The Lectern

Melville on Shakespeare

2012-01-13T09:18:00.000+08:00

It is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:--these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth. But, as I before said, it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. And so, much of the blind, unbridled admiration that has been heaped upon Shakespeare, has been lavished upon the least part of him. And few of his endless commentators and critics seem to have remembered, or even perceived, that the immediate products of a great mind are not so great, as that undeveloped, (and sometimes undevelopable) yet dimly-discernible greatness, to which these immediate products are but the infallible indices. In Shakespeare's tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so much for what he did do, as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling

W.E.H Lecky on the religious impulse

2011-12-19T11:31:00.000+08:00

Superstitions appeal to our hopes as well as our fears. They often meet and gratify the inmost longings of the heart. They offer certainties where reason can only afford possibilities or probabilities. They supply conceptions on which the imagination loves to dwell. They sometimes impart even a new sanction to moral truths. Creating wants which they alone can quell, they often become essential elements of happiness: and their consoling efficacy is felt in the languid or troubled hours when it is most needed. We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge. The imagination, which is altogether constructive, probably contributes more to our happiness than reason, which in the sphere of speculation is mainly critical and destructive.

Fragment 1111

2011-11-10T14:49:00.001+08:00

Like the Dao De Jing, Rene Leys opens with a wonderful gesture of abandonment in which, even before the text begins, it is disowned, negated, made absent rather than present.

I shall know no more then. Well, I shall not insist.

Rene Leys

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name...

Dao De Jing

Nietzsche on moral condemnation

2011-11-09T14:37:00.000+08:00

Moral judgement and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so, likewise a form of compensation for their having been neglected by nature, finally an occasion for acquiring spirit and becoming refined - malice spiritualises.

'Peintures' Victor Segalen

2011-10-21T14:52:00.001+08:00

Filling ones eyes, the waters of the long river;

Richly verdant, the mountains of an unknown district

The hastening of ten thousand miles

All in the frame of a single window.

Chen Yu Yi (1090-1138)

This unclassifiable masterpiece is a series of prose poems describing Chinese paintings, which do not exist. The four completed works of Segalen's China years: Rene Leys, Peintures, Steles, and Equipe represent an attempt to marry Eastern and Western aesthetics, to instil Daoist and Buddhist ideas within Western forms: literary fiction, painting, verse, and travel writing respectively.

Segalen's Chinese antecedents for this are the histories of Chinese art from the Tang Dynasty, especially the famous Li Tai Ming Hua Ching by Chang Yen Yuen, which provide the only source for biographies of artists and descriptions of much older paintings which are now lost. The European antecedents for this project are the prose poems of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations, and Mallarme's Anecdotes and Poemes.

But Segalen here is going beyond merely stretching the boundaries of versification and of what's possible in French, as his illustrious predecessors did with the form. Before we look at how Segalen marries Eastern and Western aesthetics here, it's necessary to examine briefly some of the salient features of Chinese painting which are pertinent to Segalen's descriptions.

In which we look at some paintings

Chinese painting -in contrast to Western painting- may be said to have the following characteristics:

· Perspective in line art (architecture, furniture and so on) is characterised by lack of a vanishing point. Buildings and furniture appear wonky to Western eyes, who see things from a Western perspective with one vanishing point. In line art perspective is avoided so that objects in front will not obscure objects at the back.

· Perspective in landscape is either non-existent, or multiple. In landscape paintings the surface plane is divided up into different areas, each one of which has its own perspective, and its own viewpoint. The effect of distance is created by composition, size, layers and fading colours.

· Composition reflects the principles of void and substance. The surface plane of the picture always includes empty space, called 'remaining white', (or liu pai) which can be interpreted by the viewer as the effect of clouds or water.

· Colours represent the thing in itself, not the optical effect of the thing under the light. Gaugin, for example, famously painted his White Horse blue, because that was how he saw it in the shade of the tree. In Chinese painting, things are painted the colour they are in reality, and no attempt is made to depict light.

· There is a kind of synaesthesia between writing and picture making. Calligraphy underpins the brushstrokes of painting, and occupies a place in the overall composition. The characters used in calligraphy also, of course, are extreme reductions of pictures.

· The painting contains a poem, and the poem has a pictorial quality. Both poem and painting strive for a glimpse of the beyond, the painting tries to capture 'the world beyond the image', the poem, 'the flavour beyond the words'. The preeminent figure in this regard was the poet painter Wang Wei, widely regarded as the most influential painter of the Tang dynasty, but none of whose paintings have survived, although his poetry has.

These characteristics may be said to embody in artistic form the basic principles of the Dao. The correct, unclouded apprehension (guan) of the ten thousand things of nature (wan wu) can be seen in the shifting perspectives and representational attitude towards the use of colour; this is a reluctance to impose, finally, a fixed perspective or viewpoint, and by this means to refrain from a 'naming' (ming) of the things and their relationships to each other.

The importance of Nothing (wu) as an organising principle of the universe is seen in the use of voids.

Peintures: within the poem is a painting, within the painting is a poem

The book consists of an opening prelude, and then three sections, the first of which describes 16 'Magical Paintings', the second, a scroll painting (these are common in Chinese art: the scroll is like a long picture book and is unrolled from right to left by the viewer so that you only see one section at a time), and the third, 16 portraits of the last Emperors of the various dynasties of Chinese history. The prose is heightened, fragmented, rich, colourful, digressive, evocative, extremely visual, witty, and achingly, searingly beautiful, even in translation (which here is excellent).

Segalen's text attempts to provide a similar synaesthesia between word and image which we find in Chinese painting, and to reach beyond both to an expression of the Dao: you did not expect a representation of things? Behind the words I am about to pronounce, there have been objects from time to time... or in other words, 'the world beyond the image', 'the flavour beyond the words'.

This synaesthesia between word and image is represented in the text by a synaesthesia between writing and speech. For the Western mind, writing is an encoding of speech in graphic form; a distinction is made between them; writing is seen as something removed, something 'having reference to' or 'representing' speech. This is a threefold process: Western writing has reference to meaning only by referring first to the spoken word. Chinese writing, in contrast, is a twofold process: Chinese pictograms, by representing graphically the meaning of a word, bypasses language as voice. Chinese characters can be read by speakers of all the different Chinese languages, even though they might pronounce the words differently.

Peintures blurs the distinction between language as voice and language as graphic constantly. The first sentence of the work refers to the reader 'listening' to the text. Later we are told This is not written to be read, but to be heard. This is not made complete by being heard, but must be seen. Later we are told to listen to the clouds. Peintures blurs the boundaries between seeing, hearing and naming.

There is a double focus here: Segalen is both trying to recreate the method by which Chinese painters reflect the Dao in visual art, and at the same time to reflect the Dao in his method of verbal art. We see the Dao twice: in the non-existent paintings he describes, and in his method of describing them.

Prelude

(This is my term, not Segalen's; the introduction is left unnamed) The Prelude signals the work's Daoist/Buddhist intentions very clearly. It begins with a sublime image of the imaginary paintings unrolled on scrolls and hanging from this rafter, encircling the viewer/reader in a panoply of images. This can be seen as a metaphor for the Buddhist view of reality as little more than projections from an empty self, as insubstantial as imaginary paintings. The 'rafter' is a reference to the Supreme Ultimate, the Pole Star. In Daoist thought, the heavens are suspended from the Pole Star, and the term for this highest point is taiji, which means literally, a ridge pole, or rafter. The same image of a beam is repeated later in the introduction.

Do not rely on any organized effect, the text goes on to warn us, not one of those fugitive mirages with which Western perspective makes play, and defines without hesitation....a reference to the aperspective nature of Chinese painting, and to the Daoist principles of guan/xu which underline it.

I. Magical Paintings

Daoist themes of circularity are signalled in the title of the first picture presented in this section, which is also the last: Ronde des Immortels (In Daoism, 'immortals' are those who have achieved transformation of their bodily substance). True to Daoist principles, the descriptions are presented before their names, so that the reader has no peg on which to hang his reading. In the Dao de Jing, seeing comes before naming. The effect on the reader is one of disorientation, but an enhanced seeing.

We are presented with pictures made of lacquer, of porcelain, of weaving, of paintings on silk and paper, and at the end, the Daoist principles of renewal and circularity and the Buddhist view of reality as an illusion are proclaimed again: The end is given at the outset, the final number is included in the first, and that in the infinite. One is one. Even two is one, if you wish. Nothing of what you touch each day is solid. All that you have just seen exists, if you but knew how to see it...

II. Corteges and Trophies of the Tributes of Kingdoms

Perhaps the most famous of the panoramic scrolls in Chinese art is the Song dynasty Along the River in the Qing Ming Festival, made by Zhang Ze Duen. This scroll is over 5 metres long, and is designed to be unrolled from right to left. It shows daily life in the Song and is absolutely crammed with detail. The river is a structuring device running all through it. One can only view a section at a time: a picture of the overall whole is impossible, only a successive dwelling on details.

In this middle section of the book, Segalen imagines a similar scroll depicting the tributes from all the kingdoms brought to the Emperor. The connecting device of this imaginary scroll is a roadway through mountains and plains. It is then a horizontal procession of precious things coming from all over the earth going towards the same destination in order to form in the same place at the feet of some ONE. It is therefore also the Journey - power in wide spaces, the presence of what is not here [wu], which comes from afar and which is sought after so far away. DIVERSITY, which is not that which we are, but other...

This compares with the description of the Dao in various places in the Dao de Jing, for example, this from stanza 42:

The number one of the Way was born

A duad from this monad formed.

The duad next a triad made

The triad bred the myriad...

The Way gave birth to the One, which gave birth to two (ying and yang), then two to three, and then the ten thousand things. In our scroll, the journey is made backwards along the road to the One, who is portrayed as the Emperor. The scroll then is a pictorial meditation of the journey, the Way. For Daoists, the Dao is both the goal and the journey, the prime cause of the universe, and the way to that prime cause.

III. Dynastic Paintings

In this final section of the book, Segalen presents a series of imaginary portraits of the last Emperor of each Dynasty, these ruinous ones, the destructive ones, the Ultimates of each dynastic fall...Not only does this reflect the Daoist belief in circularity, but it also reflects the Daoist notion of the encapsulation of opposites, which we find expressed in lines 7 -11 of Stanza 2 (and elsewhere) from the Dao De Jing:

The long the short decides

And higher lower measures,

Bronze gongs jade chimes join,

And former latter sequence form,

Ever round and round again...

The end of one dynasty is always also the beginning of another. As Segalen puts it here: How can one renovate, how to restore order without first of all installing disorder?

The sequence starts with the fall of the half legendary Hsia dynasty, and ends with the last days of the mysterious Kuang Hsu Emperor, the infant Pi Yu and the Regent Chung, of the ill starred Qing dynasty of Segalen's own time. These verbal portraits contain oblique references to episodes from the chronicles, reimagined as details from a painting. For example, here is the description of the tomb of the infamous First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang of the short lived Qin dynasty, he of the terracotta army: They trail off out of sight, three thousand diminutive personages as tall as your hand, delineated in hard semi relief. Each next to its fellow, without overlapping or concealment... We are reminded here of the attitude to perspective in line drawings, in which objects must not obscure each other. Also, we remember that the terracotta army was only discovered in 1974, 55 years after Segalen's death.

The Spirit of the Dao

The twin poles of Chinese culture are Daoism and Confucianism. These two represent the ying and the yang of Chinese thought and its artistic expression. Confucianism is concerned with social mores, the stability of the state, the individual's position in the state. The Analects are didactic, straightforward, prescriptive, assertive, unambiguous, positivist. In contrast, Daoism is concerned with the survival of the individual in the state, with the development of the inner state of the individual, with metaphysics, concerns which Confucius largely stays away from. Daoist texts such as the Dao De Jing and the Chuang Tzu are characterised by a spirit of playful paradox, ambiguity, a gentle satirising of Confucianism, a general lack of assertiveness, a mood of negativism, or nihilism. This spirit is everywhere apparent in Peintures.

The text is full of authorial interventions and addresses to the reader, full of the kind of paradoxes and ambiguities Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu delight in, in addition to the central paradox of creating pictures which do not exist. Confucianism is gently satirised in the introduction to the Dynastic Portraits section (which poses spuriously as an excerpt from Mencius): the sage and very official saint, Patron of Teachers, Moderator in the pay of Princess - Confucius, from the country of Lou, walking one day, one foot decently after the other, in the old palace of Chou of Lo Yang, modestly raising his eyes to the walls perceived the painted figures...

Confucius appears in Peintures, but the elusive Lao Tze does not.

Peintures is never far away from the idea of the hoax. In semiotic terms, the literary hoax is a sudden displacement of the relationship between sign and signified: the signified is suddenly revealed to be unreal, absent, therefore the sign is hollow, independent, autonomous. This is the method of Peintures: the real pictures represented by the signs do not exist. At the same time, the hoax can also stand for the central paradox of the Dao: if the Dao can be named, it is not the Dao. At the heart of the Dao is the idea of wu, the inarticulable Nothingness, expressed succinctly in stanza 40 lines 3 and 4 of the Dao De Jing:

Becoming begets all beings below

Becoming begotten of negation.

The heart of Peintures is similarly non-existent; and the text is also full of lacunae, reflecting in detail what is going on in the whole: She, the Inspiration, is absent from all these paintings.

The spirit of Daoism is also present in the glimpses of the drunken Painter the text gives us from time to time, a Daoist figure, a drunkard, a poet, a wastrel, a seer, a creator, the elusive narrator of the text, in short everything the Confucian scholar is not. The Taiwanese art historian Wang Yao Ting in his book Looking at Chinese Painting writes about intellectuals' position in Chinese culture: outwardly in their social roles they are Confucians, inwardly they preserve the Daoist's commitment to self-cultivation... The Chinese scholar lives in the mundane world but he longs for the freedom of nature. Locked in the dusty straightjacket of social affairs, he dreams of carefree whistling among rocks and streams. The drunken painter we glimpse in the text seems to be an amalgam of Wang Wei, whom we have already mentioned, Wu Tao Zu, a Tang painter of whom the legend says that he disappeared through a door in one of his own paintings, and perhaps 'Inky' Wang, whose technique consisted of throwing the paint around when he was in a drunken state, and then completing the picture when he was sober. (It is also said of him that he smeared paint on his bum, sat on a piece of paper to make an imprint, added a stalk and some leaves, and named the resulting painting 'Glorious Autumn Peaches'.)

Yet this inebriated vision, this piercing gaze, this clairvoyance can replace for some people - of whom you are one? - all the reason of the world and of the god.

These are spoken paintings.

Fragment 1020

2011-10-20T14:57:00.001+08:00

In Chinese painting, water is always represented by a blank space (liu pai) in which the paper or silk shows through. In terms of the picture surface, then, water is a kind of void, a Nothing, or Wu, the central concept of the Dao. In the Dao De Jing, a frequent metaphor for the Dao is water...

'Rene Leys' Victor Segalen

2011-10-10T11:55:00.002+08:00

It's always like that in China.

Rene Leys

18 November 1911

It is a city in the evening: a strong and powerful crenellated city of which we are both the guests and the masters...

Peintures

Introduction: In which is briefly outlined the historical background

Beijing. February 1911. The Manchu dynasty is in its last gasps; even its grand depravities are now diminished. For the last decade or so, the Empire has been as if in a drug induced torpor, a kind of uneasy trance; the government reduced to lackeys, perhaps, of the Foreign Powers, who hold tightly the reins of policy.

The foreigners, having gained the upper hand as a result of their victory over the Boxers eleven years before, are confined to the Legation quarter in the Tartar City. Their sequestration notwithstanding, they have control of all the branches of government that really matter in the modernising world: railways and communications, customs, excise and tax collection, monopolies of trade, and of course the supply of opium, to which the country is enslaved.

The main players in this great game against the Qing dynasty are the British, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Portuguese, The Russians, the Japanese, and, to a small extent, the Americans.

The current - and as it will turn out, the very last- Qing Emperor, Pu Yi, is a little boy of 4 years old. His father, the 28 year-old Prince Chun, is Regent and ruler. The little boy's aunt, Princess Long Yu, 43, the widow of the previous Emperor, is the current Empress Dowager. It has only been 3 years since the death of the previous Emperor, the mysterious Kuang Hsu, and his aunt, the previous Empress Dowager, the terrifying and terrible Princess Tsu Hsi, also known by her Manchu name as Lady Yehunara, and by nearly everyone else, ironically, as Old Buddha.

The Kuang Hsu Emperor died in mysterious circumstances, and speculation raged as to the causes. Some said it was on the death-bed orders of the 73 year-old, long-ill Old Buddha, who then died the day after her nephew. Others said it was on the orders of Yuen Xi Kai, ally of Old Buddha, Minister and Governor of Shandong province.

The Kuang Hsu Emperor's life had been as mysterious as his death. At the start of his reign he had engaged with the foreigners in a policy of opening up China. During the One Hundred Days of 1898 he had carried out strenuous reforms to various branches of government. These included the drastic modernisation of the centuries old examination system, which had been the mainstay of social order in Chinese life for millenia; greater freedoms for his subjects, the Han Chinese; greater protection under the law for trade and investment.

The 'spring' of the One Hundred Days had ended abruptly, however, after a palace coup carried out by Yuen Xi Kai but engineered by Old Buddha, who wanted to retard the gradual transfer of power over China from the Manchus to the foreigners and the Han Chinese.

In the autumn of 1898, the Kuang Hsu Emperor had been put under house arrest in a palace on an island in a lake in the middle of the Forbidden City, and his favourite concubine, the Pearl Concubine, had been thrown down a well on the orders of Old Buddha. Isolated from the rest of the world, perpetually entranced with opium and grief, in stupendous luxury, with his concubines and eunuchs and ever present guards, he lived thus for a further 10 years, dying in 1908 at the age of 37. His mysterious death only increased the hallowed aura with which modernisers, including educated Han Chinese and foreigners, now regarded him.

For this act of treachery against the Son of Heaven, however, Old Buddha and her allies suffered karmic retribution when the Foreign Powers extracted unfair and humiliating reprisals against the Qing and against China after the Boxer rebellion in 1900.

Since then, the government has been supine, with the new Emperor conveniently young, and the Regent unimaginative, inexperienced and no match for court factions and foreign domineering. In the cities and countryside, unrest among the Han Chinese is simmering. Dr Sun Yat Sen and his revolutionaries are active in the south and along the Pearl River Delta, China's commercial and industrial heartland. Anti Manchu and anti Foreigner feeling is high.

In this seething pot of intrigue and opportunity a 34 year-old French resident in Beijing by the name of 'Victor Segalen' (by no means to be confused with the real Victor Segalen, the author) is trying to learn Chinese.

Part 1: First Reading

The Book that Never Was

Rene Leys

28 February 1911

I. In which are briefly described both the plot and discourse of the novel

Segalen's (We call the character Segalen, and the author VS to avoid ambiguity) aim in learning Chinese is to penetrate the mystery of the life and death of the Kuang Hsu Emperor, with whom he has an obsession, and to write a book, probably a novel, about him. He trawls Beijing looking for informants, and a way in to the Forbidden City, where he hopes to interview some of those who had known the Emperor. He engages two teachers: one Chinese, Master Wang, a teacher known to the expat community; and the other, a young European lad of 18 or thereabouts, the preternaturally gifted son of a Belgian resident of Beijing, Rene Leys.

Rene Leys has been educated in Europe, and has only been in Beijing for about three years, but already he is fluent in Shanghaiese, Mandarin, and Manchu, is an expert in Chinese life and culture, and has secured the post of professor of political economy in the College of Nobles, an exalted position for a foreigner of his age and circumstances, but one that it was not unusual for foreigners to hold in that time and place.

Segalen gradually befriends the lad, and when Leys pere decides to return to Europe, Rene moves into Segalen's house, where their lessons continue. Over the course of the summer, Rene Leys reveals to Segalen that he is an intimate of the Royal Family. He was the only friend of the Kuang Hsu Emperor, and is now the advisor to the Regent, who has awarded him a concubine for his services. He further reveals, after swearing Segalen to secrecy, that he is the chief of a Secret Police force; that he runs a network of spies and informants among the sing-song girls and prostitutes of the red light district, the Chien Men Wai; and that he has constant but secret access to the Forbidden Palace on payment of large sums to the eunuchs who guard the place. He further reveals that he is the lover of the Empress Dowager, Princess Long Yu; and that she is the instigator of several assassination attempts on the Regent, all of which have been foiled by Rene and his police force. Rene is tormented by divided loyalties, to the Regent, and to the Empress Dowager. In other words, Rene Leys is deeply embroiled in Palace intrigues, his ultimate loyalty is to the Manchus, and he is heavily invested in their continuing to rule China.

The summer turns to autumn. When the revolution breaks out in October, Rene Leys and his Manchu employers are caught off guard. Faced with the prospect of the defeat of the Manchus, and the installation of Yuen Xi Kai as first (provisional) President of a new Republic of China, Rene Leys, afraid of reprisals, and stunned with anguish at the collapse of his world, commits suicide. Segalen decides to leave Beijing, his book about the Kuang Hsu Emperor unstarted, unfinished.

The novel is presented in the form of a diary kept by Segalen, charting his attempts to learn Chinese, his relationships with other expatriates, his trips around the city on horseback in the company of his young teacher, conversations, trips to the brothels and theatres of Chien Men Wai, daily life, the weather. It starts on the 28 February, and ends on the 22 November.

The prose is gorgeous, and is one of the chief pleasures of reading the novel. The descriptions of Beijing in the last days of the Qing are miraculously evocative, poetic, and laden with colour. Segalen is a thoughtful, witty and observant diarist, and writes like a dream, capturing details of his experiences and conversations almost as they occur.

On the other hand, his diary is also laced with sardonic asides at the stupidity of his hosts and the other expatriates. (These are the kind of comments one is still likely to hear in expatriate bars all over the Far East): I am making progress with my Chinese (such a practical language it is: it does away with syntax by reducing all the rules to three) Segalen notes on his linguistic efforts, and he sneeringly calls the White Tower - a Nepalese stupa in the heart of the Forbidden City- an example of art nouveau.

The discourse is not burdened with historical hindsight - the Wuhan uprising on October 10 which leads to the Revolution is related in the diary on the 11 October as an interesting but insignificant item in the newspaper- and has all the freshness and roughness of lived experience rather than the finished polish of a novel. It is a fictional, eyewitness account of the fall of the Qing.

II. West and East: Fantasies and Fears

"I maintain, d'you see, that the only way to deal with the Chinese is in the Chinese fashion. Otherwise you're wasting your time...They don't trust you... You'll never get anything out of them..."

Rene Leys

9 May 1911

Colonial literature of this type articulates to a more or less conscious degree one major fantasy, and one major fear. (This remark is no less true of long term expatriates in real life than it is of literature.) The fantasy is that the foreigner could run the country much better than the natives, if only the natives would get out of the way and let them do so. The fear is that the birth culture or identity will become subsumed in the cultural identity of the Other. Rene Leys articulates both these illusions in an entirely conscious way.

First, the fantasy. The whole career of Rene Leys, as he reveals it to Segalen, is an articulation of this fantasy. Rene, the ephebic foreigner, is gradually, on account of his remarkable gifts, given positions of authority by the government of his adopted country. By protecting the Regent, he in effect becomes the government. "You have gone further in your penetration of China than any other European known or unknown"... Segalen tells him.

The fear of the Other is articulated in a much more subtle way. Apart from Rene's ability to assume temporarily the identity of the Other through his linguistic gifts, the discourse is marked by ambiguity as to Rene's real identity. It's clearly stated that his mother is French and his father Belgian, but the discourse itself emphasises several times his matte skin, his slimness, and his black hair. Segalen has to remind himself -and remind Rene - several times that he is not Chinese, that he is European. When Segalen and Rene discuss the possible consequences should Rene be discovered on his nocturnal visits within the Forbidden City, the lad says that nothing will happen to him: "I am European!", as if reminding himself, and reminding Segalen (and the reader) that he is not Chinese. Rene has no foreign friends, apart from Segalen, and consorts only with Chinese: his students, his network of spies, and his group of friends. He is in fact, in danger of going native, a physical expression of subsuming one's own cultural identity to that of the Other.

