Justin Erik Halldór Smith

William H. Gass, Philosopher (1924-2017)

I wrote a commemoration of William H. Gass for n+1, focusing in particular on his training as a philosopher and on the significance of this training for his life's work. To read the whole thing, go here. 

William Howard Gass, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

It is not hard to imagine young Gass chafing at the bit that midcentury analytic philosophy had sought to place in his mouth...

Continued here.

Notes on ъ

In Old Church Slavonic there were two letters representing short vowels. These were called ‘yer’, and there were two species of them: the ‘front yer’, ‘ь’, and the ‘back yer’, ‘ъ’

These were reduced into ultra-short vowels in the modern Slavic languages, and eventually into signs that can’t really be called vowels at all. In Russian the ь became a мягкий знак or ‘soft sign’; while the ъ became a твёрдый знак or ‘hard sign’.

The soft sign is generally transliterated into the Latin alphabet with a single apostrophe: ’. It tells you more about how to pronounce the consonant that precedes it, than about a further distinct sound that needs to be made. When in The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann drops in a few Russian phrases, he prefers to use a ‘j’ for the soft sign: potselovatj rather than potselovat’ (infinitive of ’to kiss’). I like the ‘j’; it is, after all, an orthographic variant of ‘i’, just as the soft sign is a descendant of it. And indeed, historically, at least into the early 18th century, it would have been an ‘i’: potselovati. The letter ‘i’ continues to play a role in Romanian similar to the soft sign, e.g., the local name for Bucharest, București, or for the Moldavian cities of Huși or Iași (pronounced, roughly, ‘Hush’ and ‘Yash’, with a little hint of a vowel at the end).

There are not a few jokes about the soft sign, as of the Soviet tour guide who is walking under a massive sequence of iron letters bearing the name of the city of Tver’ (Tverj, Тверь). A letter falls and hits him on the head. Was he injured? No, it was a soft sign. (There is a variant of this joke, told by my friend Abbas, in which his wife throws a can of Coke at his head. Was he hurt? No, it was a soft drink.)

It is a different story all together with the hard sign (ordinarily transliterated by two apostrophes), at least in the East Slavic languages. It went from being a generic back vowel in Old Church Slavonic, to being an ultra-short vowel in early Russian, to simply ceasing to do anything at all by the time of the Bolshevik (Bol’shevik, Boljshevik, Большевик) Revolution. It was, accordingly, purged in an early Soviet spelling reform. Now, as it had previously stood by convention at the end of every word that did not otherwise terminate in a vowel or in a soft sign, this made many, many words at least one sign shorter. It is said that the post-reform editions of War and Peace were 100 pages shorter than the original as a result of the loss of the hard sign, but this is an exaggeration.

Or rather it is not that it was there as a mere convention, and the Bolsheviks were not entirely fair in judging it by the principle of ‘From each according to his work’. It was there as a reminder of an earlier stage in the history of the Slavic languages when every consonant had to have a vowel following it, and so, if there was to be any exception to this, it had to be marked. Languages that place vowels by default after consonants are numerous (after all, what it is to be a consonant is to be with-sound), including, familiarly, Spanish and Italian. In Sanskrit a consonant standing alone is presumed to be followed by a generic vowel, unless another vowel is explicitly indicated or unless one puts down a so-called foot: thus त is ta while त् is simply t. What the Russians realised is that the absence of a sign can in some cases do the job just as well as its presence: if nothing explicitly tells you that a word ends in a consonant, then you can simply take the consonant at the end as, well, the end. 

But what I really wanted to talk about is the fate of these signs in Bulgarian, and how this can shine some light on the character of the Balkan Sprachbund, a beautiful example of the common linguistic phenomenon in which unrelated languages that overlap in a geographical region come to have significant syntactic and grammatical similarities. Bulgarian (along with Macedonian, which is often classified as on a dialect continuum with Bulgarian) is the only Slavic language with definite articles; as in Romanian and in Albanian, they are suffixed to the noun. Bulgarian is the only Slavic language to have entirely lost its nominal declensions; while Romanian is the only Romance language to have preserved cases, they are significantly reduced and, existing alongside a modern-Romance prepositional system, appear vestigial.

In phonetics, too, there is important cross-Danube influence of Romanian on Bulgarian, and vice versa. In Bulgarian the hard sign, curiously, evolved in exactly the opposite direction than in Russian: rather than withering into non-existence, it grew into a full-fledged, healthy vowel. It is not called a hard sign at all, but rather a ер голям or ‘big sign’. It is as it were the most basic vowel sound possible: just what you get when you open your mouth and make sound, something between an ‘u’ and an ‘a’, or, more precisely, an ‘ə’. It is the first vowel in the word for ‘Bulgaria’ itself: България. When I come across it in Bulgarian I tend to read it as if it were Russian, I see it as a sort of blank or interruption in a word, as if България were ‘Bxlgaria’ or ‘B-lgaria’. But it’s not, of course, and my mistake is to take Russian as the model of all Slavic languages.

Romanian was commonly written in Cyrillic into the late 19th century (Moldovan still is), and when it was the Romanian vowel ă, the so called ‘A-breve’, was rendered as ъ. Moldovan preserves Cyrillic because of its historical-cultural contact with the Russian and Soviet world, and thus linguistically with the East Slavic world. But the historical contact with Cyrillic of the Romanian written in, say, Giurgiu, is trans-Danubian, linguistically South Slavic, and culturally Orthodox. The ə is a Romano-Bulgarian vowel, and the evolution of the ъ to accommodate it has much more to do with the soundscape of the Balkans than with any distinctly or narrowly Slavic legacy.

I would like to go on and discuss the yat' (ѣ), the yus, both little (Ѧ) and big (Ѫ), and so many other transitional fossils from the history of Slavic phonetics and of the always imperfect effort to render traces of sound by visible inscription, but this will be for another day.

--Ruse (Русе, Russe, Rousse, Rusciuc, Русчук), Bulgaria, 26 August 2017.

(The image is from the typography studio of Artem Lebedev, and is a tribute to all of the Russian letters that fell victim to the 1918 purge.)

A Theft

Your heart burns for me so
and your body and your soul
burn with desire for me
and for my body and my face.
Here is what I am referring to:
Selivanko and Mikheiko and Yakovets Boldykin
took my three-ruble horse,
and the leather saddle of a ruble and a half,
and this took place in the forest on such and such day
between the mountains and the hills.
My heart burns for you so
and my body and my soul
burn with desire for you
and for your body and your face.

(Freely translated from birch-bark manuscript No. 521, in the Древнерусские Берестяные Грамоты database. The text was composed in Novgorod c. 1400-1410.)

The Gadfly and the Spider

Nausicaa Renner wrote a very thorough review, in The Nation, of my book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, along with a review of The Stone Reader, to which I am also a contributor. Excerpt below. To read the whole thing, go here. 

Is philosophy practiced by a “specialized and privileged elite within a broader society”? Does everyone in society do it in some way? If philosophy were more like dance, it would be ubiquitous. But it isn’t a practice that we see in every culture—in fact, Smith asserts, it has only arisen organically as a defined practice twice in human history, once in Greece and once in medieval India. But if philosophy were more like ballet, we should be able to see it as part of something larger than itself.

Smith looks to answer these questions by surveying the role of the philosopher and the meaning of philosophy since ancient times in different cultures and across the world. Because he’s conducting a survey, his modus operandi is to take an expansive and prismatic view of the kinds of work a philosopher can do. While the survey includes practices that define themselves as philosophic, it also explores the philosophical aspects of things like ritual, myth, even astronomy.

The style and method of Smith’s book show him to be as good as his word. The text is divided into six chapters, corresponding with six “types” of philosopher: the Curiosa, the Sage, the Gadfly, the Ascetic, the Mandarin, and the Courtier. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they are more like archetypes or allegories, tools for exploring the changing relationship between philosophy and society. Each chapter flits about from East to West and from ancient times to modern; each teems with quotes, examples, personal anecdotes, and fictional monologues by its philosophical characters, offset as long block quotes. In writing this way, Smith has taken a huge aesthetic gamble—one that he never quite admits to. He writes, flippantly, that “A story needs characters,” making the conceit sound like a gimmick to sell books. He is selling himself short: His book is a laudable effort to straddle the many ways of thinking about philosophy, and to avoid promoting one particular perspective.

But the survey also has an agenda: Smith is vocal, in this book and elsewhere, about the problems that arise with a definition of philosophy that is exclusively Western. While I have no doubts about his appreciation for the philosophy of other cultures (he teaches classical Indian philosophy, for one), the point of his survey is less intellectual (or passionate) than tactical; he wants to convince academic philosophers that it’s a serious inconsistency, if not an actual logical fallacy, to define philosophy narrowly as a Western endeavor or, more constrained still, a Western academic one.

Ongian Meditations

I had a piece in Aeon Magazine on the relationship between literacy and philosophy. It was really a sort of summary of a recent line of reflection occasioned by my reading of Walter J. Ong, S. J. (1912-2003). His work in communications theory has been hailed by commentators over the past few years as providing a clear early articulation of many of the conceptual problems that the rise of the Internet has imposed on us. Having written this work from the 1960s to the 1980s, he's thus hailed as a 'visionary', 'before his time', etc. I tend to see him rather as perhaps the last in a long line of Jesuit polymathic weirdos, sharing in the same spirit as Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), and being, like Kircher, motivated to reflect on the natural of language and writing, and on the possibility of artificial languages or codes or programs, out of a fundamental theological commitment to the power of what they call 'the Word' to render all of nature into a rational order. In this respect for them the world is God's writing, and the eventual development of literacy in human history is thus a sort of moral progress to the extent that it aids humanity in achieving its divinely implanted potential to reflect the order of the world as God created it. 

But these considerations do not enter into my own essay, nor for that matter into Ong's rigorous scholarly work. My full essay can be found here. Below is an excerpt. 

*

A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés. The bard is not concerned with originality, but with intonation and delivery: he or she is perfectly attuned to the circumstances of the day, and to the mood and expectations of his or her listeners.

If this were happening 6,000-plus years ago, the poet’s words would in no way have been anchored in visible signs, in text. For the vast majority of the time that human beings have been on Earth, words have had no worldly reality other than the sound made when they are spoken.

As the theorist Walter J. Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (1982), it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of ‘primary orality’. There would be nowhere to ‘look up a word’, no authoritative source telling us the shape the word ‘actually’ takes. There would be no way to affirm the word’s existence at all except by speaking it – and this necessary condition of survival is important for understanding the relatively repetitive nature of epic poetry. Say it over and over again, or it will slip away. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke... 

On Jenny Diski (1947-2016)

I wrote a remembrance of Jenny Diski for n+1. To read the whole piece, go here.

Jenny was a pessimist and a misanthrope of heroic dimensions. But let me qualify that. Let me redefine “misanthropy” for my own purposes, and for Jenny’s memory. Like many people who largely retreat from the world and have some trouble dealing with it, she was so much more lucid and funny about human strivings and failures than those who are happily immersed in it. I always think of her 2003 review of Catherine Blackledge’s The Story of V. Jenny describes her own efforts in the early 1970s to work with the 12- and 13-year-old boys in a juvenile halfway house, called the Free School, neighboring a London feminist center run by “bourgeois hippy adventurers,” and the differences in goals and desires that separated these two groups:

One night I was in the Free School late. I saw a light on in the women’s hut and went to have a look. A window had been forced open. One of the younger boys from the school was standing in the middle of the room, masturbating furiously, his eyes fixed intently on a large, full-color wall poster of a wide-open vulva with a sassy feminist slogan underneath about men not being required. It seemed not so much vicious as funny and sad.

Mocking of human self-seriousness but charitable to human beings themselves, Jenny offered a living example of how, sometimes, compassion can be born of misanthropy. That is the person who comes across in a passage such as this. The writer who comes across is the one who understands, as a writer must, that what is funny is sad, and vice versa, and the writer’s task is to draw out this identity, where the blunt-minded ideologue or ordinary person can only perceive the one face of things or the other. Jenny had continental Jewish roots and a rough London childhood. She spent time in institutions, and was also taken in, and eventually expelled, by Doris Lessing. She had a daughter, Chloe, with a first husband, Roger Diski, who drowned while swimming in Sierra Leone in 2011. She had a second husband, Ian Patterson, to whom she always referred as “the Poet,” who by all accounts, notably her own, made the last eighteen years of her life the happiest ones. She wrote roughly a dozen novels, and seven or so works of non-fiction.

One of her novels, Monkey’s Uncle (1994), is in part narrated by an orangutan named Jenny, who picnics with Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Her debt to Kafka, and to Mitteleuropa in general, comes through here, as also, I suspect, some evidence of her true position relative to her own species. She told me at one point how happy it had made her to learn that “Jenny” was a popular name for orangutans in 19th-century zoos. Her living body of work reads to me now like something of an extended “Report to an Academy”: an Academy made up of human beings who, for whatever complicated reasons (genetics, developmental psychology, destiny) always remained somewhat strange to her. And from the lifelong feeling of being not quite a human being, Jenny illuminated for us (with words that are still alive) the mystery of what it is, or what it would be, to be one.

Philosophy is Said in Many Ways

I recently did an interview for the Princeton University Press blog about my new book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. To read the full interview, go here.

PUP: This book doesn’t have a conventional structure or approach. In addition to straightforward scholarly exposition, it also contains autobiographical elements, as well as what appear to be fictional excursuses, written from the perspective of invented historical figures who represent different philosophical types. What are the reasons for this experimental approach?

JS: When I began speaking with my editor at Princeton University Press, what intrigued him most were some reflections of mine on the relationship between the activity of a philosopher and the practical need we all have to earn money and pay the bills. I had recently moved to Paris, was having trouble making ends meet with my modest French university salary, and so had begun experimenting with some ‘freelance’ philosophical dialogues with people willing to pay—mostly Anglo tourists who were looking to experience the frisson of sitting in a Parisian café and talking about love and death and stuff just like Sartre and De Beauvoir. So when I began writing, that personal experience served as the point of departure for reflecting on the long history of the problematic relationship between money and philosophy—after all, one of the most common foundation myths of the tradition is that it began when Socrates refused remuneration, thus liberating whatever it is we’re doing qua philosophers from whatever it is the Sophists had been doing. This approach then sort of expanded to other parts of the book: launching into an investigation of some aspect of the definition of philosophy by revealing something about my own personal engagement with it.

As for the fictional elements, I suppose this is just an irrepressible symptom of the sort of writing I’ve come to believe can best get across what I’m trying to do philosophically. I’m with Margaret Cavendish, who explicitly lays out at the beginning of her delirious 1666 novel, Blazing World, how it is that fantasy can be harnessed and utilized for the exploration of philosophical questions in ways for which the faculty of reason alone might be less ideally suited. I faced some resistance to these portions of the book from some readers of drafts. They wanted me to more clearly mark off and explain what I was doing in them, somewhat as Martha Nussbaum does when she introduces a fictional figure in one of her books to guide as through the exposition of arguments that follow. But I didn’t want my characters to serve simply as didactic aides. I wanted rather for the work to be, at least in part, a work of fiction, a product, like Cavendish’s, of the literary imagination.

PUP: Is this book philosophy, or is it about philosophy?

JS: I don’t know that there can really be a valid distinction here. By the same token, I’ve never understood what people mean when they talk about ‘metaphilosophy’. We’re all just trying to come to a clearer understanding of the nature of this activity we’re engaged in, in order, in part, to better engage in it. Philosophy is peculiar in that a great deal of effort is expended, by those who profess to practice it, in seeking to determine where its boundaries are, and what falls outside of them. This is a problem sedimentologists, say, don’t have, and one might easily suspect that philosophy is essentially constituted by this activity, that there’s not much left over to do once philosophers have stopped trying to determine what philosophy is not. I think my approach, the transregional and wide-focused historical survey of the very different ways people we think of as philosophers have themselves conceived what they were doing, helps to establish this point: ‘philosophy’ is said in many ways, to paraphrase Aristotle. I’m sure some critics who have some stake in portraying philosophy as essentially thus rather than so, or vice versa, will be quick to say that this book is ‘not philosophy’. But I think I can survive that, and in fact I think they’ll be helping to support my thesis...

Vampirology

I wrote a mass-market book about vampires (it beats doing overload teaching or private tutoring sessions). The publishers permitted me to retain my own voice and to explore ideas at a level that made the experience, over all, very enjoyable for me. Here's an excerpt. Publication information forthcoming. 

