Austin Ratner's Blog, page 11

That Old Nerd Magic

The Lord of the Rings Box Set by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, “The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex.” Lane says he read it at 11 and 12 years old, exactly when I did--an age when a pretty girl was scarier than an orc. Lane says that Tolkien's epic particularly suits "those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back. Tolkien’s characters, like teen-agers, feel at once lonely and sociable ... prey to private fears, and the book itself, though dazzled by innocence, is also hungry to know the worst—to confront all varieties of darkness and dereliction."

I was interested to learn from Lane’s article, written in his characteristic style (plush, jaded, yet sensitive), that Tolkien lost his father when he was three years old. This lends an added poignance, Lane observes, to Tolkien's idea of "The Return of the King" and I think to the books' whole darkly romantic rationale.

"[A]nd yet to give in to it," Lane writes, "to cave in to it, as most of us did on a first reading—betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.” There's clearly partial truth in this, as some Tolkien fans attest with their near-pathological level of absorption with the pretend, with the sexless, latency world of Middle-earth. On the other hand, Tolkien's power of conjuration derives from his own immersion in reality, if a bookish level of it. Wizards are not born but made, by long study of their spell books.

Tolkien was a linguist and mythographer who in some cases borrowed names directly from existing traditions, such as the dwarves from the Icelandic Poetic Edda. And if you compare Tolkien’s description of “Smeagol” in The Fellowship of the Ring to John Milton’s description of fallen angel Mammon in Paradise Lost, it’s obvious that Tolkien consciously fashioned Gollum after Milton’s gold-digging devil (which Milton had in turn borrowed from tradition in the first place). That’s allusion and artistic theft of the most creative and delicious sort. The result is that Tolkien, like Milton, like Mammon, taps a vein of ancient gold, treasure refined over many centuries in the alembic of human imaginations, and then of course Tolkien refines and orders it further in his own imagination. What Lane rightly calls the “outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth” reflects the outlandish plenitude of the big and rangy reality of the human mind and the long human experience on earth.

On looking into The Lord of the Rings again, I find they hold up better than any of my sci-fi favorites from childhood and adolescence (with the possible exception of Douglas Adams). The scene at the entrance to the Mines of Moria is a wonder. The little band of travelers confronts a secret entrance to the Mines, and Gandalf says, “these doors are probably governed by words,” meaning that there is an Elvish password—but he might as well be speaking for the books themselves, since they are themselves words that open a secret entrance to a vast and unknown land.

Tolkien insinuates the menace and the vastness of the Mines with great sleight of hand. He has Gandalf tell of paths ahead that a pony can’t walk because too narrow or too steep, wells and pools that you shouldn’t drink from, and shows us the steps leading up into total darkness and a passageway, but nothing beyond. When Gandalf magically lights the way, he does so with a light that’s only bright enough to show the floor one step in front of him. We hear the sounds of Bill the Pony being killed outside the closed doors to the Mines, but don’t get to see it.

The Peter Jackson movie versions, incidentally, employ very different, and to my mind inferior, techniques. Tolkien hinted where Jackson tries to show everything by the light of noon. By doing so Jackson restricts the territory available to the imagination, which does a better job than his computer animators ever could. But Tolkien is thankfully a strong enough writer to purge from memory, after a little rereading, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood’s painfully uncomplicated, unmagical, uninviting performances and that score that seems to parrot the trumpets of medieval heraldry more than to evoke them.

Moria—a byzantine underground complex of passages, chambers, mansions, bridges, mines, and fire pits resembling Dante’s Hell—was constructed underneath the Misty Mountains thousands of years ago, in “a happier time,” by dwarves that have long since abandoned it to who knows what—the things that live under mountains. By sending the fellowship to revisit someone else’s creation, now abandoned, it seems to me that Tolkien has set before them his own task: to explore the mysterious, byzantine works created in bygone ages, to open the chasms of darkness within. This sort of nostalgia mixed with curiosity is in so many ways what characterizes plain old English Romanticism. Wouldn’t Samuel Taylor Coleridge get Middle-earth?




