Digressions&Impressions

Historiography of the Enlightenment in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 2

Kandiaronk: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment? … 
    You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.

Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk’s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,– of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.---David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, pp. 54-55

This is the second digression on The Dawn of Everything (here is the first); and here tweet impressions of each chapter (see here for links). When the book first appeared, David Bell (a historian of the French Enlightenment at Princeton) skewered the book for its misrepresentations of the French enlightenment, even going so far as to use "scholarly malpractice." Soon, this was followed by a generous and sensible, but at times critical review by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times. This review also strongly suggests that the characterization of Enlightenment thought is flawed. Meanwhile, Justin Smith (Paris), who arguably is the leading historian of early modern philosophy of my (now senior--shit times flies) generation, gave the book a very positive review (here). Smith notes, quite rightly that their achievement can be found in "their sympathetic plaidoyer for the singular reality of lives lived in the past, their commitment to the idea that these were real people, as weird and idiosyncratic and unfathomable by quantitative methods as you and I....It’s a weird thing to have to insist on: that there is something that it was like to be a member of the prehistoric leisure class, which is to say to have been a prehistoric human being." However, when he comes to their treatment of Lahontan's Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, he expresses considerable skepticism about their insistence that 'Adario' just is expressing the views of the historical Kandiaronk (a Huron statesman).* I then read a critical (as of yet) unpublished review by Helen de Cruz (who among her specialities is an expert on the philosophy of anthropology and the cognitive sciences). 

As it happens the last few years, I have been reflecting a bit on the encounter of Europeans with the new world as reflected in early modern (political) philosophy. And so, before I say anything else, I think it is highly likely that European philosophy was shaped by the Jesuit Relations as Graeber and Wengrow suggest (p. 44ff), and that it makes a lot of sense to look for traces of (American) indigenous influence on European thought. Prompted by Ryan Hanley, my own focus has been on the Jesuit reports on China, but I noticed, while preparing this post, that Leibniz comments on Lahontas and 'Adario' in a letter from 1710, and does not treat him as fictional. (This letter is discussed in scholarship on Lahontas.) 

In various undergraduate courses, I teach Machiavelli's The Prince, which seems to have circulated as early as around 1513, but was published in 1532; I teach More's Utopia, which was first published in 1516, and I teach the Las Casas-Sepulveda (or The Valladolid) debate (1550–1551), centered on Las Casas' Defense of the Indians read at the Valladolid debate (and drawing on his earlier works). I mention these because they are very well known through the next few centuries; all of these texts are much earlier than Montaigne's Essays, which seems a common reference among Appiah, Smith, and Bell. Now, of these three works, The Prince is rather provincial. Even though it has quite a bit to say about Mediterranean politics, the Turkish barely register, and the other Islamic powers are ignored. It is a surprisingly Euro-centered book.

By contrast, More's Utopia is clearly responding to, and drawing on, another Florentine's adventures in the Americas, Amerigo Vespucci’s The Four Voyages. Utopia is important because, in passing, great civilizations of the Americas ("New Castille," that is, what we would call Peru) are mentioned in passing, "they came to towns, and cities, and to commonwealths, that were both happily governed and well peopled." And it is strongly implied that the locals have knowledge of navigation and astronomy (but lack a compass). In The Dawn of Everything, Utopia is mentioned in passing, as an exemplary work representing "civic prosperity and hierarchy," (p. 336) but little more. The fictional city that gives Utopia its name, is generally not treated as hierarchical because property is in common and money abolished (!), and it is in many respects rather egalitarian, but it does have a political hierarchy: in which the federation is governed by elected representatives.

In addition, the whole book, Utopia, is framed by a critique of the legal practices then current among Europeans (recall back in 2013). In fact, a stadial theory (with the Bible being the savage baseline!) is inscribed in this account! And the implication, as I noted a few years ago, is that the Europeans are the real savages (a point echoed by Montaigne and by eighteenth century legal reformers like Beccharia (recall) and Sophie de Grouchy). So, this precedes Kandiaronk's criticism by considerable  time. Now, some indigenous described in Utopia are treated as savages and ripe for colonialization, so I don't want to suggest More's book is unproblematic (recall here; here). 

Las Casas  was himself steeped in the Spanish conquest and control of the Americas. (By comparison, Justin Smith does mention Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote a generation after Las Casas.) He wrote detailed histories of the conquest (and its brutalities), and echoing the work by some fellow Dominicans, he famously attacked the Aristotelian view of natural slavery (in which the indigenous were natural slaves), from the (more biblical) perspective of natural equality. Throughout his adult life he attacked the manner of Spanish rule, and as a bishop refused absolution to slave owners. Las Casas was very famous for the next few centuries. (Unfortunately, he is the originator of the idea -- which he later much regretted -- of importing African slaves to the Americas.)

Now, Las Casas' rival, Sepulveda invents (recall) the disastrous trope that the natives are inferior, and like backward children: *"If you know the customs and manners of different peoples, that the Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacent islands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults." This idea has a disastrous afterlife. In the Essay, Locke, who (alas) was rather invested in the colonial enterprise, frequently treats the savage mind as if a child's (see, especially, 1.2.27), and he suggests they don't think general propositions (1.2.12). The effect of this, and the tremendous influence of his anthropology, is -- as Chris Berry, Sandra Peart, and David Levy taught me--, that for some Enlightenment thinkers, it became natural to equate indigenous people with an earlier ('savage') age or stage of the development of the human species. It's this view that became influential among nineteenth century imperialists and their anthropological handmaidens, who draw on a contrast (which gets its most eloquent articulation, alas, in David Hume (recall here; recall here, drawing on Chirimuuta)) between civilization and savagery to justify conquest. Much of The Dawn of Everything is on the legacy of such views in anthropology and popular culture since.

But as plenty of scholars have noted, the Lockean anthropology, while influential, has notable critics including Adam Smith (recall, also with a passing comment on The Dawn of Everything) and Beattie (recall).  Hume and Smith both had stadial theories. But, as the previous sentence suggests, they have very different details. This is important because Graeber and Wengrow suggest -- and I was really fascinated and impressed by this -- that stadial theories are invented by Turgot (a contemporary of Smith) as a response to the "indigenous critique" (of the sort quoted at the top of this post), although presented by Madame de Graffigny in fictional form. And as the rightly suggest (p. 60), Turgot draws on what I have been calling a Lockean anthropology and so for him the earlier stages are vestiges of our earlier selves. (I think there is a direct influence of Locke on Turgot, but leave that aside.) This kind of thinking, inspired the earlier anthropologist mindset that studying indigenous types was kind of a window into our past (like the light of distant stars). But as I documented in my book, Smith's critique of this whole approach was well known in the nineteenth century (although some (recall) also treated him like a Lockean in these matters). While I am happy that Wengrow and Graeber are critical of the use that people like Pinker make of the Enlightenment, their own approach also flattens the intellectual landscape (and the intellectual roots of their own discipline).