His role as tutor in the language and the culture of the Other also creates the momentary illusion that he is Other. In fact, Segalen remarks at the beginning of his studies, that it is against all the dictates of logic to have a European as a teacher of Chinese, and not a Chinese. Later, Segalen records that he is carefully noting the Chinese influence emanating from this master of Pekingese life, an influence that logically can only come from the Other.

III. The Old China Hand: In which Sir Edmund Backhouse does not make an appearance

" ... "

Rene Leys

12 May 1911

These colonial fantasies and fears are embodied in the figure of the Old China Hand, the Westerner who has lived in China for years. There are several Old China Hands in the novel, both real and fictional. The latter are represented by Segalen himself, Leys pere, and Segalen's neighbour, the awful Jarignoux, who has taken Chinese citizenship, a Chinese wife and concubine and has secured for himself a position in the Ministry of Communications. References to real life Old China Hands include Marco Polo and Sir Robert Hart, who had been appointed by the Qing as Minister for Customs and Excise, and was one of the most powerful Westerners in China.

Now, for all expatriates in the Beijing of the time -both real and fictional- the archetypal Old China Hand was Sir Edmund Backhouse. Backhouse (pronounced 'Baccus'), an English Baronet, and scion of an ancient Cornish family, had been in Beijing since 1899 where he had established himself as a scholar of Chinese. He knew more about China than any other foreigner living, could speak and write Chinese and Manchu (as well as Russian and Japanese). In 1910, one year before Segalen's Chinese lessons, he had co-authored a notorious book called China Under the Empress Dowager (that is, Old Buddha herself), which had established his reputation internationally. He was also the main informant on Chinese life and current affairs to George Morrison, the Chief China Correspondent of The Times - and therefore the main international news source for what was happening inside China - who, amazingly, knew not one word of Chinese, and who therefore was totally reliant on the insights and information given to him by Backhouse.

Backhouse had gone completely native. He refused to associate with the foreigners in Beijing (apart from the contacts necessary for work), associating only with Chinese. He wore Chinese dress, ate Chinese food, and was openly homosexual. (He was to remain in Beijing in fact until his death in 1944 having survived all the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history). Naturally, such a figure was regarded with suspicion by the foreigners of the Legations, who veered between hating him for having 'let down the side' and 'gone native' and being in awe of his knowledge and gifts, and finding them indispensible for their own purposes.

Backhouse does not appear in Rene Leys. But nonetheless, his presence haunts the book in many ways. Here we note that like Rene Leys, Backhouse had gone further in his penetration of China than any other European known or unknown. Many of the details of Old Buddha's life and what Segalen calls the thrice immured Kuang Hsu Emperor had been uncovered first by Backhouse - based on information gleaned from the private diary of a Manchu courtier, which Backhouse had found in the smouldering ruins of a looted library during the Boxer rebellion- and exposed in his book. The whole basis of Segalen's obsession can be said to be founded on Backhouse's book, (although nowhere is the book mentioned in the text of Rene Leys). VS would have known of -if not known- Backhouse, as would the characters in the novel itself. In fact, any foreign resident of Beijing would have been aware of Backhouse, if only through the scandalised gossip of the Legation clubs. Backhouse's presence is therefore stated and not stated in the novel.

An Honest Interlude

At this point it becomes incumbent upon me to urge those of my audience who have not yet read Rene Leys to stop reading this essai. Such honesty on the part of a writer anxious to secure readers might appear strange and self defeating. But, in what follows I shall reveal certain spoilers, not on the level of plot, but on the much more important and subtle level of VS's whole project and the inner meaning of the novel. Once this project and meaning has been articulated here, it will be impossible for you to read the book with virgin eyes. Your purity of response will have been compromised, making it impossible for you to experience for yourself the inner meaning of the book. For it is this self- experiencing that is the essence of the book, that which gives it its extraordinary power, magical, and prophetic. So, gentle reader, step back now. For those who have already read Rene Leys or who are eager to have their innocence spoiled, let us continue.

Part 2: Second Reading

IV: Three Epiphanies and Three Questions. In which everything that went before is thrown into doubt, and in which spoilers are revealed

Or is it that Empire and Palace and all are but a historian's dream, and everything I have written on the subject but smoke playing upon the dross of nonsense?

Rene Leys

15 October 1911

On 14th November, one day after Yuen Xi Kai enters Beijing, throwing the City and Empire into a turmoil of uncertainty, Segalen has an epiphany that everything Rene Leys has told him is a lie, a fiction, a fantasy, a hoax, and that he has been played. This puts him in a quandary, because he is reluctant to relinquish the fantasy he has built up in his mind, a fantasy created by the lad; and he hangs on to the (increasingly remote) possibility that it is all true: I tell myself one should not be afraid of the miraculous side of the whole adventure. One should not turn one's back on on the mysterious and the unknown.... He tries to use logic to distinguish truth from fantasy: Today, though, by a habit of logic, be it worldly or philosophical, I simply must try and distinguish the true from the false,... the possible from the probable...the credible from the disconcerting. He resolves to confront Rene with his doubts.

Four nights later, in their last encounter together, Segalen puts three questions to the lad: 1) How did Rene become the friend and companion of the Kuang Hsu Emperor? 2) What was the exact sum Rene spent on admission to the Palace for his trysts with his concubine? 3) Has Rene - yes or no - lain with the Empress Dowager?

Segalen chooses these questions because he believes they will separate fact from fiction. Rene does not answer the first one, says he can't remember to the second one, and affirms categorically that he has lain with the Empress, and that the proof is that she has just given birth to his child. That aggravating habit of having an answer to everything! Segalen is plunged back into belief, saying that Leys should be with his child and its mother, not hanging around in Segalen's house, and warns the lad that he is in danger now of being poisoned, having polluted the blood line of the Manchus. Segalen pushes his doubts away. He turns to the start of the narrative, where he quotes what has written: I shall know no more then. I shall retire from the field. He underlines these two sentences and adds a third: and I do not wish to know any more. He in effect steps back from the abyss of revelation, to the firmer ground of what he already knows and believes.

Two days later Rene Leys is dead, and Segalen is called on to identify the body. Staring at the naked corpse of this beautiful ephebe, he reckons that the only cause of death could have been poison, but by whom? He realises that the only clue for this, and the secret identity of the poisoner, might lie in his own diary, the first-hand, day to day account, written to the minute, of Rene's reports to Segalen of his involvement with the Manchus. He reads his dairy through, carefully.

And now comes the second epiphany. Segalen realises that in fact the boy's death was caused by Segalen's warning, which Leys took as a suggestion: I accuse myself of having fed him exactly four days ago that too-suggestive cue: "Don't forget poison...". He replied "Thank you for mentioning it to me", made the suggestion his and abode by it. ...I have established with certainty the fact of my own guilt....the poison: it was I that offered it to him.

Then, Segalen has his third epiphany, that every tale told to him by Leys in fact originated as a suggestion from Segalen himself, in his obsession with the Kuang Hsu Emperor, in his questions to the lad in their lessons and conversations, and his quest to gain entry into the Within, the Forbidden City. Leys took these questions and suggestions from Segalen, and built up from them an edifice of falsity and fantasy and fed it back to Segalen: ...from the very moment of our first meeting...Everything I said, he did. In doing this, Rene Leys was able to take advantage of Segalen's ignorance of the language and the culture, and of Segalen's prior concerns. Segalen, in his turn, was easily mulled because he had already imposed his questions on the world, and could only see the culture through the framework of his obsessions.

Faced with fact that Segalen has discovered his lies, the boy kills himself. He preferred to lose his life if it meant saving face, if it was the only way of not being false either to himself or to me, of neither breaking faith nor forfeiting my esteem... By choosing this way out, Rene Leys has in fact become Chinese.

V: Circularity, Anticipation and Indeterminacy: A Narrative pas de deux

It is possible that he is playing some contemptible game of fabrication... of subject and story...

14 November 1911

Rene Leys

The effect of all this on the reader is electrifying. Not so much because of the hoax - one can see that coming a mile away- but because of the modernist pas de deux the narrative now dances with the reader. By quoting an adjusted version of the opening of the diary, Segalen sends the reader back to the beginning, and the whole narrative takes on a different perspective. The next day, Segalen follows the reader in reading his narrative through.

A number of things now reveal themselves. The first is circularity. The reader is sent back to the beginning at the moment in the text when Segalen underlines the beginning of the text. It is Segalen's rereading of his diary from the beginning which causes his last two epiphanies. The novel is now seen as a loop, with no real beginning.

The second is anticipation, which together with circularity, is revealed as one of the ordering principles of the narrative and one of its main themes. The doubts and the process of epiphany happens in the mind of the reader just as it does in the mind of Segalen, but the reader's doubts and epiphanies anticipate Segalen's. The reader anticipates Segalen's own rereading of his diary, which then happens later. The reader is always one step ahead of Segalen. Segalen's obsessions and questions anticipate -and in a sense create -the stories Rene later tells him.

The third is the way that, suddenly, all the indeterminacies of the text, all the lacunae, all the nagging doubts as to the realism and veracity of Rene's accounts of his exploits, which the reader (like Segalen) has skated over, ignored or put aside in his rush forwards through the narrative, now foreground themselves. These indeterminacies may be grouped as follows:

Indeterminacies about Rene Leys:

We have already seen how Rene's identity is blurred between European and Chinese. The text is also unclear about his age, which appears to range from 17 to 20. Other questions posed by the narrative include: whose is the carriage that Segalen sees him climbing into? Was it really Rene Leys that Segalen saw in the Regent's body guard?

Indeterminacies about his stories:

The reader has anticipated Segalen and has already formulated the same questions Segalen has about Rene's stories.

Indeterminacies about Segalen:

We do not know exactly what Segalen is doing in Beijing - the text hints that he is a doctor, but it also implies that he is not; nor do we know how long he has been there. How did he first meet Rene Leys?

Indeterminacies about narrative structure:

What is the meaning of the enigmatic first three paragraphs of the novel? It appears that at the start of the diary, Segalen has decided to abandon his attempt to write a book about Kuang Hsu, but he still nurses his obsession. Why? Why does Segalen tell us that he has underlined the first two sentences of the diary and added another? Why do we not see this other sentence when we read it the first time? Finally, at the close of the book, are we to take it that Rene's tales were true or false? What does Segalen ultimately believe about Rene Leys? Why does the narrative end on a note of suspension, with a question?

At this point the reader is reminded of the kind of narrative strategies used by Italo Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. But whereas Calvino was exploring the psychology of reading, here the narratives games have an important philosophical function, which is to examine the different cultural attitudes towards indeterminacy itself.

The West, we can simply say, regards indeterminacy as problematic. The Western mind, trained in the precision of Aristotelian scientism and the Socratic syllogism, seeks to resolve indeterminacy into an either-or, or at least, tries to establish a clear boundary between component or antithetical elements of an entity. This is reflected in Indo-European, inflected languages, whose driving force is in the direction of disambiguation.

The East, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with indeterminacy, with vagueness. Chinese characters embody several ideas and the distinctions between them are not sought; the Chinese language, with its lack of distinction between nouns and verbs, lack of pronoun use and so on, is much more capable of sustaining ambiguity. Indeed we can go further and say the whole language and culture privileges indeterminacy, and that the search for clarification, for disambiguation, is not its main direction. For the Chinese, the process of clarification carries with it the inherent danger of creating false distinctions where none exist in nature, of the false imposition of mind on matter, of the name obscuring the thing, of a wrong seeing.

The Western mind seeks either-or distinctions; the Chinese mind is unperturbed by dwelling in a state of what Keats called 'negative capability'.

The Chinese American theorist Wei Lin Yip writes: Underlying the classical Chinese aesthetic is the primary idea of the noninterference with Nature's flow.

The idea of the noninterference with Nature's flow is the heart of the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the Dao Der Jing, the work of Lao Zi, the ying to the yang of Confucius in Chinese thought, and it is to this that we now turn.

Part 3: 'Rene Leys' and the 'Dao De Jing'

VI: Three stanzas from Lao Zi

He was clearly unaware of the great Daoist principle: "All may be turned end to end, nothing will be changed."

Rene Leys

5 October 1911

VS was a student of the Dao De Jing. In fact, his entire oevre maybe thought of as an attempt at a synthesis between Western and Eastern - especially Daoist - aesthetics and ideas, and this dialogue is at the heart of Rene Leys. The three themes we have looked at above: circularity, anticipation and indeterminacy are also among the key concerns of the Dao De Jing.

In what follows we look at parts of three stanzas in particular of the Dao De Jing which are relevant to our reading of Rene Leys, focusing on a number of key concepts adumbrated in the Dao which are essential for an understanding of VS's project in the novel. (All translations of the Dao De Jing by Moss Roberts.)

Stanza 16 (lines 1 - 6)

By reaching utmost receptivity

and keeping steadfast stability

I, as the ten thousand things come forth in profusion,

Contemplate their circulation.

All multiply in fruitful growth

Then bend homeward to their root.

1) 'The ten thousand things' (wanwu) is a metaphor for the plethora of phenomena in the world. The 'ten thousand things' have no order, no hierarchy. They exist independently of any attempts to observe them, and may be thought of in Western terms as something akin to Kant's 'extensive manifold'. Note also the circularity.

2) 'Receptivity' (xu) this can be thought of as an inner emptiness, a receptivity to the ten thousand things without prior concepts about them, that is, without prior 'naming' of them.

3) 'Contemplate' (guan) can be thought of as a process of simply seeing, observing without determining. These two terms are often found together in the Dao De Jing, or are interchanged in the different source texts.

Stanza 2 (lines 12- 17)

This is why the man of wisdom

Concerns himself with under-acting

And applies the lesson

Of the word unspoken

That all the ten thousand may come forth

Without his direction...

4) 'Under-acting' (wuwei), the key virtue of Daoism, is difficult to grasp. The term wu (a different word from the wu of the 'ten thousand things') combines two concepts usually regarded as antithetical to the Western mind, that of absence and presence. As a noun it means 'what is absent', an un-manifestation, a lacuna. As a verb it may mean 'to lack', 'to be absent'. It carries an inherent negation. If one considers the ontological ambiguities of 'to be absent' in English, the 'be' implies a presence, while the 'absent 'negates it. Thus we have a present absence. Likewise with 'have a lack'. The border between presence and absence, between being and not being, between having and not having, is indeterminate, encapsulated in the word. The term wei means action, or guiding forward.

Stanza 1 (lines 1-2)

The Way as 'way' bespeaks no common lasting way,

The name as 'name' bespeaks no common lasting name...

5) 'Name' (ming) also means the process of definition, in semiotic terms, assigning a sign to a signified, but in philosophical terms, of the imposition of a way of seeing the ten thousand things through a tissue of language. This opening couplet of the Dao De Jing, then, warns against the false imposition of names on the things of the Way. An early 20th century commentator on the Dao De Jing writes: Names appear after the Way is lost, and Moss Roberts writes about naming: For Laozi, naming is the basis for dominating.

It now becomes clear, I hope, that VS's project in Rene Leys is to offer a parable about the dangers of imposing names on things, about the hazards of disambiguation, about the perils of seeing China through Western eyes. Let's see how.

First, Segalen is not clearly seeing the ten thousand things - the real life of Rene Leys, and the truth of their relationship and Rene's tall tales- because he comes already burdened with his obsessions about the Within, about the mysterious Kuang Hsu Emperor, about his book. These obsessions frame, or 'name' the things he sees, obscuring their real reality, and because of this, Rene is able to feed him the things he already wants to know.

Secondly, he names things before he sees them, and then sees them only through the frames he has already imposed on them, through the names he has already given them. A characteristic of Segalen's diary is the use of the future tense to describe certainties: I know in advance all that will happen, and all that is... all that remains impossible. Elsewhere he writes: it has got to the point with Rene Leys where I can almost guess what the dear boy is going to tell me next...The first sentence of the novel is in the future tense. This goes beyond a mere 'Orientalist' (in Said's sense of the word) interpreting the world in terms of one's construct of the Exotic Other. For the Daoist, the correct sequence for perception of the Way is: seeing, knowing, naming, acting. Segalan disrupts this sequence by 'naming' first, and only then follows by (falsely) seeing. As we have seen, this anticipation works on the structural level of the narrative as well as on the thematic. In the Dao De Jing, when naming comes before seeing and knowing, it is accompanied by disaster and the destruction of kingdoms.

Thirdly, Segalen is locked into a Western imperative of seeking to resolve indeterminacies. The indeterminacy frustrates him, and he wants to have done with it: it was the desire to know once and for all who and what he is. He does this by trying to discern (impose?) boundaries: Have you -yes or no-, lain with the Empress? The terms of enquiry, the perception of the ten thousand, is already limited by the imposition of yes- no: the terms of the question define the scope of the answer. As W.H. Auden puts it, Segalen is baiting with the wrong request/ the vectors of his interest.

Further, he is under the (Western) illusion that facts are indisputable: I was waiting for FACTS... the THE fact, the crudely palpable event that I could touch with my fingers. The Dao De Jing specifically warns against privileging one thing over another: all the things of the ten thousand are equal under the Way, and facts are not privileged simply by virtue of being facts as they are in Western epistemology.

Finally, all these Western methods of attaining knowledge that we have outlined may be understood (from the point of view of Lao Zi) as ways of reordering phenomena through the operation of a kind of psychic force: This time I mean to force an explanation out of him. Naming is dominating.

We can say then, that in Daoist terms, Segalen lacks xu, and because he lacks it, is incapable of guan, of seeing the ten thousand things correctly. This of course makes it impossible for Segalen to be capable of wuwei, and the consequences are tragic. Segalen finally arrives at guan, but as always, he is too late.

VII: A Glimpse of the Dao

Is it all true then, "Chinese fashion"?

Rene Leys
22 November 1911

However, Rene Leys is not only merely a parable. It must be remembered -and it's easy to forget this until the text reminds us - that Rene is not Chinese. This is not a dialogue between Western modes of perception and Chinese modes of perception embodied in the identities of two main characters who each represent their respective cultures. No. The circular, anticipatory structure of the novel, and the fact that Rene Leys is a European lad ensures that the dialogue between West and East happens in the mind of the reader, not only on the page. Through reading the novel -twice- the reader, like Segalen, also undergoes the process of clear seeing (guan) the ten thousand things. The novel is VS's attempt to embody the teachings of the Dao De Jing within a Western schematic, and in a way which allows those teachings to be experienced by a Western mind, rather than just read about.

We have noted already how the novel compels a second reading, a second chance, for both reader and Segalen. In this way, structurally, the novel opens up more than one possibility of seeing, more than one perspective. Wei Lim Yip, writing again about the Daoist aesthetic of vagueness in Chinese literature, says: ...This opens up an indeterminate space for the readers to enter and re-enter for multiple perceptions rather than locking them into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain direction. Which remark might just as well apply to the structure, themes and indeed the whole project of Rene Leys. What at first sight looks like a definite perspectival position becomes on second reading an indeterminate space.

At the end of the novel, before Segalan closes his diary for the last time he writes: I was his friend. - I ought to say with the same emphasis, the same loyal regret, without going any further into what exactly our friendship consisted in... for fear of killing him, or of killing him a second time ...or - which would be even more unpardonable - of being suddenly called upon to answer my doubt myself and finally pronounce: yes or no?

'Without going any further into what exactly'... 'without fear of being suddenly called upon to answer my doubt'.... 'or finally pronounce: yes or no'. These are all signifiers of xu or guan, or an ability to abide in negative capability "Chinese Fashion" without falling victim to the imperative of Western determinacy. Segalen, at the end, applies the lesson of the word unspoken and has his glimpse of the Dao. The great, wondrous beauty of this book is that the reader glimpses it before he does.

Epilogue: In which Sir Edmund Backhouse does not make a second appearance

I should very much like to have written this poem, which I venture to dub 'occasional' with a single stroke of the brush in the style of the ancient Chou bronzes. I had to content myself with translating it into French - from a non-existent Chinese original.

20 September 1911

Rene Leys

In 1913, the year Rene Leys was written, Sir Edmund Backhouse made the first of many bequests of ancient Chinese documents to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and continued to do so for the next few years. Hailed as one of the greatest collections of Chinese literature in the world by contemporary scholars, it still forms the backbone of the Library's Chinese collection. In 1918, however, rumours began to circulate that not all of these documents were real, and that many of them had been faked by Sir Edmund himself. These rumours proved true, and to cut a long and complex story short, Backhouse was revealed as one of the century's most outrageous and successful hoaxsters. Like Rene Leys, he had relied on the ignorance and preconceptions of the West to give them what they wanted.

The revelation of the Bodleian Library hoax casts doubt on the veracity of everything Backhouse wrote on China; and the truthfulness or otherwise of all his work remains to this day controversial, and impossible to finally determine. However, if the documents given by Backhouse to Oxford were non-existent, forged by himself, this means that Backhouse was a literary genius - in Chinese.

His 'translations' and 'recreations' of ancient Chinese documents are similar to the literary strategies that VS himself employed: his book Steles presents itself as translations of inscriptions on non-existent Chinese grave markers; his volume of prose poems Peintures presents itself as descriptions of Chinese paintings, which likewise do not exist; while Equipee recounts a non-existent expedition into the interior of China. What saves these works from being hoaxes is that their unreal provenance is not hidden but displayed.

The mystery of the ways in which the fictional story of Rene Leys anticipates the real story of Sir Edmund Backhouse only deepens when we learn that in his memoir, Decadence Mandchoue, which has only this year been published, Backhouse, also like Rene Leys, claimed to have been the secret lover of his Empress Dowager (old Buddha), and to have had intimate knowledge of the workings of the Manchu Dynasty. VS died in 1919, however, and knew nothing of Backhouse's disgrace.

Another source for Rene Leys has been seen in the Frenchman Maurice Roy, who also regaled VS with tall tales of his doings with the Princess Dowager Long Yu and the Manchus. However, for me, Backhouse is a much more convincing influence on the novel for the very reason that he is not in the book. Backhouse was a consumate hoaxster -unlike the unconvincing Roy- and VS, as we have seen, was attracted to the indterminate status of the hoax, seeing in it a parallel with the Dao. Backhouse, then, remains the presence and the absence, the wu, at the heart of the novel.

There remain those inexplicable moments...glimpses, flashes... insights, words no one could have made up, things no one could have fabricated... all his confidences really did inhabit an essential Palace built upon the most magnificent foundations... and the sets he conjured up ... and that teeming ceremonial and secret Pekingese life that no truth as officially known will ever begin to suspect...

22 November 1911

Rene Leys

So many things, half seen, can never be seen.

Peintures

Bo Yang on Confucius

2011-09-16T11:03:00.001+08:00

It is a tragedy for China that in all the Confucian teachings, there is little encouragement for intelligent thinking, scarce mention of the responsibility incumbent upon people in authority, and almost no stimulus for competition. Confucius only wanted his disciples, and his disciples' disciples, to accept the status quo, and to remain smug and self-satisfied.

Basho on writing haiku

2011-08-12T17:24:00.001+08:00

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and yourself are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

Mishima on hell

2011-08-11T22:56:00.001+08:00

The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail. And to see all that in the pitch darkness.

Barthes on the haiku

2011-08-11T10:04:00.003+08:00

The haiku reminds us of what has never happened to us; in it we recognize a repetition without origin, an event without cause, a memory without person, a language without moorings.

'Conundrum' Jan Morris

2011-08-05T11:35:00.000+08:00

It seems to me that what has happened to me and what I have tried to describe in this book is one of the most fascinating experiences that ever befell a human being.

What does it feel like for a man to be a man, for a woman to be a woman? Is it possible for a man, never ceasing to be a man and therefore to gain the necessary perspective, to objectively experience, and then to articulate, what it feels like to inhabit a male body? And likewise for woman? These are some of the questions Jan Morris's courageous memoire of her sex change attempts to cast light on.

The facts are well known, how James Morris, man, journalist, historian, adventurer and travel writer became Jan Morris, grandmother, dame, traveller, novelist and woman. Morris gives here a very personal account of her life. Her memoire is searching, candid, and of course, as one would expect from a writer of Morris's stature and accomplishment, beautifully written. She gives an intimate account of the relationship between gender, sexuality and the self, an account which does more to illuminate the enigma of trans-sexuality than a whole bibliography of psychological text books and case studies. It's a tale told from the inside, and thus doubly valuable, both as a record of the personal and of the universal.