--

As we consider the history of the vampire, there is an important overlap, indeed a cross-pollination, between literary imaginings on the one hand, and on the other, ostensibly factual works written from the perspective of medicine, law, or clerical demonology.

The roots of non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretch back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports. The famous journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666, is meant to be a forum for presenting cutting-edge scientific research in barometry or mechanics, but many of its pages are also taken up with testimonies from far-flung travellers and country doctors telling of what they saw when they went to investigate rumours of two-headed calves, talking dogs, or hauntings.

Early treatments of vampires are written in a tone that closely echoes the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society. The first extant treatise on vampirism (to our knowledge never translated) is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs) by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. Written in 1725, Ranfft observed that the phenomenon in question “will of course be revered by the faith of the Roman Catholics as some sort of divine miracle,” but maintained for his part that it will best be explained, along more enlightened and scientific lines, by appeal to “a certain influx in the bodies.” Here Ranfft exemplifies an approach that will be standard throughout the history of vampirological writing: an affected tone of doubt and distance from the subject matter, a strong denunciation of superstition (though this comes just as often from Catholic as from anti-Catholic authors), but always leaving open to the reader the titillating possibility that the author is himself wrong, or not completely forthcoming about his own views.

Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing and discussing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that within eight days [of his death] nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of twenty-four hours.” It is reported that “as they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.” Blagojević’s widow, too, reported that her husband had returned to “ask for his oppanki or shoes,” but after this left the village to appear in another.

The author of the report cited by Ranfft goes on to use the word ‘vampire’ in one of its earliest printed occurrences, noting that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing,” the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed. In sum all the indices that people of this sort (as already mentioned above) should have on them were present.

At issue in part, was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way in which bodies decompose (it was only in the 16th century that anatomical studies of cadavers became socially accepted, and many of them were procured by common grave robbery). While they often simply rot depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the accessibility of the space to microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal beakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement that could only be explained by assuming that the corpse had been ingesting food—food, that is, or something like it.

Another broad social change that precipitates the 18th-century fascination with graves and their inhabitants, is a growing awareness of the history of burial and the variety of methods by which human beings have disposed of dead bodies. Already in 1658 the English author Sir Thomas Browne publishes the Hydriotaphia, a strange and meandering treatise on the occasion of the discovery of Roman burial urns near Norfolk. The work expands into a broad-scoped reflection on burial practices and rituals surrounding death throughout the world. Browne remarks that “[m]any have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the soul upon disunion; but men have been most phantasticall in the singular contrivances of their corporall dissolution.” The most sober nations, he continues, “have rested in two ways, of simple inhumation and burning.” Europe, since the end of antiquity preferred interment. The increased exposure to other funeary rituals, through encounters with non-European cultures and by an increasingly systematic archaeology of the European past, lead Europeans to reflect on what, in fact, the best methods of ‘corporall dissolution’ might be. In the Balkans, cremation was still an exceptional measure in the early 18th century. Yet we might still see Blagojević’s fate, burnt ‘down to ashes’ to make sure that he can never return, as part of a broader exploration and questioning of traditional funerary practices.

Many of the conventions deployed by Ranfft reappeared throughout the 18th century in medical treatises not centrally concerned with vampires, but rather focused from a clinical point of view, on the difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death. The most interesting example of such a work is the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites many authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death.” Like Thomas Browne, he goes into great depth investigating the “funeral solemnities” of various nations, attempting to establish from a comparative perspective, that human beings across the world developed practices to avoid premature burial of the living. Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.”

Another very important work, particularly for its role in establishing the geographical domain in which vampirism is thought to occur, is the French Dominican Augustin Calmet’s 1751 Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits, and on Vampires, or the Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, etc. Calmet declares he has “always been most struck by what is related of vampires or the revenants from Hungary, Moravia, Poland, the brucolacs of Greece, those who have been excommunicated, who, they say, never decay.” As a priest, Calmet is intent on establishing the reality of the phenomena he describes, in order to characterize it as a true instance of diabolism and to warn his readers of its danger. Thus, in a chapter entitled ‘Are Vampires or Revenants Truly Dead?’, the author appeals to the wisdom of crowds. He insists it is impossible “that all at once several people begin to believe they are seeing what does not exist at all, and that they die so quickly after from a sickness that is purely imagined.” Father Calmet, like Browne and Winslow, is interested in a sober perspective to balance the supernatural, to trace the strange phenomena back to plausible medical pathologies or environmental conditions. Thus he explains:

Those who have died of the plague, from poison, from rabies, from drunkenness, and from epidemic are more subject to returning as undead, apparently because their blood coagulates more difficultly, and sometimes those who are not yet dead are buried, in view of the danger that there is in leaving them for long outside of the sepulchre, for fear of the infection that they cause… These Vampires are only known in certain countries, like Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, where these illnesses are more common.

One might at this point wonder what Calmet really thinks. Is it diabolical forces at work? Or is it a question of epidemiology? As is typical of vampirologists, the author prefers to keep us suspended between the two registers of explanation, to maintain his reader’s attention by striking the perfect balance between sobriety and gullibility.

A convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. This is the persona adopted by Augustin Calmet, and it is one that will continue in fictional form into the era of cinema. Perhaps no author embodies this type more perfectly than the eccentric English Catholic deacon Montague Summers (1880-1948), author of multiple works on witchcraft, demonology, werewolves, and vampires. He consistently claimed, in a somewhat deadpan tone, to be committed to the reality of all these things, and to be fighting against them by the power of the pen. A foreword to the 1968 edition of his 1929 study, The Vampire in Europe, tells us that Summers made all his public appearances in clerical dress, and attempted to convince others that he was a Catholic priest, though it is far more likely that he was in fact an unfrocked parson. He was a vocal advocate for the public execution of witches—in the 20th century! The author of the foreword, a Catholic priest, conjectures that Summers’s stern admonitions against necromancy are at once an expression of his own guilt, or mixed feelings about having engaged in it himself. All this, of course, is meant to heighten the interest of the reader. Which side, one constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Skeptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

...

One senses that as the vampire theme evolves and adapts, it often loses its connection to the exploration of desire and regret that is at the true essence of vampirism, the raison d’être of the vampire as a literary invention. Some ‘mere’ entertainments continue to explore the essential core of the vampire myth, even as they defer in varying degrees to contemporary sensibilities (the series True Blood is a good example here: it belongs to the present moment, but is also preoccupied with what has remained constant in vampire representations since at least the 19^th century). Yet many other appearances of the vampire seem to involve the mere outer form, the costume and the accoutrements without any concern for the inner life and struggle that have caused the vampire to appear the way he does. Often this decontextualizing occurs where the vampire plays a part in a strictly comedic or farcical scenario. More often (increasingly so over the course of the 20^th century), it occurs as a result of adaptation and appropriation, where vampires figure alongside other stock characters with whom they do not, so to speak, ‘naturally’ belong. We see examples of this art of incongruous combination going back at least as far as Gustave Le Rouge’s 1908 vampire story, Prisoner of the Planet Mars. This habit continues throughout the B-movie era, yet it seems to have mutated in recent years, as a result of the advent of the Internet and the new aesthetic sensibility centered around the ‘mash-up’: artwork that consists in the combination of elements we would not have expected to find together, facilitated by digital means.

Perhaps the most remarkable recent example of the mashed-up vampire, is the 2012 movie, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from the Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov and based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith. The basic plot conceit is what one might expect from the title: the president and Great Emancipator was, in his secret hours away from the demands of the Civil War, engaged in protracted battle with bloodsucking revenants. Why Abraham Lincoln, exactly? Because he, like Buffy or Van Helsing, represents the force of good against evil? Because he is a rough contemporary of Le Fanu and Baudelaire? Perhaps, but the real reason for bringing Lincoln into contact with the vampires seems to be incongruity itself: like Nietzsche Family Circus, Kim Kierkegaardashian, or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, our era loves to mix oil and water, to force together elements that on their own would always remain separate. The results are often hilarious, and yet, also, somewhat empty: why did we care in the first place? The answer does not necessarily make itself known.

Vampire stories seem to have a way not just of reflecting contemporary sensibilities and cultural transformations, but also of anticipating them. Pardon the glimmer of credulousness when I say this, but there is something astounding in the interwoven life and art of Sharon Tate, who starred in Roman Polanski’s 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, married the director, and two years later, while pregnant with Polanski’s child, was murdered by the Manson family in their helter-skelter spree. The Fearless Vampire Killers, as it is usually called for the sake of convenience, is a strange film. It is, as its full title suggests, meant to be a spoof, a rollicking send-up, a bit of fun. But it is far too dark to be fun. It is weighted with the historical legacy of serious European literature and folklore: a sort of churning-up and examination of the buried fantasies and memories that must have animated Polanski’s childhood imagination. Its color and light suggest something closer to avant-garde Soviet cinema, such as that of Sergei Paradjanov, than anything familiar from Hollywood. It is dank, cobwebby, perverse, and impossible to watch Tate’s Sarah Shagal, innocently taking a bath in a Transylvanian castle unaware of her fate, without thinking of the actress’s own fate beyond the confines of the story.

Polanski’s film was adapted for stage productions in Paris and other European cities, presented as a schlocky musical: a bit of fun, as we originally expected to believe the film to be, at least if we listened to the marketing division of MGM. But so it always is, with vampires. They flit back and forth, between our deepest darkest fantasies, and our need for a bit of fun and distraction. This is perhaps the most important reason for their tremendous adaptive success, and their near certain survival into the future, no matter what new degradations of our artistic values and sensibilities await us, no matter how stupid future marketers of popular entertainments will take us to be.

But, I suppose, here I am starting to sound like a decadent aesthete myself, unfit for this world and yearning for something that has been irrevocably lost. I have been writing all night, now, and I sense the first light piercing through my study’s window. Excuse me while I get up to shut the blinds.

In the Gray Zone

This is the text of the Pierre Bayle Lecture, "The Gravity of Satire: Offense and Violence after the Paris Attacks," which I delivered to the Pierre Bayle Stichting in Rotterdam on November 27, 2015. 

A civil war in Syria has, since it began in 2011, gradually radiated out to implicate nearly ever major global actor. An apocalyptic and totalitarian death cult has taken control of a wide swath of territory, and succeeded in acquiring many of the attributes of a proper state: tax collection, currency, natural resources, exports. It is perhaps a sort of pirate state, but the absence of many of the usual markers of statehood that emerged in the 20th century (notably, a willingness to maintain diplomatic relations, a seat at the UN, and so on) do not diminish its claim to geopolitical significance. Complicated individual interests dictate how more established powers relate to this new power. Turkey, existentially opposed to Kurdish statehood, stands accused of materially aiding the new power in view, simply, of a basic like-mindedness on the Kurdish question. Russia's interest is to prop up the old regime of Assad, a strong-armed and undemocratic ruler, but also a hold-out from the earlier era of secular Arab nationalisms that served as a bulwark against the rise of theocratic fundamentalism. The barrier to this shift fell in Turkey with the election of Erdogan more than a decade ago; in Iraq, it fell with the US ousting of Saddam Hussein, and in the borderlands between Iraq and Syria, as well as in pockets of North Africa, the Caucasus, and elsewhere, it is currently falling, int he most spectacular way, to a network of loosely organised militants who openly claim to wish to bring about one of the most illiberal, inegalitarian, repressive regimes not just that the world has ever known, but indeed that could even be imagined. In its most recent stage, this network has begun to export its violence far beyond the territory it hopes, at least initially, to conquer, and to the centres of power of the established, 'respectable' states that have been seeking to contain it militarily. Notably, on November 13, just two weeks ago, 130 civilians were killed in Paris in a series of attacks across the city. Some weeks earlier, a Russian passenger plane exploded over the Sinai Peninsula. 

This new power, this quasi-state, has some kind of relationship to Islam. There is significant debate --some of it serious, much of it frivolous-- as to the true importance of religious belief in the rise of this power. Some analysts have argued that what we are witnessing is not so much a 'radicalisation of Islam' as rather an 'Islamisation of radicalism': a sort of ad hoc wrapping of a radical political movement in whatever symbols and rhetoric are readily available from the surrounding culture. The 'deeper' reason for the radicalism is in turn sought in the demographic study of gender ratios, or in the backlash to America's blundering foreign policy. The anthropologist Scott Atran has compellingly argued, on the basis of extensive fieldwork, that belief in the promise of an afterlife is only one of many factors that feed into the socialisation of volunteers for suicide missions.  Many American commentators, associated with the so-called 'New Atheist' movement, have tended to disregard this evidence, and to insist that the problem is precisely Islam and the superstitious beliefs in the supernatural it foists upon its adherents. They insist that there is nothing distinctly Islamophobic about this interpretation, as it is just one regional and recent instance of the more general rule that, as they like to say, religion spoils everything. 

Whatever their causal power, the symbols and rhetoric of this new power are indeed drawn from a particular strain of Sunni theology. Under its rule, while Christians and Jews can be spared their lives if they are able to pay a 'protection' tax, Shiite Muslims must be killed if they have not converted already prior to the conquest of their territory. The lingua franca of this movement is Arabic, though it also has a slick public-relations division that operates in English, Russian, French, and many other languages besides, targeting in particular disaffected, nominally Muslim youth from what is called 'the Gray Zone': the part of the world in which Muslims and non-Muslims live side by side, and generally happily. This new movement would like to eliminate the Gray Zone: to make it impossible for Muslim immigrants to live in harmony with 'the infidel'. To the extent that Europeans allow an anti-Muslim backlash to occur in Europe in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, they are helping this movement to achieve its goals.

Scholars such as David Livingstone-Smith has analysed the way in which the propaganda of dehumanisation plays a crucial role in the drumming up of pro-war sentiment in a society on war's brink. My greatest fear, in being invited to speak to a forum like this, at a moment like this, is that I might inadvertently contribute, in even the smallest way, to the drumming. So, let me say right now that by far my most important goal, tonight, is simply to not be misunderstood. I am a pacifist, and am willing to embrace all the accusations of incoherence and self-contradiction this commitment invites. This is not a position one takes as a military strategist: it does not say that no war is in fact winnable, but only that even if you have a won a war, in a transcendental sense you have not really won. 

My second goal is to see whether I might be able to use some of my scholarly training and analytic ability to help to fight against this process of dehumanisation by calling into question some of the more facile dichotomies that are often evoked in claims about the uniqueness of European history and civilisation. This is a case, I hope, in which some old-fashioned intellectual history might play a role in improved intercultural understanding, and might therefore have some actual irenic power. Or, to put it differently, I am proceeding under the conviction that the more you know, the harder it becomes to remain a bellicose yahoo. 

What I would like to focus on, in particular, is first of all, the presumption that what is called 'Enlightenment' is in some way the intellectual property of Europe, and, second of all, the presumption that the humour and satire that have so often been seen as triggering the anger of violent fundamentalists in recent years, are somehow in turn gifts or by-products of Enlightenment. For the most part, the best commentators were able to do in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks was to invoke the formal freedom of speech that came to be a cornerstone of classical liberal thought in Europe in the 18th century. A favourite point of reference was Voltaire's famous quip about despising what you say, but being prepared to defend to the death your right to say it. What was missed in this principled stance in defence of an abstract liberty was any serious consideration of what was being said that triggered such wrath on the part of the fundamentalists: of where it came from, what it meant. What was missed was a genealogy of satire. 

In my scholarly work in the history and philosophy of science, I am involved in a research group in Paris dedicated to working out rigorous and adequate methods for the parallel study of geographically dispersed, and supposedly separate, intellectual traditions: how, for example, to study classical Greek and Chinese medicine together, or classical European and Indian astronomy, in a way that does not lend preference to the terms and concepts of the one strand more than the other. One of our basic methodological commitments is that there is, precisely, one object of study when we are considering the global history of, say, astronomy, and the local or regional inflections that result in very different styles of expression of, say, Indian astronomy on the one hand and European on the other, should not cause us to suppose that India has 'its own' astronomy, Europe 'its own', and so on. This approach has made us fairly contemptuous of the balkanized approaches that go under the name of 'studies'. As the great Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has recently written, in the latter half of the 20th century the humanities were "turned into a tenement and rented out to a congeries of regional or national philology departments (East Asian, Middle Eastern, Romance, Slavic, South Asian, and of course English and classics), with worse quarters given to those thought to be lower on the cultural-evolutionary scale." Humanists are no longer able to discern the global reach of important cultural developments, such as science and literature, and to appreciate the regional traditions for what they in fact are: inflections of a diffuse global process, and not, by any means, autochthonous growths, spontaneously generated in the special soil of a given region. 