Locke matters to the larger story in other way, and especially in light of the passage quoted above, but before we get there a brief detour with regard to  Las Casas, who is not mentioned in the book, but he is alluded to in the following passage:

Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn’t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.
    The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity? Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.--The Dawn of Everything, pp. 32-33.**

But this story does no justice to the fact that people like Las Casas attributed genuine civilization to the Americans. And, in fact, when Suarez (in 1612), the greatest of the Salamanca school, develops his state of nature theory to justify a social contract (recall), his is ground in an account of the Fall, where political life originates in patriarchic clans (and this is by no means projected onto the Americas). So, the story that Graeber and Wengrow tell while not implausible skips a few steps. (In my own view it is more likely that Hobbes and Grotius are drawing on Book 3 of the Laws and Lucretius.)

So, Hobbes' choice, in chapter 13 of Leviathan, to project the state of nature on "many places of America" (not all) actually cries out for a better explanation. These Americans are treated as anarchist, but sadly find themselves in a war of all. But unlike the later Locke, Hobbes is a natural egalitarian and so his Americans are not children or idiots. For while they are savages, they "are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great." (Chapter 46) It's true they not philosophers, but that's because, on his theory, the state of nature prevents the development of higher sciences.

So, where are we? There was a huge sixteenth discussion of the Americas in Europe. Thomas More's brother-in-law, John Rastell, has an interest in exploring Newfoundland (but the expedition ended near Ireland in a mutiny). It's a problem that this material has not been properly assimilated yet into scholarship of the Enlightenment (despite Pagden's efforts). And we see that from the start, that is the early sixteenth century, this is the occasion for stadial theories. But these are used to criticize the European (late Feudal) status quo.

I could stop here, but I want to offer a remark on the quoted passage from Lahontan. Kandiaronk's position is completely compatible with Locke's description of the state of nature in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise (1689). For Locke (recall) the invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself) (see sect 35-48), and the need for laws that can settle disputes (94). And then in section 49 he writes, "thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known." (That is an important contrast with More's account of the Utopian abolition of money.)

 I have no reason to doubt the words attributed to Kandiaronk are his. But the position was not wholly original. (Remember Locke's state of nature is actually rather pleasant; that's part of his criticism of Hobbes.) The difference being that Locke thinks the institution of money and property have beneficial outcomes that are endorsed, whereas Kandiaronk sees in them (what soon became known as Mandevillian) vices. That is to say Lahontan's readers could assimilate what they read to an already familiar position. In addition, while it is true that Lahontan's work influenced other Enlightenment books that used and perhaps drew indigenous critiques of Europe, Lahontan himself was not wholly original. He had been preceded by a somewhat mysterious and wildly popular work (recall) Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (L'Espion Turc), which was written from the perspective of a Turkish visitor to France. Of course, that work did not offer an indigenous critique, but an oriental(ist) one! And finally, Fenelon's The adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulisses (1699) was widely influential (and overshadowed Lahontan) and offered a potent attack on European hierarchies founded in luxury. But it projected the ideal into the remote (Greek) past. 

None of this amounts to a charge of scholarly malpractice. I learned quite a bit from their critical treatment of Enlightenment stuff. I would happily give the book to a nerdy kid wanting to be inspired by intellectuals taking on big problems. And, as a scholar, I am glad they have re-opened the debate over the influence of indigenous views on European intellectual life in such a provocative way. My suggestion is that this influence is real, but that it should be pushed back into the early sixteenth century. And that many of the tropes (both bad and noble) that shape debates since, actually can be found already there. 

Okay, let me stop here for now. And leave the question of why we are stuck now, for future occasion. 

 

 

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 4.: on the limits of Anarchism

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve. The man s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. Like you said, I was to count people.--From Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, p. 407 (page-number are from a 2002 adobe e-reader edition)

This post is the fourth in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.; here for pt 3.).

It is commonly claimed that Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed offers a positive representation of a planet-wide anarchist society (on a planet Annares). This is no surprise because the narrative offers extensive details on the functioning of this society. In addition, Ursula Le Guin has herself invited this interpretation by adding a brief clarificatory note to one of her short stories, "The Day Before The Revolution." The story is about a day in the life of Odo, the intellectual visionary, the philosophical prophet, of Annares, where Odo's writing and her exemplary life function as the shared principles and touchstone of the anarchist program. This dedicatory note (recall) is "In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972" explicitly inserts the story into the history of anarchist theorizing mentioning ""early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman."*

In addition, the action of The Dispossessed, which centers on Shevek, is all about the tension (I almost wrote 'dialectic') between an ossified version of anarchism and anarchism as a perpetual work in progress. And so any flaws noted in Annares can charitably be interpreted as evidence of the need for the more dynamic understanding of anarchism "properly conceived," that "was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process." (230) This Shevek attributes to what we may call true Odo-nism. And the narrative of The Dispossessed is itself plausibly understood as a narration of his growth from (recall) political "fool" (123) to this more mature understanding.

So far so good. And in what follows I do not want to deny that the representation of Anarres, a kind of Socratic political theory, is a major contribution to Anarchist thought. It is especially important because this is not an anarchism that turns its back on technology and goes back to nature: "they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods." (124) But in what follows I suggest that Le Guin herself offers hints that there are limitations to Shevek's character (development) which might suggest more fatal flaws in Annares. After all the subtitle of the book is "An Ambiguous Utopia."

But first a relatively small point. So, there are two important features of the political economy of Anarres. First, their economy consists of cooperatives or syndics which are centrally coordinated from the top-down. Now unlike the economies familiar from the Soviet Union and its allied states, this is not a state capitalism. Anarres rejects property and money. Second, the economy has no mechanism to exchange surplus in one sector (say energy in which it is abundant) for needs in another section (say food). The second feature is a consequence of a kind of self-imposed autarky and political rejection of the mother planet, Urras, from which the revolutionaries were (self) exiled. Jointly, these two features make the economy of Anarres rather fragile, especially against famines in which all kinds of transportational and logistical bottle necks develop and in which starvation is a real possibility. In fact, at one point, during the famine Shevek becomes a locally important coordinator who literally decides the rations which might mean life and death for his community (see, especially, p. 407 quoted above).

