The worst embarrassment in the history of American Modernism is the fact that one of its greatest poets, Ezra Pound, passed through World War Two with his lips firmly pressed to Benito Mussolini's ass. When Pound did come up for air during those years, it was only to spew lame-brained, pro-fascist, anti-Semitic bile over Mussolini-controlled radio. This should serve to remind us that great poets can also be major assholes. Harold Bloom has written that Pound's broadcasts "ought to be read by admirers of his poetry, since they feature virulent anti-Semitic diatribes, exactly contemporary with Hitler's Holocaust..." There is also the matter of The Cantos, Pound's large-scale masterpiece and one of the undeniable monuments of Modernism. Some Pound scholars would prefer to think that the poet of the Cantos is somehow a different man from the fascist ranter of the radio broadcasts, but even a cursory reading of the Cantos shows that this is hardly the case. Some of the poems are infected with the same strains of anti-Semitism and fascism we find nakedly displayed in the broadcasts.
I've recently discovered that all of Pound's scripts are now online at the following webpage: Ezra Pound WWII Broadcasts. Anyone interested in reading Pound's worst writings (that judgment is both moral and aesthetic) can now do so.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov
Near the middle of Pnin, Nabokov pulls out of his stylistic hat a gorgeously lyrical sentence that proves there's nothing necessarily fallacious about imitative form:
The brook in the gully behind the garden, a trembling trickle most of the time, was tonight a loud torrent that tumbled over itself in its avid truckling to gravity, as it carried through corridors of beech and spruce last year's leaves, and some leafless twigs, and a brand-new, unwanted soccer ball that had recently rolled into the water from the sloping lawn after Pnin had disposed of it by defenestration. (108)
Look beyond the alliterative music of this lovely line and notice that it's an overloaded, 'flooded' sentence that flows meanderingly down the page in a formal parallel to the swollen stream it describes. This is writing and wit of a very high order.
Unfortunately, the novel is not as good as its best moments. Pnin contains beautiful, unexpected passages on painting (94-98) and an equally unexpected, moving digression on the Nazi genocide (133-135), but as a whole it's an oddly disjointed novel, a loose collection of academic episodes that can be read as a more traditional precursor to that academic novel to end all academic novels, Pale Fire. Pnin's most important relationship, that between Pnin and the unnamed, Nabokov-like narrator who is 'unmasked' in the last chapter as Pnin's erotic and professional rival and who is possibly--or even probably--Nabokovianly mad, is a distant but distinct pre-echo of the relationship between Pale Fire's John Shade and his mad annotator, Kinbote. To better understand Pnin, however, we should perhaps ignore this precursorial significance and think more deeply about the relationship itself. For it seems that Pnin's narrator, a shadowy and almost purely grammatical presence until he usurps Pnin's story and academic position in the surprising final chapter, significantly changes over the course of the novel. (And this change itself might be Nabokov's sly, subtle parody of the obligatorily altering 'round' characters prescribed by E. M. Forster and his followers.) In the beginning, the narrator is a cruel caricaturist of his central character, inadvertently constructing a case study in the cruelty of the comic. But just as we the readers begin to settle comfortably into this interpretation, this appreciation of the narrator's ironic unreliability, that narrator becomes more sympathetic toward his antihero, even as he vanquishes him. (It's easy and costs nothing, of course, to sentimentalize those we have destroyed, but the narrator in the novel's latter half exhibits sympathy toward Pnin, not sentimentality.) The turning point may be the aforementioned passage on the Holocaust near the end of chapter five: these pages mark the narrator's unwritten realization that he's telling a tale more tragic than comic, that his caricatural project is foredoomed because his real subject is the impossibility of comedy in a world of genocide, death camps and the Gulag... But I hesitate to push this idea any further. Like all Nabokovian word-worlds, Pnin is a place of irony abounding. It is a realm where all interpretations are but castles built on quicksand. A deconstructive reading might find the novel issuing in an aporia (what a surprise!) between Pnin's and the narrator's versions of Pnin, but this attempt comes quickly and obviously to shipwreck on the fact that we only have 'Pnin's version' as mediated through the narrator, a character who knows Pnin, for the most part, at second- and third-hand--who doesn't really, in short, know Pnin at all. So if this text does in fact vanish into a postmodern fog, it's not the De Manian pea soup of undecidability but the more immediately troubling ground-cloud of individual unknowability. And aren't we all lost in that fog? this novel finally asks. Forced to know the characters of our world through the mediation of others, we muddle through a life that's half-mystery, half-conjecture, only to find ourselves at the end of it in thrall to that ultimately unsettling other, memory, that unreliable narrator inside our heads. Yes, we too are such stuff as Nabokovian novels are made on. And our little lives are rounded with copyright pages.
The brook in the gully behind the garden, a trembling trickle most of the time, was tonight a loud torrent that tumbled over itself in its avid truckling to gravity, as it carried through corridors of beech and spruce last year's leaves, and some leafless twigs, and a brand-new, unwanted soccer ball that had recently rolled into the water from the sloping lawn after Pnin had disposed of it by defenestration. (108)
Look beyond the alliterative music of this lovely line and notice that it's an overloaded, 'flooded' sentence that flows meanderingly down the page in a formal parallel to the swollen stream it describes. This is writing and wit of a very high order.
