anger and writing

 

I wrote this in 2013, before the age of the Troll King. It was prescient, or at least I’d claim that it put its finger on some damn thing in the national consciousness.

It concerns a question: in what ways does anger distort one’s reading

 

Anger, of course, is sometimes purposely provoked by a text. Sometimes that provocation is meant to align the reader and the writer in a shared indignation. Aristotle, in the rhetoric, 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. This way of construing the feeling, then, is the business of the the author who wants to arouse indignation. This author wants, in other words, for the reader to be on his side.

There is, of course, another side to making angry – for writing can be exactly the kind of ‘slight’ that Aristotle mentions. From teasing to open insult, this, too, is one of the uses to which a text may be put. It is, however, a stranger use, in a way, for reading, unlike being subject to some verbal abuse, requires complicity on the part of the reader. The reader, here, must remain with the text in order to receive the slight.

 

This latter requirement creates a certain hecticness in the second kind of anger-arousing text. The text must fascinate and slight at the same time.

 

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.”

 

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, Cemeteries 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 friendly feelings  or with anger, I don’t care”. He recognizes that this desire for a pure reaction is a vice, which must be repented. It is no good trying to make the heathen rage. It is no good trying to rouse up the “anger of imbeciles”.  The difference between using your polemical talents for good and for bad is the difference between dentistry and simply licking a sore tooth.

And one sees Bernanos’s point. What is the gain from arousing “imbeciles” to anger against you? Or, to put it in 2020 terms, owning the libtards?  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.

 

So: there are two ends to the experience of anger and literature, in the broadest sense: one is in the writing, and one is in the reading. One is the experience of reading something that made me angry, and that I felt was designed to make me – as a certain type of person – angry. The other is the experience of writing something to specifically anger a certain type, a certain audience one has in one’s mind like the buzzing from a mosquito one might have in one’s ear.

If we take Aristotle as giving us a social definition of anger, and Marcus Aurelius as giving us a description of the cosmic damage anger does, what are we to make of the modern character of provocation?

 

Why would an author want to provoke his readers?

In a sense, I’d argue that modernity is tied to provocation – or I should say the aesthetics of modernity. 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 – but attaching him nevertheless to what reading has to be, 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.

That instinctive pulling away is, in fact, part of the reason that giving offense is a high stylistic challenge. I began thinking about anger and reading when I was going over what was written in 2002 and 2003, recently, mainly about politics, so let’s take an example from that set. When I read, for example, some article by Christopher Hitchens from 2002, arguing – ostensibly – for the war in Iraq, but really committed simply to slagging those who are against the war, I break off contact. I was against the war, so what is the point? It is not that I am unpersuaded as much as persuasion is not the issue. The issue is whether or not I am going to participate in my own lynching. And yet... if the savagery that I was subjected to had something fascinating in it, would I have stayed, would I have followed?

It is, perhaps, more understandable that a writer would want to offend. Or at least that one might write something to offend in order to project one’s own anger. But the writer who actually wants a reader who is among those whom one wants to offend has to think for a bit about what he 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 exection, 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.

This is, of course, the hope of the writer whose texts derive ultimately, secretly, perhaps without his even knowing it, from the village talent for cursing.

 

 

 

ORWELL AND THE 1619 PROJECT

 

The disputes about the 1619 project, which claims that the American republic from the beginning was about slavery and the suppression of Black humanity, has been whirling off and on in the background lately. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who proclaimed that slavery was a “necessary evil”, has proposed a law defunding the teaching of the 1619 project – which is all, of course, in the name of canceling evil cancel culture – a sort of absurd ending to the absurdities of the moral panic among the unfireable portion of the commentariat. Sean Wilentz, a strong Clintonite and liberal, was dismayed to be yoked into Tom Cotton’s crusade, and has spent some time distinguishing his brand of history – which sees the constitution as a marvelous instrument that cleverly avoided the topic of slavery and was thus objectively anti-slavery –from Cotton’s. 

For those interested in the older, liberal American historiography, where the faith is that America has from the beginning been a nation tending towards progressive moral values, it is interesting to see the mishmash the old school Americanists have to make of the obvious, the moves to avoid what stares you in the face: the U.S. was originally a nation with millions of slaves, owned by millions of whites, with Northern states adopting an anti-slave and pro-segregationist position regarding African-Americans. I’d recommend a thread by Nicholas Guyatt, who gave Wilenz such a hard time in his review of No Property in Man in the New York Review of Books. https://twitter.com/NicholasGuyatt/status/1291724388174385152  In the thread, Guyatt connects Madison’s conviction that slavery was wrong (in spite of the fact that Madison was a slaveowner) with Madison’s conviction that black Americans had to be shipped back to Africa – the latter being Madison’s condition for “emancipation”.