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The Burrower

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Roald Dahl is the burrowing fox of children's literature. His mind burrows deeper and deeper into a story possibility and discovers within it a world of miniature wonders. He takes you on a voyage into mental and physical inner space--inside the labyrinth-like chocolate factory, into the underground tunnels of the fantastic Mr. Fox, inside a giant peach (in James and the Giant Peach) through a tunnel, one notes, that looks to James like a foxhole.

Willy Wonka, the fictional proprietor of the chocolate factory, is like Walt Disney a curious mixture of showman, pied piper, puritan, capitalist, and wish-granting genie--a distinctly Anglo-American figure. The four spoiled children in the book--Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt, and Mike Teavee--inspire Wonka and his creator, Roald Dahl, to an ecstasy of conscientious judgment. At the same time, Wonka is himself a captain of the childhood obesity industry, an owner of a massive sweatshop of non-union Oompa-Loompas, and a celebrant of treats, goodies, excess, and culinary delight! The moral miscalibration of the factory is creepier in the Gene Wilder movie than in the book, especially accompanied by Quentin Blake's innocuous illustrations. But the harsh punishments of the "bad" children always make me a little nervous. In short, Roald Dahl seems never to have gotten around to that psychoanalysis he needed. But who has?

Or maybe it's just that he's so good at thinking like children do, in unbridled wishes and dark prophecies, in subterfuges, feints, and magical associations. Whatever his life-story, his imaginary tales are the best--he always knows when to show and when to tell, he's very sure at the rudder. They're entertainments of consummate craftsmanship and I don't think it can be held against him that they speak both to children's dreams and to their nightmares as well. A parent must get his own mind straight if he's to help guide a child through Dahl's moral quandaries: it's good indeed to wait your turn, be grateful for what you get, etc., but the consequence of breaking these rules isn't being sucked up a pipe or shrunk to 2 inches tall; it's good to like the sweet taste of life, and there's no real punishment for that either; and maturity is not avoidance of punishment, as the Taliban would have it, but doing what you yourself think is happy, just, and good.

But even if you're not a vigilant interpreter of the tale, because you're tired or you forgot or you yourself don't know the answer or you don't care (like Pierre), it really doesn't matter, because Dahl's protagonists are always centers of moral calm, a perfectly safe and inviting vehicle for a child to climb into for a journey into the rabbit hole.

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In the Penal Colony

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A Goodreads friend makes the point that Kafka is funny. He's probably the funniest writer I've ever read. Partly the world of paranoid fantasy he depicts is just so familiar to me. (What? Is there something wrong with that? Why are you judging me?) I have laughed till I was in tears reading Kafka, and supposedly Kafka himself, his friend Max Brod, and others of his tiny Prague literary circle would often laugh quite a bit when he read aloud from his work. That said, it's true that Kafka's subject matter never strays far from paranoia, self-loathing, loneliness, and self-destruction; so how can it be funny?

Kafka is the great innovator of psychologically sophisticated expressionism. Many writers before him depicted their dreams and imaginings, but Kafka does so with a certain groundbreaking insight into the psychological motives and irrational methods of dream-life. And I believe it's that sophisticated faculty of psychological observation that makes him so funny. More than any other writer, Kafka is alert to the conscience as a potentially overactive and irrational psychical force, a wily, tormenting inner adversary which uses the imagination as its weapon in its internecine wars against the human self. It's that insight that allows him to parody (and describe) the conscience and its irrational methods, rather than be duped by them and take them at face value. Borges, who was so influenced by Kafka (he invokes the name "Qaphqa" in his Kafkaesque story "The Lottery in Babylon") is rarely very funny precisely because he chooses to take seriously the perversities perpetrated on him by his conscience. The Borgesian conscience bricks Borges up in a labyrinth, but unlike Kafka he mistakes the bricks and walls of the labyrinth for reality. He isn't onto the mischief of his own conscience and cannot laugh at it as Kafka can. This makes Borges rather lugubrious reading, even though his conscience destroys him and his claim on reality with grace and elegant persuasion.

Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" is the finest parodic description of overzealous conscience ever written. It's about a torture device for prisoners (that is faintly reminiscent of Pilates equipment) and the penal colony where prisoners are senselessly tortured. Try reading the story as an allegory on the structure and function of the human conscience. Where it says "penal colony" read "conscience." Where it says "our former Commandant" read "childhood." Certainly, where it describes the torture device, read "conscience." "It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," says the officer in the very first line.

"In the Penal Colony," like "Metamorphosis" and the novel The Trial, is of course tragic as well as witty. Every Kafka story is wise, profound, darkly humorous in some way, and so dense with knowledge, joy, and pain that I have to read a little bit and walk away (it's hard for me to read many Kafka stories in a row). Some stories are more subdued (like "In the Penal Colony" or "The Hunger Artist"), some more flagrantly ridiculous. "The Judgment" is flat-out hilarious. So is "Report to an Academy." But every Kafka story is brilliant, crafted with a blend of artistic control, imaginative freedom, and fearlessly scientific self-observation unique to Kafka, and realized with a nuance and specificity found only in the greatest of all works of literature.

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Philosopher King

Republic by Plato

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Republic is amazing in that it contains inchoate within it many of the major arguments later put forward by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, Mill, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, and many others. Because of the style--elenchus, or Socratic dialogue--Plato's many profound insights are embedded in a rambling river of desultory, all-night sort of conversation between Socrates and Plato's brothers (or their fictive analogues, anyway) and several other interlocutors who are probably sorry they ever showed up. The style is, however, fairly easy reading, at least in G.M.A. Grube's translation.

Among the major useful ideas: that our morals, laws, and values may in some cases only reflect the self-interest of the creators of those laws and values (both Nietzsche and Marx's thinking pivots on this fulcrum) and that people may not be aware of this, may take their values for granted without cynicism, and that the ruling class would have it that way; that people's minds contain conflicting attitudes to the same objects and that among these attitudes are--in everyone--"lawless desires," including even an unconscious desire of incest with one's mother and of parricide, and that such desires ought to be subject to rational consideration, modification, and control (Freud would in general agree); that knowledge can be more or less certain and that the philosopher seeks the daylight of certain truth when confronted with the uncertainty of incomplete perception, such as in the case of shadows and darkness; that the pursuit of truth is the highest pursuit. You will also find such famous passages in here as "The Parable of the Cave"--a useful contribution to epistemology and at the same time the basis for a good deal of other-worldly fabulism--and such famous concepts as the "philosopher-king," the latter half of which George Bush so well exemplified.

The Republic is also, however, pervaded by a corruptive anxiety about the aforementioned "lawless desires" and the threat they represent to the security and well-being of a civic population. This anxiety drives Plato to some extraordinarily irrational conclusions. For example, "[H]ymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city. If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law...." Hmm. Here is another whopper: "[in a spirit of approval] Nor, I believe, does Homer mention sweet desserts anywhere." Well, that is, after all, what we so much admire about Homer--he never tempted his readers to binge on chocolate, or even Nilla wafers. Plato's views on art and education, which make up probably a third or a half of the text--are in general off the reservation. Plato well understands the deep-seated irrationality of so much instinctual human motivation and the importance of reason, but he overlooks the equal human propensity for irrationality of conscience--the sort that could be said to drive fascism and other forms of political and religious extremism. But perhaps this irrational censoriousness belonged to Socrates, truly. Perhaps Plato was blinded by love of his dead mentor, to whom he devoted so much of his life and thought.


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The Explanation of Explanations

Aspects of Scientific Explanation by Carl G. Hempel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In 1965 Carl Hempel sought to describe the process of scientific explanation. While it may not sound like an original or important thing to do, it was. For now you'll just have to trust me because I'm the sort of person that electively reads books entitled Aspects of Scientific Explanation.