Unfortunately, the novel is not as good as its best moments. Pnin contains beautiful, unexpected passages on painting (94-98) and an equally unexpected, moving digression on the Nazi genocide (133-135), but as a whole it's an oddly disjointed novel, a loose collection of academic episodes that can be read as a more traditional precursor to that academic novel to end all academic novels, Pale Fire. Pnin's most important relationship, that between Pnin and the unnamed, Nabokov-like narrator who is 'unmasked' in the last chapter as Pnin's erotic and professional rival and who is possibly--or even probably--Nabokovianly mad, is a distant but distinct pre-echo of the relationship between Pale Fire's John Shade and his mad annotator, Kinbote. To better understand Pnin, however, we should perhaps ignore this precursorial significance and think more deeply about the relationship itself. For it seems that Pnin's narrator, a shadowy and almost purely grammatical presence until he usurps Pnin's story and academic position in the surprising final chapter, significantly changes over the course of the novel. (And this change itself might be Nabokov's sly, subtle parody of the obligatorily altering 'round' characters prescribed by E. M. Forster and his followers.) In the beginning, the narrator is a cruel caricaturist of his central character, inadvertently constructing a case study in the cruelty of the comic. But just as we the readers begin to settle comfortably into this interpretation, this appreciation of the narrator's ironic unreliability, that narrator becomes more sympathetic toward his antihero, even as he vanquishes him. (It's easy and costs nothing, of course, to sentimentalize those we have destroyed, but the narrator in the novel's latter half exhibits sympathy toward Pnin, not sentimentality.) The turning point may be the aforementioned passage on the Holocaust near the end of chapter five: these pages mark the narrator's unwritten realization that he's telling a tale more tragic than comic, that his caricatural project is foredoomed because his real subject is the impossibility of comedy in a world of genocide, death camps and the Gulag... But I hesitate to push this idea any further. Like all Nabokovian word-worlds, Pnin is a place of irony abounding. It is a realm where all interpretations are but castles built on quicksand. A deconstructive reading might find the novel issuing in an aporia (what a surprise!) between Pnin's and the narrator's versions of Pnin, but this attempt comes quickly and obviously to shipwreck on the fact that we only have 'Pnin's version' as mediated through the narrator, a character who knows Pnin, for the most part, at second- and third-hand--who doesn't really, in short, know Pnin at all. So if this text does in fact vanish into a postmodern fog, it's not the De Manian pea soup of undecidability but the more immediately troubling ground-cloud of individual unknowability. And aren't we all lost in that fog? this novel finally asks. Forced to know the characters of our world through the mediation of others, we muddle through a life that's half-mystery, half-conjecture, only to find ourselves at the end of it in thrall to that ultimately unsettling other, memory, that unreliable narrator inside our heads. Yes, we too are such stuff as Nabokovian novels are made on. And our little lives are rounded with copyright pages.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
"Time and Narrative in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" by Gerard Genette
Gerard Genette, a good example of the critic as technocrat, whose commentary on Proust's masterpiece contains such illuminating lines as "...the relationship between the time of events and the time of the narrative could be summarized as follows: N(arrative)1=H(istory)4; N2=H2; N3=H4; N4=H2; N5=H4; N6=H1(Swann's love); N7=H3," opens this brief (and obvious and labored) essay with a "hypothesis" that is surely the reductio ad absurdum of reductive literary criticism: "...all narratives, regardless of their complexity or degree of elaboration...can always be considered to be the development of a verbal statement such as "I am walking" or "He will come" or "Marcel becomes a writer." " Genette grants that this is a "rudimentary analogy" but then proceeds to base his entire argument (in a sentence that is, incidentally, a little masterpiece of the non sequitur) upon its "strength." The structuralist commentary that follows contains no insights that could not be gained from a reading of Proust and is thus, quite literally, worthless (and as such, it's probably the worst entry in an otherwise impressive anthology, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, Hoffman and Murphy, eds.) And so as I read the essay, my mind kept returning to that opening paragraph and an activity that I'll call "Gerard's Game": the moronic reduction of complex fiction to denuded, 'see Spot run'-style statements. Here are a few that came to mind:
Genette's fundamental "hypothesis" tells us nothing about the books in question, but I'm intrigued by its similarity to the "high concept" pitches so beloved by Hollywood executives ("It's Field of Dreams meets Rambo"). I guess all unimaginative technocrats think alike. (Well, of course they do. That's how they recognize one another.)