All of this is part of a larger emergence from the Cold War myth of the “free world”. The dawn of democracy in America didn’t happen until the 1960s, with the fall of Jim Crow restrictions on black voting and political participation. In France, it wasn’t until the 1940s that women could vote, and there was no voting rights for citizens of French colonies. Similarly, the UK was an empire that basically ruled India as it wanted to until 1947, Kenya until 1956, etc.

Orwell, in from one of his less quoted essays, Not Counting N***, written in 1939, made the same point. Orwell takes on the idea that the alliances shaping up are between “democracies” and the fascists. He is ostensibly reviewing a book by a Mr. Streit, advocating a union of the Western Democracies:

 

“Mr Streit himself is not a hypocrite, but his vision is limited. Look

again at his list of sheep and goats. No need to boggle at the goats

(Germany, Italy and Japan), they are goats right enough, and bilhes

at that. But look at the sheep ! Perhaps the USA will pass inspection

if one does not look too closely. But what about France ? What about

England ? What about even Belgium and Holland ? Like everyone of

his school of thought, Mr Streit has coolly lumped the huge British

and French empires—in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting

cheap coloured labour—under the heading of democracies!“

 

Orwell had a blind spot about America, which he often confused with the country in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. He knew and sometimes gestured at the apartheid, but he never really had a clear vision of how central it was to the United States – a vision on par with his clear-sighted view of the meaning and function of the colonies. Until a couple of years ago, Orwell’s view that the Democracies were props for a race-based oligarchy would not have found any space in the New York Times. Now, with the 1619 project, it has: with significant upset to the heirs of the Cold War anti-communist coalition.

These larger forces are what connect the diverse, rather manic responses of the Never-Trump crowd, the 90s liberalism crowd, and the anti-cancel culture crowd. It is one thing to call the Iraq invasion a mistake, but to doubt that the United States is a nation animated by a moral call – rather than just a nation – really seems, to these people, a plunge into relativism and nihilism.

!

 Good article, and a good reminder. When they opened the schools too soon, in 1831, during the cholera pandemic, one prof decided to give his usual lecture series. He died. His name was Hegel.

I think Hegel's face should be put on posters against schools reopening without lowering the amount of covid in the school district. As it was said in the Phenomenology, the Spirit is against this shit.

"On Thursday, the 10th of November, Hegel returned to his lectern and his classroom. As was his habit, he gave an exemplary lecture. With much force and energy, it was said. On Saturday, he sat in on examinations. Sunday, his wife had to disinvite friends who were coming over to eat dinner. Hegel had been seized by vomiting and spasms, which lasted the whole night. On monday, the 14th, at 5:30 p.m., he died, the doctors being helpless to do anything for him."

When Complacency is an option.

For those who are connoisseurs of political reporting banality, the ending of John Cassidy's column is another log on the fire: Here's the last graf:

'For anyone who wants to see Trump lose, it may be tempting to view parts of his reëlection campaign as a money-making scheme, and a family affair. Yet even with his abject failure to respond to the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, polling indicates that the President has roughly the same base of support that he’s always had: according to the FiveThirtyEight poll average, his approval rating stands at 41.4 per cent. Trump and the viewers of “Triggered” and “The Right View” won’t concede of their own accord. Between now and November 3rd, Biden and his supporters will have to go all out to defeat them. Complacency isn’t an option.

"

This might be the 3,403,122nd time I have read that "complacency isn't an option." Which brings up the question, when is complacency an option? The answer to that, appparently, is when politics has to do with wealth inequality, universal medical care, global warming, the pandemic, the fall of the working class, the rise of deaths of despair. There, complacency is not only an option, it is a preference.

For a special announcement - A Karen Chamisso poem

 

 

“Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses 

deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.”

Details drag us down

- our epic lives in little teardrops drown

 

Ain’t nobody great in this joint?

My lost shadow wants to make a point.

Myself, I’m wondering whether fragments will do

is it an angelic satisfaction to be true

 

to my interruptions? As a poet on the gal side

as a citizen of my full-of-promise stride

I’ve let the petites choses get under my skin

- and now I’m gonna whisper to my tonic and gin.