As you might guess, Hempel's account isn't exactly entertaining, nor is it intended to be, but it is the clearest and most organized account of the subject I know. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that "recent discussion [of scientific explanation] really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. This model has had many advocates (including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel."

Why is it important to describe or define scientific explanation? Consider a recent article in The New York Times about the Catholic Church's revival of exorcism. Here is a passage from the article:

"Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin. A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614." Progress? ("Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages." --Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Devil possession is a way of explaining the symptoms listed above. A particular mental illness would be another way. The explanation that you credit has serious implications for what you do about the problem.

Everybody attempts to explain stuff to themselves and others every single day, and arguments about the validity of various explanations are plentiful in a society with the right to freedom of expression. The senators from Oklahoma don't believe that global warming is explained by the greenhouse effect--whether they're right or they're wrong, their opinion means something significant in the computation of our national response and therefore means something for the fate of human beings on earth.

If everybody better understood how scientific explanation works, it might help to settle these arguments rationally over the validity or type of various explanations and theories (explanations and theories are much the same thing). Hempel provides criteria by which one might assess an explanation; one could ask whether an explanation had a scientific character or not or whether it was really an explanation at all versus a different ideational product of the mind.

I was introduced to Hempel and also Hans Reichenbach while researching the scientific validity of psychoanalysis, about which endless debates rage and roar over whether it's science or "pseudo-science." Like Reichenbach, Hempel suggests that knowledge is generalization from repeated instances (Francis Bacon's "induction by enumeration") and that explanation seeks to define specific observed relationships as instances of general relationships established in principle. Hempel says of psychology, "[W]hile frequently the regularities invoked cannot be stated with the same generality and precision as in physics or chemistry, it is clear at least that the general character of those explanations conforms to our earlier characterization." He makes a similar argument regarding the study of history, asserting that good historians explain historical events on the scientific deductive-nomological model, but of necessity with less than mathematical precision. To denote the somewhat lesser degree of precision, he calls historical explanation an "explanation sketch," which is "scientifically acceptable" since further research can confirm or disconfirm it. Says Hempel, "Explanation sketches are common also outside of history; many explanations in psychoanalysis, for instance, illustrate this point." So ... stick that in your Popper and Karl it. With Carl Hempel on your side, you too can win arguments staged in Goodreads reviews of books that are out of print and unrated. But at least you yourself will know.

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On Bullshit Part 2: Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be John Mayer's Lover

Addendum to previous post on Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit:

John Mayer's song "Daughters" is a perfect example of bullshit, as Frankfurt defines it. Here is the chorus, which I sometimes hear in the vicinity of the frozen food section:

Fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

I could go on and on about the hard-wearing odor of bullshit on these lines, and I will. First, allow me to translate the sentences into their component vectors of sideways bullshit. So: John Mayer--a notorious bachelor with no children--wishes sanctimoniously to remind actual parents of some things they may not have considered: namely that kids need love and that what parents do matters. Thank you, John Mayer. I have two children, but I thought all they needed was Amy's frozen Mac and Cheese. Then, as I was opening the grocery store freezer, I heard your song and I realized: mac and cheese is not all. Children also need love. It's not either / or. And John Mayer was good and wise enough to make sure everyone strafed in the merciless enfilade of his marketing apparatus knows that.

When I first listened carefully to the song, it seemed weird to me that this guy was singing about daughters becoming "lovers"--and that that was somehow the utilitarian principle on which he based his exhortation, love your daughters. I knew nothing at that time about John Mayer, but the "lovers" reference seemed to imply that Mayer did not have children of his own, because most parents don't really like to think of their kids' future love lives at all, let alone orient their parenting around their kids' future preparedness to be good "lovers." So I googled John Mayer (he does not have kids that he knows of) and I also found the lyrics to the first verse of the song, "Daughters":

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
But she's just like a maze
Where all of the walls are continually changed
And I've done all I can
To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands
Now I'm starting to see
Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

Fathers, be good to your daughters...