- Ahab chases a whale (Moby Dick)
- Caddy leaves home (The Sound and the Fury)
- Connie gets laid (Lady Chatterley's Lover)
- Gatsby loses everything (The Great Gatsby)
- Sebald walks (The Rings of Saturn)
- Austria sucks (pretty much anything by Thomas Bernhard)
- Tristram tells a tale (Tristram Shandy)
- Hamlet sees a ghost (Hamlet)
- Lad kills Pop, fucks Mum (Oedipus the King, sounding like a classic tabloid headline)
- Bloom poops, walks, drinks, wanks, thinks (Ulysses)
- Marlow does the Congo (Heart of Darkness)
- Burroughs does smack (Junky)
- Randy Romans roam the Roman realm (The Satyricon)
Genette's fundamental "hypothesis" tells us nothing about the books in question, but I'm intrigued by its similarity to the "high concept" pitches so beloved by Hollywood executives ("It's Field of Dreams meets Rambo"). I guess all unimaginative technocrats think alike. (Well, of course they do. That's how they recognize one another.)
Monday, February 21, 2011
"Plot in the Modern Novel" by J. Arthur Honeywell
Honeywell's brief 1968 essay "Plot in the Modern Novel" (included in the admirably readable anthology Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, edited by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy) outlines a historical narrative of the development of novelistic plot that is as powerful as it is questionable. Building on the work of R.S. Crane, Honeywell writes that 18th-century novelists "tended to construct their plots around definite beginnings and endings" (the novel-initiating birth and novel-terminating marriage of a Fielding hero, for example), while 19th-century novelists "began to subordinate the problem of beginnings and endings to the problem of constructing a logical sequence of events." So far, so good. All of this is greatly oversimplified, but the relative privileging of beginnings and endings as opposed to 'middles' captures the way 18th-century novels generally feel 'looser' and closer to the picaresque than the more carefully structured works of the following century. The Honeywell scheme continues into the twentieth century with the contention that Modernists turned away from 19th-century causational structure and toward "structuring the events of the novel so as to present a coherent 'world' or vision of reality." Along with these supposedly distinct--but actually interpenetrating--tendencies, Honeywell finds three corresponding tendencies of plot movement: reversal of fortune in the 18th-century (Tom Jones, Clarissa), reversal of moral intention in the 19th century (Crime and Punishment), and in Modernist novels "a movement from appearance to reality constituted by the emergence of structural patterns which give coherence and intelligibility to facts previously seen as unrelated and incongruous." Honeywell's description of Modernist plot tendencies initially reads like a pretty good description of the process of understanding Joyce or Proust, but the more I think about it, the less it satisfies me. Its most glaring weakness is a reliance on that hairily hoary critical cliche, appearance versus reality. (That's the way it's expressed, as I recall, in elementary literature textbooks: appearance versus reality, as though we are to imagine a football game between the two: the fist-pumping Hemingwayish he-men of Reality against a cadre of opiate-fogged Wildean aesthetes who wave their perfumed handkerchiefs in support of Appearance. It's a duality with all manner of nasty little sociopolitical undertones; homophobia and misogyny are but the tip of its berg.) First of all, the revelation of reality was less a twentieth-century innovation than a nineteenth-century fetish and one of the important engines of 19th-century novelistic production (think of all those Zola novels no one reads anymore, all dedicated to anatomizing a hard, 'scientific' reality beneath the appearances of French society). Bumping this tendency up to the next century in order to preserve a moralistic view of 19th-century fiction is woefully ahistorical. If we focus instead on Honeywell's description of the Modernist process of the revelation of reality, we still face the problem of Honeywell's understanding of appearance and reality as a simple opposition. It's truer to the facts of twentieth-century literature to view them as a dialectical pair. While the 19th-century saw reality as the material basis of existence and appearance as a sentimental veil, Modernism exploits and constructs a dialectic of appearance and reality. Material reality determines appearances, as in the vulgarist Marxism (when someone once accused me of being a vulgar Marxist, I corrected him thus: "I'm a fucking vulgar Marxist!"), and appearances also determine reality, as in the most decadent Wilde-ism. Much of Modernist literature, up to the present day, concerns itself with the latter side of this dialectical interpenetration: the way appearance (or representation, or discourse, or [place your favorite jargon word here]) constructs a 'reality' that demands Nabokovian scare quotes. There is much more in the heavens and hells of Modernist literature than is dreamt of in Honeywell's philosophy.
FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS by Harold Brodkey
Anyone seeking an introduction to the work of Harold Brodkey should probably leap right into the story "Innocence" from Stories in an Almost Classical Mode and not bother with his debut collection, First Love and Other Sorrows, published in 1958 and seriously dated today. There's not much to be said about the stories in First Love save that they're Fifties New Yorker stories and typical of that breed, less interesting than Salinger and much safer than Cheever at his risky best. Brodkey was in his twenties and still searching for his voice when he wrote these works. There are a few brief flashes of the writer who will emerge in the Classical Mode stories, but for the most part these are unexceptional works, apprentice Brodkey. Get a copy of Classical Mode and check out "Innocence" if you want to read a writer who can pull off sentences like "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die." (I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds wonderful. In a subsequent sentence, Brodkey attempts an explication, but he only shows us that he doesn't really know what it means either--a fact that, curiously, takes nothing away from the brilliance of the sentence.)