At the same time this inner perspective reveals a few ideological blindnesses about our dear Jan. First, is the entrapment in Western modes of sexuality in which male and female are clearly differentiated. Eastern genders are much less clearly defined. Asian men display more qualities associated in the West with femininity: grace, forgiveness, delicacy, softness; while Asian women frequently display qualities designated in the West as masculine: strength, dogmaticism, insensitivity, ambition. The most important deity of Asia is the trans-sexual Guan Yin, who appears in male and female guises. Perhaps Morris was as much a victim of her milieu as a product of it.

Secondly, it has to be said that Morris has been a life long member of the Establishment. Educated at Oxford and Lancing, with an early career in the 9th Lancers, then a job with The Times during the long decline of Empire, her journey from male to female has therefore been eased by the tolerance towards eccentricity, the politeness of members of the Establishment towards one of their own. I couldn't help feeling, as Morris describes how 'a man from the Ministry' drove all the way to her dacha in Wales to give her her new social security card, that, had Morris been born into a lower social class and been living in a semi-detached in Nottingham, the powers who rule our lives would not have been quite so sycophantically helpful. Indeed, tales of official and legal obstruction for those seeking to change their sex are still the norm. In this sense, Conundrum cannot be regarded as typical of the transsexual experience.

Thirdly, and this is my main objection to an otherwise fascinating and moving book, is Morris's attitude to homosexuality. Morris writes of a childfree homosexual couple she once knew:

They left behind them... only a void. A marriage as loyal as marriage could be had ended sterile and uncreative, and if the two of them had lived into old age their lives I fear, would have proved progressively more sterile still, the emptiness creeping in, the fullness retreating.

Here we have two myths with which heterosexual people love to bolster their gender hegemony: the sickly kind of sentimentality 'liberal' people display towards homosexuals (the truth and pathos of their condition), and 'breeder fascism'.

Breeder fascism, as Chavenet defined it, is the attitude that those who do not have children are somehow incomplete, lacking (childless), diminished, sterile, uncreative, and by virtue of having no offspring, lead empty, unfulfilled lives, unable to experience the loftier human virtues of selfless love, responsibility, blood loyalty, self-sacrifice, duty and devotion, which can only be the exclusive prerogative of those who reproduce. Breeder fascism is the attitude that having children is a uniquely special achievement which lifts parents onto a higher level of human development. To encounter this attitude in otherwise quite sane, normal, educated, enlightened people is always something of a shock. To encounter it here in a tale of a trans-sexual is something of a grotesque.

Having offspring is not a special achievement; it is mere biology. Every known life form in the universe does it, even the lowliest micro-structure does it. It is not unique or special, it is ubiquitous, commonplace, mundane, uninteresting even; and claiming that it gives exclusive access to a higher level of human development is just offensive nonsense. Worse, given the way the planet is currently groaning under an unsustainable burden of a human population fast approaching 7 billion, it is also a sign of gross selfishness, incontinence and irresponsibility.

Raising children, however, so that they become tolerant, well-adjusted members of a global community is another matter. That is special, and, given the large number of people who fail so spectacularly at it, must be uncommonly difficult. However, this is not the exclusive prerogative of breeders, but can be attempted by anyone of any gender or sexual persuasion who has access to an adoption agency and a large enough income.

To claim that having children is the only way to protect one from the void, as Jan Morris does here, is the key sign of breeder fascism. (Shakespeare says the same thing in the early, most tedious, sonnets of his cycle.) The fact is, every human being faces the void. The generations of men are like leaves, the blind poet said, and having offspring is only a postponement of the void, a postponement which in the face of that void, is infinitely insignificant.

'Porius' John Cowper Powys

2011-07-29T10:11:00.004+08:00

Given the great cultural differences in the world today, just as in the world's past, it seems to me unreasonable to think that the features and emphases of consciousness would be everywhere the same.

Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Their confused modern times produced a completely new type of human being...
Porius

North Wales AD 499, the third week of October. The last of the Roman legions has long left Britain, leaving the country in a chaos of competing tribes and interests. The House of Cunedda, an ancient and noble Romanised Brython family, is trying to hang on to the hegemony given to them by the Romans over this small corner of the British Isles. Threatening them are, on the one hand, the aboriginal Welsh, the subjugated forest people, under the leadership of their Druid and their three ancient Princesses; and on the other, an alliance of the Ffichtiaid (the Picts) and the Gwyddelaid (the Scots). To make things worse, a Saxon horde under the leadership of Colgrim is advancing to put everyone to the sword. King Arthur and his court, with Merlin, and his cavalry, the only possessors of horses in this horseless land, arrive to help the House of Cunedda in return for their assistance in trying to unify Britain and fight off the growing number of Saxon invaders. Against this historical background of violent transition between the Roman and Saxon eras of British history the story of Porius, the heir of the House of Cunedda, unfolds.

The novel is huge, in every sense of the word. At over 2800 pages in manuscript, and almost 800 pages (of very small type) in this latest and most complete edition, it teems with life and incident and characters, historical, mythical and fictional. The various machinations and alliances between the political interests, the marriage of Porius and his cousin Morfydd, who is in love with his best friend Rhun, who in turn is in love with Merlin's sister Gwendydd; the secret plot of Arthur's nephew and heir Medrawd to usurp Arthur's throne; the secret alliance on the part of the three Princesses and the Druid of the forest people with Colgrim's Saxons, are just some of the narrative incidents described. The novel also describes a clash of ideologies, with Christian thinking competing with Mithraic ritual and ancient Druidic practice and Merlin's mystical Earth worship for ideological dominance over the coming age, with Christianity itself rent asunder by the Pelagian heresy.

The text bristles with references to the ancient Welsh mythology contained in the Mabinogion, The Tale of Taliesin and Y Gododdin, Boethius, the letters of Sidonius and Cassiodorus, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, Eschenbach and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Pelagian texts and Aristophanic comedies, Greek, Welsh and Persian phrases, and underpinning it all, in the way that The Odyssey underpins Ulysses, is an Alchemical initiation rite.

The discourse is characterised by an extreme precision of observation and description, and by an extreme slowness of pace. John Cowper Powys can spend two paragraphs describing a rotting ash branch, the colour of a mist, or the sound of a reed bed in the wind. Action is suspended while the character's emotional states and thoughts are minutely described in a fashion that owes much to Henry James or Proust. The interaction of memory, psychology and intention with the wider cosmic forces in the universe are given as much space in the narrative as descriptions of food, clothes, dwellings and weapons, mountains and forest. Horses, dogs, water rats, owls and trees play as prominent a part in the plot as human characters. John Cowper Powys was one the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century. The prose is richly gorgeous, sinuous, evocative, and capable of describing the most fleeting psychological and natural states. The book demands and receives the most intense absorption on the part of the reader.

However, early readers of the novel found it overwritten; it was rejected in its original form and first published in a heavily excised and shortened version. The fact is that Powys achieved something so original and so unusual, so difficult and so tenuous with this novel, that it is not surprising that it has languished in obscurity since it was completed. For Porius may be read as an extended examination of the nature of consciousness within the genre of historical fiction.

Part I: Historical fiction and the Anachronism of Consciousness

Historical fiction is always based on an underlying anachronistic assumption, and that is that the personages of the past had a consciousness which is to all intents and purposes the same as ours. Modern readers are encouraged to empathise with or understand historical personages by the way the fiction underlines the similarity of consciousness between the figures of the past and ourselves - or at any rate, by the way the fiction does not emphasise differences in consciousness. Very good historical fiction (Yourcenar's or Broch's for example) shows greater awareness of this difference in consciousness even if it doesn't foreground it, while very bad historical fiction (Ken Follet's or Tracy Chevalier's for example) merely describes modern people in costume, participants in a fancy dress ball or a historical reconstruction (there's always a Rolex showing somewhere, or someone will sneak off behind the scenery for a quick fag and a facebook update).

In historical fiction set in the not too remote past, this underlying anachronism is not really apparent and not really important; but in historical fiction set in the very remote past, this assumption of an identically similar consciousness between historical character and modern reader becomes a form of imaginative blindness which effectively undermines the psychological realism of historical fiction. (This might account for the relative lowliness of the genre in the Academy.)

What John Cowper Powys achieved in Porius, is twofold. First, he imaginatively recreates for his fifth century characters a pre-modern consciousness quite different from the modern consciousness of his readers, doing this in such a way that a modern reader, imprisoned in a modern consciousness, can, for the duration of the novel, step outside himself, as it were, and experience a differently constituted consciousness. And second, he describes the evolution of consciousness in one character - Porius- showing how modern consciousness evolved out of pre-modern consciousness.

John Cowper Powys and Modern Consciousness

In an essay My Philosophy published in the collection Obstinate Cymric in 1947, four years before the publication of Porius, John Cowper Powys described modern consciousness. His description has much in common with contemporary scientific and psychological descriptions of consciousness, and is entirely uncontroversial. It consists of the following elements:

the imagination has more power than the will

consciousness can be visualised as something amorphous, something cloud-like, a mist

it can be projected into other objects, it can be directed anywhere at will

when consciousness imagines itself as elsewhere from the here and now, it takes with it its bodily attributes, that is, it imagines itself as still possessing the senses it has when it is inside the body

the Self is self-conscious: it can say 'I am I', and it resides in the soul

the soul and the Self are not the same, the former is a kind of envelope for the latter because the 'I am I' experiences itself as different from the soul

the Self feels itself independent of the body, although lodged in it, and also, in a different degree, independent from other forms of matter

the Self cannot escape from its necessity to feel itself located somewhere -anywhere -in Space and Time

it has a dark side, like the moon, from which it draws its power, a dynamic

the Self constantly confronts the Not-Self, and in seeking to come to terms with it, uses the senses of the body

the Self is conscious from time to time of an immense solitude

the Self may actively change its relationship to the world by determining to enjoy things rather than just endure them

Now, a few things are important here, and they need stressing.

First, consciousness is a state of psychic self awareness.

Second, it is not to be confused with mind, or the active ideas produced by the mind. The mind is only one part of consciousness, as can be seen by the fact that one is conscious of one's mind and its operations during those operations. Consciousness involves an awareness of the constituent parts of consciousness: the imagination, the soul, the mind, the conscience, the will, the 'I am I', the 'I am you' and so on, but it is also something extra, standing outside these constituent parts.

Third, consciousness exists in relation to a material body from which it imagines itself to be more or less independent.

Fourth, there is a clear division between the Self and the Not-Self. This division may be undergoing a constant state of readjustment (as in Dostoevsky's psychology), but nonetheless, there is a clear division.

Fifth, it uses sense data to confront the Not-Self; in other words, it is conscious of a gap between itself and sense data, or in still other words, it does not imagine itself to be the sum total of sense data, but as something extra.

Sixth, the Self may direct the mind, in full consciousness of doing so.

And lastly, there is a vital role played by what modern psychology calls the Unconscious, and what John Cowper Powys calls 'the dark side'.

John Cowper Powys imagines consciousness as a stark and stripped recognition of myself as a self-conscious entity in Space and Time confronting the whole visible world. So far so good, so far so uncontroversial. I think we can recognise this as a broadly accurate description, give or take some of the idiosyncrasies of John Cowper Powys's vision and way of expressing it, of our own, modern consciousness.

However, this is not the consciousness described in Porius, which differs from the above model in several important but subtle ways, which I want to look at now in more detail. First I want to suggest how consciousness in Porius differs from modern consciousness, glancing at the means employed by the discourse to depict this pre-modern consciousness, and then show how modern consciousness develops out of pre-modern consciousness in the novel.

Part II: Porius and Pre-Modern Consciousness

Again, it must be stressed at this point, that what we are involved with here is not the mind or the ideas produced by the mind, but the psychic landscape or climate which gives a home to the mind; the inner theatre in which the mind operates. Characters in Porius are capable of ratiocination: His mind began weighing the effect of a presumably accomplished fact before the process necessary to accomplish it had been set in motion. Characters produce thoughts which are recognisably modern in that they argue, for example, about issues of doctrine. They are not the primitive Neanderthals of Golding's Inheritors, but nonetheless, their self-awareness is demonstrably different from the self-awareness of modern people.

This difference manifests itself in two important ways. First, there is less awareness of the constituent parts of the Self, and second, the boundary between Self and Not-Self is highly porous.

The Wholeness of Self

The characters seem to have no awareness of the origin of their thoughts, that their thoughts come from their mind, and no awareness that their minds are a constituent of something larger and deeper, a constituent among others. Characters seem to be at the mercy of their thoughts, which suddenly arrive from nowhere: It swept like a darting seagull's wing across Porius's consciousness...Suddenly into his own fantastic and morbid mind the unpleasant idea entered: "What if..." ...And then it was that her consciousness was suddenly submerged by the thought of Porius.... Meanwhile in Nesta's head,...a totally different landscape took shape...

Part of the evolution of consciousness which Porius goes through in the novel, as we shall see, is that he suddenly starts to be aware of a separate part of his inner being which issues thoughts, and which he can observe and to a certain extent control. He began to feel puzzled at the queer directions his thoughts were taking. But were they his thoughts? Weren't they rather fragments of himself, or more likely -for how could a fragment think? - mightn't they be a drifting swarm of selves, like so any gnats or midgets? This implies that previous to this new awareness of a Self composed of various elements - a swarm of selves-, his normal state was an unawareness of the various elements which make up the Self; an abiding, if you like, within an organic wholeness of Self.

The Self and the Not-Self

The blurring of the boundary between Self and Not-Self manifests itself in three ways. First, the thoughts which so mysteriously arise are usually attached to some outward stimulation which is described as just an important part of the thought as the thought itself. Inner and outer are thus curiously attached to each other. Here are two examples: All his thoughts just then seemed to take shapes that were prompted by the flow of the water before him...All these presences, including certain wavering wisps of smoke under the arches, seemed to become only too willing bodies for his unregulated thoughts. The gap between sense data and the perception of sense data, which, as we have seen, is an element of modern consciousness, is lacking here.

Second, there is a merging of characters' selves. The Not-Self includes of course the Selves of others as well as the material world - a psychic Not-Self and a material Not-Self. The line between Self and the Not-Self of someone else's Self is constantly blurred. Characters appear to be able to read each other's minds. Morfydd is aware that the pageboy Neb is reading her mind: Neb's gaze gave her the feeling that he was reading not only her unexpressed thoughts but her inexpressible thoughts. The wording here implies that she regards it as normal that he can read her unexpressed thoughts, and what surprises her only is that she suddenly has a glimmering that he might have the power to read her inexpressible thoughts as well. When Porius embraces Myrddin Wyllt, he is able to perceive the contents of the counsellor's mind. Porius is aware when the sorceress Minue is 'cavoseniargising'. Characters are able to influence other characters subverbally, by entering into their consciousnesses: she had in fact begun to do with this young man what her Gwyddeles mother used to do with people and things, that is to say, float over them and and under them and into them till she could, so to say, lead them "by the lining of their souls". In several places in the novel, the thought of Rhun enters Porius's consciousness in advance of Rhun himself entering the scene; and Porius is aware that he and Rhun can send each other mind waves when they need each other.

In terms of the discourse, it is Porius's growing awareness of this blurring between the Self and the Self of another which implies that this blurring is the normal, pre-modern state of consciousness for those characters who do not undergo an evolution into modern consciousness: this devious wisdom he was dimly tracking down had to do with the inmost self within himself, had to do with the thought, as obscure as it was startling, that it was possible to enlarge a person's identity till it embraced other identities, till it could escape at will into others, till it could even discover that all the while beneath the obstinate opacity of itself, it was on the verge of becoming these others.

Cavoseniargizing

The third manifestation of the blurring of Self and Not-Self is of course in the role played by nature - the material Not-Self - in the novel. This is the most easily discernable difference between the pre-modern consciousness imagined by John Cowper Powys and its modern counterpart. Throughout the novel, nature impinges itself radically on the consciousness of the characters -and on the consciousness of the reader. This is done by means of the constant appearance of the made up word 'cavoseniargizing' which is a word invented by Porius to describe his ability to penetrate nature: normal consciousness to him always meant, if he was to enjoy himself, the particular plunge into Nature, or the particular taking Nature into himself, which he called 'cavoseniargizing'... Significant here is that Porius calls this his 'normal consciousness'. Porius experiences his normal, customary consciousness as a blurring of the boundary between Self and material Not-Self, an experience associated with intense enjoyment: he was too absorbed in 'cavoseniargizing' to notice anything, hear anything, or be aware of anything beyond the magical ecstasy of mingling his whole being with the elements! This blurring of Self and material Not- Self is by no means restricted to Porius alone. But only he has a word for it.

One of the effects of this detailed focus on nature by the discourse, and one of the great achievements of John Cowper Powys in this novel, is that it recreates a kind of 'cavoseniargising' in the mind of the reader during the reading of it. One becomes acutely aware of nature while reading this book, and this is accompanied by a feeling of delight.

Moreover, information - mental phenomena- conveyed by one character to another and essential for the unfolding of the events of the story, are constantly mixed with descriptions of nature - natural phenomena, both in the mind of the characters, and in the discourse as experienced by the reader. There seems to be little distinction between the two kinds of phenomena in terms of the character's relation to them: it was through a confused enough mass of material impressions that the full impact of this news had to force its way...all these impressions contributed to the entangled screen that imposed itself between his intelligence and this astonishing news.

Thus we have seen that the pre-modern consciousness depicted in the novel differs from the modern consciousness in its lack of awareness of the discreet parts of consciousness, and in a persistent blurring between the Self and the psychic and material Not-Self.

Part III: Porius and the Evolution of Modern Consciousness

It would be an oversimplification to say that Porius starts with a pre-modern consciousness and ends with a modern one, and that he is the only character who undergoes this process. In fact, the process of the character's evolution has already started when the novel opens, and is by no means complete when the novel ends. The novel depicts an ongoing evolutionary process, in which Porius alternately experiences two types of consciousness, taking two steps forward into the modern and then one step back into the pre-modern, as it were. Nor are we to assume that Porius is the only character who undergoes this process. It's just that he is the only character for whom this process is foregrounded consistently by the discourse.

Let's look at how this is done. Porius intermittently experiences a recognisably modern consciousness (according to our model) in many places in the novel, but here we limit our discussion to three significant narrative incidents only: the death of the Cewri, and two places in the final chapter. Before we look at these in detail, however, let's look at how the narrative prepares this evolution of consciousness.

We are told that from early childhood the basic conditions for the emergence of a modern consciousness are present in Porius. He experiences from an early age a great gap between his inner life and his body: Porius's awareness of what was happening to his body was divided by a peculiar chasm or gulf from what was going on in his mind. and his consciousness is described as abnormally active and one assumes this means 'abnormally' in relation to the pre-modern, unaware consciousnesses of his peers. He is able to bridge this gulf only with active effort.

The discourse constantly reminds us of the contrast between Porius's Herculean body, lethargic, somewhat earth-bound, and the rapid, evanescent nature of his thoughts: It may have been something in the curious disharmony between his sluggish body with its Herculean muscles and the almost unnatural rapidity of his conscious thoughts...

Moreover, he is also dimly aware that his consciousness is not an organic whole: The present chronicler of this same consciousness has already recorded how... Porius had learnt the trick at a very early age of separating the docile and obedient routine of his outward actions by a considerable gulf, both from his secret physical sensations and from his mental secret commentaries... but consists of an awareness of secret physical sensations (awareness of sense data) and mental secret commentaries (the mind's comments on sense data). This, as we have noted, is one of the features of a modern consciousness, and here, the ground is prepared for its emergence.

The narrator tells us that this awareness started in Porius when as an infant he arranged alphabet blocks to spell his name. This experience caused to arise in him an inexpressible delight in the idea that, small though he was, there was something in him, different from everybody else in the world... The preconditions for an experience of a confrontation with the Self and the Not-Self are present.

Incident 1: The Cewri

One incident in which Porius takes a major step into modern consciousness is the rape and murder of the Cewri, an aboriginal, semi-mythical race of cave dwelling giants. The fact that Porius acts as a catalyst in the extinction of this race (but doesn't actually kill them) is in itself symbolic of the difference between a pre-modern consciousness, in which giants and other mythical beings have their reality, and a modern one, in which they do not. As he watches the last of the two giants fleeing from him, he has a mental experience which the narrative voice describes as a moral crisis: but it was much more than that. It could also have been called an aesthetic, or even perhaps a metaphysical crisis. But really it was more than any of these things. It concerned his whole life as a living organism. The narrative voice goes on: it had so increased the division between his mind and body that his mind had suddenly felt powerful enough to put an end once for all to the disconcerting equality between these two antagonists, powerful enough to assert itself once for all as the living dominant partner. In other words, instead of the customary equality between mind and body of Porius's pre-modern consciousness there comes an awareness that the mind is the more powerful of the two, that there is thoroughly modern confrontation between Self and Not-Self.

The discourse constantly emphasises the newness of this experience. Here is one example: He became conscious of his mind as a living entity, using his body but distinct from his body. His mind felt as if it had become a new creature, strung up in itself, flexible and porous in itself, compact and resilient from centre to circumference, and able as it had never been able before, to choose between opposite possibilities of action...

Later, when reflecting on this incident and going over it in his memory, the discourse remarks: the shock of his rape of the cawres, and her death so quickly after, had roused forces within him which he felt were enlarging if not altering the whole nature of his consciousness. One of these forces seemed to be the power...of including in the sweep of his 'cavoseniargizing' both the idea of death as the end of all, and the whole array of those secret nervous afflictions. Here, his 'cavoseniargizing' seems to go beyond the mere bridging of the gulf between Self and Not-Self to something more abstract, something approaching the disciplined, mindful, martialling of concepts for a purpose, an awareness of which is a feature of the modern consciousness outlined in our model.

Incident 2: Above the tree line

Another key narrative incident where Porius experiences - and where the narrative voice deliberately foregrounds - a recognisably modern consciousness is in the last chapter. Porius is alone on the mountainside, resting in his pursuit of Ninue and the wizard Myrddin Wyllt. He is suddenly aware of a whole rush of clear essential decisions preceded by a kind of gathering itself together of his whole soul with a sudden convulsive movement which begins to heave itself up, clumsily, awkwardly, inarticulately, but resolutely and with a single-hearted purpose in view. The narrative voice remarks: There was never a moment when some interior entity, or self, or rational consciousness within him, such as the Athenians called nous or reasonable intelligence, made up its mind to issue orders to his body...Body, mind, soul, spirit, will, desire, consciousness and intention all seemed to be heaving up together in once confused inchoate movement. In other words, the newly emergent constituent parts of modern consciousness suddenly conceive of themselves as part of a larger whole.

Porius is thinking about the argument between Pelagius and Augustine, about whether Space or Time have primacy. He self consciously attempts to martial his thoughts: "I must think this out," he said to himself." ...He determined to start at the very beginning, or in other words, at the very bottom of the inescapable process used by his own mind and for that reason necessarily observable and describable by his own mind.

Then comes the most unambiguously, clearly articulated description of modern consciousness in the novel, which I quote in full: "The thing in me that says 'I am I' can divide itself into two and yet be the same. It can say 'you' to itself when there's nothing but itself there... That's the first step....and the second step is to note that the 'I' who can say 'you' to itself can imagine itself and very often does imagine itself moving through Space quite independently of its body, that is to say, if it is the 'I-you' who usually inhabits Porius's body, it can imagine itself leaving Porius's body and taking an airy journey...but though it can imagine itself outside its body it cannot imagine itself escaping from space. Wherever it imagines itself flying it cannot imagine itself ridding itself of the idea that it is still somewhere,...in space. And the third step is to note that although it is easy to imagine this 'I am I' as leaving its body and moving from one spot in Space to another, it is impossible to imagine this 'I am I' as totally devoid of any point of localization; though this point need be no more than a moving speck."

There are a few things to note here.

First, it is given to us in directly quoted thought, surrounded by speech marks, without mediation by a narrative voice

Second, there is a fully articulated awareness of the constituent parts of consciousness.

Third, pre-modern 'cavoseniargizing' has given way to a recognisably modern awareness of abstract, conceptual, ratiocination, in which an awareness of abstract concepts is matched by an awareness of their relationship to each other, and by a self-conscious effort of will to place them in a relation to each other.