Now I get it. He's singing, in so many words, I care, I am not a womanizer but a gallant knight: chivalrous (I sing 'On behalf of every man / Looking out for every girl'), pure ('it's got nothing to do with me'), idealistic and yet resigned to the fallenness of the natural world ('I've done all I can'). So fathers be good to your daughters, because if you're not good to them, they will probably grow up to be John Mayer's lover and annoy the shit out of him because of all the baggage you saddled them with, and he will gallantly do all he can but he just can't undo the damage done by your crap parenting. But he doesn't stop there. Whereas fathers can ruin their daughters as future companions for John Mayer, mothers can ruin their daughters as future mothers of future possible companions for John Mayer. This guy John Mayer is a visionary. You see, if these badly mothered girls go on to mother their own children and these children turn out to be female, and if John Mayer is still alive and able to swallow Viagra by the time they reach maturity, these girls will only be another generation of lovers who provide less than optimal results for John Mayer. So mothers be good to your daughters, too. Parents: stop thinking of yourself all the time and start thinking of John Mayer and the inconveniences your daughters' baggage may represent for his love life.

This is a rare species of bullshit. Standard bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt teaches, is when someone says things not because they're true but because the statements achieve a certain goal. The standard bullshit element in this song is John Mayer's attempt to persuade even more women to have sex with John Mayer without John Mayer having to feel guilt. However, when it comes to bullshit, John Mayer goes the extra mile--just as John Mayer does in his efforts to prepare multiple generations of women to love him properly. It's just not everyday that a bullshitter provides such obvious evidence of his ulterior motives and his lack of authority to say what he's saying.

I wonder whether John Mayer ever heard "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys." It's a better song and forecasts perhaps some well-deserved alone-time for John the Paladin:

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
'Cause they'll never stay home and they're always alone
Even with someone they love

On Trial for a Kiss

The Trial by Franz Kafka

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


On September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka stayed up all night writing a highly autobiographical, somewhat fantastical, short story called “The Judgment.” Twelve years later he was dead. He had published little, but what he’d written in that decade—including “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and The Trial—was a thunderbolt staked in the heart of literature unlike any since Boccaccio’s Decameron.

From Boccaccio (and Dante and Petrarch) emanates that realist, psychological humanism which passed through Chaucer into its apogee in the plays of Shakespeare, and resounded across the next centuries in the work of the great modernists, like James Joyce. Kafka belongs to this tradition, clearly, but he also inaugurates a new way forward.

John Updike wrote that Kafka “felt abashed before the fact of his own existence…. So singular, he spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” William Hubben said that Kafka “expressed the terror of life in such unforgettable images that comparisons with classical writers suggest themselves.” And George Steiner notes that kafkaesque is now a coinage in a hundred languages. “The letter K is his,” Steiner said, “as S is not Shakespeare’s or D Dante’s (it is in analogy with Dante and Shakespeare that W.H. Auden placed Franz Kafka as the shaping mirror of our new dark ages).”

Updike, Hubben, and Steiner are right about Kafka’s importance, but unenlightening about the reason for it. Furthermore, they seem to think of modernity as a time of darkness, and wish to anoint Kafka as its bard—a common, and a mistaken, view. John Gardner is perhaps more helpful. In Kafka’s work, Gardner writes, “particular details of psychological reality are directly translated into physical reality…. [T]he reality imitated is, not in one or two details but in many, that of our dreams…. The presentation tends to be that of conventional realistic fiction; only the subject matter has changed.”

This sounds like “magical realism,” and in fact Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is perhaps more closely associated with that movement than anybody else, was directly inspired by Kafka. In a 1981 interview for The Paris Review, Peter H. Stone asked Marquez, “How did you start writing?” Marquez answered, “...One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka: I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read ‘The Metamorphosis.’ The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect....’ When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”

Expressionism existed before; artists have always depicted the contents of their imaginations, often in a realist style. Look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or at the ancient Greek plays. But what separates Kafka and much of the magical realism he inspired from previous examples of expressionism is that he wrote with psychological insight and intent. “Despite his power of fantasy,” Harold Bloom says, “Kafka is as empirical as Freud or Beckett.” And Kafka was influenced by Freud. In a diary entry from September 23, 1912, Kafka noted that throughout the writing of his famous story, “The Judgment,” in which he first worked out his general psychological-expressionist method, he had “thoughts of Freud, of course.”