Friday, February 18, 2011
Finite Notes on INFINITE JEST : part 2
(Continued from the previous post)
11. "Dave, dude, why's your book so white?" This is not an idle or PC-motivated question. Whenever we consider a work as large and seemingly all-embracing as Infinite Jest, we should think about what it excludes and/or marginalizes. There are African-American characters in IJ, but they are without exception minor and/or stereotypical. In terms of memorable characters, this novel is as white as a Woody Allen film. A brief early scene narrated by Clenette in the first person (37-8) seems to promise an expansion of the novel's range into the African-American housing projects of its Boston milieu, but the end of the novel leaves this promise unfulfilled and Clenette never becomes more than a minor resident of Ennet House, an extra, a 'figurant.' In the early scene, Wallace briefly opens a window upon a true American hell a world away from the absurdist pseudotragedies of E.T.A. But that window is just as abruptly closed and never really cracked again. This single scene aside, the color line is a boundary IJ doesn't even attempt to cross.
12. The book's first truly batshit barrage of endnotes comes on page 53 in a paragraph discussing recreational drugs. This is a rare case where Wallace's favorite fallacy (the one about imitative form) serves him well. The footnotes druggily break up the documentary realism of the text, sending the reader to the back of the book and then back to the text in a dopily confused state, not quite remembering the beginning of the sentence he's now reading, forced to read it again, then encountering another superscript numeral, flipping 900 pages to the signified endnote, reading it, flipping 900 back pages to the text, maybe finishing the sentence, maybe encountering yet another endnote. It's enough to give the soberest of readers a taste of pothead consciousness.
13. William Shakespeare shakes hands with Michael Powell when we read Infinite Jest intertextually. The novel's relationship to Hamlet is obvious (the title, Hal as Hamlet, Tavis as usurping uncle Claudius, James Incandenza as the Ghost, Avril as Gertrude, E.T.A. as Elsinore), so obvious, in fact, that we should be suspicious of it. It seems more a facile parody of Modernist intertextuality than a genuinely powerful and deepening relationship to another work. More important, I think, is the book's less obvious relationship to Michael Powell's great 1960 film Peeping Tom, a movie that reads today like Hitchcock postmodernized. (In one of the flashbacks to James Incandenza's youth, we glimpse several Peeping Tom posters on his bedroom wall [502].) Like Psycho, Peeping Tom is a thriller and shocker, but unlike Psycho it is a completely self-conscious film, commenting directly, not symbolically, upon the medium of film and its potential for sadistic cruelty. In a scene crucial to understanding the film's significance for IJ, we learn that the central character, an obsessive serial killer-cameraman, was in childhood the object, and hence the product, of his father's sadistic filmed experiments. Once again, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad..." It's also worth noting that Hamlet's father didn't do him a bit of good, either.
14. Speaking of intertextuality, Wallace explicitly references the influence theories of Harold Bloom on page 911 and note 366, and his reference is so unaccountably angry and palpably defensive that we can only diagnose a major anxiety of influence on the part of our author/narrator. More seriously, this is Wallace at his most petty, using his novel to score an easy and trendy academic point. (When IJ was written, Bloom was an anti-PC lightning rod and seriously out of fashion in English departments.) Likewise, the book's earlier reference to Bret Easton Ellis is a case of killing a fly with a howitzer. The sad truth is that DFW today, mouldering in his grave, is a more talented writer than BEE (or Bloom, for that matter) ever was.
15. Kate Gompert. Suicidally depressed 21 year-old Kate Gompert is the most uncompromising and affecting character in this entire novel, and perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with the late Mr. Wallace concerns his failure of her. For this is a case where we actually can speak of an author failing one of his characters. When she is introduced in a 10-page scene beginning on page 68, she seems (like Erdedy) to be destined for a major role in IJ, but (also like Erdedy) we only have a couple scenes and a few brief glimpses of her thereafter. (It occurs to me that in both these scenes DFW is playing with readerly expectations, artificially heightening and then gradually dashing them.) She is a character strong enough to carry an entire novel and to be at least the equal of Hal and Gately in this one, but after the strong intro, Wallace uses her briefly and then drops her cruelly to her death. And the word 'uses' is carefully chosen. Kate Gompert provides the thin, U.H.I.D.-style veil through which DFW tells us all he knows firsthand about the suicidal depression that will eventually kill him. If you read nothing else in Infinite Jest, read pages 692-698, where Wallace dons the mask of Kate Gompert's free indirect narration to write a 12-years premature suicide note. They're some of the most brilliant and moving pages ever written about suicide, and they're well worth the price of the book. When Wallace is done with them, however, he's pretty much done with Kate. A couple hundred pages later she falls unwittingly into the hands of the sadistic "wheelchair assassins" and presumably becomes a "test subject" victim of Infinite Jest V. The character Wallace created deserves better than this; her author fails her.
16. Another note on Wallace's prose. One of his stylistic tics, the sentence-terminal supernumerary adverb, is a sign of pernicious David Markson influence, really. Wallace overvalued Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (a book I, obviously, didn't like very much), and Hal's interior monologue in the last 100 pages of the book has a decidedly Marksonian flavor. Compare the paragraph on pages 897-898 that begins "After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson..." with any page of Wittgenstein's Mistress, and you'll see what I mean.