Now, it's pretty clear that one of the side-effects or perhaps part of Shevek's mission to Urras is, in fact, the opening up of exchange of a commerce in ideas between Anarres and Urras. (And once on Urras he discovers a wider Hainish universe the possibilities of which are expanded by Shevek's intellectual breakthroughs and revealed to us in the last few chapters.) So, there is a sense in which the novel suggests that a truer Anarchism is open to the world/universe. And, so, perhaps this suggest that the limitations on the second feature might be overcome.

However, spatial distance might make planetary exchanges of commodities too slow and too costly to prevent famines. And Shevek's own approach (recall) is to promote nobly communism of knowledge, not trade. So it is by no means obvious that joining the league of worlds would be decisive on this score, and does not solve the coordination problems that are a consequence of central planning.

So, since there is no sign that Shevek is willing to promote the introduction of markets to solve the coordination problems that beset Anarres (and turn it into a more anarcho-capitalist society), it is by no means obvious that these can be solved. As an aside, it is worth noting that the (Hainish) League of Worlds seems loosely modeled on Kantian ideas as presented in Perpetual Peace. And Kant did think that such a League would need to be composed of commercial, trading republics. Some other time, I return to the Hainish League.

The other limitation of Anarres is that for all its egalitarian ethos, it has not, in fact, eliminated patriarchy. What I am about to discuss has long held me up writing about The Dispossessed. Shevek quietly presupposes and leans on women's labor of his scientist partner Tevek, who does menial tasks for him (see especially pp 488-489 and here paging of his manuscript). More important, Shevek sexually assaults the sister of one of his hosts on Urras, Vea. While the alcohol induced assault is very troubling by itself, it's his reaction once sober after that is, perhaps, especially jarring. While he feels humiliated, he never recognizes his own assault for what it is -- rather, he represents Vea as having betrayed him (355) -- and he rejects feeling any "guilt" (356) or shame, and this is crucial, nor does he seek any kind of atonement for it.

Now, that he rejects 'guilt' is no surprise because he has been taught to despise it. Guilt is associated with property, and in the consequentialist ethic of Anarres it's undoubtedly too backward-looking and too reminiscent of the kind of religions they have rejected. One can admire (recall) the cultivated, anticipatory "sensitivity" or sympathy (or empathy) with the pains and "suffering" of others that regulates behavior and mutual aid (393) among these anarchists, while still noticing that the absence of guilt and genuine atonement prevents forms of accountability worth having. They have norms that banish people from society (sending them to asylums), but nothing that allows people to -(ahh) own up to their wrongs to their victims, or themselves. 

And once one faces up to the significance of this sexual assault that Shevek simply sets aside, one notices that there is a structural undertone of always present violence on Anarres. Compared to the wars of the twentieth century, Anarres is quite pacific. But the book is literally book-ended by actual violence in chapter 1 and the threat of violence toward Shevek in the final chapter.  And while Shevek was still a comrade in good standing back home on Anarres, we see him in an unprovoked fist-fight with his near-name sake Shevet for no other reason that the near nominal identity causes a lot of mix-ups. (Shevet is the aggressor.) And once impartial bystanders decide that it would be a 'fair fight' (65) nobody intervenes to stop the punching despite the fact that this is an organicist society with an abundance of internal norm-enforcing social control. And after the fight a girl gives her body to him. 

Once one is willing to acknowledge that Anarres has more trouble than merely too much politics at the center, one sees that is very much a closed society of walls. This much Shevek himself diagnoses (with the help of his friends). But in so far as we are invited to reflect on the relentless forward looking ethic of Anarres, -- after he assaults Vea, Shevek wastes little time to engage in (a noble) political revolution -- we might well come to think that a society that is so incapable of registering harm done to each other may well be more rotten than just a certain amount of stasis in its cultural and social life. 

Again, this is manifested in troubled gender relations. Part of the political conflict that we are shown between Shevek and his friends with the more establishment critics, is also represented symbolically between his mother Rulag and his friend Bedap. And the reader can't help but wonder if the intensity of the conflict between mother and son isn't fueled by their mutual earlier personal rejection in accord with the anti-family norms of Anarres. The claims of family are treated as instance of property on Anarres, but this means that forms of what we might call natural sympathy are systematically suppressed or discouraged. 

And while one may well end up concluding that the anarchism of Anarres governed by true-Odonism in which a more robust openness to other perspectives may well be the best possible polity given the imperfections of human nature, Le Guin invites us to size up its true shortcomings carefully.+

On Covid Tedium and Regretting Oblomov

One of the strangest features of my slow Covid recovery (recall here; here; here; and here) is the pattern of (ahh) asymmetric cognitive impairment. I don't mean here just the loss of skill in doing things which I have associated with a kind of gappiness in my consciousness.

About two months in I am still incapable of reading books and spending more than thirty consecutive minutes on responding to emails. If I try to do do so I get a headache and/or a fatigue that feels like my scull is filled with a lead ball about two-thirds its size. The same effect is also produced by conversation, which I find very taxing, watching lectures, writing blog posts, and even relatively short walks. I still find most music unbearable even when well rested and without other symptoms. And when I am fatigued, even background humming or whistling can set off irritability and a kind of noise in my brain.

By contrast, I can spend my bedridden hours watching food shows and action flicks on Netflix; play online Scrabble; or scroll through Twitter and Facebook feeds. I am also aware enough of my situation to write emails withdrawing from commitments, and to spend my time reflecting on what I might do with my life, how to earn some income, if I never manage to recover the skill, that is capacity, to read and teach philosophy again.

I could, I suspect, write philosophy in short increments. But it couldn't be a professional or scholarly philosophy because I can't engage with other people's writings let alone the literature. In reflecting on this, I sometimes feel regret that my adopted philosophical style, even in these digressions, where I don't have to play by the rules of scholarship, is structured by the artifice of the imaginary, disciplined conversation with others; as distinct from, and opposed to, say, direct contact with concepts or arguments.

The other day I was watching The Grandmaster, a late and self-consciously more artistic and philosophical entry in the IP man series of kung fu films. In the key, climatic scene one of the protagonists (played by Zhang Ziyi), who has just compared her commitment to honoring the code of her family and her filial duty,  says, "To say there are no regrets in life is just to fool yourself." 