The Kafkaesque expressionist is a psychologically-educated spelunker in the caves of his own mind; by contrast, Aeschylus’s expressionism, while loaded with psychological meaning to an almost shocking degree, feels less psychologically self-aware, less attuned to the mechanisms of psychic change, more intuitive. “The dilemma of Orestes,” A.D. Nuttall writes, “is essentially public: one god says ‘Do this,’ another god says, ‘Do that.’ There is no question of attributing hesitation or procrastination to Orestes as a feature of his character (indeed, he can hardly be said to have character).” That could be called naïve expressionism, whereas Kafka represents a psychologically sophisticated expressionism—the sort, for example, that some critics have observed in the work of filmmaker David Lynch. Chris Rodley commented on Lynch’s film Blue Velvet: “The movie does seem to display or illustrate, almost perfectly, certain Freudian concerns and theories—and in an extreme, undiluted way.” He then asked Lynch, “Was that intentional?” Lynch said, “[F]ilm has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious. It’s just a great language for that.” Not so great, however, as fiction—at least since Kafka got to it.

Kafka adds to the biblical-Shakespearean tradition of inquiry into character a research into the dream-life, into the imagination as a psychodynamic force, into the manner in which emotions distort perceptions of reality. Existentialists like to point out that despite the pervasive sense of guilt and accusation in The Trial, K. never knows what he’s accused of. Updike was right in this much: it’s K.’s whole life that’s on trial—in the courtroom of his own over-zealous conscience. And we could say that were there one specific cause, repression obscures such painful memories and ideas. But all that being said, there are certainly hints as to what he’s accused of (or has accused himself of). At the end of chapter six, K. kisses Leni, his lawyer’s mistress. “Joseph!” his uncle cries, “how could you do it! … the poor sick lawyer … In all probability you have helped to bring about his complete collapse and so hastened the death of the man on whose good offices you are dependent. And you leave me, your uncle, to wait here in the rain for hours and worry myself sick, just feel, I’m wet through and through!”


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The One Book to Have With You on a Desert Isle

The Riverside Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If stranded on a desert isle, is there really any question which one book you should have with you? All I can say is that if it were me, I would want that book to be Survival Guide for the Mariner. However, Shakespeare's complete works, collected all into one volume is about as magnificent as any single art object could be.

Harry Levin writes of the age in which Shakespeare lived: "[T]he most salient characteristic of Jacobean culture was its devotion to the pursuit of knowledge, which involved the most searching introspection and the most fanciful speculation, along with the ambitious program for science that Bacon outlined...." And E.M.W. Tillyard, similarly, writes: "The Elizabethans were interested in the nature of man with a fierceness rarely paralleled in other ages; and that fierceness delighted in exposing all the contrarieties in man’s composition." If you believe these scholars then, Shakespeare was by no means unique in his study of the machinations of the human heart. Tillyard again: "[N]ot to know yourself was to resemble the beasts, if not in coarseness at least in deficiency of education. To know yourself was not egoism but the gateway to all virtue…." Everybody in those days wanted to understand their own passions, the better to harness them to reason. What is impossible to ignore is that Shakespeare observed them and creatively depicted them better than anyone in his own time, and better, possibly, than anyone before or since.

Harry Levin's General Introduction to the 1974 Riverside Shakespeare is a lucid, unpretentious skeleton key to the meanings and methods of the uncanny William Shakespeare--an essential piece of reading and a good place to start. I don't like the double columns on the vast pages of the Riverside. It takes forever to get through just one page, which I find demoralizing. But this is the cost of having it all in one volume I guess.