17. Coach Schtitt's philosophy of tennis and life provides Wallace with an opportunity to state the novel's thematic core on page 84. (IJ is filled with explicit statements of its themes; Wallace is no obscurantist; he wants his book to be understood; and IJ's not really a difficult novel compared to, say, Gravity's Rainbow or even Sebald's Vertigo. Infinite Jest is too long, but not too hard.) What I'm calling the 'thematic core,' then, is the essential tragic bind of human life, what Schtitt calls "the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without"(84). That line is Infinite Jest bounded in a nutshell.
18. The first flashback to James Incandenza's childhood (157-169) takes the form of an extraordinary dramatic monologue spoken by Incandenza's father and concerning his own father--a little tennis lesson in the familial etiology of alcoholism and depression. This is one of the many surprises hidden inside Infinite Jest, a novel that turns out to be Sam Shepardishly rich in American monologues--and even includes one Irish monologue that's scatologically, floor-rollingly hilarious.
19. The maternal side of the novel's parent-child theme lies at the heart of the fatally entertaining final film by James Incandenza, Infinite Jest V. Of what does this mysterious, unsurvivable movie consist? By novel's end it seems that most of the film is an apologetic monologue spoken by a dazzlingly beautiful mother-figure to a camera mounted in a crib and giving a baby's-eye view of the woman. Most of the novel's discussions of the film present its content as secondary to its technique, a wobbly lens developed by Incandenza that mimics the blurry vision of infancy. But since yet another of the themes of IJ is the use of technique as a flight from psychological self-investigation (whether that technique be the dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, the systematic regimens of sports training, or the science of optics), we should probably read 'against' the novel here and think about the extraordinary power of the film's content. It's a powerfully regressive, infantile, infantilizing image that cuts deeply into the viewer's psyche and activates pre-oedipal centers of polymorphous perverse pleasure. Need we wonder why 'subjects' would saw off their own fingers to keep watching this thing? It's simultaneously the most pleasurable and the cruelest film imaginable.
20. Wallace stated in a 1996 interview that the form of the first draft of Infinite Jest (not, importantly, the shorter final draft that became the published book) was based on the Sierpinski gasket, a fractal-like triangular form from which an infinite number of progressively smaller but angularly identical triangles have been removed:
Fragments of this original formal conceit (along with a Sierpinski gasket poster in Pemulis's dormroom) apparently survive in the published version as a fascination with synecdoche and self-similarity (e.g. many of the films described briefly in the Incandenza filmography can be interpreted as miniature versions of the novel in which they are contained, small identical triangles within the larger one; likewise the monologues and self-contained narratives that repeat on a smaller scale the themes and rhythm of the novel as a whole).
21. But it's more helpful to visualize the final published version as a much simpler geometrical form, an ellipse with its twin foci at Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, E.T.A. and Ennet House, the upper class and the underclass. Hal and Don never meet in the book, but the borders between the places and classes they represent are more porous. Both Mario and Hal visit Ennet House (although only Hal enters), Ennet House residents work at E.T.A., some Ennet residents are middle-class professionals. Over the course of the book we can perceive the foci of the ellipse moving closer together, promising to form a perfect circle.
22. That promise remains unfulfilled at the end of the novel. In fact, the ending isn't much of an ending at all, except for Fackelmann, whose horrifying Peeping Tom-meets-Clockwork Orange death is left mostly to the reader's imagination. To any readers disappointed by the inconclusiveness of Wallace's conclusion, I can only scream: What, you expected an ending?! You expected a novel called Infinite Jest to actually end unjestingly?!?! In fact, this novel doesn't end (how could it?), it stops. Its language ceases, but its story continues in Wallace's cleverest and most audacious formal move. The story continues in that great, unwritten, year-long arc of space-time that connects page 981 to page 3, the ending to the beginning (which is also the end of the story). This circularity is the 'infinite' aspect of the book's form, its circular synthesis of endlessness and boundary. And at some point along this unwritten arc, as we know from Hal's flashback and Don's flash-forward in the text, princely Hal meets the recovering Falstaffian Don Gately (the ellipse becomes a circle) to exhume Hal's father and recover the master of Infinite Jest V, probably in an effort to save either Orin or Joelle (or both) from the tortures of the A.F.R.... But none of this actually happens. It's only implied, pointed toward, represented--like everything else in the book.
 |
| DFW in the heart of the heart of William Gass Country |
11. "Dave, dude, why's your book so white?" This is not an idle or PC-motivated question. Whenever we consider a work as large and seemingly all-embracing as Infinite Jest, we should think about what it excludes and/or marginalizes. There are African-American characters in IJ, but they are without exception minor and/or stereotypical. In terms of memorable characters, this novel is as white as a Woody Allen film. A brief early scene narrated by Clenette in the first person (37-8) seems to promise an expansion of the novel's range into the African-American housing projects of its Boston milieu, but the end of the novel leaves this promise unfulfilled and Clenette never becomes more than a minor resident of Ennet House, an extra, a 'figurant.' In the early scene, Wallace briefly opens a window upon a true American hell a world away from the absurdist pseudotragedies of E.T.A. But that window is just as abruptly closed and never really cracked again. This single scene aside, the color line is a boundary IJ doesn't even attempt to cross.