This localism, indeed yokelism, has only been strengthened by the new strain of identitarianism in the humanities, particularly in the English-speaking world, which now takes as a gospel truth that only a member of a given ethnic or religious group "gets to speak for," "gets to decide" what is distinctive and special about that group, or, by contrast, what is shared with other groups. This identitarianism, a degenerate descendant of the sharp critique of authors such as Edward Saïd of more than a generation ago, is nominally a tendency of the left, but has by now been weaponised by virulently nationalistic thinkers throughout the developing world. A fine example is Rajiv Molhatra, who seeks to promote the study of Indian intellectual traditions, but does so in a way that falsely and unscientifically portrays them as sui generis in human history, and that plays into the ideology of religious purity known as Hindutva which is now part of the Modi government's broad arsenal for the persecution and exclusion of ethnic and religious minorities in India. When he is taken to task for his bad scholarship, indeed for his plagiarism, Molhatra typically responds, in garbled, derivative academese, that he is being held up to an imposed and colonialist regime of truth. 

This is the sad dead-end of the partition of the humanities into regional studies. It is also, ironically, the arrangement that best suits the ideology of European exceptionalism: as it leaves 'European studies', so to speak, as the implicit default subject of whatever is not explicitly cordoned off and 'marked', in a structuralist sense, as being concerned with the non-European world. 

The consequences of this limited perspective have been disastrous, not just for the academy, but for society as a whole, for our understanding of who we are, of who our neighbours are, and of our long shared history together. In science, technology, literature, crop rotation, any domain of human culture that might be of interest, Europe is and always has been a peninsula of Eurasia. My colleague Karine Chemla, the great scholar of the history of Chinese mathematics, likes to say that she "does not care about China," by which she means simply that what is of interest to her is whatever it is people are doing when they seek to prove things with numbers. This is something that has been done in China, among other places, and is eminently worthy of study. Similarly, I want to say that I do not care about Europe. Whatever happens here is a regional inflection of global developments, and to see this is perhaps the best way to move beyond the false presumption of a clash of civilisations that has obsessed and paralysed so many European and American thinkers over the past several decades. 

I am not a historian of literature, and am much more at home discussing the transregional diffusion of techniques for the calculation of infinite series, or proofs for the existence of God. But again, the methods we have developed for one domain of human cultural activity will work just as well for any other. 

What is literature, anyway? And what does this have to do with our effort to understand the apparent conflict between the Islamic and European worlds? In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, we heard repeatedly a sort of stock genealogy of that magazine, that invoked the venerable tradition of French satire, going back to Alfred Jarry, Honoré Daumier, and of course Voltaire. Satire is seen as a fairly well-bounded genre, and is appraised in political terms, as a lowly but necessary part of the functioning of a free society. Critics of Charlie Hebdo from the left and the right, ranging from Jean-Marie Le Pen to the dissident members of the PEN American Center writers' organisation, also assess the significance of the magazine in political terms. Le Pen the elder called it an 'anarchist rag', and stopped just short of thanking the Kouachi brothers for murdering its most prominent contributors. Critics on the left, in turn, seemed unable to distinguish its cartoons from racist propaganda, the overt intention of which is to drum up hatred of an enemy group in preparation for war or pogroms.

As I've said the last thing I want to do is to participate in this drumming, and for this reason it might seem strange for me to come out in defense of Charlie Hebdo-- again, not just in defense of its formal right to exist, but in defense of its content and its spirit. I believe that the only adequate defense is the one that considers satire from the longue durée perspective, and that seeks to understand it as a rhetorical mode with special rules governing it, rules that are different from those that govern straightforward political speech. A Nazi propaganda cartoon that depicts Jews as rats is not satire. It has a straightforward purpose: to dehumanize Jews in the minds of readers. Satire, typically, especially in its Juvenalian strain, takes up the voice of its intended target, in order to reveal the inherent moral baseness or logical incoherence of this voice. It is a sort of ventriloqy, and as such it is by definition in danger of being misinterpreted. Critics of satire will often complain that it has 'gone too far', but what they really mean is that it has done its job too well, and has discomforted the critics themselves in its ability to reproduce satirically language that originates in prim and straightfaced earnestness.

Now it may be that there is no other way: satirists perhaps must simplyaccept that society will heap its scorn on them, as if they were the earnest evil ones, just as the jester in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublyov, is abused and debased by the local prince's men for the simple fact that he lives in order to make people laugh, which is to say to remind people of the absurdity of human social life and the illusion of power it grants, for example, to local princes. But we as analysts and critics should aspire not to join in this abuse, not to join in the abuse, but rather to understand how this particular category of speech functions: that says what it means by saying the opposite of what it means, that, by lying, exposes the lies on which society is built.

One of the lies, or at least conceits, on which society is built, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown, the one that conceals the functions of the body. By holding in expulsions and ejaculations, not just of fluids and gasses, but also of certain words, we become properly social beings, and to let these demons out is precisely to challenge and to threaten the social order. In this way vulgarity becomes one of the most powerful weapons in the satirist's arsenal, and also one of the elements of satire that makes it easiest for polite society to distance itself from the lowly work of the satirist even while weakly affirming satire's formal right to exist. Thus in the weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks did we often hear prim bourgeois liberals insisting that, while they are against extrajudicial assassination of course, vulgar cartoons are "just not their cup of tea." But the vulgarity is not gratuitous; it is necessary. When Aristophanes has his fictional version of Socrates deny the existence of celestial divinities by comparing the thunder of the clouds to farting, he is not just telling 'fart jokes', but rather undermining the reigning vision of the sociocosmic order, which perceives divine itnention in great and lofty things, by accounting for it in the same terms as lowly and undignified things. This is, in Douglas's sense, the intrusion of the body where it does not belong, and it is dangerous indeed. The right to intrude in this way is of course an important formal freedom gained in the West by with the rise of liberalism's commitment to liberty of expression and of the press, and Charlie Hebdo emerges directly out of the period that saw some of the final obstacles to these liberties falling away, with the decline of censorship laws in the latter half of the 20th century. Yet many left intellectuals today (in contrast with the 1960s) tend to see vulgarity as at best a formal freedom to be tolerated, rather than a dangerous force to be tapped into. Thus for example Eliot Weinberger, writing earlier this year in the London Review of Books, described Charlie Hebdo as a bastion of 'frat-boy humour'. As if France had 'frat-boys', and as if vulgarity were not also central to the aesthetic and moral vision of Cervantes, Boccaccio, and Rabelais.

Now it might seem a bit overblown to invoke such canonical and timeless authors in connection with an operation as humble, and as focused on the constant stream of current events, as Charlie Hebdo. But the novel, as its very name suggests, is similarly humble in its origins, and similarly preoccupied with what is 'new'. It also shares an evolutionary ancestor with the joke. As Jim Holt recounts in a remarkable study of the origins of European literature:

During the centuries of Arab conquest, folktales from the Levant, many of them satirical or erotic, made their way through Spain and Italy. An Arab tale about a wife who is pleasured by her lover while her duped husband watches uncomprehendingly from a tree, for instance, is one of several that later show up in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Once in Europe, the folktale began to cleave in two. On the one hand, with the invention of printing and the rise of literacy, it grew longer, filling out into the chivalric romance and, ultimately, the novel. On the other hand, as the pace of urban life quickened, it got shorter in its oral form, shedding details and growing more formulaic as it condensed into the humorous anecdote.

Thus when we are wathcing Pasolini's cinematic rendition of Boccaccio's masterpiece, blocked by the Italian government censors on its release in 1971, when we re-encounter the tale of the young man who pretends to be deaf and dumb, and sneaks into a convent in order to have sex with the lusty sisters, we should be aware that we are enjoying a story with a deep, trans-Mediterranean pedigree, with subspecies variants scattered throughout the Arabic-speaking world like so many different varieties of Mediterranean cat. Arguably the crowning achievement of the French Annales school of historiography is Fernand Braudel's work The Mediterranean, published between 1923 and 1949, which takes that body of water not as the boundary between civilizations, but rather as the center of a single civilization. The mistake of the present age, perhaps resulting from changes in our modes of travel, is to take continents, rather than seas, as the basic units of cultural cohesion. Braudel's work called this presumption into question, in part by charting the trans-Mediterranean transmission of cultural motifs in the period of the late-Middle Ages and, more explosively, into the Renaissance. We have mostly come to terms with the trans-Mediterranean heritage of European philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. Literature by contrast, particularly since the 19th century, when it became centrally implicated in the construction of European national identities, has remained rather more resistant to this broader regional contextualization. This resistance likely has less to do with Eurocentrism than with abhorrence of the idea that this great art could have lowly and folkloric ancestry, and that styles and genres could have paths of oral transmission. But the historical record is clear enough: wherever we can detect the activity of traveling bards, the recitation of erotic fabliaux, the sheer illiterate delight of a raunchy joke, we can detect both the spirit that would under slightly different circumstances yield up great canonical novels, and, at the same time, we can detect a spirit that is by no means unique to the European continent.

In much more recent history as well, it is worth noting in passing, under somewhat different political circumstances, the basic spiritual unity of the lowly joke and the lofty novel has made itself known. Thus in the Soviet underground network of samizdat publishing, joke books circulated right alongside the great literary works of banned authors. Jokes, in turn, were and are called in Russian anekdoty, anecdotes, and the power of these vulgar little stories to subvert the political order is well known. Putin, it is worth noting, is no fan of Charlie Hebdo either, and actively encouraged an anti-Charlie Hebdo rally under the sponsorship of his puppet governor in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The great modern satirical novels are characterized, of course, not only by vulgarity, but also, often, by a sharp self-awareness, even a self-defeating preoccupation with the impossibility or futility of what it is they are trying to do. The most well-known exemplar of this is assuredly Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novel that ends before it even begins, because the narrator cannot figure out a way to get started: though in the course of not-beginning, he also manages to take down the conceits of the puffed-up philosophers, the pointless violence of the war-makers, and so on. Throughout the modern period in fact, many great satirical novels appear preoccupied with the moral weight, the gravity, of the very project of fiction: impersonating voices, inventing worlds, and claiming as true what is in fact false. Cervantes cleverly attributes the authorship of his own Don Quixote to the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli, on the supposed grounds that Muslims have a different comportment to the truth than Christians do, and fewer moral qualms about making things up. But what he is in fact doing is subverting the medieval genre of knights-errant literature by producing a novel that is openly 'Moorish', which is to say openly deceitful, and also openly tricksterish, in the comparative-mythological sense of a supernatural being that is able to deceive not just by regular speech, but by spinning out counterfeit worlds. For Don Quixote, who is perhaps the truly simple-minded character in the novel, knights-errant novels express the 'truth' in the sense of 'moral truth': they offer up a proper image of the way things should be. But for someone involved in the production of the Don's tale, perhaps the Cide, offering up moral fables as truth is the greatest falsehood of all, and accordingly the proper response is to subvert the genre, via satire, and with an aim that is eminently philosophical: to destroy the pretense to truth of genre-conventional works by making the writing of fiction principally an exploration of the moral and metaphysical dimensions of recounting as true events that are strictly false. 

All of these preoccupations --vulgarity, self-awareness and self-defeat, the limits of the straightforward truth-claims of philosophy, the moral gravity and simultaneous necessity of fiction-- come together in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s remarkable ‘novel’, Leg over Leg; or, the Turtle in the Tree, concerning the Fāriyāq, What Manner of Creature He Might Be, first published in Arabic in Paris in 1855. The work does not have a typical narrative structure, and in the era it was often described in French and English as a non-fictional travel report of an Arab in Europe. But it consciously draws on Sterne, as well as on classical Arabic poetic forms such as shukf, in order to engage with philosophical ideas, among them the ideas taught in the traditional Arabic system of learning, having significant roots, ultimately, in Aristotle. Thus for example there is a long discussion of the questions whether grammar is a science, and an illustration of how lessons may be drawn from grammar for the resolution of philosophical questions. A tutor explains to his student, for example that he “had long harboured doubts over the question of the immortality of the sould and inclined toward the dictum of the philosophers to the effect that whatever has a beginning must have an end. But when I found that grammar has an ‘inchoative’ but no ‘terminative’, I drew an analogy between that and the soul and ceased to be confused, praise God.” The tutor goes on to give the student a deliriously ornate analysis of the different types of metaphor that one must master in order to be a true grammarian (and thus, in order to have the elements of philosophy). These include “the aeolian, the ornitho-sibilant, the feebly chirping, the tongue-smacking, the faintly tinkling, the bone-snapping, the emptily thunderous, and the phasmic, while the aeolian itself may be sub-divided into the stridulaceous, the crepitaceous, and the oropharyngeal, the crepitaceous may be sub-sub-divided into the absquiliferous, the vulgaritissimous, the exquipilifabulous, the seborrhaceous, the squapalidaceous, and the kalipaceous.”

What explains this astounding cascade of vocabulary? For al-Shidyaq, the overabundant and often agressively repetitious style is intrinsic to the very raison d'être of the work. "I have imposed on the reader, he writes, "the condition that he not skip any of the 'synonymous' words in this book of mine, many though they be (for it may happen that, on a single road, a herd of fifty words, all with the same meaning, or with two meanings that are close, may pass him by). If he cannot commit to this, I cannot permit him to peruse it and will not offer him my congratulations if he does so. I have to admit that I cannot support the idea that all 'synonyms' have the same meaning, or they would have called them 'equi-nyms'." As Rebecca Johnson argues, al-Shidyaq's aim of critiquing institutionalized conceptions of sacred texts, of breaking down ecclesiastical authority and social conventions, is directly facilitated by his method of equinymy: the "simple definitions of words" that "seem to collapse under the weight of his lists of subtly differentiated synonyms -- does not establish him as the ultimate linguistic authority as much as it shows that language itself is the key to dissidence" (xxviii).

Language as the key to dissidence: this is precisely the gravity of satire. We should not be surprised that one of the earliest and most aggressive synonymic bombardments in the work focuses on the many different names for female genitalia --'the sprayer', 'the gripper', 'the nock'--, male genitalia --'the thimble', 'the snub nose', 'the falcon's stand'--, and so on. Here the author is drawing on his massive erudition and internalization of medieval Arabic dictionaries, and also of shukf, a genre of obscene classical Arabic poetry. As the scholar Adam Talib has shown by some very clever side-by-side comparisons, this genre makes the most aggressive, sexually explicit rap lyrics look prudish by comparison. In both genres, the overt purpose is to be so exaggeratedly obscene as to sever the link to any conceivable act that one might actually carry out in this world, to let the imagination run free, and so to subvert not only ordinary sexual morality, but also those who would insist that the function of the narrative arts is to track reality.

Al-Shidyaq is writing as an Arab in 19th-century Paris, and indeed the first edition of his work is presented as a straightforward travelogue. Some of what strikes him about that city may be thought of as its inescapable clichés, indeed many of the same clichés that continue to fascinate and defie the people who recently attacked it. At one point he focuses his method of repetition on the concert-hall organ as the embodiment of Frankish bon-vivantism. The organ produces its sound, he effuses, by "strumming and humming, mumbling and rumbling, jangling and jingling, squeaking and creaking, chirping and cheeping, burbling and barking, clicking and clacking, gnashing and crashing, chinking and clinking, gurgling and gargling, purring, cooing, and bleating, thrumming and drumming, roaring and guffawing, gulling and gabbling, la-la-ing and lullabying, horses' neighs and the roaring of waves, clubbing of billy goats and cricking of cradles, cries of men at war, calls of merlins and raven's caw, old women moaning and heavy doors groaning," and so on.