When you have spent more than seven weeks in bed, you have plenty of time to linger on one's life choices. So, perhaps that's why the just-quoted scene from The Grandmaster affected me greatly. I decided her stance is a fine response to the "I regret nothing" attitude of hedonism. (It is no surprise that Edith Piaf's song gets appropriated so often in commercials.) Of course, a life with only regrets may be no life at all! 

The existence and acknowledgment of regret is not a sunk cost fallacy, but rather a consequence of accepting or tracking the consequences of meaningful choices. The realization that one could meaningfully have, perhaps from a certain vantage point should have, done otherwise is a sign that one takes a certain kind of responsibility or ownership over one's actions.* It need not entail that one would do anything different. If one dislikes sentimentalism, one can call regret an aesthetic by-product of being accountable to self.

As I scan the books in my library, including the piles of books I had intended to read the past few months, I realize regretfully that despite my familiarity with its conceit, I never read Oblomov. I wonder if I had read it, I would have been better prepared for the in-activity, the Oblomovitis of covid long hauling.

As I was lying in the dark, the vacuous spinning of my insomnia wearing off, I decided that I regret I never read Oblomov would make a fine title of my aphoristic, covid memoires. 

 

 

 

On Books and Strangers in Libraries and the Tube

Yesterday, in the tube, I was reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel). It's a long book, and despite a teenage infatuation with Narziß und Goldmund, I have been ambivalent about reading any more Hesse. (I intensely disliked Siddhartha, which I read in college, and Der Steppenwolf, which I could not finish.) Despite my misgivings about Hesse, I had bought it in paperback last year because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's  recent (and excellent), Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here).

I enjoy letting me reading habits be shaped by the quiet recommendations of fellow scholars. While I was contemplating the silent web of allusions that connect the formation of my library, I realized that I had stopped reading and was starting at the angelic infant quietly sitting across from me. Or to be precise, I was following his (her?) gaze as s/he explored the confined surroundings of our subway car. I wondered if joint attention really was involuntary.

My silent reveries were interrupted by a pleasant voice diagonally across from me, who informed me that I was reading an excellent book. I looked at her, and said, thank you for that encouragement, I had been uncertain I would finish it. She said resolutely, it gets better the more you read of it. I looked down at my copy, I was on page 154, and wondered at what page I would surrender myself over to the book's life-world. When I looked back at the lady, she had reverted back to the resolute norm not to make eye-contact with anybody in the tube. Before I was aware of what was happening, the angelic infant was dragged out of the tube at Camden Town. 

I had noticed before that the book I would read could attract some comment from other, otherwise resolutely no eye-contact passengers. And once, while exiting the tube at Westminster, I had been given a book I had inquired about over my protests. My benefactor cut my off, as the doors shut, with a compelling I work for Penguin, I will treat this as a marketing expense.

While waiting for the elevator that would take me from the underground level to the exit, I noticed a guy reading Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I had seen him on my ride into town earlier in the day; we had been compelled to leave our train, when, while "being held to regulate traffic" at Chalk Farm (I love the name of that station), it was changed from the Morden via Bank to the Morden via Charring Cross line.

I felt a strange excitement to see one of my favorite books being read (recall)  on the London Underground (twice in a day no less). I suddenly understood the pleasant voice's desire to share. So, I mentioned to dude, that's a great book, I hope you are enjoying it. He responded without hesitation, I dislike science fiction, but it was my reading group's choice and so far I am enjoying it. For no apparent reason, while we were entering the elevator, I decided to volunteer, I love teaching her in my utopia/dystopia classes. I could see he was eyeing the book I was holding, Where do you teach, he said with surprise, while I was as subtly as possible trying to make it impossible for him to catch the title of the book. I did not want to talk about Hesse.

I am writing this a day later in the British Library just as a patron sits down next to me with a big pile of books including Stormtrooper Families by Wackerfuss. My friend Jeff Bell coined the term heterobibliophilia, to capture the particular form of scholarly voyeurism when one peek at the books and manuscripts on tables temporarily vacated by other scholars taking a break in the library (recall also this post). I am suddenly grateful that the no-eye-contact-rule norm is even stronger in the British Library than in the tube.* 

As the elevator went up, and we were making small-talk, his eye caught Hesse, and he said with real warmth, as I knew he would, I loved Narcissus and Goldmund. I admitted that my once favorable views on it had changed for the worse a long time ago. At the street corner we were about to part; he firmly shook my hand and said, I am Ned, it was a pleasure. I took it, and said, same here Ned; I am sure we'll bump into each other again. And then, remembering he had mentioned his name, I said, while he was letting go of my hand, I am Eric.

I had not expected Ned's handshake. I looked at my book vaguely guilty for badmouthing Hesse to strangers. As I crossed the street I sensed betrayal to the anxieties and confusions of my teenage self. And yet...through Hesse I had discovered Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche a philosophical journey had opened itself up to me. To mock Hesse meant to mock the chain of causes that got me here. So much for living by amor fati! 

The rain was pouring down Heath strait; I rushed home.

LeGuin on the Absence of Knowledge; or on Socratic Political Philosophy

The unknown [...] the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion [...] But if it were proven that there is a God; there would be no religion...Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?

That we shall die.

Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. From Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 57

The Left Hand of Darkness is an exploration in Socratic political philosophy because it explores the institutional and cultural possibilities of the human species (genetically) mutated into hermaphrodites. It does so by imaging them on a cold planet, Gethen, -- "the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world" -- where conditions make it hard to move (quickly) much beyond mere sustenance.  In The Dispossessed, LeGuin had also used the device of an extreme environment in that case to think through the nature of anarchic institution. On Gethen the two main societies are states: one is a kingdom without strong sense of nationhood, while the other is a dirigiste police-state with full employment run by a kind of politburo (or, perhaps, the deep state of the secret service).

By Socratic political philosophy (recall), I mean the ongoing theoretical exploration of richly textured models of comparative institutional frameworks that are humanly possible, but unavailable given the near-impossibility to solve the transition problem (that is recall), how to create an ideal political future with a population raised under bad institutions (or worse, that is, bad breeding). from any present status quo.

Ambisexuality is, of course, at the very edge of human possibility. (In the novel planetary visitors speculate that the Gethens may be the product of an immoral experiment in the distant past.) On Gethen, perverts are those (few) with a single sex.  Another time I discuss the exploration of sex/gender in this novel.