12. The book's first truly batshit barrage of endnotes comes on page 53 in a paragraph discussing recreational drugs. This is a rare case where Wallace's favorite fallacy (the one about imitative form) serves him well. The footnotes druggily break up the documentary realism of the text, sending the reader to the back of the book and then back to the text in a dopily confused state, not quite remembering the beginning of the sentence he's now reading, forced to read it again, then encountering another superscript numeral, flipping 900 pages to the signified endnote, reading it, flipping 900 back pages to the text, maybe finishing the sentence, maybe encountering yet another endnote. It's enough to give the soberest of readers a taste of pothead consciousness.
 |
| A still from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) |
14. Speaking of intertextuality, Wallace explicitly references the influence theories of Harold Bloom on page 911 and note 366, and his reference is so unaccountably angry and palpably defensive that we can only diagnose a major anxiety of influence on the part of our author/narrator. More seriously, this is Wallace at his most petty, using his novel to score an easy and trendy academic point. (When IJ was written, Bloom was an anti-PC lightning rod and seriously out of fashion in English departments.) Likewise, the book's earlier reference to Bret Easton Ellis is a case of killing a fly with a howitzer. The sad truth is that DFW today, mouldering in his grave, is a more talented writer than BEE (or Bloom, for that matter) ever was.
15. Kate Gompert. Suicidally depressed 21 year-old Kate Gompert is the most uncompromising and affecting character in this entire novel, and perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with the late Mr. Wallace concerns his failure of her. For this is a case where we actually can speak of an author failing one of his characters. When she is introduced in a 10-page scene beginning on page 68, she seems (like Erdedy) to be destined for a major role in IJ, but (also like Erdedy) we only have a couple scenes and a few brief glimpses of her thereafter. (It occurs to me that in both these scenes DFW is playing with readerly expectations, artificially heightening and then gradually dashing them.) She is a character strong enough to carry an entire novel and to be at least the equal of Hal and Gately in this one, but after the strong intro, Wallace uses her briefly and then drops her cruelly to her death. And the word 'uses' is carefully chosen. Kate Gompert provides the thin, U.H.I.D.-style veil through which DFW tells us all he knows firsthand about the suicidal depression that will eventually kill him. If you read nothing else in Infinite Jest, read pages 692-698, where Wallace dons the mask of Kate Gompert's free indirect narration to write a 12-years premature suicide note. They're some of the most brilliant and moving pages ever written about suicide, and they're well worth the price of the book. When Wallace is done with them, however, he's pretty much done with Kate. A couple hundred pages later she falls unwittingly into the hands of the sadistic "wheelchair assassins" and presumably becomes a "test subject" victim of Infinite Jest V. The character Wallace created deserves better than this; her author fails her.
16. Another note on Wallace's prose. One of his stylistic tics, the sentence-terminal supernumerary adverb, is a sign of pernicious David Markson influence, really. Wallace overvalued Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (a book I, obviously, didn't like very much), and Hal's interior monologue in the last 100 pages of the book has a decidedly Marksonian flavor. Compare the paragraph on pages 897-898 that begins "After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson..." with any page of Wittgenstein's Mistress, and you'll see what I mean.
17. Coach Schtitt's philosophy of tennis and life provides Wallace with an opportunity to state the novel's thematic core on page 84. (IJ is filled with explicit statements of its themes; Wallace is no obscurantist; he wants his book to be understood; and IJ's not really a difficult novel compared to, say, Gravity's Rainbow or even Sebald's Vertigo. Infinite Jest is too long, but not too hard.) What I'm calling the 'thematic core,' then, is the essential tragic bind of human life, what Schtitt calls "the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without"(84). That line is Infinite Jest bounded in a nutshell.
18. The first flashback to James Incandenza's childhood (157-169) takes the form of an extraordinary dramatic monologue spoken by Incandenza's father and concerning his own father--a little tennis lesson in the familial etiology of alcoholism and depression. This is one of the many surprises hidden inside Infinite Jest, a novel that turns out to be Sam Shepardishly rich in American monologues--and even includes one Irish monologue that's scatologically, floor-rollingly hilarious.
19. The maternal side of the novel's parent-child theme lies at the heart of the fatally entertaining final film by James Incandenza, Infinite Jest V. Of what does this mysterious, unsurvivable movie consist? By novel's end it seems that most of the film is an apologetic monologue spoken by a dazzlingly beautiful mother-figure to a camera mounted in a crib and giving a baby's-eye view of the woman. Most of the novel's discussions of the film present its content as secondary to its technique, a wobbly lens developed by Incandenza that mimics the blurry vision of infancy. But since yet another of the themes of IJ is the use of technique as a flight from psychological self-investigation (whether that technique be the dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, the systematic regimens of sports training, or the science of optics), we should probably read 'against' the novel here and think about the extraordinary power of the film's content. It's a powerfully regressive, infantile, infantilizing image that cuts deeply into the viewer's psyche and activates pre-oedipal centers of polymorphous perverse pleasure. Need we wonder why 'subjects' would saw off their own fingers to keep watching this thing? It's simultaneously the most pleasurable and the cruelest film imaginable.