He is fascinated by the distinctively Frankish fondness for revelry in the presence of such a strangely vital, breathing instrument as the organ (already in the 17th century Marin Mersenne had noted the appropriateness of the instrument's name, given its resemblance to a living, breathing animal). Al-Shidyaq contrasts this cultural trait, this easy self-abandonment to the irrationality sensuality of music, to the pervasive musicophobia of the traditional villagers in his home in Lebanon:

The natives there [in the Levant] are fanatical about religion and warn against anything capable of causing sensual pleasure. Consequently, they do not want to learn to sing or play an instrument or to use the latter in their places of worship and their prayers, as do the Frankish shaykhs [i.e., the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church], lest this lead them into disbelief. Thus every one of the gentle arts, such as poetry and harmony, for example, or painting, is an abomination. Could they but hear the humans sung in the churches of their aforementioned shaykhs or the tunes of the organ that people are so fond of and that are played in places of entertainment, dance halls, and cafés to attract men and women, they'd find no sin in the tambour.

The organ al-Shidyaq is describing might easily have been found, fifteen or so years after his book's publication, in the recently opened café, Le Bataclan, which dates to 1865. The killers who came to that venue on November 13 of this year did not stay long enough or live long enough, of course, to reconsider their idea of sin. They had grown up themselves in the Gray Zone, but by the time they came to this concert hall in the very heart of it, where Muslims and non-Muslims happily revel alongside one another, they had been converted to a version of their nominal religion that left no room for reconsiderations of any sort, for thoughts of any sort that are not dictated by some revered authority. Al-Shidyaq for his part had been born a Maronite Christian, but after moving to Istanbul to take up work as a chief typographer to the Ottoman Sultan, he happily converted to Islam. Some commentators see ample signs of his coming conversion already in Leg over Leg. Back in Lebanon, at the end of his life, he insisted on being buried in the Christian cemetery of his ancestors, but with a bold Islamic crescent on his gravestone. Al-Shidyaq, we might say, wanted to stay in the Gray Zone even in death.

Now it might be objected that my reflections here are suited to a post-January 7th world more than to a post-November 13th world. Imperial powers are now downing each other's fighter jets, and NATO is holding emergency meetings. What use is literary criticism at such a moment in history? The most recent attack in Paris was overtly military, rather than simply criminal (though I am uneasy about making such a distinction), and it was not based on the killers' inability to appreciate the literary output of their victims. I might be tempted to claim that Daesh has failed to appreciate the literary inspiration in the name that the band playing at Le Bataclan took for itself --the Eagles of Death Metal-- but we all know that the ironic playfulness of some subgenres of indie rock had nothing, but nothing, to do with the choice of targets. And yet we might take this evident lack of interest as itself a measure of the distance --in imagination, in hopes and expectations from life-- between the killers and their victims. This is not, at all, a civilizational divide, between the pious Muslims on the one hand and the wayward post-Christian secular Europeans on the other: the 'infidels', as Daesh calls them. But it is most definitely a divide within a single trans-Mediterranean civilization. In this divide, the dour and self-serious fundamentalists find unwitting support from the prim bourgeois liberals who think the defense of obscenity is merely a matter of upholding a formal but largely regrettable freedom, as well as from those on the left who mistake satire for a mechanism of colonial domination. Jokes are serious. What we are defending when we defend satire is not simply 'the right to offend', but rather a particular disposition to the world, one that differs as much from the literal or straightforward disposition as the novel differs from the police report or medical file. What we are defending is imagination, playfulness, and, yes, freedom: freedom from the simple lies that keep society running, the lies that tell you what is right and what is wrong, that you should behave thus rather than so: the lies that the small spirits of the fundamentalists crave to believe. What we are defending is the Gray Zone.

Yakutia

I've just completed the first lesson of L. N. Kharitonov's Self-Teaching Manual of the Yakut Language (Third Edition, Moscow, 1987). What satisfaction! At this early stage the vocabulary is very similar to Turkish, though to be precise the true relation is the reverse: modern Turkish is a distant descendant of a Central Asian proto-Turkic, and of all Turkic languages it is Siberian Yakut, or Sakha, that preserves the most archaic features.

My eventual hope is to be able to do an English translation of the oral epic known as the Olonkho, or at least of the parts that have been written down. What I've previously been able to read is Platon Alekseevich Oyunsky's (1893-1939) Russian translation of the saga of Nurgun Bootur the Swift (Yakutsk, 1931), as well as a number of his scholarly works on Yakut poetics. Oyunsky also wrote some of the most heavy-handed, schlockiest Soviet socialist poetry I've ever read (and I've read a lot), but even this didn't do the trick: in 1939 he was removed from a train returning from Moscow to Yakutsk, and arrested for his involvement in 'Yakut bourgeois counterrevolutionary organizations'. He died in a labor camp that same year, and was rehabilitated, for what that's worth, in 1955.

Oyunsky's translations of portions of the Olonkho into Russian are stunning, and to the extent possible evoke the  full richness and vitality of the lived --which is to say recited, or quasi-sung-- poem. Is his work, now, 'obscure'? Is it 'obscure' to take an interest in this material? It seems so, especially in our hyperprofessionalized academic landscape where the slightest deviation from our 'area of specialization' is taken as a sign of deviance. But what is important about Yakut epic is that it offers a plain and revealing case study for coming to understand the oral roots of literature. The Olonkho is as literary as Homeric epic, but the history of Siberia's encounter with the technology of writing is different from that experienced in the Eastern Mediterranean. (Plato and Aristotle both cite Homer as an authority, largely thanks to his work having been written down, and the tradition to which I am supposed to belong, philosophy, is often thought to be a tradition of commentary on these two, so I hope it's clear where I'm going with this: philosophy = Olonkho + writing.) 

If you do not read Cyrillic, this might look, more or less, like Russian, but it is nothing of the sort. Even the borrowed terms in Sakha are adapted to the radically different phonetics of Turkic. For one thing, as in Spanish, consonant clusters must be flanked by vowels on each end, thus скамейка ('bench'), becomes ыскамыайка, and flaunts right at the outset the dreaded ы, which can strictly never be an initial vowel in Russian, and which the rabid nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky recently called for eradicating from the Russian language altogether: it is an ugly 'Asiatic' letter representing an ugly Asiatic sound, he said; evidently anxious about the clarity of the distinction, he insisted it was for nomadic pagan hordes, not for Russians.

I have tremendous admiration for Soviet foreign-language pedagogy, and am consistently impressed with instruction manuals published in the USSR for the minority languages of the union, even if this means that the Yakut I will be learning, at least for now, will center principally on daily life at the factory, or some dull athletic competition of young Pioneers. Curiously, in Kharitonov's historical introduction he bemoans the Tsarist-era Russification of Yakutia, yet the themes and names he chooses for his exercises are decidedly Russian (and not just Soviet) as well. Here's my translation exercise from the first lesson:

This is a class. Here is a table, a chair, a bench. There stands a stove. This is a door. Here sits Sergei. There sits Semyon. Over there stands Ivan. Ivan, come, sit here. Mikhail, come, stand here. What is this? This is a class. What is this here? This is a table, a chair, a bench. What is standing there? There stands a stove. What is over there? Over there is a window. Where is the door? That is the door. Who is sitting here? Sergei is sitting here. Where is Liza sitting? Liza is sitting there. Is Ivan sitting? No, Ivan is standing. Who is standing over there? Ivan is standing over there. Is Piotr here. No, Piotr is not here. 

Even with this rudimentary material, the story-seeking human mind fills in the scene, imagines it all. I am reminded here of Nabokov's recollection of his first encounters with English instructional books:

My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar --Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts -- 'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan', 'Sam is in bed', and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ --for the initial lessons, at least-- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician's chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me.

And why is Ivan standing? I now find myself wondering. And where is Piotr? (Is he a delinquent? A counterrevolutionary?) And how inviting and hearthy, to find a stove in the classroom. Is this Yakutia? I want to be there. 

Over and over again, literature is born, from stories, from suggestions, from traces. The supposed archaicness of many of these traces is no impediment; even in the most hyperrealist novels of the modern age, it has been the mind of the reader doing most of the work, filling it all in.  

Much of this filling-in was once done by the bard, by the reciter of literature. But a shift occurred, in much of the world anyhow, after which, it was thought, literature is not to be recited at all, but read. And now all we readers have are traces. Increasingly it seems worthwhile to me to study and to reflect upon the relationship between living literature, of the sort the Olonkho represents, and the fossil vestiges we have now come to take, almost without reflection, for the real thing. 

Joining PEN

My application to join PEN American Center as a 'professional member' was approved. I had been worried they might reject it, since I remain, at least with respect to who pays my salary and what my daily responsibilities looks like, an academic philosopher, but I basically told them that professional philosophers have no conception of a shared avocation that binds them together with their homologues in Azerbaijan and Rwanda, and that for that reason, more than any other, I'm looking to change crowds. 

Here is what I wrote, in part: 

"Over the past few years I have been drifting gradually away from my academic community (I am a professional philosopher), towards the community of people who define themselves as writers. The reasons for this shift are various, but I will focus on one. Philosophers are in the end extremely provincial, belonging to national traditions with little sense of the existence of a global community of kindred souls. The further one ventures from the Anglo-American and Western European world, the harder it is for professional philosophers to recognize a shared vocation with the people they encounter. Writers by contrast are sharply aware of the global scope of their work, and are capable of sincere solidarity with one another that transcends state and tradition. 

"I have on occasion signed petitions, initiated or supported by PEN, in support of persecuted writers and journalists throughout the world. It has recently come to seem to me that my support of such causes might be more useful if I were not simply speaking as a lone voice, but as a member of an organization committed to them. I'll admit that the recent debates about Charlie Hebdo among American writers, in which I participated from my perch in France, helped to bring into clear relief for me how important global solidarity is and why it is best, for me, to pursue this as a writer (rather than as, say, an academic or an activist). But the Charlie Hebdo affair was a crisis in the proper sense: it did not really bring about anything new, but only made plain the cleavages that were already there, both among American writers, and between me and my supposed community of academics who, by contrast with the majority of members of the American chapter of PEN, could not even begin to grasp how important it is to stand against the persecution of satirists everywhere. I take it that this is because they do not understand how important satire is. I expect writers to be somewhat more advanced in this regard."

Earlier, in October of last year, long before I had considered joining PEN, I wrote to a friend:

"Increasingly I have trouble thinking of myself as part of the community of American philosophers, and not only because I live and work in Europe, but also because its members seem fundamentally incapable of understanding what it is to be a philosopher as something more than being able to rattle off the same list of American (and sometimes British, Canadian, and Australian) names, departments, and annual events, or being able to formulate an opinion on Brian Leiter. How different American philosophers are, in this regard, from writers or artists, or, in a somewhat different way, natural scientists, who are all ready and eager to recognize an Albanian or Iranian, say, as one of their own, so long as that person is a self-identified practitioner of the same ancient craft!

"Why is there no philosophical equivalent of PEN? Why are the annual APA meetings treated as being of such tremendous cosmic significance, while the various modest attempts at global philosophical encounter, such as the World Philosophical Congress, are scoffed at by American philosophers as if they were John Bolton at the United Nations? In the end it's because the people who attend the World Philosophical Congress wear cheap suits and have big moustaches and seem, by American parochial standards, to be generally out of it. But again, in the case of, say, literature or art, there is an underlying shared something that the American and the Albanian practitioners of the ancient craft love, and that they recognize as shared. This shared something takes them beyond the differences of costume and idiom. Is there a comparable something that American philosophers love? I'm beginning to have my doubts."

I am still reeling from the time I wrote a piece for the New York Times 'Stone' series about the need to pay attention to the ethical and metaphysical commitments of, e.g., hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers throughout the world, if we are truly committed to increasing the diversity of, and promoting inclusiveness within, academic philosophy. The response? I was accused on the Feminist Philosophers blog of 'mansplaining'. Elsewhere, many supposed that I had attempted a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of inclusiveness: for them, it was self-evident that people from different demographic sectors of one and the same society must be included in the project of philosophy, but the idea that people from different societies should be included too struck them as no less self-evidently absurd. This, for me, more than any other, was the moment I thought to myself: Never mind. I'm done here.  

I'm not leaving philosophy, but I am leaving behind, to the extent possible, the professional organizations and networks that do not permit me to live out my philosophical commitment to cosmopolitanism. It seems to me, from what I have been able to discern so far, that for complicated historical reasons it is 'writers', and not 'philosophers', who have better cherished and preserved this ideal. 

Making Shit Up

Nabokov said its humor did not age well, and unlike Moby-Dick, which is occasionally dismissed as a school-boy's adventure story but never as hokey or stale, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha seems to suffer under the weight of its most representative scenes. The association of the whole with these mere parts is either too vivid, or it is not vivid at all, as in the case of the subnovel of Anselmo and Lothario, which everyone today knows, without knowing where it is from. Most of these scenes are played out in Part I, by the end of which the presumed hero has survived several battles against hallucinated enemies, drawn his squire hesitantly but hopefully into all of them, and mingled with several different minor characters, many of whose own stories, and not just Lothario's, amount to novels within the novel. He has been tricked into a cage by a sympathetic pair, a canon and a priest, and taken back to his home, to his housekeeper and his niece, in the hope that he might be cured of his madness. 

Part I was published first in Madrid in 1605, and over the next ten years would be published in Brussels (1607), Milan (1610), and, in the first of many English translations, in London in 1612. Part II would be published ten years after Part One, also in Madrid, in 1615. Although Don Quixote is so often reduced to the battle with the windmills, which has been concluded within the first few chapters of Part One (leading us to suspect that its iconic character has at least something to do with the fact that many readers get no further), it is Part II, and what happens or is imagined to have happened between 1610 and 1615, that is the true clavis to understanding the novel in its entirety, and in all its philosophical, subversive, deceitful greatness.

So, at the beginning of Part II, Don Quixote is lying in bed, and the priest and the canon come to see how he is doing, to check whether he has recovered from his madness, or whether he continues to take himself for a knight errant. Sancho Panza is there as well, still believing, or willing to believe, that his master is a knight errant, and that great things await them once they set back out on the road. To the solicitous pair's disappointment, the Don continues to maintain that what had looked like madness was in fact the result of supernatural enchantment, a common occurrence in the tales of knights errant, so that, in his case, giants only looked like windmills, a helmet only looked like a washbasin, and so on. But bedside conversation turns to a stranger form of enchantment still: someone, perhaps some quasi-divine being, has, it turns out, produced a written account of everything that happened while Don Quixote was out practicing his knight-errantry, and has published it, first in Madrid in 1605, and later in Valencia, Milan, Antwerp... 

The men have arranged for a visit from a recently graduated student, the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, who has himself read the novel, and may know something of how it came about. Thus in Chapter 3 of Part II (in Edith Grossman's elegant new translation):

Don Quixote was extremely thoughtful as he awaited Bachelor Carrasco, from whom he hoped to hear the news about himself that had been put into a book, as sancho had said, though he could not persuade himself that such a history existed, for the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the blade of his sword and his chivalric exploits were already in print. Even so, he imagined that some wise man, either a friend or an enemy, by the arts of enchantment had printed them: if a friend, in order to elevate them and raise them above the most famous deeds of any knight errant; if an enemy, to annihilate them and place them lower than the basest acts ever attributed to the basest squire, although --he said to himself-- the acts of squires were never written down; if such a history did exist, because it was about a knight errant it would necessarily be grandiloquent, noble distinguished and true. This gave him some consolation, but it made him disconsolate to think that its author was a Moor, as suggested by the name Cide, and one could not expect truth from the Moors, because all of them are tricksters, liars, and swindlers [embelecadores, falsarios y quimeristas].

There is no explanation, yet, of why the Moor, in addition to being in his nature a deceiver, should have such a remarkable supernatural ability to know the stories of individual people in the real world, and to transpose them from there into the world of a novel. But Sansón, perhaps, gives us a small hit when he proceeds to make a few basic distinctions between forms of writing:

[I]t is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.  

The student does not reveal his source, but he is plainly relating from memory what he has learned studying the philosophy of Aristotle at university. The Greek philosopher writes in Book I of the Poetics: 

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

To which genre of writing is Don Quixote supposed to belong, now? The answer seems inseparable from the question of the work's authorship, and of its actual subject. The possibility is briefly considered, more than once, that Sancho Panza is the real hero of the novel, a possibility that is of course mocked and dismissed by Don Quixote himself, who claims that it would violate the most basic rules governing the knights-errant literature to place the squire at the center of the tale, rather than to have him subordinate to his knight. But there is of course very little in the novel that does respect these rules, and in this respect the suggestion and the refutation go together as a sort of affirmation. 