Fourth, Porius's thoughts on Time and Space reproduce the awareness of location in time and space that is a feature of modern consciousness in the model we looked at earlier.

Incident 3: The Life Illusion

In his sojourn on the mountainside, Porius suddenly thinks of Rhun. And not only did the thought of Rhun dominate his mind, and an "idea" it certainly was rather than a presence, and this fact saved him from the least suspicion that any accident might have befallen his foster brother, but this "idea" was entirely independent of the tremendous vision that lay stretched out before him. But now his thought of Rhun is not the blurring of his and Rhun's consciousness which is a feature of the pre-modern mind - Porius knows this is not a telepathic communication from his friend- but an idea arising out of a modern consciousness detached from nature. Again, this is not a steady process, but works intermittently. Earlier, Porius was aware of the ability of telepathy leaving him: "How strange", he thought, "That I can caress with my eyes this rugged profile so like my own, and yet not be able to catch a single one of the thoughts that are even now racing through that corrugated head."

This loss of an ability to blur his Self with the Self of his friend is related to his earlier awareness of what John Cowper Powys calls 'the life illusion'. The life illusion is a sort of diffused conceit of yourself... a sort of feeling that to be what you are, and to feel as you feel makes you a person in some peculiar way superior to the people you meet. In reality, or course, it only makes you different. And since every creature is different from every other creature, and since there's experimentation in values going on all the time, a person who wants to be wise must analyse and criticise, even while he obeys, the values he's received from the past.

We can say that the pre-modern ability to blur with the psychic Not-Self of the Other gives way, finally, to the theory of mind of modern consciousness. Porius says to Medrawd in the last chapter: "Everything that exists is a private experience - shared only very superficially and casually by others - of a particular consciousness with its own particular powers of awareness." Communion with the Other has given way to the isolated modern Self, a Self which can hypothesise that the Other has a similarly constructed consciousness, but nonetheless, a Self which ultimately dwells in eternal solitude.

oooOOOooo

Knowledgeable sceptics may be muttering at this point that this foregrounded consciousness is a feature of all John Cowper Powys's works, and that there is nothing special about his use of it here. However, the foregrounded consciousness which is so characteristic of Powys's method here finds itself in a perfect marriage with subject matter and setting. In Porius, Powys's mystical realism is put to use to enliven and deepen not only the genre of historical fiction, but also our understanding of the evolution of consciousness.

And he became aware of an unfathomable power within him, a power that was at once divine and human, animal and elemental, a power that could be drawn upon at will, not to create or destroy, but simply to 'enjoy to the end'.

Porius

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?

Virginia Woolf

"Wolf Solent" John Cowper Powys

2011-06-13T11:07:00.005+08:00

He had come more and more to regard 'reality' as a mere name given to the most lasting and most vivid among all the various impressions of life which each individual experiences. ... One of his own most permanent impressions had always been of the nature of an extreme dualism in which every living thing was compelled to take part.

Nomos and physis

This book operates on two distinct levels. The first level is a Lawrentian story of adultery and cuckoldry in a small English country town. Wolf Solent arrives in the town where he was born, after an absence of many years, to take up the post of secretary to the local squire. He falls in love with and marries Gerda, the daughter of the local stonemason. At the same time, he develops an ineluctable passion for the daughter of the local bookseller, Christie. His young wife is carrying on an affair with her childhood sweetheart, while Christie is fighting off the incestuous advances of her own father. Meanwhile, the squire is feuding with the vicar, and both are feuding with the local poet. There is lots of social observation, village fetes, afternoon tea, walks down leafy lanes, and a wealth of eccentric and eccentrically named characters. The novel is focalised through the eponymous protagonist, a highly educated, morbidly sensitive young man, the possessor of a 'mythology', and the story is largely about how he loses this personal mythology and becomes socialised in the world, a Dostoevskyan tale of how a young ego grows up and comes to terms with the disillusionment consequent on greater maturity and experience.

The second level, however, is really about something much deeper: man's relationship to nature, and the tension between human culture and society, and the natural world and its cyclical processes. On his journey to his hometown, Solent reflects on religion: ...It seemed as though all the religions in the world were nothing but so many creaking and splashing barges, whereon the souls of men ferried themselves over those lakes of primal silence, disturbing the swaying water-plants that grew there and driving away shy water fowl. Here, human culture, symbolised by religion, symbolised by creaking barges, floats on top of the primal lake of nature, barely disturbing it, but leaving no real lasting impact or impression. The book is really about the age old tension between nomos (society) and physis (nature), a tension first articulated by the Greeks.

The tension between these two, nomos and physis, is presented in two ways: by Solent's thoughts, and by the narrative voice, including plot and description.

Solent's Thoughts

Solent, as an educated man, sees the world in terms of Greek mythology. At times of stress he utters the Greek lament: Ailinon, Ailinon (Woe!) from Aeschylus, and he is aware of nymphs, dryads and other mythical creatures lurking in the undergrowth. Powys underpins all his novels with a mythical foundation, usually Arthurian or from the Mabinogion. Wolf Solent is unusual in using classical Greek mythology as a foundation, underlining further the nomos - physis dialogue.

Solent is acutely aware of nature, and of his position as a consciousness- endowed being in nature: nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind; and it had become a custom with him to keep a region of his intelligence alert and passive for a thousand whispers, hints, obscure intimations that came to him in this way. At key moments in the novel, he succumbs to reveries about nature and his position -as a representative of humanity- in nature. He has the ability, shared with the squire, to see things stripped of the mischief of custom. He constantly has flashes of intuition, in which the social world appears as superficial, and the natural world as the only reality: my world is essentially a manifold world. He exists in a kind of suspended state between cosmic immensity, and microscopic detail, a kind of Blakean vision of the whole world in a grain of sand. In the face of the primal silence of nature, the social conventional dilemma in which he finds himself - married to one woman but in love with another - appears meaningless and trivial, a creaking barge, merely the mischief of custom.

In a key passage, Solent engages in an imaginary dialogue with the skull of his dead father (the disembodied head is a key motif for Cowper Powys, and one that comes from the Mabinogion). Wolf asserts that reality is an illusion caused by consciousness, while his father asserts that the only reality is the natural world: "There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky, " asserts Wolf. "Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly," laughs the skull, "Life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It's at the bottom of your pond, it's in the body of your sun, it's in the dust of your star spaces, it's in the eyes of weasels and the nose of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails."

Wolf believes that every human being is the possessor of a 'life illusion', a motivating force that underpins all interactions with the world and which defines the character of each person. To a certain extent, the novel is about how Wolf loses his 'life illusion' and ultimately sees that the real purpose of life is to forget and to enjoy, to endure and to escape, to surrender nomos in the face of physis. This takes place in the arena of a struggle between his mother, and his father. His mother represents nomos: What's the use of tilting against conventions? It's more amusing, it's more interesting, to play with these things. They're as real as anything else, she says. His father represents physis: "Life in me still, you worm of my folly, and girls' flesh is sweet for ever and ever; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow hammers' eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls."

The Narrative Voice

In the plot, the nomos - physis tension exists, as we have seen, in the social conventions of Wolf's marriage and the various adulteries surrounding it, and how these conventions appear when set against the natural world of physical love and procreation. Another key area in which this tension exists is in sex.

Nomos sanctions certain kinds of sexuality, and outlaws others, while physis has no attitude at all towards them. From the point of view of physis, all kinds of sexuality are natural, and sexual identity is seen as much more complicated than a mere hetero-homo duality. Nothing is against nature. That's the mistake people make, and it causes endless unhappiness. The minor characters all embody different kinds of sexuality: the bookseller Malakite and his two daughters embody incest; Wolf's own father, a promiscuous but now dead figure, embodies rampant heterosexuality uncomplicated by convention; the squire's obsession with Wolf's predecessor, the young man Redfern, represents a suppressed necrophilia; there are various homosexual relationships suggested between the vicar and the local poet, and Wolf himself is aroused by the sight of two village youths swimming naked in the local pond. One of these youths is his wife's lover, and Wolf is fascinated by the sight of the young man's genitals floating on the surface of the pond. His jealousy is tinged with envy. Celibacy is represented by the hideously ugly spinster Selena Gault who nurtures an undying but unreciprocated passion for Wolf's father; conventionalised sexuality is represented by Wolf's mother. Considering the book appeared in 1929, Cowper Powys was way ahead of his time both in his ideas about sexuality and in his depiction of it.

The book balances descriptions of social life with nature, and it is in these last that the enduring power of the book lies. No other prose writer in the language comes close to the power of Cowper Powys's writing on nature. His prose descriptions of the natural world can best be compared with the nature poetry of John Clare, Blake and Dylan Thomas. Cowper Powys can take us in one sentence from the furthest reaches of cosmic space to a drop of water on a frog's back.

His writing has an intensity of vision that lingers in the mind long after the book has ended, and which enhances the way we view our surroundings. If greatness in art is measured by its ability to rattle us, to change the very way we perceive the world, this book is very great art indeed.

My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me, but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the consciousness of others.

John Cowper Powys on birdsong

2011-06-09T11:32:00.002+08:00

That particular intonation of the blackbird's note, more full of the spirits of air and of water than any sound upon earth, had always possesed a mysterious attraction for him. It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart's tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.

"The Age of Stupidity: Cultural Life in The Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era Vol 1" I.C. Faraway et al

2011-05-15T12:57:00.000+08:00

It was like being present at the birth of a new civilization, as the ruins of the old world rose from the sands in which it had been buried for thousands of years.

Faraway

Introduction

In spite of the fact that the causes and results of the Great Cataclysm of three thousand years ago have been well studied, the Pre Cataclysmic Era remains a mystery due to the eradication of the sources. All evidence, all records of the PC Era, were more or less wiped clean by the Cataclysm, as is well known. Until 20 years ago, when Faraway stumbled upon the remains of an ancient 'library' in the Central Desert. Although this astonishing and fortuitous discovery attracted little attention at the time, it will probably be regarded in future ages as the most important discovery of our Era.

Faraway, in his introduction to the ip, describes the 'library'. It was stored in a vast square building, completely buried by the sands. The 'books', as we know they were called, were arranged in orderly rows, on racks, connected by wires into a loose network. Each one was about 6 feet tall and three feet wide, made of black steel and open at the back for the wiring. Most of them were in pristine condition. The building had been protected from the Cataclysm by the sand. It is suspected that there were more 'libraries' of this kind with more 'books' in other places, and we think these 'libraries' were all connected to each other by means of cables running under the ground. Inside the 'books' we found data, stored on extremely primitive electronic devices, some of them damaged beyond reading, but most of them still recoverable.

Professor Faraway and his team of researchers then spent the next 20 years retrieving the information stored on the discs, deciphering it, transcribing it, and piecing it together to build up the completest picture of the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era available. The results are astonishing. Faraway divides the ip into four broad sections, each dealing with an aspect of the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era, painting as complete a picture as is now possible of the Ancients.

Faraway's designation of the IPC Era as 'The Age of Stupidity' is based, he says, on historical precedent. It appears from what we can make out that at some point in the very distant past, there was an Age of Enlightenment, then an Age of Reason, then came the Age of Stupidity. The record for these first two Ages is very scant indeed, as most of the evidence discovered in the 'library' pertained only to the most recent Age. Only very dim traces of the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment survive in the detritus of the Age of Stupidity, explains Faraway.

Faraway defines Stupidity as the inability of humans to understand the interconnectedness of things, a blindness as to the results of actions, an inability to connect previous causes with results, an inability to recognise that which is staring them in the face, and a deliberate espousal of ignorance. Faraway warns that this is a concept difficult to understand in our age, when everything is known, and we are all connected and always follow our own best interests. It was the deliberate elevation of Stupidity to new heights which was the chief characteristic of the Age, and which marked it out as different from the Ages which had preceded it, notes Faraway.

oooOOOooo

Stupidity in Politics

The ip begins with a description of the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era's political scene. Faraway describes something which the Ancients called 'democracy'. This seems to have been the illusion that political power was invested in the hands of the people; that they could exercise this power by periodically electing 'presentatives', as they were called, and that these 'presentatives' were beholden to the will of the people. It seems that Meruhca, in those days called 'America', (a more lovely and euphonius name than the current label, which always seems to me to have something of the veruca about it) was ruled by two parties, and that government consisted in maintaining the 5 Illusions of Freedom: Free Speech, a Free Press, Free Healthcare, Free Education and Free Markets. In spite of huge amounts of unequivocal evidence to the contrary that the world was run by a powerful and secretive clique, the myth of 'democracy' and the 5 Illusions persisted, in large part actively perpetuated by this clique. 'Democracy', amazingly, was regarded by the Ancients as the most perfect form of government. It's hard for us now living under The Multinational to appreciate this profound historical gap, and some degree of historical imagination is required.

Faraway's thesis is that the secretive ruling clique, consisting of bankers, royalty, heads of the arms industry and commerce, and something called the 'Vatican', the purpose of which is still unclear, manipulated the broad mass of the people by cultural means in two areas: education and mass consumer culture. It's in these activities and the evidence that they left behind that the general and specific effects of Stupidity can be most easily traced.

Stupidity in Academia

Faraway shows how Stupidity is reflected in the growing prevalence in the historical record of the words 'elitism', and 'anti-elitism'. Apparently, IPC man believed that all forms of advanced knowledge were suspect, that experts were not to be trusted, that any form of intellectual or artistic pursuit that did not immediately appeal to the broad masses and which was not instantly and easily assimilable was actively discouraged, stamped upon, and ultimately destroyed.

For an example of this process, the ip traces the decline of the universities, archaic precursors to our own Univercity, citing passages from the data in which 'academics', as they were known, decry the study of any 'elitist' subjects (literature, science, philosophy, economics, history, nuclear physics etc) produced by Dead While Males in favour of more popular and less intellectually challenging subjects such as Alive Brown, Black or Yellow People Studies, Marketing and Sales Techniques, and a strange subject known as 'Theology', which Faraway admits to not fully being able to delineate from the available evidence.

The content of these courses, as far as we are able to make out, was determined by the perceived disadvantage of the subject. A complicated ranking system known as 'the quota' was employed. Those writers and thinkers (the Ancients used the term differently from how we do) who were disadvantaged in terms of their social backgrounds, skin colour, physical ability, sexual orientation, geographical location, accent, taste and income were given precedence over writers and thinkers who showed more objective quality markers such as originality of thought or expression. It seems that the Ancients were not able to distinguish between knowledge and information, and this lead in part to their downfall. As Faraway puts it: The imbalance in the criteria for inclusion in these studies had a negative effect on education and the dissemination and creation of knowledge. The study of trivia instead of real knowledge separated Immediate Pre Cataclysmic man from his history and cultural roots and devalued both them and him. At the same time, this elevation of Stupidity made it more difficult for Immediate Pre Cataclysmic peoples to avoid the pitfalls and mistakes which led eventually to the Cataclysm itself. Grim words of warning there.

The pursuit of egalitarianism, driven by the myth of 'democracy' and the hostility towards real knowledge, became unbalanced in the Age of Stupidity. Everyone could buy a phd, which meant that the qualification became meaningless as a marker of knowledge. Faraway cites phd titles submitted towards the end of the period (establishing a clear chronology in the Pre Cataclysmic Era is problematic) and they perhaps more than anything clinch his argument for the prevalence of Stupidity in academia:

The Spirituality of Snowboarding
Judgement of Unpleasantness and Pleasantness as a Function of Expansive and Restrictive Responses
An Attribution Theory Analysis of Attitude Change in a Forced Compliance Paradigm
The Influence of Blue Collar Life and Upward Mobility Aspirations on the use of Elaborated Speech Code in Written Speech
Connecting selves : relationship, identity and reflexivity on the ’frontline’ in a New Zealand call centre
The nature of reward, and the modification of reward contingencies, in emotion-based learning

Naturally, what was happening in the universities, had a trickle-down effect on the rest of the education system, which, towards the end of the Age, became little more than a means for the inculcation of Stupidity in the very young.

The Culture of Stupidity

In the Age of Stupidity, culture was not something which elevated the broad mass of the people, inspiring them to transcendence, independence and spiritual enrichment, but was instead dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Culture was expected to bend down towards the people, rather than the people expected to reach up towards culture. These expectations had an adverse effect on both people and culture. It appears from the evidence that the people themselves participated vociferously in this process, against their ultimate best interests (an element of Faraway's definition of Stupidity, as we have seen), as it turned out.

In keeping with the myth of 'democracy', the mere right to voice an opinion was regarded as more important than the responsibility to ensure that an opinion was informed, thoughtful and not marred by Stupidity. In his zestful enjoyment of his rights, IPC man seems to have been unembarrassed by the Stupidity of his opinions. Great energy, and reams of disc space were devoted to arguments calling for the right of free speech, the right to voice an opinion. The opinions expressed, however, once those rights had been secured, seem, at least from our vantage point, to have been mostly the output of idiots.

One of the chief characteristics of the culture of the Age of Stupidity was the easy availability of content produced by people and put out on something called the 'Internet', or 'World Wide Web ', which, according to Faraway, seems to have been a prehistoric form of the Infraweb, one which was accessed by 'electronic books' rather than the Bainwaved Information Stream of today. Everyone had a 'face book' or a 'blog' or an 'itube' account, and the views of anyone with access to these were taken as seriously as the views of experts or scientists, or those long immersed in a specialist field. Instead of the Information Packages lovingly produced by the Certified Experts in the Historical Research Department of The Multinational and disseminated on the Infraweb by means of BIS, the 'Internet' was a free-for-all, a place where anybody could create anything at any time; a place where the 'democratic' ethos was most vibrant, but also a place where Stupidity was most in evidence. The technology itself was clunky in a 'steam- and- string' kind of way (the 'Web' was accessed by a crude device called the 'youphone' which everyone carried on their person!), but miraculously, it seems to have worked. There was no overseeing control, a thought which must seem horrible to the HR Department of The Multinational.

One of the key cultural activities of the Age of Stupidity was something called 'advertising'. This requires some explanation. Rather than the central planning, production and distribution of goods and services that we enjoy today, Immediate Pre Cataclysmic societies laboured under the Illusion of the Free Market. This meant that commercial activity was spread out amongst a host of different companies, some of them engaged in production, some in distribution and so on. This key structural feature necessitated 'competition', in which one company had to compete for the attention of the people with another. This was done by means of the cultural activity of 'advertising'. In this activity, vast resources were devoted to the creation and dissemination of art designed to persuade people to choose one company's products, and not another's. Apparently, this was done by means of a magic substance called 'money', which Faraway will examine in more detail in a subsequent volume: Daily Life in the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era.

All households were equipped with a number of electronic devices called 'TV's or 'radios', the purpose of which was purely and simply to disseminate 'advertising'. 'Advertising' appears to have been endemic on the 'Internet', and indeed there is evidence to suppose that many of the 'sites' on the 'Web' were designed purely for 'advertising' purposes in mind, including the ubiquitous 'face book'. Personal electronic devices called 'cellphones' and 'youpads' were also developed purposefully in order to deliver 'advertising' to people on the move. In their interactions with their friends and associates, the Ancients spent a great deal of time talking about the 'adverts' they had been exposed to, and there was even an annual prize, the Noble Peace Prize for Literature, which was awarded to the best slogan. Faraway cites the slogan "I'm lovin' it", which was used by a burger company called 'Ronald McReagan's' and which won the prize three years in a row towards the end of the Age of Stupidity. The quality of the 'adverts', from what I can make out from the examples included in the ip, seems to have been amazingly crude. Some of them even feature a person holding the product and smiling and telling the most blatant, unequivocal lies about it. Scenes were staged, situations were faked, and data concerning the product was fabricated out of thin air and presented as reality.

Amazingly, Immediate Pre Cataclysmic man tolerated, and even perhaps enjoyed this constant barrage of untruth at all hours of the day and night, in all places, and as an accompaniment to even the most intimate and private of acts, for Faraway can find no evidence of attempts to restrict or curtail it, which he says is testament to the power of the Illusions of the Free Market and Free Speech. According to Faraway, this 'advertising' was very successful. Evidence exists testifying to the enormous persuasive power of 'advertising' as people acquired thousands of utterly useless objects for which there could be no conceivable need. In fact, the activity of 'advertising' seems to have become a structural feature of Immediate Pre Cataclysmic society, perhaps even its defining feature.

Faraway makes a strong case that it, perhaps more than anything else, contributed to the events which led to the Cataclysm, as the planet was laid waste by companies competing to make ever more useless and unnecessary products to satisfy the demands of 'advertising'. Faraway argues that cultural life was stultified by this main activity, and that the Ancients were dehumanised by it. Happiness was equated with acquisitiveness; needs were confused with wants; inner fulfilment was believed to be reside in social status; and there was an overwhelming expectation of instant gratification whatever the cost. The average citizen in the Age of Stupidity seems to have been little more than an alimentary canal with an underused brain and overused reproductive organs attached, as Faraway puts it perhaps somewhat sharply.

Faraway has also discovered evidence that the overwhelming presence of 'advertising' in the culture of the Age of Stupidity, as well as the forms it took, was a deliberate strategy by the ruling clique to pacify and render the populace supine in order to minimise dissent or revolt. Certainly, in comparison with the culture of our own times, the culture of the Age of Stupidity would appear to be impoverished.

The Language of Stupidity, and the Stupidity of Language

One of the most interesting sections of the ip are those in which Faraway reports his discoveries on the use of language in the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era. One of the ways in which Stupidity permeated the tenor of the Age was in its language, and in its views about language. Then, as now the language of global culture was English, but it was an English that is far removed from the language of today. The Age of Stupidity seems to have been an era in which there was very little enjoyment of or respect for language for its own sake, an idea which may seem repellent to today's audience.

The Ancients had an imperfect understanding of the connection between syntax and cognition. Certainly, compared to our understanding, the Ancients knew very little about language or about the brain. It's a wonder that they achieved what they did. Immediate Pre Cataclysmic man believed that the best kind of language was the most simple. The 'face book' evidence from the 'Internet' in particular shows an extremely impoverished use of language, with much of it appearing to have been produced by simpletons.

Faraway has uncovered evidence of style guides, popular grammars, rule sheets and media files which reveal, amazingly, that the dumbing down of language was a deliberate choice. This had an unfortunate effect on IPC man's ability to think. With the simplification of syntax came the simplification of thought; with the simplification of thought came the inability to produce complex syntax; which in turn created an inability to produce complex thought. In addition there was a strange taboo against adjectives, metaphors or specialist terms (this latter was part of the general denigration of specialist knowledge we looked at earlier). The result of this was a general shrinking of the average vocabulary. By the end of the Age, Faraway notes, most citizens only used about 150 words on a regular basis. The writing machines which people used included a thing called a 'grammar checker', which automatically 'corrected' (censored) complex syntax or idiosyncratic language, and shortened long sentences. Even well-educated people (such that there were) eventually began to believe that the 'grammar checkers' were correct. In this way, the ruling clique (who produced the writing machines) ensured a uniform standard of Stupidity on everyone, stifling the ability for independent thought and original expression.

In one of the most interesting examples included in the ip is a media file of a 'TV show' (as the Ancients called the extended 'adverts' they endured on this technological device) in which a famous professor called Stanley Fish is being interviewed about something he is trying to sell. The interviewer asks him: "What is it about good writing that makes it good?" The professor answers: "I like plain writing." The interviewer lets this gross distortion pass unremarked; he does not correct the professor and ask him to answer the actual question put to him, but nods as the professor confuses his personal opinion about what kind of writing he likes with what makes good writing generally. The citizens of the Age of Stupidity were incapable of thinking in precise subtleties of distinction because their language and their views about language simply did not permit them to. An apotheosis of Stupidity was reached when a man called Little Bush, who appears from his language-use to have been a mental defective, was 'elected' as President of the World.