20. Wallace stated in a 1996 interview that the form of the first draft of Infinite Jest (not, importantly, the shorter final draft that became the published book) was based on the Sierpinski gasket, a fractal-like triangular form from which an infinite number of progressively smaller but angularly identical triangles have been removed:
Fragments of this original formal conceit (along with a Sierpinski gasket poster in Pemulis's dormroom) apparently survive in the published version as a fascination with synecdoche and self-similarity (e.g. many of the films described briefly in the Incandenza filmography can be interpreted as miniature versions of the novel in which they are contained, small identical triangles within the larger one; likewise the monologues and self-contained narratives that repeat on a smaller scale the themes and rhythm of the novel as a whole).
21. But it's more helpful to visualize the final published version as a much simpler geometrical form, an ellipse with its twin foci at Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, E.T.A. and Ennet House, the upper class and the underclass. Hal and Don never meet in the book, but the borders between the places and classes they represent are more porous. Both Mario and Hal visit Ennet House (although only Hal enters), Ennet House residents work at E.T.A., some Ennet residents are middle-class professionals. Over the course of the book we can perceive the foci of the ellipse moving closer together, promising to form a perfect circle.
22. That promise remains unfulfilled at the end of the novel. In fact, the ending isn't much of an ending at all, except for Fackelmann, whose horrifying Peeping Tom-meets-Clockwork Orange death is left mostly to the reader's imagination. To any readers disappointed by the inconclusiveness of Wallace's conclusion, I can only scream: What, you expected an ending?! You expected a novel called Infinite Jest to actually end unjestingly?!?! In fact, this novel doesn't end (how could it?), it stops. Its language ceases, but its story continues in Wallace's cleverest and most audacious formal move. The story continues in that great, unwritten, year-long arc of space-time that connects page 981 to page 3, the ending to the beginning (which is also the end of the story). This circularity is the 'infinite' aspect of the book's form, its circular synthesis of endlessness and boundary. And at some point along this unwritten arc, as we know from Hal's flashback and Don's flash-forward in the text, princely Hal meets the recovering Falstaffian Don Gately (the ellipse becomes a circle) to exhume Hal's father and recover the master of Infinite Jest V, probably in an effort to save either Orin or Joelle (or both) from the tortures of the A.F.R.... But none of this actually happens. It's only implied, pointed toward, represented--like everything else in the book.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Finite Notes on INFINITE JEST : part 1
1. This book and I have a history. Long ago, shortly after the last Ice Age (the Vanilla Ice age), when Infinite Jest was first published and hyped to the Moon (hell, to Jupiter and beyond the infinite), I saw the author on Charlie Rose and, to put it mildly, I was not especially impressed. I watched Wallace, with his bandanna and his grad student angst, and I thought: jackass poseur. Nonetheless, something about the interview--and the hype; I'm not immune--led me to pick up his book and give it a try. I read the opening scenes and concluded that IJ was a seriously overrated, and not particularly well-written, late addition to the School of Barth--in short, not worth my time. The book impressed me so little that I eventually gave my copy away. Fast forward about a decade to see me ordering the tenth anniversary edition of IJ from Amazon. Something about the book had stayed in the back of my mind, and I decided to give it another chance. This time I read the first hundred pages before concluding that it was a weak pastiche of Barth, Pynchon, etc. and, as before, not worth the required reading time. I skim-read the bulk of the book, finding a few scenes of interest, and then returned it to the shelf. Four years later--a week and a half ago--I retrieved it and decided to force myself to read the damn thing, the whole damn thing, footnotes (endnotes, technically) and all. Imagine my surprise when at page 150 I realized that I was no longer forcing myself, that the book held me and compelled my forward progress and was (gasp!) actually worth the time. I still have serious criticisms of and reservations about Infinite Jest, and I read the book with some resistance throughout, but this reading has forced me to more positively reevaluate both the book and its author.
2. First things second: You'll need two bookmarks to read IJ properly, one for the text and one for the endnotes. This fact places the novel in rather elite company upon my bookshelf: My only other two-bookmarks-absolutely-required books that I can recall at the moment are The Annotated Lolita and Allen Mandelbaum's great translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (available in three extensively footnoted paperbacks from Bantam Classics). It probably doesn't need to be said that both these works kick IJ's ass--but I said it anyway. And if you're trying to decide which English translation of Dante to read, take Hugh Kenner's advice and mine: choose Mandelbaum.