This affirmation would be echoed in at least one significant interoperation of the novel. In "The Truth about Sancho Panza," a parable written in 1917 and published first in 1931, Franz Kafka hypothesizes that the squire is the true subject of the novel, and that the 'knight' is in turn a projection of his own lapse into the factitious world of fiction: "Without making any boast of it," Kafka writes,

Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

Kafka wishes to 'disenchant' Don Quixote by making its protagonist a simple-minded yet curable man, sucked in by fantasy but not misled by it. The world that Sancho Panza returns to, by the end of Kafka's parable, is our world. This is thus not so far from Milan Kundera's reading of Don Quixote: that it is the great milestone of the beginning of 'modernity'. What could be more modern than disenchantment? If you see things shifting shapes, it is not that the world is enchanted, but that you are mad: the death of nature and the birth of the clinic at once. 

Yet we might place the squire at the center of the action for reasons that Kafka does not seem to have detected. Who, after all, would violate the conventions to which Don Quixote himself is so faithful? A deceitful Moor, perhaps. And why? Because he is not interested in our world, but in spinning out spurious and false (or, to stick with neutral language, 'non-actual') ones. And why? Because he is a poet and not a historian. And why? Because, as Aristotle taught and as the Moors both learned and eventually passed on to the Christian universities of Iberia, it is this use of the narrative art that is closest to philosophy: to the investigation of the problems of metaphysics that the novel, properly conceived, invites us to consider. This is a fraught and morally treacherous investigation -- it invites us to entertain the false as true (or, again, to put it in neutral terms, to consider the non-actual as actual).

For Don Quixote, who is perhaps the truly simple-minded character in the novel, knights-errant novels express the 'truth' in the sense of 'moral truth': they offer up a proper image of the way things should be. But for someone involved in the production of the Don's tale, perhaps the Cide, offering up moral fables as truth is the greatest falsehood of all, and accordingly the proper response is to subvert the genre, via satire, and with an aim that is eminently philosophical: to destroy the pretense to truth of genre-conventional works by making the writing of fiction principally an exploration of the moral and metaphysical dimensions of recounting as true events that are strictly false. 

 A convenient table summarizing the two possible, and possibly overlapping, novels called Don Quixote would look something like this:

Written by	Who is a	About a	Scope	Genre	Truth value
Cide Hamete Benengeli	Moor	Squire	Possible worlds	Fiction/poetry	False
Miguel de Cervantes	Christian	Knight errant	Actual world	History	True

What becomes clear in Part II is that Cervantes has attempted to merge himself with the fictional author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, in order to break with the genre of knights-errant literature, to subvert it, by producing a novel that is openly 'Moorish', which is to say openly deceitful, and also openly tricksterish in the comparative-mythological sense of a supernatural being that is able to deceive not just by regular speech, but by spinning out counterfeit worlds. The Cide has accomplished something even more remarkable than this, something more remarkable even than what your average evil deceiver (to invoke a personage from another European work of fiction that would appear a few decades later) might pull off. As the Don and the others begin to realize at the beginning of Part II, he has not just spun out a world out of words and presented it as truth; he has moreover taken their world, the world of the knight and the squire and entourage, which they had previously supposed to be simple fact, and, by writing it, has made it factitious.  

Cervantes's invention of the Cide, and his characters' coming to self-consciousness as the inventions of Cide, is a particularly complex variation on the sort of meditation on truth and falsehood, and on poetry and history, that seems to have served as a metafictional accompaniment to many important prose works from the ancient to the early modern periods. Thus Lucian of Samosata in his remarkable second-century CE work of science fiction, the True History, begins with an extremely awkward confession of the author's own recourse to lying, coupled with a hopeful insistence that dishonesty is not so much a cop-out, as it is a necessary element, of story-telling:

I could not condemn ordinary men for lying, when I saw it in request amongst them that would be counted philosophical persons: yet could not but wonder at them, that, writing so manifest lies, they should not think to be taken with the manner; and this made me also ambitious to leave some monument of myself behind me, that I might not be the only man exempted from this liberty of lying: and because I had no matter of verity to employ my pen in (for nothing hath befallen me worth the writing), I turned my style to publish untruths, but with an honester mind than others have done: for this one thing I confidently pronounce for a truth, that I lie: and this, I hope, may be an excuse for all the rest, when I confess what I am faulty in: for I write of matters which I neither saw nor suffered, nor heard by report from others, which are in no being, nor possible ever to have a beginning. Let no man therefore in any case give any credit to them.

It is not Lucian's fault if he has to lie: nothing worth telling has ever in fact happened to him. Reality has not done its part to enable him to be a compelling history-teller, so he will have to be a story-teller instead. He goes on to tell of a trip to the moon, and of a great bell he found there that enabled him to listen in on conversations on earth, and of all sorts of other things that would eventually, more or less, come true. 

Prose fiction is born of deceit: it amounts to an adoption of the outer form of history writing --that is, relation of the actual-- in order to explore the possible-but-non-actual, which is supposed to be explored only in verse (at least if we agree with Aristotle, which Cervantes, via Sansón, invites us to do). The outward markers of the exploration of mere possibility, meter and rhyme and so on, are eliminated, and what results is the novel: a straight report of something that did not happen. That the novel is in its essence a dissimulation constituted a clear problem --a moral and philosophical problem: what are we doing and how can we presume to do it?-- for prose fiction writers from Lucian at least through Cervantes, even if the problematic character of the endeavor is subsequently eclipsed with the elevation of the novel to a respectable bourgeois art form, and to a pillar of the display of national cultural greatness.

Flaubert just churned out worlds, and the world itself was in on the game; these worlds, the worlds of the 19th-century realist novel, soon became movies, and by now it is entirely taken for granted that we live alongside multiple parallel worlds. If these raise moral and political problems, problems for censors or ratings boards, these problems are now thought to lie only in the particular content of this or that entertainment, and the idea that the entire undertaking might be a great, morally untenable dissimulation seems to have been entirely occluded.

Or almost entirely. One genre that appears to preserve, and to be sustained by, the same problematic charge that makes Don Quixote a masterpiece is the genre that is sometimes called 'parafiction', the genre of pseudocumentary, of the fake encyclopedia entry, perfected by Borges and evoked in the literary work of Calvino, Bolaño, of Luigi Serafini with his separatist universe encyclopedized in the Codex Seraphinianum, of all the tongue-in-cheek footnotes and pseudo-critical apparatus of the various postmoderns, who seem, in their way, to in fact be returning to a premodern preoccupation with the moral and metaphysical problem of presenting as true what is in fact false, a concern that was only temporarily hidden by the canonization and nationalization of the novel as recently as the 19th century. 

The Arthurian romances and knights-errant novels, as Don Quixote's canon (the character, that is) insists, instill an appreciation of the truth, and this is what saves their fabulous, non-actual plots from being found guilty of the sin of lying. They deviate from fact, into fantasy, for the sake of moral truth. But, the canon warns, abandon the normative dimensions of story-telling, and you have nothing left over but a lie. Satire is what happens when the normative dimensions are disowned and mocked, and the author stands open to the accusation of lying, of making shit up, and consequently feels compelled to face, exposed, the philosophical problem of truth and falsehood. 

All great prose fiction is satire. 

Charlie Hebdo and Literature

"Jesting destroys dignity, removes honour [yudhhibu bi-mā' al-wajh], breeds hatred, spoils the sweetness of belief and love [yudhhibu bi-halāwat al-īmān wa-l-wudd], tarnishes the learning of a religious expert [faqīh], emboldens the ignorant, deadens the heart, alienates from God, and spawns silliness and humiliation." --Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ibshīhī (d. 850/1446-47).

"[Ibn Sa'dān] once said: come let us make this night of ours one of mujūn [libertinism, obscenity] and indulge in much jest [na'khudhu min al-hazli binasibin wāfir] for seriousness has tired us, beaten our energies with sadness. Give us what you have." --Al-Tawhīdī (c. 318-414/930-1023)

*

In response to the recent attempt by some members of PEN to betray persecuted editorialists throughout the world by refusing to honor the survivors of a right-wing death squad's attack on a group of caricature artists in Paris a few months ago, Harper's has taken my April essay out from behind its paywall. Many have been writing on the Internet about their exasperation with all the 'think pieces' on this topic. When will we have finally had enough? they wonder. My answer is that there will be no more need for 'think pieces' when there will be sufficiently serious thinking about this question. What the PEN protesters have given us is a refusal-to-think piece: Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism that both denies commonalities of experience and history when they are present (as between Europe and the Arab world), and presumes such commonalities when they are in fact absent (as between Anglo-American and French traditions of humor and satire), all on the basis of the ungrounded extension of the currently preferred American analytic lens of 'whiteness' and 'non-whiteness'. This lens certainly reveals quite a bit about American history and its enduring legacies, but very little about the broader history of the Mediterranean and its peoples, against the background of which the recent Charlie Hebdo incident is best understood.  

I have been defending Charlie Hebdo, not only on the basis of a commitment to freedom of expression, but also out of an appreciation for what is expressed. Obviously I can't command others to agree with me here, to have a taste for something they simply don't like. I also can't command you to like Lolita, for example. But if all of a sudden I find myself surrounded by people saying that they refuse to approve of, or even to take a look at, a book that condones child rape, I'll be right to judge that this isn't really a question of aesthetic taste or critical judgment in literature; it's a question of political forces, at work perhaps beyond the awareness of the individual reader, that are determining what is to legitimately count as a work of literature.

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python...), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I've written elsewhere, it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco'd in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work --often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny-- as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

I have also maintained elsewhere that the judgment of taste that we so often hear, invoking Charlie Hebdo's vulgarity or childishness, is a sure indication of what is really going on: it is classic Anglo-American arrogant prudishness, mistaking itself for solidarity with the oppressed.The idée fixe among Anglophone would-be progressives has been that Charlie Hebdo is 'crude', 'childish', 'vulgar', or, as Eliot Weinberger curiously put it in the LRB, that it specializes in 'frat-boy humor'. As if France had 'frat boys', and as if jokes about the body and its orifices and noises, and about the delirious variety of human grotesquerie, weren't also the humor of Cervantes and Rabelais. I did not want to get dragged back into the mêlée this time around, but I'm reading Don Quixote right now in Edith Grossman's lovely new translation, and I'm struck by just how much this particular sensibility matters to me, and how much it's worth fighting for in a world that doesn't get it and is afraid of it.

In the Harper's piece what I was trying to do was to insist on a revision of the facile view that what Charlie Hebdo represented was something distinctly and exclusively 'Western', 'Enlightenment-based', etc. Hence my attempt, space permitting, at a sort of genealogy of the joke and of the sources of bawdy literature --of which I see Charlie Hebdo as a descendant-- in pan-Mediterranean oral folklore. I detect here a possibility for going back around all the apparent dichotomies that both French laïcité defenders such as Alain Finkielkraut as well as the American left thinkers who have taken such a firm stance on Charlie Hebdo have helped to perpetuate, and finding a shared history and a common reality.

To put this a bit differently, Rabelais is closer to an anonymous medieval Arab raconteur than he is to, say, Peter Carey. You can classify Charlie Hebdo as a product of the wit-shrouded racism and imperialism of the Enlightenment, assimilating it to Voltaire and so on, but there is an alternative genealogy, which I have been trying to draw out, which connects the modern European satirical tradition to something much larger than Europe, and to something much older than modernity. It is my opponents, and not me, who are perpetuating the ideology of European exceptionalism by acting as though satire has no roots, and can have no purchase, outside of Europe.*

The reason for bringing up Kant and Descartes was not to cow opponents by argument ad auctoritatem, but rather to show that it is not in some supposed superiority of European rationality, as expressed in the European philosophical tradition, that we're going to find an answer to why Europeans supposedly 'get the joke' and why non-Europeans supposedly do not. European philosophy is embarrassed by humor, distances itself from it, and when Kant tries clumsily to engage with it, he shows how unprepared the philosophical tradition is to do so in a rigorous way. So my point was to say that the invocation of 'I think therefore I am' at the Paris rallies after the attacks was misplaced; and that if we want to make sense of Charlie Hebdo's humor, we have to look to a very different domain of culture than philosophy, the one that, again, reaches back genealogically to Rabelais et al. and from there across the Mediterranean to a part of the world Europeans wrongly imagine as the total opposite and negation of their historical experience. But I had to talk about philosophy in order to show why it wasn't delivering the tools to get us out of this apparent impasse.

I am not a big fan of most laïcité rhetoric, and I am sensitive to how it is used for purposes of exclusion. (I am also not listening to what Salman Rushdie is saying on this topic.) This is why I've tried to be consistent about coupling my position on Charlie Hebdo with an equally insistent position on, e.g., the rights and dignity of regular and non-regular ('illegal') migrants to France. I see my position as the one that, more than that of those with whom I disagree, is most insistent that Islam must not be perceived as a monolith, that in fact there is no such thing as the Muslim community, but rather numerous disagreeing factions, by no means all of which agree with the attackers that there is something unacceptably offensive about the content of Charlie Hebdo. Anyhow I do find that the more I defend my own view, the more I detect a certain sclerosis in it, and I'm scared of that too, which is why I've been trying to move on to other things, to come back to this later and see if my view has changed. For now, it hasn't.

--

*If you would like an introduction to some Arabic texts that make Charlie Hebdo's 'frat boy' humor look like pious scriptural commentary, I recommend starting with Zoltan Szombathy's Mujun: Libertinism in Medieval Muslim Society and Literature (2013).

For more on the transmission of literary styles and genres, including 'vulgar' ones, see J. A. Abu Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyric (2001).

Finally, I've learned a great deal from all the articles in The Rude, The Bad, And The Bawdy: Essays in Honour of Geert Jan Van Gelder. Edited By Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond, and Arie Schippers. Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust (2014). Of particular note in this rich volume is Denis McAuley's "Two Fart Jokes in Ibn 'Arabī's Muhādarat Al-Abrār" (198-207).       

The Jersey Script

As many readers will already know, there is only a very small number of known scripts that remain entirely undeciphered.

There is, for example, the Rongorongo storyboard of Easter Island, which could very likely have been made up by clever Rapa Nuians in the 19th century in order to flummox the missionaries who had been calling them illiterate. There are the Pictish inscriptions of Scotland, that were only discovered to be writing at all, complete with logograms and syllables and everything, as a result of statistical analysis undertaken by a mere machine. And there are the Tărtăria tablets of Romania, dating to the 6th millennium BCE, which, many argue, is far too early for any writing system and therefore could only have given us representational art so rudimentary and stick-figure-like as to resemble letters as if by chance. The same may be said of the oracle bones of Shang Dynasty China.

But there is another undeciphered script that seldom gets mentioned among these more famous cases: the rumored traces of writing found scattered around the island of Jersey, in the English Channel.

If the Jersey Script is seldom mentioned, this is probably because its existence has not been confirmed by any reputable scholar. In fact, for the past century, the rumors of the script have been dismissed as a complete and total fraud.

As is well known, Jersey is home to under 100,000 inhabitants. They are subjects of the United Kingdom, though the island is historically French. A handful of Jerseyans still speak a variety of Norman French known as Jèrriais, though only metropolitan French is recognized, alongside English, as an official language. Many Jèrriais speakers were once formidable whalers and fishermen, and moved in large numbers to Newfoundland at the beginning of the 17th century. In the 1640s King Charles II granted the Jèrriais bailiff George Carteret a large parcel of land between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. Over time, the settlers who followed him there came to speak an evolved version of Jèrriais that is sometimes called 'Néo-Jèrriais' or New Jerseyan. Although this state has no official tongue, technically, Néo-Jèrriais was the de facto language for administrative, educational, and journalistic communication in New Jersey until well after the Civil War. To this day, students at Princeton University have the option of submitting their written work in Néo-Jèrriais, and of course we are all familiar with the august tradition, at the annual graduation ceremony, of the discourse in that language, held before proud parents, by the graduating cohort's salutatorian. 

It goes without saying that it is Princeton that serves as home to the world's most respected Department of Jerseyan and New Jerseyan Studies, and the rare books and manuscripts room of the university library holds the largest and richest trove of documents in these languages. I myself am an amateur Jerseyist, and have attained a fairly high level of proficiency in Néo-Jèrriais (I'm not too humble to admit). So naturally, during the term I spent at Princeton in 2011, I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the library as often as I was able (given all my other responsibilities), and to search through these materials, hoping to find something that would help me to better understand the French legacy in the New World.