Stupidity triumphed over common sense as IPC man willingly abandoned his most precious human attribute in favour of a kind of intellectual laziness everywhere present in the evidence. This, Faraway explains, accounts for the astonishing gullibility of the Ancients, the readiness with which they accepted bizarre doctrines, such as the 5 Illusions of Freedom, the ease with which they submitted to political control and the extent to which they were unaware of their mental slavery, all defining characteristics of the Age of Stupidity.

oooOOOooo

Reflections

20 years in the making, Faraway's ip is a monumental achievement casting light on the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era, bringing forth a civilisation once thought irretrievably lost, and enhancing immeasurably our understanding of our history. Faraway's ip will form the basis of a new series from the Univercity: Studies in the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era. Vol 2 will cover religious life, Vol 3 daily life and vol 4 dissent in the Immediate Pre Cataclysmic Era. The completed series will no doubt prove seminal for a whole new field of Pre Cataclysmic studies, as future scholars unearth more supporting or contradictory evidence from Faraway's library, or reinterpret Faraway's evidence in different ways. However, no thoughtful person viewing this ip can avoid the following reflections.

It is surely one of the ironic accidents of history that the contents of the library Faraway discovered focussed heavily on the Age of Stupidity just prior to the Great Cataclysm, and that it contained very little information on even earlier ages, which still remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness. The huge barrier of the Age of Stupidity lies across our view of the whole of human history, blocking from our sight the great achievements of the Ages which came before it. As Faraway puts it: It is perhaps the tragedy of the Ancients - and a betrayal of their mission to humanity- that their culture of Stupidity inevitably obscured the more intelligent cultures of the past from the eyes of a more intelligent future. To be sure, there are traces in the record of great cultural achievements preceding the Age of Stupidity; we can glimpse ghosts in the data, faintly luminous names such as Johann Shakespeare Joyce, William Dickens, Emily Elliot, James Bourne, the Count of Monte Cristo, Christ Marx and Princess Britney Gaga. But, until such time as other libraries under the sands are discovered, our inadequate knowledge of the shadowy figures which lie behind these names must remain just that.

Fragment 0510

2011-05-10T10:40:00.000+08:00

[In 19th century literature] references to homosexuality were carefully encrypted and are becoming less decipherable as time passes.
Graham Robb: Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century.

In a famous (notorious) passage from Les Miserables, Hugo carefully encrypts the gay character of Grantaire, one of the group of revolutionaries on the barricade. From the very beginning his difference is signaled: he is the lone sceptic among a group of idealists. He is introduced as a character apart from all the others. The passage begins with a characteristic Hugolian rhetorical device: the question- answer: How came he there? By juxtaposition. This highlights the clue as to how we are to read the text: by the means of juxtaposition the character will emerge and we shall see him there.

I quote the passage in full below. I have divided it very loosely into lexias creating two levels of discourse placed in juxtaposition to each other. The level of the highlighted lexias carries the encoding; these lexias signal to the knowledgeable that Grantaire is gay. The level of lexias not highlighted ambiguates, disguises, normalizes the highlighted level, 'protecting the innocent' and keeping Hugo well away from controversy or censorship. In constantly switching between these levels, the discourse takes one step forward, and two steps back; points out the character's gayness, and then ambiguates it; reveals it and then hides it immediately; flashes it, then veils it. Let's follow this dance.

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.

Les Miserables Part 3 Book 4 Chapter 1 "A Group which Barely Missed Becoming Heroic"

First thing to note is the all-male environment, always the main clue. The prison in Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead also provides the context for an encoding of gay characters. Likewise the love story of Varena and Olive in James's Bostonians is set in an all female context of the woman's movement. Context is everything.

We are then told that Grantaire 'loved' Enjolras, but the word is juxtaposed by two, more innocuous words: 'admired' and 'venerated'. We are to understand these two words ironically, as we have already been told, emphatically, that G is the only sceptic in the group, a position incompatible with admiration and veneration.

The word 'unite' is of course pregnant with meanings. We are told that his longing to unite with Enjolras is G's character, his nature.

Then comes the characteristic Hugolian rhetorical device of a disembodied incomplete fragment: A phenomenon often observable, meaning, we can see homosexuals everywhere around us, but we may not talk about them. The subject is unmentionable, unspeakable. The incompleteness of the fragment, and its position in the discourse signals its significance.

Then, we are told that Grantaire 'needs' Enjolras, another significant word: necessity implies lack of choice in the matter, a natural imperative.

More significant word choices and juxtapositions follow: 'chaste' juxtaposed with the phallicly suggestive 'hard' and 'upright'. The words 'soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless' are used: these are very common words to describe gay characters in 19th century medical, social and legal discourse. They act as blaring signals, but the discourse ambiguates them by attaching them to Grantaire's ideas, not his nature. Again, this is incompatible with Grantaire's hard scepticism, so we are meant to take the attachment of these words to the character's ideas as ironic. Then the words 'moral backbone' are used, another standard contemporary view of homosexuality.

Then, buried towards the end of this long paragraph, we have a list of classical references, all same sex couples.

Classical reference in itself was a standard means of referring to homosexuality in the 19th century. For homosexual people in the 19th century, classical references harked back to a mythical time, a golden age of homosexual freedom and social acceptability. Classical references allowed poets to write about same sex love by referencing Virgil or Ovid; they allowed artists to paint male nudes under the guise of mythological figures. Classical references both obscured and revealed the real message: same sex desire. Classical references in literature both refer to the myth, and at the same time to homoerotic representations of that myth in art. 'Pollux' refers both to the mythological character and to his unabashedly erotic representation in art. 19th century (educated) homosexuals were adept at reading these double voiced signals. They had to be.

Pollux
Patrocles
Nisus
Eudamidas
Ephestion
Pechmeja

Admittedly Pollux was a 'twin' of Castor, but there is no doubt about their attachment to each other. Patroclus was famous as the lover of Achilles, the boyfriend whose funeral games form the content of the 23rd book of the Illiad. Nisus and his partner Euryalus feature in an episode of Virgil's Aeneid in which they are cruelly separated. Ephestion was the boyfriend of Alexander the Great. Since antiquity their relationship had been compared to that of Achilles and Patrocles, as they also compared themselves.

Pachmeja was an eighteenth century French author of a work called the Telephus. He was famous in his life for his great friendship with De Breuil- the two lived together and shared their incomes. Lempriere, in his Universal Biography of 1810, calls them the Pylades and Orestes of France. This later couple, referred to by Hugo himself at the end this passage, have been paired from earliest antiquity, and were a very well known code in the 19th century for a same sex couple.

The encoded meaning of Eudamidas's presence on this list is lost; he was a Spartan king, and the subject of a painting by Poussin. It is not sure what Hugo meant by this reference. It is an example of what Robb means when he says that the symbols for encoding gay love have become less decipherable. Perhaps it referred to some long forgotten local scandal of the time of writing; perhaps to an article on Poussin's painting, now lost; perhaps the meaning is Sparta itself, a society in which homosexuality is known to have flourished. Perhaps Hugo just liked the euphony of the name, and used it to throw in a red herring, a juxtaposition.

The list is preceded by this statement: His nature was thus constituted. There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. For 'obverse' and 'reverse', of course, read 'inverse', or 'invert', one of the standard liberal, neutral designations for homosexuality in the 19th century.

The discourse comments on this list: They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs.[...] Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.

(The translation of 'backed up' here is perhaps less than felicitous...)

Then follows a short paragraph, in which 'juxtaposition' gives way to 'affinity', and in which Orestes and Pylades, those archetypal classical gay lovers, are matched to the phallic suggestiveness of their initials in an alphabet: the 'zero' of O and the 'one' of P.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is 'appropriation' or 'prurience'. Associating it with something in one's own love life is either 'conscripting a writer for the cause' (gay) or 'demonstrating its universal relevance' (straight).

Graham Robb: Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century

Inadvertent Obscenity #12

2011-05-02T15:54:00.000+08:00

Oscar Browning assisted young Italians, as he had young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired.
Dictionary of National Biography

'Les Miserables' Victor Hugo

2011-04-29T09:46:00.001+08:00

I have never said l 'Art pour l ' Art; but always l 'Art pour le Progress. It is for Progress that I suffer now, and for Progress that I am ready to die.

Victor Hugo to Baudelaire, October 1858

Progress is the mode of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress; the collective advance of the human race is called Progress. Progress marches; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine...
Les Miserables 5.1.20

Hugo’s gigantic novel is the great bugbear of French literature, lying like a Massif Central across the cultural landscape of 19^th century France. Hugo himself is the central peak of French literature, at least in his own estimation. Napoleon is supposed to have said, echoing Louis XIV: La France, c’est moi, and if he didn’t, Hugo certainly would have, and he might have added: La literature, c ‘est moi.

Hugo’s egoism and certitude of his own greatness is legendary. At the heart of his 1866 epic, The Toilers of the Sea, for example, is a huge monogram of Hugo’s initial: the wrecked ship wedged between the two vertical pillars of rock, stranded high and dry by the receding sea: The huge capital H formed by the two Douvres linked by the crossbar of the Durande stood out against the horizon in a kind of crepuscular majesty. Hugo associated himself with majesty, with size. Les Miserables, huge, sprawling, prolix, is Hugo at his most majestic.

In the debates about the purpose of art which were such a feature of 19^th century culture, Hugo was on the side of those who believed that art should have a purpose beyond itself. Art for Hugo should subordinate itself to political necessity, which he saw as moral enlightenment, the betterment of humanity, Progress. Art should morally uplift. Art should teach. This view of art is everywhere evident in Les Miserables, with its book length rants on the evils of capital punishment and religious incarceration, the moral depravity of the ancient regime, the evils of poverty, the role of women, the injustices of the penal system, the nature of history, the sociological study of argot, the legitimacy or otherwise of insurrection.

Part of the reason for Shakespeare’s greatness, for Dostoevsky’s also, is that nowhere in their work can you point to a view and say: “This is what the author believes, this is what he wants us to believe.” Shakespeare the man is entirely absent from his plays; Dostoevsky took care to keep his own views out of his novels and never to privilege one view over another. With Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, the reader is always given the role of interpreter and final arbiter between the great dialogues of the plays and novels.

Hugo’s strategy is the opposite. In other writers, it is necessary to always hold in mind the gap between the narrator and the author, who, theoretically, are quite different. In Hugo, the opposite is true. The narrator is always Hugo, and we always know exactly what he intends, what he thinks, and what he means, because he tells us, unambiguously, at length. In the narrative voice, in the same way that Hugo the man positioned himself in the society of his time, Hugo the narrator positions himself as the Great Teacher, the Great Reformer, the Seer of Society, the High Priest of Progress, the Almighty Father. The reader is given the role of student, of disciple, of child, and any movement on the part of the reader towards independent thought, towards personal interpretation, is strictly prohibited by the narrative voice. This takes place on the level of content and on the level of language, as we can see if we look in more detail at his style.

Le Style Hugo: rhetorical devices:

In order to achieve this didactic voice and mission, Hugo employs a number of characteristic rhetorical devices, presented below in no particular order.

Synonym strings

From thence visions, suppositions, conjectures, romances sketched out, longings for adventures, fantastic constructions...

A common complaint of the 21st century is that 19th century writers prefer to use 50 words where one will do. While this is usually nothing more than a linguistically sterile age bemoaning the tastes of a more fecund one, in Hugo's case, the observation is usually true. Hugo loves to create strings of synonyms, single words or even synonymous phrases. Here he is writing on how the government uses fear to bolster its position:

This then is the great art, to give a success something of the sound of a catastrophe, in order that those who profit by it may tremble also...

so far so good, but then he piles on subsidiary, largely synonymous phrases:

...to moderate a step in advance with fear, to enlarge the curve of transition to the extent of retarding progress, to tame down this work, to denounce and restrain the ardencies of enthusiasm, to cut off the corners and the claws, to clog triumph, to swaddle the right, to wrap up the people-giant in flannel and hurry him to bed, to impose a diet upon this excess of health, to put Hercules under convalescent treatment, to hold back the event with the expedient, to offer to minds thirsting for the idea this nectar extended form barley-water, to take precautions against too much success, to furnish the revolution with a skylight.

This has the effect of a bludgeon. While the first part of the sentence works on its own to cause a pause for reflection in the mind of the reader, the string of synonym phrases which follows crowds the mind with noise, a procession of images and metaphors which is ultimately too cloying, too loud, which dulls the power of the original image, and causes the mind of the reader to tire under repeated blows, to give up its independence, to submit.

Definitions
The Revolution of July is the triumph of the Right prostrating the Fact.
The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called the Avenger...
Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century.
He who says convent says marsh.
To place, by process of thought, the infinite below in contact with the infinite above is called ‘prayer’.

X is Y, X is called Y, he who says X says Y, to X is to Y. This is a very characteristic device, employed with great frequency both in the narrative and expository passages. Here, Hugo declaims. By defining, like a dictionary, he creates, he preserves, but he also (de)limits. Hugo's definitions brook no dissent, they forestall all argument, invite no discussion. They carry the odour of a dogma.

Parallel definitions
The relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the republic.
The insurrection is often a volcano, the emeute is often a fire of straw.

Similar to the previous device, here Hugo creates parallels in which there are four terms in the definition, not merely two, and then sustains them for paragraphs.

Questions and answers
What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national…
Who stops revolutions half way? The bourgeoisie? Why? Because the bourgeoisie is the interest which has attained to satisfaction.
This wind meets talking tongues...and sweeps them away. Whither? At hazard.

The rhetorical question and its answer is one of the most insidious devices of rhetoric, in that it gives the illusion of interaction, of freedom, but is actually a way of delimiting the scope of the enquiry. The answer is determined by the scope of the
question, and this scope is decided in advance by the speaker with some aim in mind. It is also a standard didactic device, employed by professors and teachers.

Expository discourse markers
Let us complete this exposition.
This said, we proceed.
Savage. We must explain this word.
Let us proceed.
We specify.

The discourse marker, used in lectures, helps the teacher to convey the structure of the ideas, their method of organisation. The listener/reader/student is lead by the hand through the thicket of ideas.

Moral Maxims
The moral world has no greater spectacle than this: a troubled and restless conscience on the verge of committing an evil deed, contemplating the sleep of a good man.
No tongue could tell all that there was in that word, woman, thus uttered by this child.
It is the peculiarity of sublime spectacles that they take possession of every soul and make of every witness a spectator.
The sea is the inexorable night into which the penal law casts its victims. The sea is the measureless misery.

The moral maxim is appended to a narrative incident to make the symbolism clear, to remove any ambiguity from it, and to remove all independence of interpretation. In the early part of the novel, Jean Valjean's despair at his fate in the galleys is described in a chapter that employs the extended metaphor of a man cast overboard from the ship of society into the wild sea of misery. The chapter ends with the last moral maxim quoted above, an entirely superfluous explanation (fixing) of the symbolism employed. Likewise, when Jean Valjean is standing over the sleeping priest contemplating whether he should steal the silver, Hugo interrupts the scene to fix its meaning with the first maxim quoted above.

From the highly specific narrative, Hugo always moves to a generalisation couched in the form of a maxim. This movement from specific to general, and back again is the chief characteristic of Hugo's didactic style and method. In this he is influenced by the moralising of Aesop's (and to a lesser extent La Fontaine's) fables, which also have this movement from specific narrative to general maxim, and which also have a didactic purpose.

(To be fair, this movement from specific to general is perhaps more pronounced in English translations of Hugo than it is in French. French definite articles carry more ambiguity with them about whether the following noun is to be understood in the general sense or the specific, whereas in English this is made very clear by the total absence of an article denoting generality, or the definite article denoting specificity. Compare La Revolution with Revolution and the revolution.)

Ejaculated fragments
Bitter wretchedness!
Bos cretatus.
Admirable efforts! Sacred attempts!
Limpid purities!

These contribute not so much to the didacticism of Hugo's style, but to its resonance, its majesty.

God
What is the ideal? It is God. Ideal, absolute, perfection, the infinite - these are identical words.
He who knows that, sees all the shadow. He is alone. His name is God.
What love begins can only be finished by God.

Finally, there is often the disconcerting suggestion, not only that Hugo alone knows what God's plan is, but that he actually is God.

These rhetorical devices are not restricted to the narrative voice but also infect the characters, who, most of them, are mere mouthpieces for Hugo's views. When Jean Valjean foils Montparnasse's attack on him, he subjects the thief to a long tirade on the vices of idleness and the virtues of labour. This long speech contains Hugo's views, and also his rhetorical devices. Likewise, the long speeches given by Grantaire (and his earlier incarnation, Tholomyes - these two are actually the same character only with different names) contain also the same rhetorical devices listed above. The long love letter which Cosette receives from Marius is really only a string of more moral maxims from Hugo to the reader. It's tempting to think that Hugo is sometimes satirising his own style, but the irony necessary for satire is incompatible with his strategy of didactic disambiguation, and that kind of (post-modern) textual game is in any case alien to his spirit.

The cumulative effect of these rhetorical devices is to blur the line between grandeur and grandiosity, between portentousness and pomposity, between high moral seriousness and mere sonority. Too often Hugo achieves the latter while aiming for the former. Moreover, Hugo’s style ultimately infantilises the reader by the paternalistic removal of all ambiguity. This is what Flaubert meant when he said the novel was infantile, and what Baudelaire called the 'heresy of didacticism'.

The novel couples an epic imagination with a didactic mission. Les Miserables exists as series of narratives wedged between long expository passages where the great man, the great writer unambiguously teaches. They contain various different kinds of writing: historical narrative, philosophical reflections on the meaning of history, sociological and linguistic theses, huge slices of social, urban history, natural history, political economy, political philosophy and so on. These expository passages are often called digressions, but they are not strictly digressive, according to Hugo's own definition: When the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression. Rather, they are part of the movement from specific to general which we have seen operating on the level of the language operating also on the level of the structure; an expression of Hugo's insistence that art should be useful, and that its main use is to teach. Of what good is a story unless we also learn something from it? Not trusting his readers to draw their own, correct, conclusions from the narrative, he packs his novels with information and uses them to educate us and to transmit his wisdom directly. This is a fatal artistic weakness from which all Hugo's novels suffer.

And yet.

The novel is a stupendous achievement, with moments of utter magnificence and compelling power. Hugo's monumental self-certainty is matched only by his colossal gifts as a story teller, both in his invented narrative, and in the historical sections. The minor characters - in other words, those who are not encumbered with the burden of conveying Hugo's views- are very well drawn, especially the Thenardiers, Eponine, and Gavroche, and the book is packed with unforgettable images and situations.

When Victor Hugo can forget that he is Victor Hugo, and just focus on telling the story, he is unassailable. If only Hugo had trusted his story-telling gifts more, if only he had trusted in the power of ironic ambiguity to convey the lessons we need to learn. But then if he had, he wouldn't be Victor Hugo.

It is a lesson at the same time.
Les Miserables 5.2.2

Victor Hugo on the first political necessity

2011-04-16T21:21:00.003+08:00

Let us not weary of repeating it, to think first of all the outcast and sorrowful multitudes, to solace them, to give them air,, to enlighten them, to love them, to enlarge their horizon magnificently, to lavish upon them education in all its forms, to offer them the example of labour, never the example of idleness, to diminish the weight of the individual burden by intensifying the idea of the universal object, to limit poverty without diminishing wealth, to create vast fields of public and popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the exhausted and the feeble, to employ the collective power in the great duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes and laboratories for all intelligences, to increase wages, to diminish suffering, to balance the ought and the have, that sit to say, to proportion enjoyment to effort and gratification to need, in one word to evolve from the social structure, for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort; this is, let sympathetic souls forget it not, the first of fraternal obligations, this is, let selfish hearts know it, the first of political necessities.

Les Miserables

Baudelaire on Poe

2011-03-31T11:08:00.000+08:00

All you who have ardently sought to discover the laws that govern your being, who have aspired to the infinite, and whose repressed emotions have had to seek a terrible relief in the wine of debauchery, pray for him. Now his bodily being, purified, floats amid the beings whose existence he glimpsed. Pray for him who sees and knows, he will intercede for you.

Jon Silkin on the canon

2011-03-16T15:47:00.000+08:00

Surely the area isn't to be demarcated, so that as little error as possible may be made; the area should be as fully as possible explored for what in the end rejoices one.

'The Good Soldier Svejk' Jaroslav Hasek

2011-03-10T14:58:00.002+08:00

Great times call for great men.

This is the greatest anti-war book ever written, the greatest work of literature to come out of the First World War, (baring only the poetry of Owen and Rosenburg), and a modern classic. It is also one of the funniest, bitterest and bawdiest satires on human stupidity you are likely to find.

Despite his terrible rheumatism and the fact that he has been certified by the military discharge board as a congenital idiot, Czech patriot and Prague citizen Svejk joins the Austro Hungarian army after the assassinations in Sarajevo. Assigned first as batman to a Chaplain, then to a Lieutenant, then promoted to company orderly, the book details Svejk’s adventures behind the lines during the first two years of the war and culminates in his being arrested by his own side as a Russian spy on the Galician front. Narrowly avoiding execution, Svejk returns to his company. The book is unfinished, as Hasek died before he was able to complete it.

The European Everyman

It takes a writer of great gifts to create characters who take on an independent life of their own after the reader has completed the book; it takes a writer of special genius to create characters that are so life-full that they actually enter the folklore of the nation that gives rise to them. Dickens was one such, Hasek is another. From his first appearance in sketches, stories and feuilletons in the first years of the 20^th century, to his more fully developed manifestation in this huge novel, the character Svejk has come to embody the folk character of those lands in central Europe previously part of the Austro Hungarian empire: Czech, Slovakia, Bohemia.

An anonymous, modest hero, shabbily dressed, Svejk embodies the little man who lives by the creed that if you cannot fight against the Empire, you can at least make its servants wish they’d never been born. Svejk’s weapons in this unequal war are cunning and guile hiding under a mask of innocence and idiocy, the propensity to land himself and his superiors in trouble, and the ability to spin tales that alternately and simultaneously enthral and appal the listener.

Hasek’s target in this satire is the Austro Hungarian Empire, especially its Army, and the Church which bolstered it up. But although the book is firmly located in time and place, and although its satire is directed at something long gone, the book still has enormous, mythic, resonance.

The Army and The Myth of the Good Soldier

In times of war the fundamental problem faced by a government is how to compel men to fight for it, to suffer for it, and to die for it. Beyond the promise of pay and loot, or the threat of punishment, what can compel men to leave their homes and jobs to endure privation for the sake of aims which are largely conceptual: ‘territory’, ‘national integrity’ and so on, and which are of more tangible benefit to those doing the compelling than those compelled? What can compel men in the face of certain death to obey their officers and leap over the parapets towards the enemy, rather than turning their guns on their officers and running for their lives towards the rear?

Military activity occurs within a framework of expectations. For the common soldier, these expectations are that they will be fed and housed and equipped and armed and transported, that their lives will not be unnecessarily thrown away through carelessness or a cavalier approach to the lives of others, and that if they meet death, their family will be taken care of and their memory honoured as heroes. For the officer, these expectations are that an order will be obeyed, that the system works to transmit directives, that the soldiers under his command have willingly subsumed their individualities in order to form part of a unit which can be ordered around, and that men and officers are united in a common strategic or tactical aim. The whole framework is united by belief in a myth which we can call The Myth of the Good Soldier.

It is in the nature of myths that they are never directly articulated but only referred to in passing, or obliquely, or in retellings. We can never point to a text and say: this is the original source of the myth. Even Sophocles, in his creation of the Oedipus myth, for example, was using stories already extant and known to all. Likewise, the Myth of the Good Soldier is nowhere fully presented but appears obliquely in other texts: army regulations, court martial procedures, staff directives, soldier’s vows, propaganda and recruitment campaigns; it forms the basis of such sentiments as Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori, regimental mottoes and verses such as Brooke’s If I should die, think only this of me… In fact, given the centrality of war in civilisation, the Myth of the Good Soldier is one of the foundation myths of the whole class structure, articulated indirectly through concepts such as ‘Honour’, ‘Patriotism’, ‘Duty’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Country’, ‘Loyalty’, ‘Courage,’ ‘Cowardice’, concepts appropriated or indeed invented by the compellers.

The satire in Hasek’s novel works in a double way: by directly articulating the hitherto directly unexpressed Myth of the Good Soldier, and then by satirising it.

Articulating the Myth

Throughout the novel this myth is constantly articulated:

‘Why in Gods name don’t you think’, bawled one of the members of the commission.

