry – or at least, the writer who tries to provoke the reader, instead of making the reader indignant – will be unread. In other words, that provocation is futile.

And yet, and yet... provocation is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of modernity. Georges Bernanos begins his polemical work, Immense Cemetaries Under the Moon, by quoting another of his polemical pamphlets in which he wrote:  “J’ai juré de vous émouvoir, d’amitié ou de colère, qu’importe! – I’ve sworn to move you, with friendship or with anger, I don’t care”- in order to repent of trying to rouse up the “anger of imbeciles”. One  would think that, obviously, there is no gain in arousing “imbeciles” to anger against you. But in fact, provocation – rousing the reader to anger – is perhaps the extreme test of style. For the imbecile who stays, who continues to read, even as the reading makes him angry, must stay for some reason. Must, in the end, find the slighting of his opinions, his lifestyle, his existence worth staying with. Of course, one could say that this simply proves how much of an imbecile he must be  – just as rancid meat attracts the fly, insult attracts the injured.

The modernist author, Baudelaire or Flaubert, is driven to insult by the sense of universal stupidity that makes the dreamt of work impossible – in as much as one is infected with that stupidity. And thus, the best work is second best work, an endless clean up operation of cliches and insensibility. Or, to put this in larger terms, if one way of writing is to lure the reader to an act of identification, another way is to lure the reader by the rather strange via negativa of alienating him in an initiatory ritual. To follow the provocations of a writer is to be inducted into following the writer. Reading is, after all, an act of following. William Gass talks about the sort of visual ‘wind” that blows through the written page – the invisible movement of the eye, which is called upon to deliver an image that immediately transcends itself in a concept. The image, then, of the written word is not exactly like our tradition of the idea – which in the empirical tradition is simply a sort of copy of a sense impression – since the written word exists as a meaning, first. Its shape is meaning laden and led. And not only is this so for the bare atom of the word, but for the way the eye follows in some line or another the accumulation of words. Left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up – it is all a matter of following in some direction. To pull away is to break that movement, and this is what one would expect when the movement is directed towards slighting or insulting.

Initiations are of different kinds, using different materials. The writer who actually wants a reader to feel included in an objectionable group has to think for a bit about what she is doing. Oftentimes, this second thought sublimates the insult in the prose, turns it into an accusation, and the text into something vaguely like a courtroom. Anger favors the courtroom as much as love favors the bedroom. In the courtroom, the defendent has no choice but to undergo the injury of the charge. The angry writer tends naturally to make a courtroom out of his text. This still poses the problem of what the reader is supposed to get out of it. Perhaps the reader is caught by a spell – or by a curse.  Josef K. never attempts to flee, although the system of the courts and the police seem incomprehensible to him, and the charge against him is never pronounced. Perhaps if it had been, perhaps if he’d known the charge, the spell would have broken and he would have fled. But the difference between The Trial and the trial one might seek to impose in a text is that the reader can flee. It is, after all, a kangaroo court. But even a kangaroo court stages a mock execution, a symbolic death, and perhaps it is this that both angers the reader and keeps him from breaking off contact. He revolts at his mock effigy, he revolts at being hustled towards a final condemnation, and in his anger he stays.