Although there is some technology, including radio, it seems science is not very developed on Gethen (astronomy is mentioned by the characters, but hard to pursue given the "meteorological conditions"). There are engineers and physicians, a few (not very impressive) mathematicians, but no scientists it seems. (The reader is left to ponder the question if one could discover radio waves absent the kind of theoretical work produced by Maxwell.) While there are temporally specific stories of the past, there is no history something symbolized by the calendar on Gethen: the current year is the base year. (So, the past year is the year 'one-ago.')

One might say, then that symbolically the Gethens live in the ever-present. (The novel's action takes place in the period when that's changing because they have made sufficient technological and political progress to move their standard of living away from bare survival.) Whatever motion that occurs is slow--something exemplified by the slow motion of their motorized caravans.

While there is plenty of mysticism, there seems to be no philosophy on Gethen. In fact, the wise on Gethen "exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." (p. 57) Interestingly enough, this is said by one of those who cultivate the practice of Foretelling, which is a major institution in the Kingdom (Karhide). The Foretellers live modestly even though the sell their services. (And so almost certainly are the richest institution in the Kingdom). In fact, the Foretellers pool a trained group's hunches in a cultivated manner. It's not hard to see in this a metaphor (and satire) of mid-twentieth century science of forecasting  The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969, by which time the authority of such science was waning.

The lack of philosophy [this is a theme in LeGuin] is made visible, indirectly, in the quoted passage above. Death is called "sure, predictable, inevitable... certain," but not necessary. This is a society that lacks investigation in modality, conceptually and practically.

The lack of philosophy is not explicitly explored. But we can speculate on the reasons for its absence. In Karhide the social mores have evolved in such a way that preventing embarrassment to another has been developed into second nature. This has a peculiar consequence, in that they don't know how to lie, but rather have "long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it." (122) They have, in fact, built up all kinds of norms that prematurely and routinely end inquiry in social affairs. Now, obviously, this need not have prevented speculative philosophy. But it would not encourage it either.

In fact, the only time that modality is mentioned in any significant fashion is in the quoted passage above. Now there are a few different ways to gloss 'making life possible' in that passage. But I think one fair way to restate the position is the idea that that the only thing that makes life worth living is permanent, intolerable uncertainty. If this is true, then the philosophical enterprise, which as a regulative ideal refuses to accept such a possibility, may well be a hindrance to the good life. 

 

 

 

On Not Re-reading, Pirsig

At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of 'quality'. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame. 2006 The Guardian.

In starting this piece, I remembered the amazement I felt at meeting my classmate, Julio Tuma (who went on to do a PhD in the philosophy of biology), in the first week of graduate school in Hyde Park at The University of Chicago in the sweltering Midwestern heat. Julio was an ex banker, who didn't just ride an old motorcycle, but also repaired it. At the time I decided to interpret it as a kind of providential sign (except that I did not believe in providence) that I had made the right decision going to graduate school at Chicago in philosophy.* (My original, intention, thwarted by fateful comedy of life, had been to study game theory in international relations.)

Let me explain, by way of diversion: a few years ago, an excellent and philosophically subtle, mathematical economist confided to me in a letter that "it dawned on my yesterday that my (very little) knowledge of philosophy is heavily influenced by one of my favourite books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig."

In response I wrote (this is in 2013), I went to The university of Chicago, sent their by the enthusiasm of my English professor (Michael Fixler), who made me read Pirsig alongside Milton and Derrida (and a smattering of Shannon's information theory). Professional philosophers do not tend to admit to liking the book, although I did once write a blog-post about it in homage to Fixler (see here). 

Fixler was a Milton expert, who showed more than a passing likeness to the main character of Bellow's Herzog (Fixler and Bellow met at Chicago so it's not impossible). Fixler's very fine book, Milton and the Kingdoms of God, got overshadowed by the more influential work of Christopher Hill and Stanley Fish. When I met him in the early 1990s, the frail Fixler, who had suffered a bad traffic accident a few years before, was obsessed with a species of structuralism. He was convinced that certain literary structures were not merely robust cultural features, but that they were embedded in biological features of our brain reinforced by constraints of information theory. After being drafted into a course on the metaphysical poets with him my junior year, I took the senior seminar (which turned into a directed reading course) on the afterlife of the fourfold ascent starting with the Phaedrus through Shannon. (I think the idea occurred to him in the mid 70s judging by this publication.) I have no idea what the course was called, but I do remember that Fixler was pleased I discovered the Four Quartets in preparing my term paper, and I always think of Fixler fondly when I stumble across further allusions to the Phaedrus and the fourfold (even when crossed out). 

Fixler was not my introduction to Pirsig (although he did introduce me to Lila). I am pretty sure that I devoured Zen as a trusted companion while traveling alone (by train not motorcycle) in Sweden the Summer before I went to college.+  But by the time I met Fixler, I had taken enough undergraduate courses in philosophy to recognize that Pirsig was not taken seriously by professional philosophers -- unlike, say one of my other teen favorites, Doug Hofdstadter, who was clearly a buddy of  Dennett --; I knew it was best to keep his influence on me quiet.

The fact that autobiographical narrator of Zen loathed professional/academic philosophers -- he creates a memorable portrait of a bullying professor (often taken to be the now, otherwise forgotten [although that's not entirely fair, but about that some other time more] Richard McKeon) at The University of Chicago, who generates acolytes who can parrot empty philosophical phrases -- did not deter me from being excited about going there. (I did not take up riding motorcycles, but did visit Bozeman on a road trip once!) 

Because I do no have photographic memory, I adore re-reading books (recall David Heller's wisdom [here] and Zadie Smith's [here]; I love being surprised by new features in an otherwise familiar text. Even so, I do not re-read many except by teaching them. (This is compensated by another habit of reading books for the first time when I teach them.) The main reason for this is practical: time is limited, and the books I wish to read for the first time growing at a discontinuous rate. However, there are some books I do not re-read because they belong, like a time-stamp, to a particular period of my life (e.g., Sheltering Sky belongs to my teenage years; Anna Karenina and War & Peace are part of my year as an employed office worker 1994/5).

For a long time, I did not re-read Pirsig's Zen because I worried I could not engage it except as a critic. After all, odds were high that as a trained philosopher, I would find the book annoying. I worried that its musings on quality and truth would strike me as sophomoric; that my professional self would laugh at my teenage self for being taken in by Pirsig's (ahh) sophistry. But in writing these lines, I recognize a potentially, more cowardly truth: I did not need Pirsig to remind that there is a non-trivial connection between the post-Platonic institutionalization of philosophy and a a certain kind of aggression (Pirsig does not hide his fierce aggressiveness in encountering it) that moves the university based practice of philosophy inexorably away from excellence.