‘Humbly report, I don’t think because it’s forbidden to soldiers to think on duty. When I was in the 91^st regiment some years ago our captains always used to say: A soldier mustn’t think for himself. His superiors do it for him.’

‘I think it’s splendid to get oneself run through with a bayonet, and also that it’s not bad to get a bullet in the stomach. It’s even grander when you’re torn to pieces by a shell and you see that your legs and belly are somewhere remote from you…’

‘Humbly report sir, I’m awfully happy’, replied the good soldier Svejk. ‘It’ll be really marvellous when we both fall dead together for his Imperial Majesty and the Royal Family…’

Svejk is the perfect exemplar of the Mythical Good Soldier. He is polite and deferential to his superiors, expresses patriotic and martial sentiments, obeys to the letter every directive given to him, upholds in all circumstances the daftest military regulations and the reasons for them, and offers only the god like composure of an innocent child to those who suspect that he may be fooling them.

In a sense, no satire is needed, because by fully articulating the myth, Hasek exposes if for the bullshit it really is: the myth exposes itself as ludicrous.

Satirising the Myth

However, through his actions, Svejk also satirises the myth. There are countless examples throughout the novel, but the best one is when Svejk upholds army regulations when a major-general comes to inspect the latrines. When the men are using them.

Svejk sensed the gravity of the situation.

He jumped up just as he was, with his trousers down and belt around his neck, and having used the scrap of paper in the very last moment he roared out: ‘Halt! Up! Attention! Eyes right!’ and saluted. Two sections with their trousers down and their belts around their necks rose over the latrines.

The major-general smiled affably and said: ‘At ease. Carry on!’

…

Haf you viped your arsch?’ the major general asked Svejk.

‘Humbly report sir, everything’s in order.’

‘Von’t you sheet no more?’

‘Humbly report sir, I’ve finished.’

‘Vell now pull your hoses op and shtand at attention again…’

Svejk in his full splendour was already standing in front of the major-general who delivered a short address to him in German: ‘Respect for superiors, knowledge of service regulations and presence of mind mean everything in wartime….this man must be promoted at once and at the next opportunity his name must be put forward for the Bronze Medal for meticulous execution of duties and perfect knowledge of…… but you know what I mean…’

Hasek’s genius is that the whole thing works with a wink to the reader: we know what Svek is up to, standing with his beshitted arse in front of the major general, but the officers are mostly clueless, or at best, suspect something but cannot put their finger on what’s happening.

The Church

The novel mostly works by an alternation of incident and discourse. The narrative voice is kept mostly to the background, letting Svejk himself carry the main satirical burden. Only occasionally does the narrative voice break in with ironic or sarcastic asides. Most of these are attacks on the Church and its role in wartime.

Preparations for the slaughter of Mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination….When criminals are executed, priests always officiate, molesting the delinquents with their presence. The great shambles of the world war did not take place without the blessing of priests. Chaplains of all armies prayed and celebrated drumhead masses for victory for the side whose bread they ate.

Svejk becomes batman to a Chaplain Katz, and again the satire works by expressing the myth, and satirising it at the same time. Here is a sermon delivered by a drunken Katz:

‘Sing something boys’, he shouted down at them from the pulpit, ‘Or do you want me to teach you a new song? Now sing with me:

Of all the people in the world,

I love my love the best.

I’m not her only visitor

I queue up with the rest

Her lovers are innumerable.

Now, tell me pray her name:

It is the Virgin Mary…

You’ll never learn it, you bastards, I’d like to have you all shot, do you understand? I state this from this holy place of God, you scoundrels, because God’s a thing that’s not afraid of you and’ll give you hell and all because you hesitate to turn to Christ….’

oooOOOooo

The book teems with life and characters and comic incidents and hoaxes; and stories. Everyone in the novel has stories to tell, and they are retold with gusto. Svejk is a kind of Sam Weller, with a fable for every occasion:

‘Humbly report, sir, it’s got to be shaken out of me like a hairy rug in order to get the proper view of events, if I’m permitted to quote the favourite words of the late lamented cobbler Petrlik, when he ordered his apprentice to take down his trousers before he started flogging him with a strap’.

But he is not the only one. He encounters a volunteer in gaol, and the two exchange stories, surpassing each other in scabrous invention. The book is truly funny, and should be read in public with caution.

In spite of all its hilarity, the book gets steadily darker as Svejk approaches the front, and the comedy more bitter.

As the troops passed through and camped in the neighbourhood there could be seen everywhere little heaps of human excrement of international extraction belonging to all the peoples of Austria, Germany, and Russia. The excrement of all nationalities and of confessions lay side by side or heaped on top of one another without quarrelling among themselves…

The illustrations which accompany the text in this edition, justly famous throughout Europe, are by Hasek’s friend, Joseph Lada. They were not seen by Hasek, and not approved by him. Although they are charming, with the kind of graphic flatness of folk art, they do somewhat mitigate the anger of the book’s satire. Lada’s world is quite different from Hasek’s: it’s a world of comic strip heroes and villains, whereas Hasek’s world is altogether more complex and three dimensional. Lada’s Svejk is funny, an innocent folk hero. Hasek’s Svejk is satirical and ultimately subversive.

I do not know whether I shall succeed in achieving my purpose with this book. The fact that I have already heard one man swear at another and say ‘You’re about as big an idiot as Svejk’ does not prove that I have. But if the word ‘Svejk’ becomes a new choice specimen in the already florid garland of abuse I must be content with this enrichment of the Czech language.

'Beware of Pity' Stefan Zweig

2011-02-25T10:14:00.001+08:00

Here in the arena of the inner man the big tournaments take place.

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky Stefan Zweig

From my very first dreams, that is, from my very childhood, I was unable to imagine myself otherwise than in the first place, always and in all turns of life.

The Adolescent Dostoevsky

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

The Idiot Dostoevsky

Stefan Zweig is the early 20th century inheritor of Dostoevsky; or so he would have us think. Like the Russian master, his fictional territory is the human soul, or to put it in Freudian terms, the ego. Zweig was the author of an influential and well-regarded study of Dostoevsky. This novel –the only full length novel published by Zweig in his lifetime - may be read as dialogue with two ideas of Dostoevsky: the development of the self, and the centrality of pity or compassion in the human heart.

The protagonist, a cavalry officer in the Austrian army, Lieutenant Hofmiller, a young man of 25 who has only known the army, inadvertently insults a young crippled girl at a dance. In order to make amends, he befriends her and her family, and her doctor, the enigmatic Dr Condor. He becomes ever more deeply embroiled in the affairs of the family until things reach a crisis of conflict between his duty to his regiment and his duty to his crippled friend, Edith, who has fallen in love with him. From this small incident, Zweig builds a large psychological edifice in much the same way that Dostoevsky does.

Zweig’s two main themes here are the development of the ego through the pity aroused by another human being’s suffering; and the consequent loss of freedom this entails.

Zweig’s dialogue with Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky charts the development of the ego in his penultimate novel, The Adolescent, in which Arkady achieves a fully socialised ego through the conflict aroused by insults. In Zweig’s novel, this development of ego awareness is occasioned not by insults, but through pity. By experiencing pity, Hofmiller becomes aware of his own individuality and the reality of another. His growing friendship with the family, and his increasing centrality in the world of the cripple brings him to the realisation that he can be an important part of other people’s lives, that he is not just an insignificant cipher in a unit, as he had until now regarded himself.

Zweig’s second theme, that of compassion, is most clearly enunciated by Dr Condor: Pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands and above all his heart off it. Dr Condor has married one of his patients, a woman whom he had been unable to cure of blindness, perhaps in an attempt to fulfil the Dostoevskyan maxim from The Adolescent: I would set it down as a commandment for any developed man to make at least one being happy in his life, unfailingly and in something, but to do it in practice, that is in reality. Dr Condor warns the young Hofmiller that pity is like a drug for the person who is the object of it. That person demands more and more, until pity becomes a terrible burden on both pitier and pitied. Pity has the power to corrode and infect all other emotions. Hofmiller is forced to ask himself does he really love Edith, or is it merely pity? Does Edith really love him, or is her love merely an addiction to the pity he gives her? Both pity and love become a burden, a loss of freedom. True sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current…anyone who identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Zweig’s model of ego development

Having set himself a Dostoevskyan task, however, Zweig falls short of fulfilling it. The novel contains a number of weaknesses which ultimately undermine Zweig’s claim as the inheritor of the mantle of Dostoevsky in early 20^th century central European literature. These weaknesses stem from a rather constricted, perhaps one can say, timid approach to life and humanity, a lack of a truly original imagination, an Austrian Herrkoemmlichkiet that Zweig simply cannot escape from.

Dostoevsky’s model of the ego posited an initial, rampantly egoistical self, an untamed monster at the heart of its own world: Arkady in The Adolescent says: I was unable to imagine myself otherwise than in the first place, and gradually this ego becomes socialised through its awareness that others also have this experience, in other words, a simultaneous awareness of itself as subject and object marks the first step of ego awareness.

Dostoevsky’s work is full of examples of protagonists who do not become healthy socialised egos, but who remain locked in their immature solipsism. The narrator of the short story A Gentle Creature, for example, seeks to understand his wife’s suicide only in terms of his own impact on her, not in terms of her own problems, in terms of her own experience of her life: She was frightened by my love, asked herself the solemn question whether to accept it or not, found the question too much for her to bear and thought it better to die.

Hofmiller has the same moment of immaturity, when he visits the cripple for the first time after his inadvertent insult, his second meeting with her. She is seated in the same corner at the same table, with the same rug over her knees, hiding her deformity. Hofmiller remarks in parenthesis (Why repeat a situation so painful to me?) an insight into his solipsism. He shows no awareness that she also has feelings about the situation; he is locked into his own egoistic perception of it, projecting them onto the other, in much the same way the narrator of A Gentle Creature is.

However, the insight of this Dostoevskyan psychology is undone by the revelation that Hofmiller has until now regarded himself as a nothing, as an insignificant nonentity. Packed off to the army at an early age by an uncaring family, he believes himself to be marginal, overlooked, insignificant, and only at the age of 25 does he realise that this might not be correct. This simply does not ring true. Dostoevsky’s psychology, of an initial untrammelled egoism socialised through internal conflict is both more original artistically and more accurate psychologically than Zweig’s notion of an ego unaware of itself brought to awareness through an awakening of pity. One simply cannot have the kind of solipsism Hofmiller shows in the earlier stages of the book when he projects his fears onto Edith if one believes oneself to be a nonentity.

Zweig starts with an ego which is nothing and which becomes something; Dostoevsky starts with an ego which is everything and which becomes something, a vision which is both more radical and more insightful.

The Aphorism

Another main area of weakness in the novel occurs at what we may call the level of the aphorism. Any novel that aspires to enduring greatness includes in addition to plot, description and dialogue, aphorisms in which the ‘teaching’, or the ‘thinking’ of the author is revealed. These aphorisms interrupt the flow of the story, stand outside it, comment on it, and add to the multiplicity of voices in the novel in that they are not the voice of the narrator, but closer to that of the author. Hugo’s narratives, for example, or Eliot’s are full of these kind of aphorisms. They add depth and interest to the reading experience, Hugo’s through their sonority and portentousness, Eliot’s through their sheer originality of thought and expression. At the same time, they reveal, unwittingly, perhaps, the soul of the author. (It’s interesting that Dickens, who towers above everyone else, completely eschews these kind of aphorisms, while Dostoevsky’s aphorisms are never Dostoevsky’s, but always those of his characters or the narrator, who is always a character in the story.)

Zweig’s aphorisms are also given by the (first person) narrator, but here the difference between narrator and author is so indistinguishable as to be tantamount to the same thing. And the aphorisms reveal further the sheer conventionality of Zweig’s soul.

“It is always encouraging to a talker to find he is being a success.” “Any form of constraint fetters the true forces of the spirit.” “Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit.” “ A man of limited vision is hard to bear with in any sphere in which he is invested with power, but in the army it is intolerable.” These are aphorisms of such banality that they are hardly worth the labour of reading or copying. They exist on about the same level of: “A carriage has wheels.” They do not challenge, they do not startle, they do not rattle the soul. They barely even interest.

In describing the tyranny of the Colonel of the regiment, a martinet before whom everyone trembles, officers and men together, Zweig writes: A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbour. Justice in some mysterious way makes up for violence. Are we really to believe and accept that a deserter, for example, lined up with other deserters in front of a firing squad about to be shot as a disciplinary measure will feel much better about it because he knows he is not alone in his punishment? Are we really to accept that this is a form of justice? Does Zweig really expect us to accept this guff?

Where Zweig really reveals himself, though, is in the aphorisms about love and sexuality. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his own passion, for he is not the creature, but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love, is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to the other’s passions… So far so good, so far so general. However, when the aphorism switches from generalities about love to the specifics of love between men and women, Zweig really reveals his conventionality: When a women resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex, the initial gesture of refusal is a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion, she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when Fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man…and he, wooed, remains cold and on the defensive… not to return a woman’s love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman’s advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. So ladies, let me ask you, do you agree? Is the full and only law of your sex to resist unwelcome passion? Is the primordial instinct of the female to refuse? How do you feel about being designated as ‘inhuman’ on those occasions when you do not refuse, and when you break your ‘natural modesty’ and reveal you have the hots for a man? Are your impulses to make advances towards a man really your noblest feelings?

Zweig’s aphorisms do everything to confirm the prejudices and worldviews of his readers. They maintain the Gemutlichkeit of his world, rather than puncturing it.

oooOOOooo

The novel is not all bad. There are some redeeming features. Hofmiller’s internal predicament is shattered by the assassination of Ferdinand and Sophia in Sarajevo, and the public historical world finally impinges in the personal and psychological. The descriptions of the mobilisation and early days of the war that follow are very fine. The book gives an admirable portrait of a class and time long vanished, and in spite of its faults and narrowness of soul, is somehow compulsively readable.

Finally, I hate to cast cold water on NYRB for their excellent efforts to revive the forgotten books of the past, but they need a better editor. The translation appears to have been made by writers who do not know English let alone German (Ungeduld Des Herzens actually means The Heart’s Impatience); and the introduction, by some American journalist, is therefore, as one would expect, a miracle of cultural ignorance and illiteracy.

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

The Idiot

Notes towards a reading of 'Brothers Karamazov' 12.12

2011-01-23T15:18:00.000+08:00

"Now, thank God! we've come to the real point: he was in the garden, therefore he murdered him.' In those few words: ‘he was’, and ‘therefore’ lies the whole case for the prosecution. ‘He was, therefore’. And what if there is no ‘therefore’ about it, even if he was there?”

Now the defence isolates the logical non sequitor in the prosecution’s case, in the fallacy of hindsight, in the faulty logic of the argument –and the method of arguing- employed by the prosecution.

He invites us again to consider the relationship between the parts and the whole.

Oh, I admit that the chain of evidence -- the coincidences -- are really suggestive. But examine all these facts separately, regardless of their connection.

It seems to me that this carries further the dialectic between faith and reason which is the underlying structural dialectic and main thematic content of the novel: the struggle between reason and faith.

Compare these two syllogisms:

a) He was there, b) therefore he committed the murder. The matter from the trial,

a) I believe in God, b) therefore he exists. The matter from the reason/belief dialectic throughout the book

Both syllogisms represent the prosecutor’s method of arguing (pointed out here by the defence): b) follows a) as a logical step; given a), b) follows.

The defence attacks this method, beginning with a):

a) The prosecution uses/represents ‘faith’: pictures, sideshadowing narratives, fallacies, received opinion, false dichotomies, evidence from witnesses who have been the victims of false interpretations, references and use of spurious science (psychology) as its method of establishing a position for the murder. In both syllogisms, a) is a sideshadowing narrative, a received idea, a fallacy.

He then goes on to b):

b) Even if we ignore the problems with a), or accept them, b) still does not follow as a logical step, a step in cause and affect. In both syllogisms, in the gap between a) and b) there is a logical non-sequitor.

The defence, uses/represents ‘reason’ and the double edged sword of interpretation to unpick all the prosecution’s arguments and to show how wrong and unfounded they are, arguing logically against the murder. Moreover, the defence shows the faults in the reasoning of the prosecution by honing in on the logical non-sequitor which underlies the ‘faith’ based method. ‘Reason’ attacks both the method and the content of ‘faith’.

Dostoevsky is pointing obliquely here, artistically, to his view that reason, although correct, is unable to defeat faith.

Because a mistrial is about to occur, in which the peasants choose the ‘faith’ argument and wrongly convict Dimitry, when of course it is the ‘reason’ argument which is the truth of what really happened – in the fullest sense- on the night of the murder.

By winning the case ‘faith’ loses the argument; while ‘reason’ wins the argument by losing the case.

Faith and mathematical proof are two irreconcilable things. There’s no stopping someone who has made up his mind to believe.

A Writer’s Diary 1876. Mar.2.3

Fragment 0116

2011-01-16T13:40:00.010+08:00

Dostoevsky wrote of Pushkin: He is one of the greatest of Russians who is still far from being interpreted and understood properly. After Pushkin no one has said anything new.

Dostoevsky’s own project – his depiction of the burden of consciousness- has its seeds in this poem by Pushkin, composed on the occasion of the poet’s thirtieth birthday:

Gift haphazard, unavailing,

Life, why wert thou given to me?

Why art thou to death unfailing

Sentenced by dark destiny?

Who in harsh despotic fashion

Once from Nothing called me out,

Filled my soul with burning passion,

Vexed and shook my mind with doubt?

I can see no goal before me:

Empty heart and idle mind.

Life monotonously o'er me

Roars, and leaves a wound behind.

Perhaps only Dostoevsky could have found the real anguish in the lines Vexed and shook my mind with doubt? and used them as a springboard for his own depictions of enraged consciousness:

What right did this Nature have to bring me into the world as a result of some eternal law of hers? I was created with consciousness, and I was conscious of this Nature: what right did she have to produce me, a conscious being, without my willing it?...

From 'The Sentence'

DOW
October 1876

Mozart to Constanze

2011-01-07T11:45:00.000+08:00

Arrange your dear sweet nest very daintily, for my little fellow deserves it indeed, he has really behaved himself very well and is only longing to possess your sweetest XXX. Just picture to yourself that rascal: as I write he crawls onto the table and looks at me questioningly. I, however, box his ears properly - but the rogue is simply XXX and now the knave burns only more fiercely and can hardly be restrained.

Notes towards a reading of 'Brothers Karamazov' 11.9

2010-12-28T10:25:00.000+08:00

11. “My dear fellow, upon my word I don't know”

The devil appears to man, and man asks him whether God exists, and the devil replies that he doesn’t know. This is the essence of the whole chapter.

Can sarcasm get any more corrosive than this? Can irony get any more bitter than this? If the devil doesn’t know, who does? The ramifications of this little snippet of dialogue are endless and spinning.

Is the devil an atheist or an agnostic?

Is the existence of the devil necessary for the existence of God?

If I believe in the devil, do I believe in God?

What if the devil is lying?

Does the devil exist, or is he a projection of man’s?

Is it easier for an atheist to believe in the devil than in god?

If an atheist becomes convinced of the independent existence of the devil, does it then follow that an atheist might eventually come to believe in god?

In asking these questions, we operate on at least three levels: theological level, belief level, and literary level. What is the theological, doctrinal point of view? What do I believe about this? What is the ideational, symbolic position of the character in the scene?

"Summer in Baden Baden" Leonid Tsypkin

2010-12-19T11:33:00.000+08:00

There are some books that are so good, that are so in tune with the reader’s current obsessions, that they create a conflict in the reader, a conflict between awe for the achievement of the author, and a kind of burning jealousy and sullen disheartenment that the author had the idea and executed it first. This is the book that I should have written, dammit!

This slim novel has two intertwined narratives and worlds. In the first, the narrator ‘Tsypkin’ is on a train journey from Moscow to Leningrad at some point during the late Soviet period. Day is waning, and it is deep winter. He is reading on his journey the Diaries of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, the writer’s second wife. He arrives in Leningrad, stays with an old friend, and in the morning goes to visit the Dostoevsky museum in Kuznechny Street. His impressions of his journey and his visit to Leningrad are interwoven with the impressions which arise in his mind engendered by the book he is reading, which form the second narrative.

In this narrative, the Dostoevskys are on their way to Baden Baden in the summer of 1867 to escape from the writer’s creditors. They stay in the spa town for a few months, where Dostoevsky is consumed with his passion for gambling and plagued by terrible fits of epilepsy, Anna is pregnant with their first child, they are harassed by money worries and ill treated by the natives of the town, and continuously insulted and humiliated.

This brief synopsis does little to convey the great power of this book, however, which lies chiefly in its prose style, and in its method.

Tsypkin (or his translators) has invented a new kind of sentence, one that meanders for pages and pages, but is broken by dashes, a kind of stream of consciousness monologue compounded of impressions of the journey- impressions of the book he is reading on the journey- ideas that spin out from these impressions- memories of what he has read of Dostoevsky’ life- mini narratives that flesh out- as only fiction can- the known details of that life - the relationship between the writer and his wife- mini narratives that vivify the quotidian texture of Dostoevsky’s life as he experienced it- the sweat- the eternally patched and darned clothes – wearing the wrong kind of hat - the subtle grades of humiliation encountered on visits to pawnshops- memories of the novels and other Dostoevskyana- it’s a perfect representation of a mind thoroughly immersed in the work of another writer- a representation of the process of reading itself- of a mind in the grip of a lifelong obsession.

Particularly powerful and subtle is Tsypkin’s method of incorporating details from Dostoevsky’s novels into the narratives about the Dostoevskys in Baden Baden. Dostoevsky is accused by his neighbour at the roulette wheel of having scooped up some of his neighbour’s chips after a particularly big win. Dostoevsky of course had no idea he had done this, he is so wrapped up in his obsession with winning, the inner sensations of it; but the other man is convinced he has done it on purpose. For a moment, the whole crowd around the table regards Dostoevsky with disdain; he is a thief in their eyes, a scoundrel, and he savours this humiliation, bracing himself against it with mad fantasies of revenge, just as the underground man does in his novel. This incident comes from The Adolescent, written in the mid 1870s, after D had already returned to Russia from his European exile. Tsypkin in this way uses material from the fiction to flesh out his imagined rendering of Dostoevsky life. At the same time this suggests how such fictional incidents may have had their roots in Dostoevsky’s biography, where they were to lie dormant for many years until mined by the writer.

This is a hugely successful way of circumventing the biographical fallacy, that bugbear of biographers, by incorporating it into the fabric of an artistic narrative, one that is personal, imaginative, sensitive and utterly convincing. Much of the strange essentials of Dostoevsky’s biography are here, through the power of art, made perfectly lucid and understandable, notably his fraught relationship with Turgenev; his humiliating fall from grace after the huge success of his first novel; his self-defeating loyalty towards his terrible, grasping relatives; his anti-Semitism, which is particularly worrying for Tsypkin, himself a jew; his imprisonment and exile.

Chief among these is the role played in the novel by Anna Grigorievna herself. She forms the chief focus of the second narrative; and indeed the novel is as much about Anna Grigorievna as it is about Dostoevsky and ‘Tsypkin’. The text is larded with incidents and observations from her Diary. This brings her inner life and relationship with the writer into focus in a much more powerful way than most standard biographies of Dostoevsky do, where she is more often than not relegated to the status of helpmeet. Here, her central role in the novel reflects much more her central role in Dostoevsky’s life, and allows the reader to arrive at a more nuanced, more sympathetic, human understanding of Dostoevsky’s whole world. Through this, the reader comes to regard Dostoevsky as Anna herself does, with a mixture of awe, exasperation, pity and love.

An unforgettable book.

Fragment 1611

2010-11-16T12:05:00.003+08:00

Paradoxes, Prophecies and Parodies, on the Difference Between Private and Public Writing, and the Benefits of Ambiguity

It was rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university and was preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch published in one of the more important journals a strange article, which attracted general notice,….What was most striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion. Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side. And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in their applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque.

The Brothers Karamazov 1.1.3

Peter Ustinov called Dostoevsky ‘the prophet of paradoxes’, and this is true in two ways, in that Dostoevsky’s prophecies are often profoundly paradoxical, and in that he employs a paradoxical tone to sound his prophecies.