The Causal Nexus and the American miracle belief

One of the funnier aspects of "objective journalism" is its relationship to causality. We live in a world that is well mapped out, on the micro level, by then statements. You throw a stone into a pond - a cause - and then waves spread out from the center.

The specialness of America, however, interrupts this story for the journos. I noticed this often in the Iraq occupation. Although it was easy to see insurgency would happen, easy to see that the U.S. would respond as it always responds in low intensity warfare - by trying to save the lives of American troops, which inflicts much more casualties on those it is occupying , whilst trying to win their hearts and minds - and that this was obviously going to destablilize the place progressively - the journalists always had a conditional: maybe in the next three months things would get much better! Cause, miracles happen! A similar belief that the causal nexus shows mercy on American Goodness shows up in the reporting about the election. Maybe Covid is gonna disappear! Maybe the economy will come roaring back!

One can't be totally certain. God might tell us all, in a loud voice, that Melania is really the newest incarnation of the Virgin Mary. But the odds are low.

This is why it is fun to read the D.C. insiders and the political writers, who all swallow this stuff and create elaborate analogies with, say, Biden now and Dukakis in 1988. Ah, I remember the analogies of Iraq like they were yesterday - analogies are the go-tos, the plan B of the casually illiterate.

By November there will be at least 200 thou dead of Covid in the U.S. There will be at least 35 million unemployed, and millions more who don't count. The landlords will be bleeding, and millions will be trying desperately to find someone to move in with. The machine has been started, and we are not going to see it stop.

1Jim Haug

The colonized and the exiled

Normally, histories of Europe talk about colonialism in terms of a mother country, or center, and a periphery. But in actuality, the periphery was located in Europe itself. It was located in Europe’s peasantry. Colonialism and the agricultural revolution in Europe are parts of the same process – the process that gave us capitalism and, more generally, the process of production that has become the norm, either achieved or striven for, across ideologies, for the last century.

The doubling of the European and the American savage is the secret heart of the noble savage myth. While conventional histories attribute the noble savage idea, wrongly, to Rousseau, and attribute the savagery solely to the Indians, in actuality the topos was as much about the European peasant, about the laws and norms concerning the forest and the field, which is what Europe largely was, as much as America, up through the 17th century in England and France. And of course all through the 19th century for much of Prussia and Austro-Hungary, Italy and Spain. The peasant was always considered a savage by the city intellectual – Engels called them simply stupid, idiots, clowns (a word for rustic in the 16th century, from, one school holds, colōnus “farmer, settler – from which comes, of course, colony) - and in Vienna, around 1900, intellectuals would say things like Vienna lives in the 20th century while Galician peasants live in the fifteenth.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading Claudio Magris excellent study of Joseph Roth and the culture of exiles from the Ostjuden. It is from Magris book that I learned that Roth, who was born in a shtetl, wrote an impassioned study in 1927, Juden auf Wanderschaft, of the culture and immigration of Jews from the shtetl. It begins with thunderously excommunicating introduction that reminds me very much of the Black power high notes of the 1960s:

“This book waives all applause and approval, but also even the contradictions and criticism of those who disregard, disrespect, hate and persecute the Eastern European Jews. It is not turned to those Western Europeans who, out of the fact that they were born to elevators and toilets, deduce the right to make bad jokes about Romanian lice, Galician bedbugs, and Russian fleas. This book waives as well the “objective” reader, who with his cheap and sour good intentions squints at the East and its inhabitants from the shaky towers of Western civilization; lamenting, out of pure humanity, the lack of good sewage and out of fear of infection wants to imprison the poor immigrants in barracks, leaving the solution of a social problem to mass death. This book will not be read by those who deny their own father or grandfather, who through chance escaped from the barracks. This book is not written for a reader who will take it badly of the author that he treated the object of his study with love instead of “scientific empiricism”, which is another name for boredom. “

The kickass and risky gambit of telling off your reader from the first sentence – that is how you know you are reading a writer for whom books and molotov cocktails are interchangeable. Or at least, who knows that this is one circuit of exchange.

Magris’s book, which in French is Loin d’ou, hasn’t, I think, been translated from Italian to English. Too bad. It prods a thickly covered historical lacuna: under the murder of the European Jews there was a culture that we miss more and more today, a culture in which the dialectic between the prophet – the magghid – and modernity’s “symbol workers” was seeded with ways of thinking through an escape from the ruthless cruelty of the modern treadmill of production. This too was murdered.