Most of what I was able to turn up was curious, but hardly worth dwelling on. There was a scattering of doctoral dissertations written by quirky students over the past several decades who had decided to avail themselves of the right to submit their work in Néo-Jèrriais. Thus for example I read fragments of Henry Guimauve's 1968 thesis, Lè jèrriais dagns l'mousv'megnt ouvriè àmerikaign d'l'egntr-deû-guerres [Jerseyans in the American Labor Movement of the Inter-War Period]. I read some headlines from the Trenton-based newspaper L'Dgide [The Guide], published in Néo-Jèrriais daily until 1887 (one article that caught my attention, dating from May 2, 1865, spoke of a "Lèttre inecdytte d'Dgonne Ouilquès Bouthe s'là quàstion d'l'indépamdanç dè néo-jèrriais" ["Newly Discovered Letter from John Wilkes Booth on the Question of New Jerseyan Independence"].

But what struck me most among my many disoveries was the cache of letters written by a certain Guy Le Miel between 1903 and 1907. Le Miel, born in Saint Hellier in 1862, maintained an active correspondence with the Princeton linguist and groundbreaking Jerseyist Quincy Gorman, which dealt with many topics, but which often came back to reports of an undeciphered writing system that had turned up in various spots around the island. Gorman remained far more skeptical than Le Miel, yet he was always prepared to at least entertain the Jerseyan's often outlandish speculations. It appears that in April, 1908, the Princeton professor had grown so intrigued that he made a special trip to the English Channel to observe for himself the samples of writing about which Le Miel had written. 

Gorman's trip is already well-known, at least in Jerseyist circles, as he published a summary of it in the scholarly journal Romance Philology (vol. 47, no. 3, October, 1911: pp. 332-334). This short piece is responsible for putting an end to serious inquiry into the Jersey script for the past century, since Gorman came back from the island entirely convinced that Le Miel was a fantasist and that he had led his distinguished guest on a wild goose chase. Gorman does not mince his words in the article: "Monsieur Le Miel led me around from one wooded grove to the next, assuring me always, 'We're sure to find what we're looking for here', or 'Just wait 'til we get to the next hillock, where there's always a new trove of writing that turns up each day'. Truly, I have never seen such pointless chicanery in my long life."

Gorman went on to give a summary of the scholarly evidence for the existence of a Jersey script: "We know that before the various waves of Germanic peoples came to these Channel Islands, they were inhabited by short and dusky Kelts. These may be properly called the aborigenes of Europe, and it was surely a foreshadowing of the eventual conquest of the globe by our own proud race that in ancient times our forefathers had already appropriated all of Europe from its primitive inhabitants-- or at least all but the very most distant fringes of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, where indeed the local people still live out their miserable peat-covered existences just as their ancestors did before them. There is no small debate in the Channel as to how thoroughly those peoples were stamped out by the arrival of the Germanics. On Jersey in particular many residents speak of a small, hairy people --calling them les chevelus--, who live in the most wooded parts of the island, who forage at night, steal chickens from farms, and make fire with sticks. It had been my theory, prior to my visit in 1908, that these people may in fact have thrived until the very latest times, and may have carved stones much in the manner of the Picts. I had earnestly believed that it was to such stones that Le Miel intended to lead me. Nay, indeed, I was sorely mistaken." 

Having myself read through Le Miel's letters to Gorman (Gorman's to Le Miel are presumably either somewhere on Jersey, or lost to this world), I now believe that the Princeton professor was fundamentally ignorant of what the Jerseyan amateur scriptologist had written to him. I suspect that Gorman himself was not able to read Jèrriais, though he spent his entire career playing the expert. To put it very simply, Le Miel was not talking about stones.

Consider what he wrote in a letter of April 7, 1904: "Ie suys allez-cherchè d'l'escryturr ç'matijn. Ô qv'beau-jourr p'cherchè d'l'escryturr!" ["I went out looking for writing this morning. O what a beautiful day to go looking for writing!"]. When I first read this, I assumed I was misunderstanding-- Le Miel has a very idiosyncratic system of spelling, one that appears to be mostly of his own invention (though there are some authors with similar quirks from the bailiwick of Minquiers). Fortunately, in his subsequent letter of September 17, he offers a detailed account of what he had meant by 'looking for writing', one that now makes it all make perfect sense to me (I hope you will forgive me for skipping straight to English here; eventually I will publish a critical edition of the Jèrriais, but before I do that I hesitate to make anything available that may contain errors):

I awoke before dawn and headed to the beach. As I descended the path down to the dunes I could still see, flashing before my mind's eye, all the letters that had cluttered my mind the night before. What was it I had been reading? Darwin? Count Tolstoy? The Gita? I couldn't even remember, but whatever it was it had cluttered up my head, prevented me from seeing.

But then, as I approached the water, I saw it: the foam. The infinite bubbles popped in succession, and when I first arrived I could see no pattern. So I sat, and watched, and soon enough Nature's own code came popping through. Unlike Mr. Morse, whose frantic messages are always announced under the haughty name of 'news', she tells me nothing I don't already know, and everything I'll ever need to know.

(There are those who say the ancient Celts had their own system of writing, which they chinked into stones so that the gods would not ignore them, and so that their descendants would venerate them. That may be so. I've seen some stones with such markings myself, but I was unimpressed, and I threw them out into the sea as far as I could.)

The bubbles popped to me, confirmed to me: yes, they said, today is a good day to look for writing. Get thee up to the meadowlands, they said, to the Noir Pré where the orchids bloom. So I ran to the meadowlands with giddy anticipation, and once there I caught my breath and began to search around on the ground, parting the grasses with my hands like they were the hairs of my own head.

And I saw them there. The three-tonged imprint of the Jersey crapaud: an inviting prologue. And a bit further on I saw what I had most hoped to see, and what the bubbles had promised even before I set out, my very favorite of all this island's works: the delicate track-poem [èmpreijnte-poème] of the lesser white-toothed shrew.

There is writing everywhere, Professor Gorman. Please come to visit Jersey, that I might show it to you.

Yours truly,

Guy Le Miel 

Grim as Blacksmiths

For health reasons, mental and physical, I decided to take a few days' break from my tremendous professional duties and from my long list of looming deadlines for things to be written (most of which I really do not want to write, and can barely even remember agreeing to write), in order to read some books from which I might hope to derive some pleasure, amusement, or inspiration. This is what I used to do in graduate school: in the month before submitting my dissertation, I read Ulysses and Der Zauberberg both, and at the time I felt that this task was equally important to the one that gained greater public acknowledgement. Back then, I found this sort of purposeless reading (or even, perhaps, purposively purposeless, as in zwecklose Zweckmässigkeit) was the best way to ensure that I would continue to think new things, to develop in unpredictable ways. 

And what fine recreation this weekend has been! I've been alternating between two books, László Krasznahorkai's Satantango and a collection of Melville's shorter novels. I have much to say about both, but that would be improper for the moment, since I'm not finished, and the whole point of this weekend was to stop this incessant tapping at the claviature and do some damned reading. But very briefly, the two authors could not be more different, and going back and forth between them is a sort of swing between two extremes of literary pleasure. With Krasznahorkai, I sink into the ground, and feel my own death; I process it all in the lower-back part of my brain, the lizard part that survives when I sleep and that I've always imagined will be the last to go. With Melville, it's all in the front; it makes me smile and want to read it out loud for love of life. 

Now, forthwith to some representative passages.

First, from Krasznahorkai: "'I'll go south', Futaki declared, gazing at the rain. 'At least the winters are shorter there. I'll rent a little land near some town that's growing and spend the day dangling my feet in a bowl of hot water...' Raindrops were gently trickling down both sides of the window because of the finger-wide crack that ran all the way from the wooden beam to the window frame, slowly filling it up then pushing their way along the beam where they divided once more into drops that began to drip into Futaki's lap, while he, being so absorbed in his visions of faraway places that he couldn't get back to reality, failed to notice that he was actually wet. 'Or I might go and take a job as a night watchman in a chocolate factory... or perhaps as a janitor in a girls' boarding school... and I'll try to forget everything, I'll do nothing but soak my feet in a bowl of hot water each night while this filthy life passes'."

And from Melville (this from The Encantadas, or, The Enchanted Isles): "[A]part from [the tortoises'] strictly physical features, there is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures. Lasting sorrow and penal helplessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does not fail to enhance the impression... As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow, weary draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck. Their stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the midwatch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings to ram themselves against rocks and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world. Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks; buckets, blocks, and coils of rigging; and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toadstools and all fungous things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs."

Strange. When I had set out to transcribe a few passages, I had been thinking of the two works as opposite in every way. Copying them out, I found they were remarkable similar in imagery... but, still, not at all alike in perspective. Krasznahorkai's humans are Melville's tortoises. Melville's hero stands outside it all with wonder and joy, observing and recording; Krasznahorkai has no heroes, but only men, clamoring as best they can, sinking into the elements. They are not even straightforward or long-lived, like the tortoises. Just mossy and sunken.

I've already said too much. Back to reading.

Ragnarök on the Seine

This is an essay I wrote for The American Reader. To read the whole piece, please go here.

*

What is Europe? Where are its cracks? The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently argued that a ‘Latin Union’ should be carved out of the crumbling EU, on the basis of shared linguistic and cultural heritage.^[1] Agamben would like to include France in this breakaway federation, yet there is in fact some ancient and medieval basis for the belief that French identity, unlike Italian, is not simply descended from the Romans, but indeed is forged out of a significant encounter with the Germanic and Celtic worlds.

For one thing, the very ethnonym, français, denotes in the first instance Frankish people, speakers of the Germanic Old Franconian language, who also left their name to a certain fort that would grow into a city later distinguished as the birthplace of Goethe and the home of the German stock exchange. Students in traditional programs of Romance philology were required to master the non-Romance languages of influential neighbors; those specializing in Spanish also took Arabic, while those focused on France had to prove mastery of German. But here in fact the neighboring relation does not do justice to the nature of the influence in question. The two cultural spheres are co-generated, and share much of the same stock of treasures. Before there was Tristan und Isolde there was Tristan et Yseult. La Fontaine and the Brothers Grimm tell many of the same tales, gathered from the French and German countrysides like mushrooms. The German word for ‘France’, Frankreich, hits us like Thor’s hammer, even as it accurately describes the thing in question. France is the Reich of the Franks.

There were also the Norman (i.e., north-man) raids, which would give us the name of Normandy and would make the French composer Erik Satie’s theory of his own Viking origins, which motivated him to change the spelling of his first name, at least plausible if not confirmed by any real evidence. And there is, finally, a very real linguistic and geographic line dividing France into roughly two halves, the so-called Midi or South of France, where the langues d’oc are spoken, which overlap considerably with other Romance languages in the Mediterranean region, some national, some regional, and some onlyvillageois; and the North, where the langues d’oïl have their home, overlapping with the worlds of the Bretons, the Flemish, and even, on the islands of La Manche, with the Anglophone cultural sphere.

This division has led many French thinkers to feel compelled to take sides, to prefer one half to the other, and to account for French identity as either fundamentally northern or, by contrast, essentially Mediterranean. The deep strain of what can rightly be called ‘Nordicism’ running through French history has its plainly harmless instances, as in Satie’s insistence on his own Viking ancestry. But there is also something serious at stake, something that has to do with generally unspoken convictions about the spiritual dimensions of civilizations in history. The protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel, À rebours (inadequately translated as Against Nature), is the decadent Catholic medievalist Pierre Des Esseintes. He specializes in Latin texts, yet he hates the official Catholic philosophy whose appearance marks the beginning of the high Middle Ages, whose substantives “breath of incense,” whose adjectives “are coarsely carved from gold.” He prefers the Gothic, the Anglo-Saxon, the fragmentary, poetry that comes forth without specious argument; he longs to visit Holland and England, and drinks Danzig Brandwein rather than Cognac. The geography of Des Esseinte’s imagination is northern, even when the language of his revered authors is Latin.

Perhaps no French author has taken this Nordicism further than Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose most characteristic and lasting work of fiction describes nothing more than an attempt on the part of a semi-fictionalized Célinean hero to flee France for Denmark. Céline is ideologically pro-German, and his odyssey unfolds in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Third Reich. But nothing about his political orientation in itself could explain why, in his derangement, the author would have considered Denmark the most fitting place to seek sanctuary. He had sent his stash of gold there before the war, and intended to go there to recover it in the war’s final days, with his wife Lucette and his cat Bébert in tow. He was arrested by the Danish police for treason against France, on a warrant delivered from Paris.  Céline would end up in a Danish prison for a year and a half, and, from 1947, would live in exile in a small home near the Baltic sea, until his pardon was arranged and he returned to France in 1951. Throughout his exile, he maintained a long correspondence with his editor, the dean of French publishing, Gaston Gallimard. His letters are a jumble of hatred, paranoia, and declarations of undying love for Lucette. Unlike the fascist Ezra Pound, who around the same time was enduring a nervous breakdown in a US army cage somewhere in Italy, there was no breakdown, no repentance, no realization akin to the American poet’s: “Tard, très tard, je t’ai connue, la Tristesse / I have been hard as youth sixty years.” Just more hardness. Just more blame for the Jews. 

The publishing house founded by Gallimard in 1911, and bearing his name, is an institution that matters to French literary life in a way for which it is difficult to find equivalencies in other countries. Farrar Straus and Giroux? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt? The New Yorker? All of these together do not begin to approach the importance of Gallimard as an arbiter of literary taste, and therefore also, as the French see things, as a guardian of French culture and history. Gallimard is principally responsible for the literary careers, besides Céline, of Gide, Malraux, Queneau, Simenon, Aragon, Breton, Sartre, and Ionèsco, to mention just a few names from the canon. To be among the editors at Gallimard is thus to serve as a high priest and a kingmaker, even as a god who keeps the world going by what René Descartes (who died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650) called ‘continuous creation’. By ‘the world’ here, we should of course understand le monde, a fascinating French invention which reduces everything—the planets and stars, the comets, the earth with its core and mantle, and all the plant and animal and human life crawling upon its surface—to the experience of a certain class of people in a certain smallish country. Gallimard sits atop this world.

3

On July 22, 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man, committed, in Oslo, the worst atrocity in Western Europe since the end of World War II. He murdered seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers and young adults attending a summer camp organized by the Norwegian Labour party on the nearby island of Utøya. Anders Breivik’s goal was to initiate a war against multiculturalism in Europe, which he saw as inevitably leading to a loss of authentic European existence, a mongrelization at best, and a total Saracenization at worst. He is currently serving a twenty-one-year prison sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law. This comes out to a little over three months for each person dead.

A year or so after the attack, an editor at Gallimard, the well-known French novelist and essayist Richard Millet—having been most recently in the news for his discovery of the young Francophone American author Jonathan Littel’s monde-shattering Holocaust novel, Les bienveillantes (Gallimard, 2006^[2])—would publish what he called an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik: a literary elogy to the Norwegian murderer.^[3] The author distinguishes between the literary quality of Breivik’s mass slaughter, on the one hand, and the political and moral dimensions of it on the other. He stresses repeatedly that he has only come to praise the first of these. It is only the liberal multiculturalist herd, which for him is the same thing as the uncultured, illiterate, un-literary herd, that is incapable of making this distinction.

Millet was born in 1953 in Corrèze, in south-central France, but would spend much of his youth in Lebanon. He grew up speaking Arabic as if natively, and would later complain of not feeling entirely French upon returning to his home country. In the mid-1970s Millet would join up with the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war, a right-wing and ultranationalist organization founded by the Lebanese Maronite leader Pierre Gamayel in 1936. He would later write in his 2009 Confession négative, “I had to kill men back then, and women too, and elderly people, maybe children,”^[4] though according to the newspaper Libération he only spent a few months in the phalanges, and at most had an occasion to fire his Kalashnikov into some sacks of sand.^[5] Here, then, perhaps, we have a first glimpse of an explanation for why Millet is impressed with Breivik: the one’s tall tale is the other’s deed.