Spinozism, Venice-style

To say that Venice is an interior is a possible summation of everything I have said so far. It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and this same self-sufficiency is what creates that 'endless imaginary fragmentation': the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.--Javiar Marías Venice, An Interior, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa p. 49.

To be self-sufficient, without (external) need, and a source of endless imaginary fragmentation is to be a Spinozistic substance.  This Spinozism is marked by a few familiar tropes: the absence of chance (49), and the co-existence of homogeneity (31; 41) and fragmentation (42).  (I am not the first to note the Spinozistic resonances; see here.) The reader is prepared for such Spinozism a bit earlier in the text:

I have always had the sense that the threat of catastrophe, of irremediable calamity or total annihilation, was less a genuine fear among its inhabitants and more of a necessity. This deliberate feeling of dread -- artificially created, in my view -- immediately infects visitors too, probably even the most ephemeral ones, who have only to set foot on a bridge to feel that this could well be the city's final day.

Venice is the most protected and studied city in the world, the most closely monitored and watched. The universal desire is not only to preserve it, but to preserve it exactly as it is now. We know that it cannot cease to exist, that it cannot be lost. The terrible certainty that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or expansion, without the possibility, in short, of any surprise or change, means that the Venetians see life from the 'viewpoint of eternity'*...The viewpoint of eternity! The words froze my blood, while we were having supper together: I was eating sole, and he salmon. Can there be a more frightening, unbearable, less human point of view? (26-27)

Marías wouldn't be Marías if he didn't inject -- cf. knowing echoes to Aristophanes's hiccup -- some comic dissonance (sole vs he salmon) while engaging in the hyperborean flights of metaphysics.

What to make of all of this? Is Venice, An Interior more than the expression of a weird, kind of artistic, competitive emulation with Thomas Mann? [One may say that Mann:::Plato's Phaedrus :: Marías :: Spinoza's Ethics.] Mann's Death is explicitly mentioned, in a comically dismissive aside (12), about the inferiority of the beach at the Hotel des Bains to the beach at Hotel Excelsior (on The Lido).

As an autobiographical aside, the only time I was on the Lido, I stayed at the Excelsior with my dad. I do not recall the beach especially well. But I was rather sick -- I only recovered once we made it to the opera in Verona -- and shunned the sun. (I started wearing sun-glasses at a later date.) My most vivid memory of the Lido was being offered huge bowls of chamomile tea by the immaculately dressed, Excelsior's staff. Since then, whenever I smell chamomile, I remember these huge bowls.

I do not want to deny that Venice, An Interior is primarily a shameless attempt by a publisher to cash in on Marías's sudden commercial success in the English speaking world. (It's short and per word probably hugely overpriced.) Others have suggested that Venice, An Interior is a kind of extended metaphor for the writing life (creativity, imaginary fragmentation, etc.). I wouldn't deny it. But  this understates the story's ambition; Venice is treated as a metaphor for our age with its many threats of man-made catastrophes (produced by terrorists, ecological disaster, or bankers who rely on models of randomness that fail to grasp all genuine possibility, etc.). To say that the threat is manufactured, it does not follow it is not real. (I honestly believe it is possible that Donald Trump will accidentally blunder us into WWIII.)

And Marías puts his finger on the oddity of our hyper-connected times in which we all seem to get infected with a certain, pervasive dread; this dread entails that we have more confidence in the unfolding  of necessity than the more familiar, uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises. That is, we are all weak-willed Spinozists now, without the love of fate.

 

Zadie Smith On Being a Teacher and Student

The novels we know best have an architecture.  Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times.--Zadie Smith, "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," in Changing My Mind, 41.

A rereader [recall] can come to inhabit (p. 43) a limited number of novels. Time is scarce, so it's no surprise that we learn the architecture of only a few novels, although some of us may be surprised to learn how few we learn. Smith does not explain the the upper limit (half a dozen), and is discretely silent on how many rereadings are required to come to know a novel's architecture. As it happens, she provides evidence that she required at least five such re-rereadings; Smith decided to inhabit "Pnin," which is a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita," (42) and later in the essay she admits that only during the "most recent rereading" (that is sixth time she read it) that she thinks "to kneel in front" of her "desk, place a glass of water at eye level and a position a comb, on end, behind it. Zebra cocktail! Nabokov saw it--now I do. And it's beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place." (54)

As it happens, on re-reading Smith's essay, I noticed that in between her analysis of Nabokov and Barthes, and the nature of writing and reading, she weaves two other analyses on subjects close to my troubled heart: first, that of the constitution of meaning (which I will largely ignore here); second, that of teaching (which I will focus on). Near the end of her essay, Smith notes that "Whether one quite approves of it or not, it's a Nabokovian assumption that if you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward enough (for you). His students learned this soon enough." (54) Smith then adds a footnote (13) with quote from Nabokov: "My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examination." (54 n. 13). 

On Smith's rendering, Nabokovian teachers demand from their students a mastery of detail both of the subject matter studied (e.g., novels) and the matter taught (the lectures about these novels, etc.). There is no surplus to be generated by the student; she aims to master all, but no more than the subject studied and the lectures taught about the subject. The Nabokovian teacher is godlike, and the student's attitude qua student is a form of gratitude to the teacher for his gifts (recall this post). The student acquires (quite partial) mastery of a subject, and that is its own reward for a certain type of student.

I don't think Smith means to endorse Nabokovian teachers. For, earlier in her essay, she had remarked (i) that there is more than one type of student, and (ii) that the teacher need not force the students into a particular kind of mold (and i-ii are at odds with Nabokovian position):

To observe these two natural, unschooled reactions is fascinating [qua teacher]: they reveal within the famous ideological debate a more intimate and important question of character, into which a teacher should not necessarily intrude. Why not allow each student to find out for himself what kind of rereader he is? No bad blood need to be spilled over it (as it was when I was in college). After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place--the house will sand either way. (43)

I am a bit suspicious of the idea that the two reactions she describes -- (A) "to those students who have a tendency to feel humbled before the act of writing, [Barthes'] 'The Death of an Author' is a perverse assault on the privileges of authorship, on the possibility of fixed meaning, even upon 'Truth' itself'  and (B) those students who "are excited to to add to the text's indeterminacy, their own indeterminacy as well" (42) -- are natural and unschooled. Perhaps, they are natural to "writing students" at elite colleges. (For those that like traditional schemas, (A) stands for authority loving types and (B) stands for the freedom-loving types. [Smith tells us she is naturally drawn to (B; 43; see also 49)]) That we teach to multiple souls at once is also a familiar fact of life to teachers who teach in some non-selective environments.