The Paradox

A paradox works by playing with an inversion of terms and thereby sustaining mutual incompatibilities. The greatest paradoxicalist in the world, Oscar Wilde, wrote: if one is going to go to the trouble of having parents, one must undertake to bring them up. This paradox works by substituting the term ‘parents’ for its opposite ‘children’, thus turning a profoundly banal statement that is really not worth the trouble of uttering, into something witty, possibly absurd, but on deeper reflection actually quite profound, in this case, hinting at the often painful process of growing individuation and the assertion of oneself in the face of parental or familial pressures.

In his public non-fiction writings Dostoevsky is addicted to this kind of paradoxical utterance, in which he inverts the normal terms for their opposites: War fosters brotherly love and unites nations. 1876. Apr.2.2, he writes, substituting ‘war’ for ‘peace’ in this case.

In one essay in the Dairy, called 'A Paradoxicalist', Dostoevsky reports a conversation with a man who utters a string of witty paradoxes:
Humanity loves war in order to be part of some noble idea. It is a human need.
A prolonged peace hardens people’s hearts. 1876. Apr.2.2
Science and the arts flourish particularly in the immediate postwar period. War renews and refreshes them…1876. Apr.2.2
It is specifically for the people that war has the finest and the most sublime consequences. 1876. Apr.2.2

We encounter the paradoxicalist again a few months later, when in a discussion about bon ton, he utters, among other things:
Every fashionable society is good in that it is in closer touch with nature than every other society, even agricultural ones, which mostly all still live in an unnatural fashion. 1876. Jul.4.1

Dostoevsky seems to parodying by these means the war-mongerers of Europe, and Russia and perhaps those Westernisers who saw in European civilisation the best of all possible worlds. By the use of paradox, he is signalling that he doesn’t really believe these terrible things. We read, we smile, we say, how charmingly paradoxical, how outrageous, how witty.

The Prophecies

So it is a shock then to discover that the very same ideas expressed in public by the paradoxicalist are found in a private letter, written by Dostoevsky to his niece in 1870: With your views on war, I can’t possibly agree. Without war, people grow torpid in riches and comfort and lose the power of thinking and feeling nobly, they get brutal, and fall back into barbarism. Without pain, one comprehends not joy. Ideals are purified by suffering, as gold is by fire….You write: “People kill and wound and then nurse the wounded.” Do but think of the noblest words that ever yet were spoken: “I desire love and not sacrifice.” Here, in private, Dostoevsky reveals that what appear to be paradoxes in his public writing, are actually straightforward expressions of opinion, passionately held convictions, Jeremiads, prophecies.

Leaving aside the whole problematics of the nature of the prophecies (Dostoevsky passionately believes that war is an act of Christian love, that it is more enobling than peace…), what is profoundly disquieting about this addiction to a paradoxical tone in his public utterances is that it calls into question every belief or opinion that Dostoevsky voices in his fiction and in his journalism, both the religious and the atheistic.

Parody and Burlesque

We have already seen how, in Dostoevsky’s fiction, laughter from other characters often accompanies statements of the loftiest idealism as well as statements of the deepest depravity, and this laughter serves to place these statements in a field of ambiguity, where the statement has two simultaneously existing statuses: as a profundity, and as a parody of a profundity.

Dostoevsky employs laughter in certain places to foreground this double stance. But that doesn’t mean to say that where there is no laughter, there is no ambiguity; that this ambiguity exists only where there is laughter to highlight it.

The paradoxical tone has the potential to infect every utterance even without the presence of laughter from the characters, so that we can no longer take anything Dostoevsky says as having one, stable meaning: it means one thing, but it also means its opposite. As the narrator says in Brothers Karamazov, it’s a double edged sword.

Some Examples of the Double Edged Sword

How can I believe in God without a God to believe in?

Profundity or Parody? For an atheist, or for someone earnestly struggling with questions of belief, this is a profundity. But we have to acknowledge the fact that Dostoevsky possibly intended it as a parody of the kind of soul searching that atheists go in for; we have to face the fact, based on his private writings, that Dostoevsky himself found this kind of statement ludicrously stupid, and that he is actually scorning this kind of soul searching.

I have seen the truth, and its living image has filled my soul for ever.

Profundity or parody? For an atheist, this is a parody of the kind of profundity that fundamentalists utter. We know Dostoevsky regarded this a profundity because his private writings are full of this kind of stuff, but the paradoxical tone of his public writing opens it up to the possibility that it can be read as a parody of the religious.

What makes Dostoevsky profoundly modern is that the paradoxical nature of his writing not only forces a conscious interpretative decision upon the reader -parody or profundity? – but it also allows both interpretative choices to exist simultaneously. (This is a characteristic of 19^th century Russian philosophy which is full of examples of thinkers who were able to simultaneously hold beliefs regarded by Western thinkers as opposites and therefore mutually exclusive.) This in part accounts for the fierceness with which atheists, nihilists, and Christian fundamentalists alike claim Dostoevsky as their prophet.

oooOOOooo

Dostoevsky was haunted by the fear of being misunderstood, and he complained many times in his public and private writing that his words had been misinterpreted as paradoxical, when he had intended them as prophecies, and vice versa. Let’s look at two examples, first from his letters, and second from the Diary. In the first he complains that what he had intended as straight talk had been interpreted as parody, and in the second, that what he had intended as parody had been interpreted as prophecy.

Example 1: Private

In July 1876 he wrote to his friend Solovyev complaining about the reception an essay from the Dairy had received: And then there happened precisely what I had expected: even those newspapers and magazines which are friendly to me raised an outcry, saying that my whole article was hopelessly paradoxical; while the others bestowed not the smallest attention on it – and here I am who believe that I have opened up the most important of all questions!

The essay in question, published in the June issue of the Diary consisted of four chapters, entitled, ‘My Paradox, ‘Deduction from My Paradox’, ‘The Eastern Question’, and ‘The Utopian Conception of History’. In them Dostoevsky rehearsed at length his view of Russia’s spiritual mission, with nasty sideswipes at the Jews and the Westernizers. In it we find utterances such as these:

We are revolutionaries out of some internal necessity, even out of conservatism. 1876. Jun.2.2
Russia’s whole power, her whole personality, so to say, and her whole future mission lie in her self-denying unselfishness. 1876. Jun.2.3

Conservative revolutionaries? Unselfishness as a form of power? These are classic paradoxes, in which terms are inverted and mutual incompatibilities are sustained.

What’s most interesting about Dostoevsky’s complaint to Solvyev, however, is that a) he precisely expected this response, and b) that he believed his audience would recognise his sincerity. It’s not surprising that his audience thought he was being paradoxical, given the titles he gave the chapters. On the other hand, it’s very surprising that, given these titles and the tone, Dostoevsky genuinely expected his audience would see his real intention, would see through the parody to the prophecy.

Example 2: Public

Our second example has Dostoevsky putting his complaint and his explanation entirely in the public sphere.

In the October 1876 issue of the Diary, Dostoevsky wrote about suicide, about the possible reasons for (what was perceived then as) an epidemic of suicides among the young. In one chapter, called ‘The Sentence’, Dostoevsky presented a suicide note from a materialist, of course, who committed suicide out of boredom. After accusing Nature for having created him against his will, having endowed him with the burden of consciousness only to extinguish it at death, the writer of the note passes sentence on Nature: Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party. 1876. Oct.1.4.

The whole tone of the essay is once more steeped in paradox but at the same time, is one of the most profound justifications of atheism in literature, an expression of pure absurdism that anticipates Camus, Becket, Keirkegaard and Sartre.

Dostoevsky was inundated with letters about this essay. He was accused of justifying suicide (a potentially dangerous accusation given the Orthodox stance on suicide and Dostoevsky’s past as a political prisoner), accused of putting dangerous ideas into the heads of the young and disillusioned. His words were taken seriously as prophecies.

Two months later, in the December issue of the Diary, he answered these accusations in an essay called ‘A Belated Moral’: Good lord! Do I have many readers like this? [Do people] seriously believe that I described this case to win him sympathy?

In this second essay, Dostoevsky describes how his friends had urged him to insert a moral into ‘The Sentence’ to make his intention clear. Dostoevsky remarks in this second essay: I myself while writing the article (The Sentence) felt that a moral was essential, yet somehow I felt embarrassed to add one. I felt ashamed to assume that even the most naïve of readers would be so simple minded as to miss the inner sense of the article, its intent and its moral. Its intent was so clear to me that I could not help but assume that it was equally clear to everyone. It seems that I was mistaken. 1876 Dec 1.2.

In a further essay, he reveals that he had intended ‘The Sentence’ to be a parody of atheism, a burlesque of logical positivism, what he called ‘straightline thinking’.

The Benefits of Ambiguity

What’s significant in these two examples is that Dostoevsky reveals that he expected this kind of response, a response wildly different from his intention. If that is the case, what prompted him to employ this kind of style? What was the reason for couching his most heartfelt convictions and most strenuous oppositions, his prophecies, in a style that was so paradoxical that it opened up a huge gulf between the intention of the author and the reception by the reader, a style that rendered his utterances capable of being interpreted as prophecy and at the same time as a burlesque of prophecy?

Part of the answer can be found in the same letter to Solovyev we looked at earlier:

One can set up any paradox one likes, and so long as one doesn’t carry it to its ultimate conclusion, everyone will think it most subtle, witty, comme il faut; but once blurt out the last word, and quite frankly (not by implication) declare: “This is the Messiah!” why, nobody will believe in you any more – for it was so silly of you to push your idea to its ultimate conclusion.

He then goes on to mention Voltaire, a writer Dostoevsky intensely admired, and a famous master of paradox: If many a famous wit, such as Voltaire, had resolved for once to rout all hints, allusions, and esotericisms by force of his genuine beliefs, to show the real Himself, he would quite certainly not have had a tithe of the success he enjoyed. He would merely have been laughed at. For a man instinctively avoids saying his last word, he has a prejudice against ‘thoughts said’.

He then quotes a line from one of the most beautiful and famous poems of 19^th century Russian literature, Silentium, by Tchyutchev: A thought once uttered is untrue.

The Paradoxical Prophecy, and the Prophetic Paradox

For Dostoevsky, the paradoxical prophecy, the prophetic paradox, was a way of deliberately sustaining ambiguity because ambiguity was in itself a virtue that–most superficially perhaps- guaranteed success as a writer by allowing a wider range of responses from his audience. A self-conscious, deliberately maintained ambiguity of intention- which he learnt in the early part of his journalistic career as a way of cheating the censor - was a way of dealing with the slipperiness and unreliability of language, where many a slip happens between mind and lip, between author and reader. At the same time, it allowed the true self of the author to remain hidden from view within the work of art, and the final word on the matter to remain forever unspoken.

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.
Tyutchev

Beauty’s an awesome terrible thing! It’s awesome because it’s indefinable; as indefinable and mysterious as everything in God’s creation! It’s where opposites converge, where contradictions rule!
BK 1.3.3.

Brother Ivan, never mind being an atheist, writes religious articles for a practical joke…
BKK 1.2.7.

'A Writer's Diary' Dostoevsky

2010-11-15T11:28:00.003+08:00

Part 2

Sometimes I write my diary not only for the public, but for myself – that’s probably why it occasionally contains some rough spots and surprising ideas – I mean ideas quite familiar to me and which I’ve been inwardly elaborating for a long time but which seem to the reader to have sprung up unexpectedly and unconnected to what has preceded them.

1876. Jul.1.1

I’m not very pleased with my Diary. I would have liked to say a hundred times more.

I wanted very much to write about literature, and precisely what no one has written anything about since the thirties: about pure beauty.

Letter to Y. Polonsky.

It is in the nature of a diary to blur public and private voices (who is the intended reader of a diary?) and thus the Diary affords an amazing insight into Dostoevsky’s mind and workshop, prefiguring many of the ideas later to surface in Karamazov, and echoing or developing ideas found in his previous works. In this part, let’s look at what the Diary tells us about Dostoevsky’ s ideas on literature, his views on language, his aesthetics and his personal obsession with suicide.

Literature

Coming from the pen of one of the chief literary practitioners in the Russia of the time, the Diary is surprisingly reticent about literature. Dostoevsky himself commented on this, that he wanted to focus more on contemporary life and on issues of greater interest to the general reader than mere professional, literary ones. It is to be lamented that he took this approach, as much of his views on contemporary life are unpleasantly reactionary and have lost their relevance, as the events which stimulated them have become lost to view. His literary reminiscences, however, are still fascinating to modern readers.

Dostoevsky includes reminiscences and his views on: Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, his late brother Mikhail Mikhailovich, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Cervantes and George Sand. Perhaps most interesting of these are what he says about Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy, his two greatest contemporaries, and his idol, Pushkin.

Chernyshevsky was Dostoevsky’s greatest ideological opponent. An arch rationalist and utilitarian, Westerniser and radical liberal, Chernyshevsky stood for everything Dostoevsky himself hated about the European tendency in Russian life. Dostoevsky’s book Notes from Underground had been written in response and rebuff to Chernyshevsky’s hugely influential novel What Is To Be Done?, written when Chernyshevsky was in prison. Dostoevsky had been accused by his enemies of lampooning Chernyshevsky. In the Diary he set the record straight, describing his growing friendship with Chernyshevsky, which had been interrupted by Chernyshevsky’s arrest, and generously offering his support and solidarity to the prisoner and exile. One can have a good deal of respect for a man, even when one has radically different opinions from him.

In the Diary Dostoevsky called Tolstoy an enormous talent, a remarkable mind and a man highly respected by educated Russians, and devotes a whole chapter to a detailed discussion of Anna Karenina, which appeared in instalments as the Diary was appearing. He was utterly convinced of the greatness of the novel -Anna Karenina is perfection as a work of art…to which nothing in the European literature of this era can compare. He saw that Tolstoy, like himself, was aware of the propensity for light and dark within the human psyche: It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness that evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been; that abnormality and sin arise from the soul itself, and finally that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined and so mysterious that there are and cannot be either judges or physicians … Dostoevsky saw all this in Karenina.

However, he thought that Tolstoy was blind to the gulf between the intelligentsia and the People, pouring scorn on Levin’s statement I am also one of the people from Book 8 of Anna Karenina: he’s the son of a Moscow nobleman of the upper middle level whose historian was Count L Tolstoy, critiquing also Tolstoy’s narrow range in focussing only on the upper levels of society in his work. He also attacked Tolstoy for not joining his own side of the debate on the Pan Slavic Movement and the Eastern Question. Tolstoy – like many others- thought the whole thing had been magnified by a hysterical press and could see no benefit for Russia in it. This was a grievous sin in Dostoevsky’s eyes, and placed Tolstoy on the side of Russia’s enemies. Those who were critical of the Pan Slavic movement contributed to the dissociation Dostoevsky saw as the major social ill of the day. He also railed against Tolstoy’s passivism, ranting that Tolstoy, in refusing to support the war against the Turks was thereby condoning the atrocities the Turks had committed against their Slavic populations. Dostoevsky could be pretty unpleasant in print, and had no compunctions against employing the lowest methods of gutter journalism to attack his opponents. In this case, he reported in graphic detail the atrocities committed by the Turks, and then more or less blamed them on Tolstoy.

Pushkin was Dostoevsky’s literary idol. Pushkin’s star had waned since his death in 1837; poetry had generally been eclipsed by a general movement towards prose, fictional and critical, since the 1840s. There were no public statues or commemorations of Russia’s greatest poet anywhere in Russia, a fact that Dostoevsky bemoaned in 1876. In 1862, a group of students at Pushkin’s old school floated the idea of a memorial and began to raise funds. It took nearly 20 years to get enough public interest. At last in June 1880, a statue was unveiled at a ceremony attended by all the luminaries of Russian literature (except Tolstoy, who declined the invitation). There were a number of speakers, including Dostoevsky, whose keynote speech made a huge impression: people were weeping, there were fainting fits in the crowd and a half hour long ovation. Even Turgenev, Dostoevsky’s old enemy, was moved to tears and embraced his rival. This event was the zenith of Dostoevsky’s career and marked the start of Russian veneration for both writers that continues to this day.

For Dostoevsky, Pushkin was the archetypal Russian, embodying in one person all those qualities that made the Russian character great. A Russian who fails to understand Pushkin has no right to call himself a Russian. He saw in Pushkin three qualities that were especially important. Pushkin was the first to understand and depict the dissociation of the intelligentsia from the People. In his portraits of the ‘wanderers’ Eugene Onegin and Aleko he showed young men of the intellectual class tormented by a sense of boredom and rootlessness due to their separation from the People, from the soil. Second, he embodied Russia’s ability to understand and incorporate foreign influences and make them her own: the capacity to respond to the entire world and to assume completely the form of the genius of other nations in a reincarnation that is almost total. Third, Pushkin was the first poet to realise the potential of the oral culture of the People, and to see that they were not simply slaves; he was the first to present portraits of the People taken directly from their own truth: Pushkin bowed down before the People and accepted their truth as his truth. For Dostoevsky, nothing new had been said in Russian literature since Pushkin. The message Pushkin gave the world was this: “The truth is not outside you, but within. Submit yourself to yourself; master yourself, and you shall see the truth. This truth is not to be found in things; it is not outside you or somewhere beyond the sea but is to be found first in your own work to better yourself, conquer yourself, humble yourself and you shall be freer than ever you imagined….” An axiom which he saw contained in Tatiana’s refusal of Onegin.

It’s hard to recognise Pushkin in Dostoevsky’s assessment of him. Many of the themes mentioned in the Pushkin speech and the essays devoted to Pushkin echo the themes in those sections of the Diary that deal with Pan Slavism, the Eastern Question, and Russia’s holy mission. In spite of some of the insights into Pushkin’s great masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, Dostoevsky’s remarks about Pushkin reveal more about Dostoevsky than they do about the poet.

Language

For Dostoevsky, language was intimately connected to thought: There is no doubt that language is the form, the body, the outer casing of thought… If we do not think in words, ie, by pronouncing words mentally, at least, then we think using the “elemental, fundamental power of that language” in which we prefer to think. The more flexibly, the more richly, the more diversely we master the language in which we choose to think, the more easily, diversely, and richly we will express our ideas in it. He complains often that one’s ability to think is restricted by the fact that thought can only be expressed in ready-made words or phrases.

Language was also connected to (national and individual) character: Without a knowledge of one’s natural language, without mastering it, one can’t even shape one’s character. He regarded Russians who were brought up speaking French as neither fully French nor fully Russian, incapable of expressing anything accurately or precisely, and rendered frivolous and cynical by the language they used. He likened the influence of French on a growing Russian boy to the pernicious influence of masturbation: those who were forced to learn French in their youth would forever suffer from impotence of thought, just like those prematurely aged young men whose nasty habits have sapped their strength before its time.

Nothing for Dostoevsky was more indicative of the great gulf between the educated classes and the dark mass of the People than the fact that the former used French and not Russian as their main language. His reverence for Pushkin, Lomonosov and Gogol was in large part due to the prominence they had given Russian. Each of these writers gave new possibilities to the language of the People and raised it from the level of the language of the uneducated to the language of the intelligentsia. In Dostoevsky’s fiction, French is used to parody the useless idealistic Europeanism of the generation of the 40s. He had a low opinion of the French generally: Are the French really human beings? he asked sarcastically in the Dairy. He called upon Russian Mamas to make sure their children learnt Russian, not French. This would heal the great problem at the heart of Russian life, the dissociation between the intelligentsia and the People. Just as the People would regenerate the intelligentsia, so their language would revive Russian as a vehicle for the expression of great thoughts. We will not have our living language until we merge completely with the People.

Aesthetics

In Dostoevsky’s world, with the exception of painting and literature, the other arts are curiously absent. He was indifferent to music, architecture, dance and the other arts of civilisation. However, painting had a huge impact on him; and the first thing he and his wife did on their travels after they had checked into their hotel, was to head straight for the city art gallery. Paintings occupy a key place in many of his novels, and in the Diary.

It’s in the discussion of paintings that Dostoevsky reveals the basic tenets of his aesthetics. In the 19th century debate over the role of art, in which one was either a utilitarian or an aesthete, he was essentially an aesthete. As early as 1861 he had been arguing fiercely for the freedom of art, for art to have no other purpose or benefit than its own nature, and that it was this unhampered, free nature that was of the greatest benefit to mankind: Art will be true to man only if its freedom of movement is not hampered he wrote in an article in his journal Time in 1861. The search for beauty, the appreciation of beauty was a human instinct, and art should be nothing more than this: Beauty is useful because it is beauty, because a constant need for beauty and its highest ideal resides in mankind.

In the Diary his position remains essentially the same. In a review of the great exhibition of contemporary Russian art in March 1873, where Repin’s famous Volga Barge Haulers was exhibited for the first time, he developed his ideas. He warned young artists against the desire to cheapen their art by following the popular trend, or by instilling it with tendencies. He urged them to follow their own artistic instinct and to be free to their own vision: To satisfy social demands, the young poet suppresses his own natural need to express himself in his own images, fearing that he will be censured for ‘idle curiosity’ he suppresses and obliterates the images that arise out of his own soul; he ignores them or leaves them undeveloped, while extracting from himself with painful tremors the images that satisfy common, official, liberal, and social opinion. What a terrible simple and naïve mistake, what a serious mistake this is!

Those artists who used art to display their tendencies, to agitate for social change, abused art and themselves. The result was always inferior to art that was free of tendencies. He saw a great lesson in the example of Gogol, whose early art, free of tendencies, was magically life full; while his later art, in which he tried to put forward his religious views, was sadly weak: Gogol, in those passages in Dead Souls where he ceases to be an artist and begins to convey his own views directly, is simply weak and not even characteristic. But his Marriage and Dead Souls are his most profound works, the richest in inner content, precisely because of the artistically rendered characters who appear in them. Dostoevsky took this lesson to heart in his novels, where the range of philosophical arguments displayed never detracts from the truth of the fiction, where the philosophy never overwhelms the art.

Dostoevsky knew that the language and methods of philosophy and art were incompatible. In his fiction he was always prepared to sacrifice the former in the interests of the latter, even at the risk of muddying the clarity of his philosophical ideas. In 1879 he wrote to Pobedonestsov about Brothers Karamazov: [the argument] is here presented not point by point, but, so to speak, in an artistic picture…And here there was a further obligation of art: I had to present a modest and majestic figure…. I was forced, will or nill, by artistic demands to touch upon even the most trivial aspects….. Dostoevsky worked under the obligation of art, and when he did so he believed that this obligation to art came before his obligation to philosophy. This is the same view expressed throughout the Diary.

This is most interesting in terms of Dostoevsky’s thoughts on character in literature. Dostoevsky’s characters voice a range of philosophies from the most sarcastically atheistic to the most prophetically religious. However, one of the most noteworthy qualities of Dostoevsky’s art – and one that he shares with Turgenev- is that these characters never become mere mouthpieces for the author’s views, they never descend into mere types. In the works of the artist who creates types…the result is something false, he wrote in the Diary. In this respect his great model and idol was Dickens, who, he held, managed through the process of idealising his observations, to create real people, not types: Dickens never saw Pickwick with his own eyes; he perceived him only in a variety of forms of reality that he had observed; he created a character and presented him as the result of his observations. Thus this character is every bit as real as one who really exists, even though Dickens took only an idea of the reality. Dostoevsky’s conception of his own art was one that focuses on characters. All the profundity, all the content of a work of art thus resides only in its characters.

Dostoevsky has been called a (social) realist, a label that he would have deplored. He lambasted the realists of his time, especially those who reproduced in their work field notes of sayings and speech patterns taken from real life (he was an addict of this practice himself, however). He saw a kind of naivity in this. For Dostoevsky, the world was perceived through the senses and mediated by the mind: “One must portray reality as it is,” they say, whereas reality such as this does not exist and never has on earth because the essence of things is inaccessible to man: he perceives nature as it reflected in his ideas, after it has passed through his senses. We see reality almost always in the way we want to see it, as we ourselves, in a preconceived manner, wish to interpret it to ourselves. Total objectivity, reportage, therefore was impossible, and what the artist should focus on was the quality of the ideas that mediated his experience of the world. What matters is not the subject, but the eye. The ideal therefore had an essential place in the process of artistic creation. The task of art is not to portray the random bits of daily life, but their general idea, perceptively read and faithfully drawn out from the entire range of similar phenomena of daily life.