The French author, moreover, is particularly impressed with the Norwegian’s choice of targets. He bemoans the process currently taking place throughout Europe, of “the conversion of the individual into a mongrelized, globalized, uncultivated, social-democratic petit-bourgeois,” and he adds, in case it were not clear where he was going with this: “thus the sort of people Breivik killed.”^[6] But again, Millet insists that it is only in the realm of the tale, of literature, that Breivik’s act may be lauded. “I would like for it to be kept in mind,” Millet writes, “that I do not approve of the acts committed by Breivik, on July 22, 2011, in Norway.” And again, a few pages later: “I repeat, I condemn the acts.”^[7]

To the extent possible Millet would like to “separate them from their political, indeed criminal, context, through their literary dimension.” But if we suppose that the political and criminal context of these acts consists in the fact that they were carried out at all, then the same act’s literary dimension can only be supposed to reside in a parallel world in which the acts were not carried out, but only imagined (as for example Millet’s own massacre of Lebanese civilians, or a massacre described in a novel selected by Millet for publication at Gallimard). Insertion of an evil act into reality would seem to cancel whatever literary quality it may have had when it remained suspended in the imagination.

Millet believes that evil, like literature, is preoccupied with ‘perfection’, but it is not clear in what respect he believes Breivik’s deed approached perfection. Clearly, when Millet says that Breivik’s deed has a literary quality, that it is ‘perfect’ like literature, he does not mean that Breivik is himself a littéraire. In fact, Millet goes to great lengths to denigrate Breivik’s own writing ability and class-inflected habitus.  For example, he describes Breivik’s 1500-page treatise on European civilization and its destiny as “a sort of manifesto, of which the naïvetés, the composite character, the ‘Wikipedia culture’, are not hard to discern.”^[8] We are told twice that Breivik is a child of divorced parents (his father Jens David Breivik, a former Norwegian diplomat, lives in retirement in the South of France), and we are treated to a mocking diatribe on the young man’s tastes and fashion sense (one that, indeed, will seem as irrelevant to any non-French reader as Pierre Bourdieu’s graphic plotting of the class determination of musical and gastronomical sensibilities in 1960s Paris):

He is heterosexual; he likes snowboarding, Budweiser, Chanel perfumes, Lacoste shirts (the company… swiftly protested against the photos in which Breivik, being arrested, sports, with a strange smile, a polo shirt featuring that horrible little crocodile, one of the emblems of contemporary infantilism).^[9]

Budweiser and Chanel belong to two different symbolic registers where I come from, but mutatis mutandis we can all understand Millet’s point: that Anders Breivik is a trashy yokel, and if he has any ‘literary’ talent this will be of the spontaneous variety, art brut, and not a cultivated skill. This trashiness seems to rank, for Millet, somewhat ahead of the seventy-seven murders as a reason for consternation.

When Millet says that there is ‘something that goes beyond what is justifiable’ in Breivik’s massacre, his understatement is meant to keep attention focused on what he takes to be Breivik’s “perfection of writing by means of an assault rifle.”^[10] Millet praises Breivik for being something more than a “Warhol of anti-multiculturalism,” who is after nothing more than his 15-minutes of glory, or notoriety, in the news cycle. No indeed, Millet insists, Breivik is something more exalted than this. “[H]e is a writer by default.”^[11]

On what grounds, now? I mean, how on earth? Could it be that I’ve mistranslated Millet’s French?  

No. I go back over the syntax and vocabulary, and the meaning is as clear as day. Millet believes that literature’s principal function is to preserve language, and along with it “memory, blood, identity.” These are what pay the price when extra-European populations become “installed on our soil,” and when “multicultural nihilism” fails to react.^[12] Thus, Breivik’s work is a work of literature to the extent that it seeks to preserve the purity of language and culture.

Breivik is doing a far better job of this, Millet thinks, than the Scandinavian writers who have declined to take up arms and have determined to work instead with strings of words. The editor denounces the Norwegian crime novelist Kjell Ola Dahl, for example, who in his Kvinnen i plast of 2010 describes an Oslo policewoman who likes to wander around the immigrant neighborhood of Grobarlandslein: 

Lena loved to melt into the crowd that teemed between the colorful buildings, with the borrowings of foreign architecture, like the minaret in the Akerbergersvein. The only thing that was missing, to complete this exotic touch, were the calls to prayer of the muezzin.^[13]

“In this decadence,” Millet responds, “Breivik is without a doubt what Norway deserved, and what is awaiting all our societies, which continue to blind themselves in order better to deny themselves, particularly France and England.”^[14]

He goes on to express his preference, among Norwegian authors, for a certain Gunnar Staalesen. This one is the author of a novel called At Night All Wolves Are Grey. Millet takes this title as an indication that Staalesen understands nuance, subtlety, and therefore that he is “more of a writer” than the others.^[15] It is implied that Staalesen thus has something in common with Breivik, since both are writerly, and since, when you think about it, Breivik is a sort of “lone, grey wolf.”^[16]  Breivik, Millet concludes, ‘has something grey about him. It is in this sense that he could have been a writer.’ For a critic who sets himself up as a connoisseur of subtlety, Millet does not seem to be making much of an effort to deploy it here.

Most lovers of literature are willing to concede that Norway has yielded up at least one right-wing extremist who was also a great author in the traditional sense: Knut Hamsun. Yet Millet recoils from the opportunity to compare Breivik to Hamsun, the author of the epoch-defining 1890 novel, Hunger, and of the protofascist, yet lyrically beautiful 1917 Growth of the Soil, “who,” Millet tells us, “as is known, was openly a Nazi.”^[17] Rather than making the comparison himself, he lets an unnamed journalist for the Nouvel Observateur do it for him,^[18] only to pretend afterwards to refute it. These are the final sentences of his elogy, and they provide a useful clavis for understanding the whole.  

In these last lines, we are presented with an ostensible plea to separate ‘literature’, understood here as nothing less than language itself in its purest expression, from fascism. The same journalist for the Nouvel Observateur, Millet writes, 

goes so far as to take aim at the Edda, that is to say at the foundations of Scandinavian culture, which would make of Breivik the derisory reincarnation of the wolf Fendrir, the son of the áss god Loki and the killer of the god Odin, whom Snorri Sturluson describes as having ‘a hairy face, the lower jaw against the earth, the upper jaw against the heavens’.^[19]

Millet accuses the journalist of a delirium, one typical of the ‘New World Order’, which

tends to call ‘fascist’ any reflection on purity, identity, origins, and which, having run out of arguments, ends up challenging our very being: our culture, for example the Chanson de Roland, soon to be erased from our heritage, having been deemed politically incorrect and racist, like the Edda of the Nordic peoples, and along with it that which still makes it possible for us to name, and which the moral New Order is in the process of eradicating: literature.^[20]

‘Literature’ is the last word of the essay. It is with literature that Millet has associated the name of Anders Breivik at numerous points, while also, at numerous points, seeking to assure his reader that he disapproves of the mass murder, and, finally, again and again, seeking to deny that either the mass murder or his particular conception of literature has anything to do with fascism. Fascism is common and trashy, like snowboarding, or polo shirts by Lacoste. Millet is talking about literature here, which is not trashy, but exalted, and evidently, as the familiar phrase goes, beyond good and evil.

There is a deeply engrained idea in French intellectual culture that language can function as a weapon of structural or systematic violence. But when Michel Foucault called our attention to this, he was, however pessimistically, focused on the eventual remediation of this ‘violence’ through systematic transformations in the way we speak. Millet identifies the connection between language and violence too, but seems to suppose the former has run its course, and now gives us nothing but trashy Scandinavian pageturners about tattooed detectives (who are oblivious to the Muslim menace, etc.). He seems to think therefore that at this point real violence will do better what language has ceased to do.

I too love the Edda, and runestones, and the Chanson de Roland, and all that is as if charged  with that ancient authenticity that seems so incompatible with life in the modern world; and I’ve struggled to articulate, mostly for the sake of my own conscience, how this love can coexist in a single individual with the commitment to the values of a global citizen, to equality, fraternity, and justice. But they do coexist. As the great German Romantic author Novalis wrote in his collection of aphorisms published in 1799 under the title Pollen, it is this very coexistence that grounds the lively, productive imagination. Why not move back and forth between uprooted worldliness and organic communitarianism? Why not see these as modes of engagement with the world, rather than as mutually exclusive claims about how the world must be? Millet never even considers the possibility. This is because, at bottom, he is not in possession of a particularly lively imagination (occasionally his work rises to the level of an inspired blog post, as when in the essayLangue fantôme, which accompanies the elogy to Breivik, Millet interprets the fluctuating length of Umberto Eco’s facial hair as an index of the state of European letters).

Millet is a dullard, and one who had no trouble reaching the very summit of French high-browdom. That is where he would have stayed, if he had not made one small faux pas, and admitted that the world of letters and the world of murder are all the same to him.

4

It is not hard to imagine what sort of scornful things Millet might have to say were he to turn his attention to the Scandinavian metal scene. Its partisans have at least this much in common with the former Gallimard editor and Phalangist, that they value raw experience, authenticity, and so on. But just look at them with their long hair and piercings and black clothes! Plainly, they come from broken homes, without bookshelves.

Yet Norwegian black metal plays a more important role in the present story than our Gallimard editor might have preferred...

To continue reading, please go here. 

--

1. Giorgio Agamben, “Que l’Empire latin contre-attaque!,” Libération, 24 March, 2013.
2. Published in English as The Kindly Ones, New York, Harper Collins, 2009. 
3. Richard Millet, La langue fantôme: essai sur la paupérisation de la littérature, suivi de Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Éditions, 2012. 
4. Richard Millet, La confession négative, Gallimard, 2009. 
5. Édouard Launet, “Richard Millet. Soldat perdu,” Libération, September 5, 2012. 
6. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 109. 
7. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 109. 
8. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 107. 
9. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 107-108. 
10. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117. 
11. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117. 
12. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117. 
13. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 118. 
14. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 118-19. 
15. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119. 
16. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119.
17. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119. 
18. The article to which Millet refers is David Caviglioli, “Que nous disent les polars scandinaves sur le massacre d’Utoya?,” Nouvel Observateur, 28 July, 2011. Online at: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/polar/20110727.OBS7708/que-nous-disent-les-polars-scandinaves-sur-le-massacre-d-utoya.html 
19. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 120. 
20. Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 120. 

The Norwegian Far Right Comes to France

[From an article soon to appear...]

The publishing house founded by Gaston Gallimard in 1911, and bearing his name, is an institution that matters to French literary life in a way for which it is difficult to find equivalencies in other countries. Farrar Straus and Giroux? MacMillan? The New Yorker? All of these together do not begin to approach the importance of Gallimard as an arbiter of literary taste, and therefore also, as the French see things, as a guardian of French culture and history. To be among the editors at Gallimard is thus to serve as a high priest and a kingmaker, even as a god who keeps the world going by what Descartes (who died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650) called ‘continuous creation’. By ‘the world’ here, we should of course understand le monde, a fascinating French invention which reduces everything –the planets and stars, the comets, the earth with its core and mantle, and all the plant and animal and human life crawling upon its surface-- to the experience of a certain class of people in a certain smallish country. Gallimard sits atop this world. 

On July 22, 2011, the 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, committed, in Oslo, the worst atrocity in Western Europe since the end of World War II. He murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers and young adults attending a summer camp organized by the Norwegian Labour party. Breivik’s goal was to initiate a war against multiculturalism in Europe, which he saw as inevitably leading to a loss of authentic European existence, a mongrelization at best, and a total Saracenization at worst. He is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law. This comes out to a little over three months for each person dead.

A year or so after the attack, an editor at Gallimard, the well-known French novelist and essayist Richard Millet, would publish what he called an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik: a literary elogy to the Norwegian murderer. The author distinguishes between the 'artistic' quality of Breivik’s mass slaughter, on the one hand, and the political and moral dimensions of it on the other. He stresses repeatedly that he has only come to praise the first of these. It is only the liberal multiculturalist herd, which for him is the same thing as the uncultured, illiterate, un-literary herd, that is incapable of making this distinction.

Millet was born in the region of Corrèze, in south-central France, in 1953, but would spend much of his youth in Lebanon. He spoke Arabic as if natively, and would later complain of not feeling entirely French upon returning to his home country. In the mid-1970s Millet would join up with the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war, a right-wing and ultranationalist organization founded by the Lebanese Maronite leader Pierre Gamayel in 1936. He would later write in his 2009 Confession négative, "I had to kill men back then, and women too, and elderly people, maybe children," though according to the newspaper Libération Millet only spent a few months in the phalanges, and at most had an occasion to fire his Kalashnikov into some sacks of sand...

In Pomerania

The far-right National-Democratic Party of Germany has put up campaign signs in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with the slogan 'Ausländer raus'. In case you don't believe me, I've provided photographic proof. On closer inspection, the signs in fact read 'Kriminelle Ausländer raus', but this is more a vivid example of the pragmatics of font size, and other elements of graphic design, than it is a mitigation of the political view expressed. The NPD hovers as close as it can to the boundary which, if crossed, would place it in violation of the German constitutional ban on neo-Nazism. In the past decade there have been two failed, but close, attempts to have it outlawed. The MLPD, the Marxist Leninist Party of Germany, has made this one of their principle campaign issues in the current election, which from my American free-speech point of view looks like a frivolous distraction, as there are far better ways to isolate fascists than to give their organizations the extra charge of illegality. The National Socialist Underground has committed at least a dozen murders since 2000; an illegal NPD would be great for their recruitment.

 

According to a 2010 article in Die Zeit, in that year a constitutional court ruled that the phrase 'Ausländer raus' by itself does not necessarily amount to a violation of the constitution; the entire context of the phrase needs to be considered in order to determine whether in a given occurrence it is meant as a reference, or indeed a citation, of the phrase as it was used in the 1930s. Without the addition of 'criminal', however, the NPD would probably not be able to pass off the phrase that follows as independent from the identical phrase as used by the Nazis, as the entire context of the party's existence is the longue durée of fascism in Germany. But as it is they can claim, bald-faced, that they are only pushing for the same desideratum that even center-left parties support: the deportation of non-citizens convicted of felonies. Said by its members to be a party of 'grandparents and grandchildren' (i.e., frightened old bigots and energetic street-fighters), the other campaign signs alternate between 'Sie' and 'du', exhorting the kids for example to 'Vote German!', in the familiar second-person plural, and pleading with them 'Don't be a frog!' (the motif of the complacent amphibian, in water slowly brought to boil, has been borrowed from the Greenpeace campaign against global warming). It's hard not to notice, finally, that the campaign signs for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, often found defaced by NPD activists, are themselves much more aggressively nationalistic than would have been acceptable some years ago ('Deutschland ist stark, und soll es bleiben', etc.), the principal difference being that the CDU stresses Germany's current strength, while the NPD sees the current state as one of dangerous decline, with only one possibility for salvation.I should add that in the ten days I've been in Greifswald I've seen no one who looks like a neo-Nazi. Nor have I seen anyone a neo-Nazi might identify as an 'Ausländer', so perhaps the shock troops feel they've done their job and can stay home and play World of Tanks or whatever it is they do. Interracial contact seems to remain as much an abstraction as it had been in the DDR, with its poster art featuring African workers who somehow still look like the figures one might have seen in poster art for coffee or banana advertisements from a half century before. The theme in the DDR was of course friendship and solidarity, whereas the NPD stresses hatred and separation, but still somehow things remain the same.

 

In Pomerania, Trabants are parked in front of apartment blocks not for the sake of kitsch Ostalgie, which one might see on display for tourists in Berlin. They're just left over, just like anyone older than 25 is left over. The island of Rügen, the gem of East German tourism, still has its monuments to the victory over fascism, still has streets in towns like Binz and Sassnitz named for General Heinz Hoffmann. There's also a town called Gingst and one called Zingst, and one called Libnitz. Some are German deformations of West Slavic words, others adapted from Scandinavian. What used to be the West Pomeranian Voivodship of Usedom is not far away, and I don't know how that word came into being (the Polish equivalent is 'Uznam', which suggests, at least to Russophones, a 'finding out'), but it sounds like an archaic form of 'usury' that one might come across, say, in the Domesday Book. Many places, including the fishing village in which I am lodging near Greifswald, bear the name of 'Wiek', or some variation on it. I am assuming this is an altered form of the Scandinavian 'Vik' (from which we also get Reykjavik and Jorvik, later known as 'York'), and have seen historical documents that mention 'Wyjk', 'Wick', and so on. Vik means place, and there are many such places. I'm in one of them.