Smith advocates a kind of restraint in which the teacher allows the student to find out for herself what kind of rereader the student is. The problem is that it is not entirely clear that the restraint Smith advocates on the side of teachers also permits the discovery by students of being (say) a kind of Nabokovian rereader. That is to say, it's quite crucial to Smith's advocacy that certain ways of responding to texts are natural and unschooled. But her own text undermines this thought because to become a Nabokovian rereader one must also be schooled by Nabokov or some other teacher that shares in his "vision of total control." (55) This Nabokovian teacher does not permit the existence "of a secondary power directing and diverting," (55)* and so cannot allow a student unschooled nature to remain unschooled inside his classroom.

There is evidence that, Smith recognizes the point of the previous paragraph. Above, I suggested that Smith recognizes two souls. But that's not quite right. She also recognizes a third, educated soul which recognizes that the relationship between author and reader is a "partnership" which is "far more hesitant and delicate than" Barthes's (or Nabokov) allows. In this partnership, author and reader are "stumbling towards meaning simultaneously, together." (56) Smith does not say much to explain that 'simultaneously'--it can't mean what it means either in special relativity or in ordinary common sense. Against Barthes, Smith wants to hold on to the idea that the Author completes the text before the reader reads it. Both writing and reading can be intentional activities, but the meaning of/produced by the text is something that exceeds the Author's intentions, even though she must be willing to (decide to) live with the meaning so unfolded. (An Author can always press delete and restart until the text is submitted.) So, I suspect she means that for Author and reader the meaning of the text is something unfolds as the text unfolds. There is more to be said about her notion of meaning (but that's for another time).

The partnership is a "connection" between the reader and "a consciousness other than" her "own." That is, to read is to connect with bits of somebody else's mind. It is based not on an implicit or explicit contract, but on the reader's "cautious faith." (56) By contrast, writing is an imposition of one's thoughts on imagined/unknown others: "in many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want..." (55 n. 7 quoting Joan Didion)** Smith is clear that these 'many ways' don't exhaust the act of writing, but they are necessarily a part of it (while also exploring this act simultaneously in her novels [recall here and here]).

To reach the point of allowing for some such partnership, one must be taught to be schooled in reflexes that correct or transform the unschooled natural responses. Frustratingly, Smith is not very elaborate on the ways one is taught to become a hesitating (I have used stuttering) rereader (although it's clear that in her case, it means a giving up an exclusive embrace of freedom). But we can discern at least two ingredients: first, the very practice of rereading is a necessary step in such an education. It's only then that you learn that while you can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable, (46, quoting Nabokov). That is, one must become accepting of failure in one's life (51), while not resting in it. Mastery of detail is an indirect means toward recognizing this end.

But second, and this is something that Nabokov does not seem to permit, one must be allowed to recognize that one's loneliness is an original and enduring impulse in reading about another "individual's experience of the world through the unstable medium of language." (56) There is, of course, a lot to be said about all the words in the previous sentence. But here I just want to note that if Smith is right, this requires as a duty on teachers to make space for the recognition of the existence of such loneliness by students (without of course drawing attention to their particular loneliness in front of other students--after all, a a teacher should not necessarily intrude nor embarrass) and then orient this recognition not to their (vain teacherly) selves, but to the thoughts of other worthy, individuals.

 

Zadie Smith and the Novelist's Utopia

One lucky sod now escaped through the squeaky double doors -- a feckless novelist on a visiting fellowship -- but she did not retire unobserved.--Zadie Smith On Beauty.

The unnamed visiting novelist makes no other appearance within the novel. She is mentioned just before the anticipated, great set-piece debate at a faculty meeting over freedom of speech/censorship and political correctness* between two of the main protagonists in the novel (two male, British art historians -- Rembrandt scholars -- employed at a prestigious liberal arts college in New England near Boston <-- this understates all their familiar, racial, and political relations and rivalries). And she is only noticed by the Dean's secretary (herself not a very consequential character in the novel). We are told nothing else about her--not even the place she is visiting from.+

The presence of this novelist does solve a problem of perspective in the novel. The novel is often written from inside the characters' minds or takes up a (shifting) perspective alongside a particular character describing reactions and events from their individual point of view. But sometimes the intended perspective is left a bit ambiguous; there are instances in the novel where the reader is offered brief reflections from no point of view fully owned by any depicted character (see, for example, here). For, the perspective of the novel becomes unified if one attributes the represented, narrative perspective to this lucky sod who becomes the 'author' of the narrative.

The novelist's departure from the scene of action suggests that we are to imagine this nameless author as herself projecting and imagining the represented action. She is herself a spectator with a very limited or partial perspective; she cannot possibly have  been a witness to all the events described. She must have relied on testimony and imaginative, sympathetic projection into the circumstances of the characters presented.

The previous paragraph may seem rather fanciful (and the significance of the mention of this 'lucky sod' has been interpreted differently). But the reflexive, insertion of a narrator, who, herself is a spectator with a very limited or partial perspective, who relies on her power of imagination is a device that Smith (Zadie, that is) had also used [recall] (with less subtlety) in The Embassy of Cambodia, where the device is explicitly marked.

Moreover, identifying this lucky sod with a counter-factual Zadie Smith projected into the novel illuminates another feature of the novel: the main action of the novel shifts between the very detailed descriptions of and maps changes in concretely named, neighborhoods (and cemeteries, pubs) of Northwest London, and the fictional, Wellington College projected onto an imaginary place in New England (get it?) near Boston. While this fictional Wellington undergoes the seasons (and the passing of the years), it is presented and experienced by some of the novel's characters as changeless place. (Of course, the novel also reminds us that Wellington is built on slave labor--which is shown to be part of the suppressed memories that constitute the place.) Wellington is thus outside space and time: a no-place (u-topia), despite having a name and identity.  Smith's roots are in, and she is, of course, herself a fine chronicler of, NW London.

I close with a promissory note: the pretense of authorial reflexivity is not just a post-modern, literary game. On Beauty presents and encourages aesthetic and moral-political reflection on and engagement with different modes of artistic depiction (with Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson, De Staalmeesters, and, especially, Hendrickje Bathing playing central roles.) By inserting herself  into the life of the novel, Smith acknowledges something of the moral, leveling criticism (voiced by one of her protagonists, Howard, whose attempts to live coherently in light of his own theories we see come undone in all kinds of ways,) of the projection of artistic independence, of the very idea of inventive genius that stands outside political economy and power relations (even if she also shows in the final scene that at least some art is the product of forces other than consumer demand).