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Polished Bones and Hobnailed Boots

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The style of narration in The Emigrants is akin to a pathologist murmuring into his dictaphone at the end of a long day of autopsies. It confronts ugliness, despair, and destruction with a mask of neutral reserve and tireless scientific dedication to detail. It's unique and beautiful, breathes real life, and artfully expresses a melancholy feeling of obligation to history:

"And so they are ever returning to us, the dead," Sebald writes of the discovery of the body of mountain-climber Johannes Naegli 72 years after his disappearance. "At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots." (p. 23)

For much of the first half or three-quarters of the book, I considered it marred by an orthodox devotion to elusiveness, ambiguity, misery, uncertainty and a Baudrillardian insistence on the link between commerce and destruction: "Deauville ... the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction." (p. 116)

I advise you to pause midway through and marvel at Sebald's necromantic power to conjure melancholy. Then read five poems by Walt Whitman and the following quote from astronaut Alan Bean and call me in the morning.

Bean, who went to the moon with Apollo 12, said this about his homecoming from the desolation of the moon:

"I've not complained about traffic. I'm glad there are people around. One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers and I'd just go around there, get an ice cream cone or something and just watch the people go by and think, 'Boy, we're lucky to be here.' Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden."

And then, having shored yourself up, you must push on through to the end of this book, where Sebald proves himself so much more human and courageous a writer than those who satisfy themselves with a specious finality of melancholy and bleakness alone, those who regard ignorance and obscurity as an inevitability of epistemology rather than a byproduct of psychology--repression--as Sophocles and Freud would have it. The narrator confesses a feeling of guilt about omitting to ask his friend Max Ferber about his parents, who were killed by Nazis when he was a boy, and on p. 183 Ferber says, echoing Wittgenstein's famous last sentence of the Tractatus, "of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing." The narrator and Ferber are united in repression and silence, the German in repression of crime, the Jew in repression of suffering: "When I asked if he remembered saying goodbye to his parents at the airport, Ferber replied, ... he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them, or whether he and his parents had embraced or not." (p. 187)

At last we are squarely back in the realm of Freud and Sophocles: "Naturally, I took steps," Ferber says, "consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents' sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years." (p. 191)

This dehiscence of memory and guilt late in the novel serves to explain and also redeem the forsakenness that preceded. And the motivic butterfly which has haunted the narrative throughout like a recurrent dream or uncatchable memory turns out to be a messenger of liberation after all, albeit a messenger with a somewhat unstable, fluttery flight path.

A difficult but magnificent book.




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On Bullshit

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Why is there so much bullshit?” asks Princeton philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt. He doesn't ask plaintively, but rather in the formal manner of a rigorous philosophical inquiry. He defines bullshit, more or less, not as lying, but as talking about something without knowing about it and without caring whether you know. You could be right, you could be wrong, but you don't know it. All you know is your agenda. That's propaganda in a nutshell. A reckless disregard for truth, and subordination of truth to an agenda that is more important than the truth. Commentary on cable news channels is complete bullshit. The commentators don't care about facts, they care about ratings, or perhaps about some political goal, like taxes or terrorism or defeating their ideological enemies at the polls, and they're content to say anything to get the desired end-result. It's a serpentine Machiavellianism in regard to fact.

On the other hand, as Frankfurt is well aware, the academy is full of bullshit (according to him Yale, where he used to teach, is the bullshit capital of the world--probably because of Paul de Man), precisely because over the last half-century the academy has succumbed to an entrenched skepticism of truth and reality as "constructions."

"Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about," Frankfurt says. Because so many academics have profound doubts about the existence of truth and fact (yes, it makes no sense...), they are obligated to bullshit or to shut up, and unfortunately they have chosen the former.

The word bullshit, when applied to a fitting object, is pleasurable to say and to read. It is a highly specific word--it names a species of dishonesty that differs from lying, as Frankfurt clearly shows--and therefore it's highly descriptive, honest, truthful, useful. In short it's the opposite of what it names with fitting scorn. It is honorable. It is the shibboleth of all those who care about what is true and what is ...



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