 

So there were the Slavic tribes, and there was Swedish Pomerania from the end of the Thirty Years War until 1815, and there was the DDR and then I showed up. But somewhere near the end of this series there was German Romanticism, which became permanently associated with Western Pomerania thanks to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, who captured the landscapes, the seascapes, the dawns and nights of the meadows near Greifswald, the cloister ruins at Eldena, the Backsteingotik churches, the cliffs of Rügen, and the coast of the Eastern Sea. So one walks the same paths, and speaks of the sublime, and of the sea as Urmutter, and as one does so one worries about going too far and getting overexcited about the same sort of shit that declenched the historical process that led to the NPD. But the adolescents, born even after the fall of the DDR, haven't made all the connections yet, and so they go to the cliffs of Rügen and they place locks on the safety fences on which they have engraved their names, and they throw the keys into the sea. One might also indulge one's romantic side, in a slightly but not fully different sense of the word, by jumping into the night-black sea and drowning. If I worked for the Pomeranian tourism board I would propose an ad campaign that plays on the multiple meanings of the romantic: "Looking for a romantic getaway? Try plunging into the void from atop the stark precipices of Rügen!" &c.

 

There are sea swans on Rügen that seem to insist on being symbols of something. The supermarket at Sassnitz features canned lungs. There are slugs on the trails at Jasmund, and dried leaves and humus cluster on their mucous tails as they peristaltate in a relative hurry across dangerous open spaces.  There are two little hardscrabble boys, DDR boys, timeless, chimney-sweep boys, standing on the coast at Rügen selling beach stones from a bucket. The younger one, five or so, asks in a pip voice, "Would you like to buy some stones?" I say I'm not sure I have enough money. "Maybe you want to collect your own stones then?" he says understandingly. That I might not want any stones at all is out of the question.

 

The CDU, led by a woman who comes from the East, is pragmatic and serious, and seems to have been thrust by the worldwide economic crisis into a role that makes it uncomfortable. What else can it do but keep touting Germany's strength, even if in doing so it gives new life to the old stereotypes about Mediterranean folk as work-averse and childishly unable to plan for the future. Even Goethe, sympathetic and world-feeling as he was, could not withstand a few gratuitous comments to this effect in his beautiful Italienische Reise. At the same time, I am certainly convinced that there is such a thing as Prussian discipline. I am at the receiving end of it, teaching a summer-school course on Kant's Critique of Judgment for a well-known government-funded student association at the University of Greifswald, where I am expected to show up promptly every morning at nine, and to have prepared more thoroughly than I can recall doing for quite some time. Come to think of it, in that same work Kant himself argues that die Zucht, discipline, is the highest natural end of humanity (der letzte Naturzweck des Menschen), while Glückseligkeit by contrast, happiness, which had been of supreme importance for Aristotle, comes out as merely fleeting, subordinate, trivial. Aristotle, as you may know, was Greek.

 

But I am always so happy in Germany! A student told me I speak German like Friedrich the Great, and that I would have fit right in at Sans-Souci. I thought this was a compliment, but when I asked him what he meant, he explained that I tend to just use French words, and to tack on German suffixes at the end: thus 'dezidieren' instead of 'entscheiden', 'ambig' instead of 'zweideutig', 'Fidelität' instead of 'Treue', and so on. This breaks my heart, since I am on record insisting that what gives German its great aesthetic advantage over English is precisely its relatively greater resistance to Latinate borrowings: 'Tier' instead of 'animal', 'Gesicht' instead of 'face', 'Fürsorge' instead of 'solicitude', and so on. And now here I am neglecting the very qualities I had come to praise. The reason is simple: another language now stands in the way, prevents me from accessing all the Rilke and Hölderlin and Goethe I read in my twenties, when I learned all those blunt Germanic roots that made me shiver. This other language is one I've taken great pains to learn in more recent years, and whose poets I've barely read. It takes much from Latin, and thankfully a bit from Frankish. I do my best with it. 

Notes on Blood Meridian

I want to say a number of different sorts of thing about Blood Meridian, but I think it will be true to the way Cormac McCarthy himself approached the novel in its creation to move out from the most elementary constituents. Let's start with apostrophes.  

There are no quotation marks, nor is speech set off by italics (there are no italics at all, in fact, save for the epilogue, which is entirely italic). But quotations are marked by other punctuational and orthographic cues in a way that flows naturally and clearly. It struck me on my first reading in fact that McCarthy had solved the seemingly impossible problem of capturing spoken language in an adequate and verisimilar way. Out of fidelity to his characters, McCarthy cannot but permit them to drop the terminal g's from gerunds, and to rely on contractions of phrases like I am not, I cannot. But these people are illiterate and anyway unconcerned with the conventions of high speech, and so are not aware in their speaking that they are leaving anything out. And so there is no need for apostrophes that in conventional prose signal the awareness of an absence, and we are left with pure speech:

I aint.

I caint.

We goin to whip up on the Mexicans.

In this way McCarthy avoids lapsing into a condescending campestral in the manner of Snuffy Smith: I'm fixin' to do some shootin', &c., and gives us, one feels, unmediated access to a variety of speech that predates all recording technology by a half century.

Some words are deformed, too, beyond simple contraction, e.g.:

Ort to of shot that one too.

The most significant deformation of this sort comes in the choice --not a small choice-- of the accusative form of the second-person personal pronoun:

You aint seen my dog have ye?

Without context, we naturally incline to reading this in an Elizabethan manner, in a way that rhymes with pee or lee. In the novel however it is always clear that ye lies somewhere between yah and yuh (often approximated in American writing as ya), a very familiar American vowel, as in:

What can I get yuh?

This pronoun, it seems to me, does important work for McCarthy as the bridge between the discursive traditions of the Old and the New Worlds, between Milton and Peckinpah, whose successful bridging is the the principal literary accomplishment of Blood Meridian. 

I said 'Old and New Worlds' and I said 'Milton and Peckinpah', but another way of saying this might have been: between epic and the movies. The novel relies on cinematic conventions throughout; it has wide-focus and narrow-focus shots, images that would not makes sense without an intervening century of film. To cite just one example:

They diminished upon the plain to the west first the sound and then the shape of them dissolving in the heat rising off the sand until they were no more than a mote struggling in that hallucinatory void and then nothing at all. 

Relative to whom, now, are the riders disappearing? In the event, there was no character left behind to watch them. We can only imagine a stationary camera tracking their gradual disappearance: we are the omniscient unspecified perceiver of the events that unfold in literature, but our perception is cinematic to the extent that it is not a view from nowhere, but a 'shot'. 

At the same time, the language is unrelentingly archaicizing, reaching back long before the events recounted in the novel of the mid-19th century, which happen to have been contemporaneous or nearly so with the first proto-cinematic fiction of Flaubert and other French 'realists'. There is a fiddler who stands without the door; there are strange forgotten forms of quantification:

Of humans they saw none.

There is inversion of the standard adjective-noun order of modern English:

They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable.

A favorite verb is the Germanic 'reckon', which survives in the contemporary German rechnen, to compute, but which in English suggests a form of deliberation prior to the discovery of mathematics, let alone computers, when deliberation was ultimately modeled after the arbitrary power of God at the final judgment:

...some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate.

There is frequent reliance on the existential, rather than predicative, use of the verb 'to be':

Before man was, war waited for him.

And McCarthy's favorite archaicism, of which I counted more than a dozen occurrences, is the nor that is not preceded by a neither, which generates a curious impression that everything is, implicitly, negation:

Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome among themselves.

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go.

Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose the opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of the heavenly bodies and their powers and claims.

Is McCarthy's archaicism anachronism, as in, mere anachronism? It seems to me that the author has sought to adopt a register that is appropriate to the conditions of the Texas-Mexico borderlands of 1850, and to the people there, who are repeatedly described as 'neolithic' or 'stoneage' (the abolition of hyphens in the novel is also worth noting), as either savage and heathen or 'christian only in name' (and worth noting, too, the strategic deployment of the lower case). The language cannot be contemporary, cannot be 19th-century, because it is describing a region and a sequence of events that in no way fit with the self-conception of that age that European novelists like Flaubert were actively producing. And this is the story of America: when Europeans (including, one supposes, those of Boston and New York) were worrying about who was showing up at whose salon, the settlers of the western frontier were massacring Indians, raping children, and collecting scalps. And what other personal pronoun but ye could work for the psychotic hillbilly epic that tells of this conquest (thanks to which I was able to spend my childhood in the malls and on the freeways of California)? Already completely defunct in the enlightened parts of the English-speaking world, the pronoun would live on in the outer reaches, where Enlightenment was at best a gross joke (a joke underlined moreover in the character of the judge and in his natural-historical researches), and would endure, to this day even, as a link between premodern Anglo-Saxon elementalness and something quintessentially American: 

I'm gonna whoop ye.

Like the pronoun on which we have been dwelling, there is another word, a common and familiar noun, that bridges the Anglo-Saxon and the American Western. I have in mind the word country, which Americans seem to have taken the lead in conflating with 'state' or 'nation', but which has never lost the parallel sense of environment or surrounding wide-open space or campagne: a parallel that perfectly suits the mythology of 'country' that is implicit in the 20th-century idea of 'country-western', an idea whose 19th-century origins McCarthy aims to lay bare. The medieval, pre-nation-state conception of country is explicitly stressed in the author's  summary at the beginning of chapter VI, where he cryptically cites a stock legal phrase descending from Old French: 

Et de ceo se mettent en le pays [And with that they set out into the country].

And toward the end of the novel, when the kid is locked up in San Diego and, so he thinks, soon to be hanged, there is speculation that it was the country that made him crazy. One suspects that this is meant in both senses, both in the sense of the desert and the other landscapes he has endured, and in the sense of the United States, whose imperial expansion is the distal cause of everything that happens to him. 

McCarthy is sometimes called 'nihilistic' by commentators, in view of the fact that his characters engage in horrible violence without any apparent moral reflection. In fact, his characters are almost total ciphers, whose actions are not really actions at all, but events in a cosmos that also prominently features shooting stars and lightning storms. I don't even want to engage the criticism that this novel is 'too violent' (this is much like saying Swan Lake would have been better if there hadn't been quite so much dancing), but I do think it is worthwhile to insist that the absence of reflection, like the violence itself, is entirely necessary to the novel's artistic aim, and entirely appropriate to the author's epic intent. That is, he is describing, I won't say a premodern world, but an extramodern one, one that integrates human beings within an all-encompassing cosmology, but does not set these human beings over against that cosmos as a special kind of agent, the 'moral' kind. This is the point of McCarthy's constant return to the pre-anthropocene geology that anticipates the human events he describes, and in relation to which these events are a sort of degenerate echo.

It has often been argued (though by now somewhat controversially) that the individual moral subject had not yet been discovered in Homeric epic, that the world Homer describes is a cosmos governed by the fates in which war cannot be morally problematized because human action has not yet been sufficiently set apart from, say, meteorology to make bloodshed appear as devious or preventable. 

I suspect that it is only from within such a cosmos that we can adequately reimagine the experience of the violence between the American irregulars and the Native Americans they were charged with annihilating. Although all of the characters, Native and non-Native alike, remain total ciphers, one comes away, astoundingly, with the sense of having understood for the first time what this particular historical encounter was like for the various parties with their various limited perspectives. The breathtaking account of the kid's first encounter with Indians, during a Comanche ambush, involves nothing but a sort of inventory of their wardrobe and ornamentations, but the articles noted are already enough to tell so much of the story of the European conquest of the New World, and of the way this was lived, in medias res, by the lowly ones on both sides with a life-or-death stake in the outcome of the conquest. The passage is worth citing in whole:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear and cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse's ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotseque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning [note!], screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. 

As it is not difficult to anticipate, unpleasant things ensue. There is a report of a man who has to crawl across the salt flats naked for days to arrive, almost dead, at a settlement. He can't walk, because the Indians have cut off the bottoms, but only the bottoms, of his feet.

It is a victory of McCarthy's epic imagination that such atrocities are recounted without inducing in the reader the slightest interest in 'taking sides'. US imperialism and its ideology of manifest destiny are, we all know, the side that is to be blamed, ultimately, for the fact that some lad lost his soles. But that's not what this novel is about, and in refusing to be about this it already subverts the mythology of the western genre that it also represents par excellence. This novel is about a world Homer already knew, where war is an ontological force that lies deeper in the order and reason of the cosmos than human history, where humans have nothing to learn --where there can be no Bildung for a young hero-- even if they can at least come to know, through its most magnificent instances, the order that precedes them:

He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. 

--

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Bébert

There is a cat that sits on the sidewalk in front of the bistro Chez Bébert near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris (I snapped his picture just yesterday). He does not greet visitors, but he does give them to know, in his silent occupation of that crucial space before the door, that this is his bistro, and that, whatever the surrounding humans may call him, he is Bébert. And anyone who has read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's infamous 1957 novel, D'un château l'autre [From Castle to Castle] cannot help but wonder, upon encountering this Bébert, whether here is not in fact a concrete instance of the well-known feline power of reincarnation.

Céline had been an unrepentant Nazi-collaborationist, a traitor, a bloody anti-Semite, and an otherwise all-around awful person. As the war was drawing to a close, he got it into his head to flee Paris, through the ruins of Germany, to Denmark. He had intended to take only his wife, but his beloved cat, Bébert, imposed himself, refused to let them go alone. So Bébert was stuck in a sack and hauled through the craters and bombed-out castles, and would eventually prove to be the only remotely admirable character in the author's subsquent fictional retelling of the odyssey. On arrival in Copenhagen, Céline was arrested (it is not at all clear why he thought the Danes would have wanted him), and Bébert seized. The cat had cancer, for which, rather remarkably under the circumstances, he was able to receive an operation. Eventually he was returned to France along with his owner, who died in 1961, after years, according to some sources, of eating nothing but noodles. Bébert himself is said to have lived only until 1952. 

Yet it seems somehow vulgar to stamp Bébert with a date of demise, to give him a necrologue and be done with it. For in surviving the war, in becoming the only steady weight and the only bastion of serenity in the most terrible and blazing work of 20th-century literature, Bébert came to stand for survival itself, and demonstrated why in the popular imagination the feline is indestructible (we call it 'reincarnation' and we number the lives at nine, but what we really mean is that there is some indestructible cat essence that just keeps pushing through all the gross violent things men do to cats and around them).

Impressions such as these, no doubt, inspired George Steiner to write:

It is Bébert I want to write about--Bébert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning... Bébert would be a joy to report on. Céline is not.

Is the cat really the spirit-animal of the French? We know, particularly from Robert Darnton, that the cat was the animal most excessively abused around the period of Revolutionary fervor, bound together and thrown onto bonfires en masse, so that the rowdies, unhappy about their labor conditions or something, could delight in the cats' screeches as a sort of next-best-thing to punitive justice. And we know of Chris Marker's obsessive attempt to impose the figure of the cat heraldically in place of himself, to dissolve the human into the feline. Marker's cat was a composite of the Japanese maneki-neko, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire (another peculiar French obsession), and his own domestic animal, who was called Guillaume. Like Bébert, Guillaume had many lives, and does not always appear to have been hosted by one and the same physical cat. Yet he was always Guillaume.

And then there is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who realizes at the very end of Tristes Tropiques that he did not have to go all the way to the tropics to have a primordial encounter, as there was one waiting for him right there in his apartment:

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to is in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers  in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.

I am not going to venture a theory of national character, or attempt to explain why it was left to a German to write Dog and Man (Konrad Lorenz, following Johan Huizinga, if I remember correctly, attempted to minimize the role of the cat in human society by arguing from medieval transfers of title to estates, which show that cats were always considered part of the property, like trees, while dogs always went with the previous owners; we know however that at least some cats will follow their owners through the apocalypse). But I do think Steiner is right about Bébert's symbolic power as the embodiment of a commendable --because silent-- will to survive, a symbolic power that makes sense only against the deep, deep background of folk beliefs about what cats are capable of. And I would add that if one is looking for national symbols, it is good that France has Bébert, and not only his human companion, who died most definitively in 1961, still a shit (a shit who'd just completed another, final masterpiece called Rigodon), still uninterested in serenity or forgiveness.

And I am convinced also that attention to the cat massacres of the 18th century; to Lévi-Strauss's turn away from the savage toward the feline; to the Cheshire graffiti that still covers Paris in memory of Chris Marker; and to Céline's misanthropic escape into cat-love, to the complimentarity of his anti-semitism and his philo-felinism: that all of this considered together (no doubt alongside other examples I haven't recalled) could tell us a great deal about the cultural and intellectual history of modern France.