Dostoevsky saw himself as a fantasist. He was convinced that if you looked carefully at life, it appeared to be fantastic, miraculous, that there was nothing prosaic about the everyday: What is most miraculous are very often the things that happen in the reality around us... If once in a while we suddenly analyse it and see in the visible not the things we wished to see, but the things that exist in actual fact, then we at once take what we have seen as a miracle...

Suicide

Dostoevsky was obsessed with suicide. Every major novel from 1866 onwards contains a character who commits suicide, or who intends to. Likewise, the Diary is full of stories of suicide. Perhaps it was true that there was an epidemic of suicides in the late 1870s, but Dostoevsky was certainly convinced there was. In his Diary he tried to find the reason for this, and to give some explanations as to the causes of suicide. For him, suicide went straight to the question of the existence of God.

His explanation was that suicidalists were driven to their action by an inability to satisfactorily resolve questions of belief. This of course reflects more Dostoevsky’s own obsessions, than the suicidalists’ themselves, who may have had a range of reasons, including economic despair, alcoholism, mental illness and depression. However, Dostoevsky’s thoughts on suicide are worth looking at in detail, as they illuminate many aspects central to his religious thinking towards the end of his life, and how he himself resolved his own life long struggle with faith.

In October 1876 he wrote an essay where he discussed what he called ‘straightline thinking’, the propensity of contemporary thinkers to reach for the most logical conclusions by relying on rationality as the easiest way of resolving dilemmas. What a straight line approach, what quick satisfaction with the petty and insignificant as a means of expression, what a general rush to set one’s mind at rest as quickly as possible, to pronounce judgement so as not to have to trouble oneself any longer.

Although this was part of a general attack on positivism which the Slavophile philosophers were launching at this time, Dostoevsky went further in saying that this process of simplification actually was harmful: Because of this excessive simplification of views on certain things, the cause itself is sometimes lost. In some instances, simplicity harms the simplifiers themselves. Simplicity does not change, simplicity moves in a straight line and is arrogant above all. Simplicity is the enemy of analysis. He held that positivism eventually reduced everything to zero: What is simpler and more restful than a zero?

He then cited two cases of suicide which had been in the news. One of them, the suicide of an out-of-work seamstress who had jumped out of a window holding an icon. The other was the tragic suicide of Herzen’s 17 year old daughter, who had killed herself in Florence. Dostoevsky surmised from her suicide note, which had been reported to him by Pobedonestsov, that she had killed herself out of despair with this straightline thinking, which had been passed to her as a habit of thought by her Westernizing father: Here we have the soul of one who has rebelled against the linearity of things, of one who could not tolerate this linearity, which was passed on to her from childhood in her father’s house….her soul instinctively could not tolerate linearity and instinctively demanded something more complex. Of the two suicides, D argued that the second had suffered the most, from atheism, while the first had leapt into the void with the consolation of Christ – or at least religion.

He then followed this essay by printing a suicide note from some someone who had killed themselves out of boredom, as he says in the introduction to the note. Dostoevsky does not offer any provenance for the note, and we now know for sure that it was written by Dostoevsky himself as an attempt to exemplify in fiction the straightline thinking that leads to suicide. It is one of the most searing documents of atheism ever produced: angry, logical, sarcastic. No matter how rationally, righteously, and blessedly humanity might organize itself on earth, it will all be equated tomorrow to that same empty zero. Though there may be some reason why this is essential, in accordance with some almighty, eternal and dead laws of Nature, believe me, this idea shows the most profound disrespect to humanity, it is profoundly insulting to me and all the more unbearable because there is no one here who is to blame. This fictional note has echoes of Ipolit Ivolgin’s ideas from The Idiot, and echoes also Isabella’s speech from Measure for Measure: To Whom shall I complain? It is designed by Dostoevsky to show the paucity of rational atheism, and how it eventually leads to suicide.

This fictional note involved Dostoevsky in a storm of controversy. He was accused of offering an example to potential suicides, and he was forced, in another essay in the Diary to clarify his purpose and his meaning. He had intended the note to show the soul of someone who had lost faith in the immortality of the soul, and the consequences of this: When the idea of immortality is lost, suicide becomes an absolute and inescapable necessity for any person who has even developed slightly above the animal level. For Dostoevsky, immortality of the soul was the foundation of his thinking. Without faith in one’s soul and its immortality, human existence is unnatural, unthinkable and unbearable.

He developed these ideas about suicide in one of his most remarkable stories, published a few months later in the April 1877 issue of the Diary: A Dream of a Ridiculous Man. In this story, a straightline thinker, brought to the brink of suicide, dreams that he has committed suicide, and gone to paradise. As a result of this dream, he returns to his life with a renewed sense that the immortality of the soul is manifested through love: You must love others as you love yourself.

The idea of making it a genuine Diary was really naïve of me. A genuine Dairy is almost impossible: it can only be a work cut about to suit the public taste…

Letter to Mms Altschevsky April 9^th 1876

I have decided to discontinue the Diary. There is a combination of many reasons: I’m very tired, my epilepsy has grown worse (precisely because of the Diary), finally, I want to be freer next year, although scarcely do I pass even two months without worrying. I have a novel in my mind, and heart, and it asks to be expressed…

Letter to S.D. Yanovsky. 1877

A.E. Housman on the cure for alcoholism

2010-11-09T11:13:00.000+08:00

On your expert advice I left off alcohol for a week, with no effect except the production of gouty symptoms, or symptoms which I am accustomed to regard as such. Your other recipe, a cold douche after my warm bath, is impracticable, because my bath is cold.

'A Writer's Diary' Dostoevsky

2010-10-29T09:57:00.018+08:00

Part 1

You write that I am squandering and abusing my talents on bagatelles in the ‘Diary’. You are not the first from whom I have heard that. And now I want to say this to you and others: I have been driven to the conviction that an artist is bound to make himself acquainted down to the smallest detail, not only with the technique of writing, but with everything – current no less than historical events – relating to that reality which he designs to show forth.

Letter to Mms Altschevsky April 9th 1876

Contexts and Contents

A Writer’s Diary was conceived primarily as a way for Dostoevsky to make money. He had first mentioned the idea of editing something in the shape of a paper in the autumn of 1868, when he was hard at work on The Idiot, and then again in slightly more detail in another letter to his niece in the spring of 1869. Of course, he was an old hand at journalism, having turned out puff as a fueilletonist in the 1840s, and edited and managed two journals with his brother in the 1860s. However, his conception for the Diary was to be the sole author, to use it as a mouthpiece for his views, to build up his reading public, and to -hopefully- provide a source of steady income.

His first opportunity came in 1873 on his return to Russia after his self-imposed European exile, when he was offered the editorship of The Citizen, a journal owned and put out by the right wing Slavophile, Prince Meshchersky. Dostoevsky, in addition to managing the paper and editing contributions, contributed his own column, called A Writer’s Diary. The experience was not a happy one, however, and disagreements between him and the proprietor soon made it impossible for him to continue.

He tried again in 1876, on his own this time, printing the Diary and distributing it himself from his house. This version of the Diary ran from January 1876 to December 1877, when he abandoned it due to pressures of work on Karamazov, and his declining health. He put out a single edition in August 1880, which was concerned mainly with his famous Pushkin speech and the fall-out from that event. In January 1881 he recommenced the Diary, intending to continue indefinitely, but he died of emphysema in February, leaving only one complete issue for that year.

The Diary had an unusual and avant garde form– half journal half letter. It carried no advertising and Dostoevsky was the only contributor. It was what nowadays might be considered or conceived as a blog or an emailing list. It is a form whose modernism is often quite at odds with the reactionary conservatism of its contents.

In 1877, at the height of its success, in a fervid intellectual climate and a market noisy with journals and newspapers, the Diary had 7,000 subscribers. It boasted Pobedonestsov (the tutor to the next Tsar, intimate of the Imperial Family and Procurator of the Holy Synod and the most influential politician in Russia) as one of its regular readers, and involved Dostoevsky in an avalanche of correspondence.

The Diary covers a wide variety of topics presented in short numbered essays – from 6 to 12 in each monthly issue- with long titles. Sometimes the essays stand alone, and at others, there is a common thread linking the entire issue. A number of short stories also appeared in the Diary, including Bobok, A Gentle Creature, A Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and The Peasant Marey. There is a wide array of styles and voices ranging from the irascible and the sarcastic to the prophetic and religious; from aggressive and often unpleasant polemical argumentation to anecdote and reminiscence; from the wildly paradoxical to the most straightforward expression of opinion. It offers a fascinating view of contemporary Russian life and politics, unparalleled in its depth and breadth. In it, through the range of topics he addressed, Dostoevsky sought to clarify his position in the intellectual landscape of his time, particularly in the endless debate between the Westernisers, and the Slavophiles.

The topics covered include, in random order:

biographical information and reminiscences
the Pan Slavic Movement and the Eastern Question
the People and Orthodoxy
the contemporary European situation
Russia and Europe
literature
suicide
court cases
the Jews
language, its uses and corruptions
aesthetics

Let’s look at some of these in more detail. In Part 1 we will focus on Dostoevsky’s involvement in the Diary with the wider political and historical questions of his time, and in Part 2 with the deeper issues of morality, language, literature and aesthetics.

The Pan Slavic Movement and the Eastern Question

In the summer of 1876, the Slavic population of Bulgaria and Serbia rose in revolt against their Ottoman overlords. The revolt failed, and the Ottomans were vicious and bloody in their reprisals, massacring an estimated 12,000 people. News of the massacres spread like wildfire throughout Europe, but had an especial impact in Russia, where there arose a spontaneous movement among the People to aid their brother Slavs. The country was galvanised in support of those Balkan states who had declared war on Turkey. Donations poured in, a unit of volunteer troops was formed under the command of General Chaievsky, and young idealistic women signed up to be nurses behind the lines. Widespread patriotic fervour reached epic proportions when the Tsar declared war on Turkey in the spring of 1877.

The intelligentsia were divided about all this. On the one hand, the Westernizers maintained that Russia could ill afford to alienate the other European powers, and had enough troubles at home without wasting money on expensive foreign campaigns abroad. On the other, the Slavophiles declared that this was a supra national movement of Slavs, and that Russia should seize the opportunity to establish a greater Slavic empire, with Constantinople as its new centre. Dostoevsky was on the Slavophile side of the debate, going so far as to discuss publicly his support for the Constantinople idea. In this, his position had shifted more to right from the 1860s, when he had still been at pains to show the differences between his ideas and the Slavophiles’.

In the Diary, he poured scorn on the Westernizers and those who were against the Pan Slavic movement. He denied categorically (and one has to admit, rather naively given what we know about the Tsar’s territorial ambitions) that Russia had any imperial or territorial interests in the region, and was keen only to provide a standard round which the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe could rally in their struggle to overthrow the Ottoman yoke: Russia is their [the Slavs] protector, and even perhaps their leader, but not their ruler, she is their mother, but not their mistress.

Dostoevsky indeed went further than the Slavophiles, in that he saw the Eastern Question as an opportunity for the resurgence of Orthodoxy. In one illuminating essay in the Dairy, he quoted extensively from a 16th century document: The Book of Predictions by Johann Lichtenburger, which had been sent to him by a reader. One passage in particular caught his attention: The great eagle shall arise in the East, and those who dwell in the islands of the West shall wail…he shall fly to the south to recover that which has been lost…And God shall kindle a love of charity in the eagle of the East that he may fly to this arduous task, his two wings flashing on the heights of Christianity. He saw in this firm proof of Russia’s mission: the eagle was Russia bringing Orthodoxy to Europe. He came to see this as Russia’s Holy Mission, and expressed this view repeatedly in the Diary: Does not Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy alone, contain the truth, and the salvation of the Russian People, and in ages yet to come, the salvation of the whole of humanity? Has not Orthodoxy alone preserved the divine image of Christ in all its purity? And perhaps the principle preordained mission of the Russian People, within the destiny of humanity as a whole, is simply to preserve within it this divine image of Christ in all its purity, and when the time comes, to reveal this image to the world that has lost its way! Russia’s involvement in the Turkish war, her suppression of Polish independence, her support for the Balkan Slavs were all supported by Dostoevsky, not for reasons of Russian imperialist expansionism, however, but for the spread of Orthodoxy, which he saw as a liberating, unifying force for Europe.

Orthodoxy and the People

The Diary shows the extent of Dostoevsky’s messianic thinking at the time, and how he had come to conflate the very notions of Russia and Orthodoxy. Earlier, in Demons, he had written: He who is not Russian, cannot be Orthodox, and he who is not Orthodox, cannot be Russian. In the Diary, he went even further, conflating Orthodoxy and the People: He who does not understand our People’s Orthodoxy will never understand our People themselves, a position which the liberal, atheistic, European, aristocratic Russians such as Turgenev detested.

Many liberal Westernizers were contemptuous of the religion of the People. The People did not know scripture, they were uneducated, stuck in a morass of bestiality and alcoholism. Dostoevsky refuted this idea. Although he acknowledged that the peasants had been brutalised by their serfdom, and that they were uneducated, and that there was a terrible wave of alcoholism after the emancipation, Dostoevsky maintained that nonetheless, the People knew the truth of scripture. It was part of their oral culture, kept alive in stories and legends and given real truth by the strength it gave them to endure their suffering: The people know Christ, their God, even better than they know ours, perhaps, although they never attended school. They know because for many centuries they endured much suffering and always in their grief they would hear of this God-christ.

Dostoevsky’s own Orthodoxy was problematic. His letters and his fiction attest to the great life long struggle between atheism and Christianity. In 1854 he had written to Fonvizina: I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so until the end of my life. In 1870 he wrote to his friend Maikov: the fundamental idea that has tormented me all my life long is the question of the existence of God. His fiction is based on the eternal dialectic between atheism and belief, culminating in the highly ambiguous and powerful Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. In the Diary, he reveals that his own faith had come to him out of suffering, and that he had learnt it from the People as a prisoner: I know [the People]: it was from them I accepted Christ into my soul again, Christ whom I had known while still a child in my parents’ home and whom I was about to lose when I, in my turn, transformed myself into a European liberal. For Dostoevsky, Orthodoxy was the belief of the People, not of the clergy, and to a certain extent he was anticlerical. The very first reference to Christianity only appeared in his published works in 1862, and his work of the mid 1860s – Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground- are both highly ambivalent about it. By the mid 1870s, the period covered by the Diary, his earlier agnosticism had gradually given way to a rabid but highly individualised version of Russian Orthodoxy. This internal conflict was partly alleviated by down-playing the supernatural elements of Christianity (he was scathing about all forms of mysticism, devoting several essays to debunking spiritualism and seances, which were fashionable at the time), in other words those elements that were harder for an educated 19^th Century intellectual to accept, and emphasising what one could call the ‘socialistic’ elements of Christianity, its emphasis on brotherly, neighbourly love, the figure of Christ himself as the redeemer of suffering: In Russian Christianity – real Russian Christianity- there is not even a trace of mysticism; there is only love for humanity and the image of Christ, those are the essentials.

The plight of the People was the key social question of the time. Westernizers were convinced that the only way forward for the People was for them to reject their past utterly, and embrace Western education and science. The Slavophiles, on the other hand, saw the way forward in the traditional peasant communes. Dostoevsky waded into this debate, asserting that the only way forward was for the intellegentsia to bow down before the People and listen to what they had to say, to let the People lead, to heal the dissociation that had existed between the intelligentsia and the People since the reforms of Peter the Great. He held that the emancipation of 1861 had finally come about because the government had been persuaded to bow down to the People: The Russian people were liberated with land precisely because we suddenly resolved to bow down before the People’s truth. Dostoevsky was convinced that the salvation of Russia, indeed of humanity itself, was to be found in the belief of the People: Our People love truth for the sake of truth and not for show. They may be coarse and vile and sinful and unremarkable, but when their hour sounds and the cause of common truth of all the People is to be undertaken, you will be astounded by the degree of freedom of spirit which they will show before the burdens of materialism, passion, the lust for money, and possessions, and even before the fear of the cruellest martyr’s death.

It could be said that Dostoevsky to a certain extent idolised the People. The People are by no means as hopeless, by no means as easily swayed and lacking in form as our cultured stratum. and he even went so far as to call them more developed than the intellectual classes. When he compared the Russian People with the fourth estate in Europe, he warned that the latter were moving towards a revolution which could never happen in Russia, where: Our demos is content… He was always quick to attack the Slavophiles for idealising the peasants: They regarded the Russian peasants almost as some French villagers or shepherdesses on porcelain teacups and seems to have been blind to his own idealisation of the People. However, he was also aware of their depravity, their cruelty, their stupidity, and this aspect of the People also features in the Diary, especially in some of the descriptions of the court cases.

Perhaps the biggest accusation that may be laid at Dostoevsky’s feet was his elevation to a spiritual level of the terrible suffering of the People. I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything he wrote in an early essay in the Diary. By making suffering a spiritual need, rather than a consequence of economic and political inequality, he made it easier for the Slavophiles to neglect to strive for any real practical improvements in the life of the People, improvements that would actually alleviate their suffering. He was quick to criticise the generation of the 1840s for emphasising the idealistic improvement of humanity in general, while continuing to live off the fruits of their own peasants’ labour. After all, one can all to easily learn to live with an abstractedly universal sorrow, nourishing oneself spiritually on the contemplation of one‘s own moral beauty and the flight of one’s civic thought, while still nourishing oneself bodily on the quitrent of those same peasants. However, he seems to have been blind to the fact that his own elevation of suffering as a spiritual need was of a similar species of hypocrisy.

The Contemporary European Situation

In the late 1870s the seeds of what would later become the First World War were being planted on the European continent. The influence of Austria, particularly in Italy, was waning; Bismarck had unified the German states, creating the Prussian empire in the process; Turkey was the sick man of Europe, and everyone knew it was simply a matter of time before the Ottoman empire imploded; England was the driving force of industrial modernity, had undisputed mastery of the sea, and a huge overseas empire; and France was riven by internal divisions between her Republican party, the socialists, and the Bonapartists. Dostoevsky ‘read’ contemporary European history in terms of the interaction of three forces: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy.

Dostoevsky detested Catholicism. Even atheism is preferable to Catholicism he wrote in the Diary. He held that Catholicism peddled a version of Christ who had actually succumbed to the third temptation of the Devil, and thereby gained the kingdoms of the world. This idea first appeared in The Idiot, and was developed as the key idea of The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. This was manifest in the statism of the Roman church, which sought to bring the states of Europe under its spiritual control, and which persisted in behaving as a temporal kingdom. Naturally, people were beginning to reject it, and atheism, materialism and socialism (the three evils of Dostoevsky’s personal ideology, and at the same time, the things he was most attracted to) were a direct result of Catholicism, and grew out of it: Roman Catholicism long ago sold out Christ for the sake of Earthly dominion, forcing humanity to turn away from it and so being the principle cause of Europe’s materialism and atheism, quite naturally this Catholicism engendered socialism in Europe. He analysed the internal situation in France, and the power struggles between the French and the Prussians in terms of a giant Catholic conspiracy theory, engineered on the one hand by the Pope, and on the other the Jesuits, whom he called a black army […] outside of humanity, outside of citizenship, outside of civilization. He warned that the Church with the Jesuits, in its effort to cling to temporal power, would finally turn to the people in Europe- in the past it had ignored them in favour of courting their rulers- and cynically sell them a version of Christianity that was similar to what the socialists were selling: It will distort Christ and sell him to them once more, as it sold him so many times before for the sake of earthly dominion, upholding the rights of the Inquisition, torturing people for freedom of conscience in the name of a loving Christ,…it has sold Christ to the Jesuits, and justifying “any means for the cause of Christ.”

As for Protestantism, Dostoevsky saw in it an expression of the German national character, which was defined only by its opposition to Catholicism. Protestantism was essentially a form of protest against the statism of Catholicism, and once Germany had won the battle against Catholicism, and defeated it, it would die out, having no Word of its own to replace the Catholic Word. Dostoevsky followed to a certain extent the thinking of the Slavophile philosopher Komiakov, in that they both saw in Protestantism a divisive, dissociative force, one which emphasised the individual at the expense of unity under the Church. These preachers always destroy the image of faith provided by the church and supply their very own. Dostoevsky especially held that Protestantism resulted in an increasing relativity of morals, a kind of anything-goes approach to moral questions, which naturally he deplored. He also followed Pobedonestsov in the view that Protestants worshipped Humanity, not God, and the emphasis they placed on the Bible was because the book had been of such valuable service to humanity, not because it was the word of God. This brought it perilously close to atheism.

Dostoevsky held that European history was driven by the power struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism: Catholicism is no longer Christianity and is transforming itself into idolatry, while Protestantism is taking giant steps towards atheism and toward inconstant, fashionable, changeable (and not eternal ) morality. He held that the only clear sighted person in Europe (apart from himself of course) was Bismarck, who, he claimed, fully understood the nature of the struggle and the stakes involved. Bismarck supported the French Republicans because he knew that the greatest threat to the peace of Europe was socialism on the one hand, and Rome, on the other. However, Bismarck was incapable of realising the true nature and mission of Russia, which was the proclamation of the Slavic
Word, the Word that would bring peace and unity to all of Europe, if only they would listen: The mission of the Russian is unquestionably pan European and universal.

Russia and Europe

Since the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia’s relationship with Europe had been fraught. On the one hand the Westernisers saw in European culture an answer to all of Russia’s problems; on the other, the Slavophiles rejected the European Enlightenment. Dostoevsky himself moved from a youthful position of espousing European socialist ideas – indeed he had been imprisoned for them- to a position closer to the Slavophiles in the 1860s. In the Diary in the late 1870s, he put forward views that were more extremely Slavophile. He always recognised European achievements in art, science and industry, and welcomed the benefits they could bring to Russia, but he lambasted Europe for its atheism, its materialism, its warmongering for the sake of market dominance and economic stability, and its socialism. Again and again in the Diary he laments the fact that Europe had no understanding of Russia, that it did not recognise Russia as a European Power with a unique contribution to make to the European scene: For Europe, Russia is a puzzle, and Russia’s every action is a puzzle and so it will be until the very end.

There were fundamental spiritual and moral differences between Europe and Russia: The European spirit is perhaps not as versatile as ours but is more self-enclosed and particular, despite the fact that that spirit has certainly been elaborated with more detail and clarity than ours, and while Russians were equipped to see these differences, Europeans were not. Naturally, Europeans were capable only of understanding Russia through their own eyes, in the light their own mores. They were thus incapable of realising that Russia had no territorial or imperialistic ambitions in Europe. Russia’s whole power, her whole personality, so to say, and her whole future mission lie in her self-denying unselfishness.

The chief obstacle to European understanding of Russia was the view of Russia that the Westernisers – specifically those Russian liberal expatriates who lived in Europe - had emphasised in their interactions with Europeans, a view which stressed the backwardness, exoticism and barbarity of Russia. Those Russians who have settled abroad have an image of Russia and her People as a drunken peasant woman holding a bottle of vodka. Dostoevsky makes it clear in the Dairy that he regarded these kind of Russians as only half Russians, sarcastically calling them ‘wise men’, ‘straightline thinking people’ ‘traitors’. In their rush to espouse Western mores, these people were in effect debasing themselves and betraying Russia.

oooOOOooo

In his understanding of Europe, his times, and the destiny of Russia, Dostoevsky showed more Hegelian influence than he was perhaps aware of. His idea that European history was driven by a conflict between its three religions betrays a Hegelian way of looking at history, both in the existence of underlying forces and in their triadic interaction. Dostoevsky’s ideas on contemporary politics and history are marred by a religious idealism that at its least malign was simply naïve, and at its most unpleasant was frankly fascist. An example of this is his conviction that nations were guided by a spiritual destiny, and that it was the destiny of Russia to be the servant of all humanity, if only the European powers could see that. He who would be first in the Kingdom of God must become the servant of all. This is how I understand Russia’s destiny in its ideal form.

It’s not at all certain that the Poles, or the Ukranians, or the perpetually restive tribes of the Caucasus would have agreed with this.

Coming next in Part 2: Dostoevsky on literature, language, aesthetics and suicide.

Tolstoy on love

2010-10-04T20:57:00.001+08:00

There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.