That is, Smith is pretending as if she has learned from her own characters, characters that we have to take to be imaginatively projected by her fictional counterpart, who has worked out and presents the comic and creative interplay between these characters's ideas and actions (not to mention bodies occupying places). And, thus, she gently, but decisively -- to quote the essayist, Zadie Smith -- by "directed play" leads the reader to imagine what it would be like for an author to be on equal footing with her characters, while effacing, momentarily, that she does so, perhaps not with Nabokov's 'total control', but certainly on her peculiar terms.

 

 

The Novelist Speaks for Nobody? On Zadie Smith's Trial of the Author

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"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss” was one of the mottoes of the Khmer Rouge. It referred to the New People, those city dwellers who could not be made to give up city life and work on a farm. By returning everybody to the land, the regime hoped to create a society of Old People—that is to say, of agrarian peasants. When a New Person was relocated from the city to the country, it was vital not to show weakness in the fields. Vulnerability was punishable by death.

In Willesden, we are almost all New People, though some of us, like Fatou, were, until quite recently, Old People, working the land in our various countries of origin. Of the Old and New People of Willesden I speak; I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right. I could say, “Because I was born at the crossroads of Willesden, Kilburn, and Queen’s Park!” But the reply would be swift and damning: “Oh, don’t be foolish, many people were born right there; it doesn’t mean anything at all. We are not one people and no one can speak for us. It’s all a lot of nonsense. We see you standing on the balcony, overlooking the Embassy of Cambodia, in your dressing gown, staring into the chestnut trees, looking gormless. The real reason you speak in this way is because you can’t think of anything better to do.”--Zadie Smith (2013 The Embassy of Cambodia.

The implied narrator of Smith's story is the old (presumably retired) lady standing on the balcony overlooking the Embassy of Cambodia in Willesden. (There really is an embassy there on Brondesbury Park.) It's possible there is a second implied narrator who is never mentioned but who has a knowing perspective on Fatou's life (this narrator sometimes shares Fatou's thoughts). But it's more likely* that we're supposed to imagine that the nameless old lady on the balcony is herself imagining the details of Fatou's life constructed out of a few glimpses of seeing the African-born young woman walk by occasionally. She does so by imaginatively (or sympathetically) projecting herself into Fatou's circumstances. Thus, she is very much akin to not just an impartial spectator, but also a novelist.

It's one several reflexive moments in this compact story. And we are forced to ask the political-poetical question: with what 'right' does somebody (the 'author' not to be confused with Zadie Smith) speak on behalf of another (let's call her 'the represented'), especially when the represented are not even a minimal unity (they are multiple peoples). [Notably, a viable option, a federation, in which multiple peoples form a unity, is overlooked; the implied narrator, who has an obsession with world, political history, especially genocidal history (in addition to the Khmer Rouge, Ruanda, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust are all mentioned in passion), is evidently not a political philosophy.] It's clear that the represented did not elect the author. Even so, the author was chosen. The nature of this being elect is left a bit vague: at first it seems chance (the vagaries of being born at a particular place), but in a further imaginary dialogue this is explicitly rejected -- being born at a specific gives no special title -- it may also be thought fate or necessity or (God's) providence, although the author presents the represented as suggesting that the whole thing (the author speaking for the represented, etc.) just is nonsense. In the presence of nonsense, representation does not get off the ground.

The represented are presented as suggesting that the author is chosen because she herself lacks the imagination to do something else. (This is the first charge) That is the author is taken to lack that very quality (imagination) which, in fact, is the core of her skill (and, when lucky, the source of her possible sustenance.) We may say, then, that the author presents the represented as charging her in addition, with lack of social utility (nothing "better to do"). These two charges seem to go unanswered. That is, Zadie Smith is giving the prosecution against (at least part of) her art a full hearing.

I write a 'part of' because it is explicitly denied that we're dealing with poetry:

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When the Embassy of Cambodia first appeared in our midst, a few years ago, some of us said, “Well, if we were poets perhaps we could have written some sort of an ode about this surprising appearance of the embassy.” (For embassies are usually to be found in the center of the city. This was the first one we had seen in the suburbs.) But we are not really a poetic people. We are from Willesden. Our minds tend toward the prosaic. I doubt there is a man or woman among us, for example, who—upon passing the Embassy of Cambodia for the first time—did not immediately think: “genocide.”

Here it is suggested (it's an earlier chapter than the one quoted above), that there is a unity, a we, a people in Willesden. This people(the represented)  is unimaginative (prosaic) not poetic. One may wonder how a unity, such a we, is possible without poetry. 

Genocide is understood as a purification that is romantic in spirit. It's not about progress, but about a return to a more authentic and strong lifestyle in which there is no space or place for vulnerability.

To speak for the represented one must be receptive to some such vulnerability and possess a willingness to sympathize (or empathize) with others. Yet, throughout the short story the limits of sympathy are shown and discussed by the author:

The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world—in its dramatic as well as its quiet times—we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

Time and attention are scarce goods, and sympathy places a heavy demand on both and so generate huge opportunity costs. To much sympathetic care for others would swallow up "our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures." The art of living requires limits to the moral and sympathetic imagination even if it is only invoked in a spectatorial fashion (to follow the history of another is not to participate in it). And here we have the damnest charge against the author (and Smith's craft); she is a passive witness to just bits of the lives of others (in this case Fatou, who lives a life of near modern slavery, and reflects on this fact).

The metaphor of this authorial passivity, is the embassy's wall, which occludes a garden from view; in this garden there is a regular, almost eternal game of badminton in which "violent conclusion" and "hopeful return" are alternated; this game is represented by the shuttlecock whose movements is -- like the shadows in Plato's cave -- partially visible above the wall.

I am running out of space here to discuss the ways in which the little story meets the charges against an author who through her craft and imagination gives voice to those who are generally kept voiceless in our polities. But I close by noting that the whole story treats the very narrow circle of friendship as the superior alternative (to the caring or moral spectatorship). It's friendship (not family) that activates kindness and generosity. Even when the friendship is not pure nor equal (there are motives of conversion, sexuality, possession, and need), it can motivate actions that counterbalance some of the worst that humanity has to offer. And, whatever else Zadie Smith is showing us, the author is a friend to no one,  not even to the represented.