3. In the beginning is the end. The first scene of Infinite Jest (Hal Incandenza's ill-fated university admissions interview) is chronologically the last scene of the story. This perfect inversion of fabula and syuzhet is the sort of thing that would've caused the Russian Formalists to cream their jeans--if they had worn jeans, and if the Party had approved of cream--but Wallace is doing something more and riskier than mere formalist play. The fact that this scene is the end of the story is not made immediately clear and the reader cannot be certain of it until he has read the final page, but the realization/suspicion came to me somewhere around page 80, and it utterly transformed the tenor of that opening scene. What upon first reading seemed a fairly standard bit of postmodern dark comedy became a much darker and even tragic scene, a tragedy of postmodernity. This movement from comic to tragic recurs in many different scenes throughout the novel and should be considered one of its signature rhetorical devices. It's probably the most effective way in which Wallace critiques postmodern fiction even while writing it.
4. The opening interview scene and the lengthy Erdedy scene that follows hard upon show us, respectively, the best and worst of Wallace as a narrative artist. The interview scene effectively places the reader inside the monad called Hal Incandenza and permits us to feel the pathos of his crippling self-consciousness and surreal inability to communicate (both 'postmodern conditions' par excellence, the latter being one of the novel's major themes; I'm surprised, in fact, that Wallace doesn't explicitly quote Cool Hand Luke at some point, given that throughout Infinite Jest we have scenes of a tragicomic "failure to communicate." He probably does quote it, somewhere), and it achieves all of this in a prose that is both fluid and metaphorically rich. The Erdedy scene, by contrast, finds Wallace in full fallacy-of-imitative-form mode (a mode all too familiar to readers of his late story collection, Oblivion), evoking the obsessed, repetitive, boring life of a drug addict through deliberately boring and repetitive prose. Granted, we are inside Erdedy's consciousness, but the representation of oppressive boring obsession need not itself be oppressively boring. Only one passage in this entire section impressed me: Erdedy sees/imagines a bug crawling in and out of a hole on a girder that supports his stereo and thinks of his stoned self in terms of the bug: "It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question"(20). Here is the infinity of Erdedy's subjectivity bounded in a nutshell. His overwhelming desire is to disappear into the lack that defines his self, a lack he simultaneously acknowledges and refuses to examine, a refusal aided by the very substances that help him disappear. It's the first appearance of an idea crucial to the novel as a whole: characters seek oblivion in flight not only from the world but from the self, from the psychological traumas that they, Bartleby-like, prefer not to explore, the deep, individual, psychological factors beyond the reach of pop discourses of therapy and recovery. This is the scene's key passage; the rest might as well be silence. I suspect that Wallace places this scene--one of the work's most tedious--close to the beginning as a challenge to the reader. Only those readers who make it out of Erdedy's room can explore the riches hidden beyond.
5. Most of the time, Wallace's prose fails to impress me. I'm not a fan of his hyperactive transitional 'and so then but's, and his like totally like compulsive use of the word 'like' never ceases to annoy me. Even as I read some of Infinite Jest's best sections--and there are many amazing ones that stand out like prime numbers in the novel's endless but not insoluble equation--I usually heard Wallace's prose rattling and buzzing in my mental ear like a mild case of tinnitus. One aspect of the Wallacian style that I find interesting and worthy of deeper thought is its frequent deployment in free indirect narration of 'dictionary' words that the character upon whom the narration is focalized would never use. Poorly educated and unread drug thug Don Gately, for example, uses the adjective 'Nietzschean' at one point. A critic biased against Wallace (James Wood, to pick a name out of thin air) would interpret this as a failure of free indirect narration and congratulate himself on catching DFW in flagrante. But a complete reading of IJ shows us that something much more complex is going on here. Most of the time, Wallacian narration is an interplay of two distinct voices: the voice of the character represented via free indirect narration and the voice of the narrator (who both is and is not, must be and cannot be, Hal Incandenza). Wallace, that is, elaborately constructs a series of free indirect narrative voices only to deliberately puncture their fabrics with alien words. This creates a tension between the characters' and the narrator/author's voices that's more 'realistic' than the elaborate ventriloquism of free indirect or first-person narration. It foregrounds the constructed nature of the text, the linguistic foundation of all its representations. (It's also worth noting here that Wallace defuses potential criticism by foregrounding this very technique late in the book, when the feverish Gately is 'lexically raped' by the wraith of James Incandenza.)
6. One fruitful way to read Infinite Jest is to listen for those moments when it indirectly comments upon itself:
The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. (67)
The whole thing's unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. (1012 n.110)
...[I]s the puzzlement and then boredom and and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff? (947)
It is an index of Wallace's deliberateness as an artist, of the extent to which he knows exactly what he's doing, that some of the harshest criticisms to be levelled against IJ are to be found within the book itself.
7. To state the most obvious and scariest thing about this novel: it's fucking huge. Infinite Jest is a 'loose, baggy monster' (one of the Leavis siblings, I think, on Dickens's huge late works). It's baggier than a pair of hip-hop pants, and its individual parts are hypertrophied like its athlete characters' arms and legs. It has the body of a Dickensian megalosaurus, the oversized legs of a field goal kicker, and a brain the size of the M.I.T. student union. It's so enormous that it excretes almost a hundred pages of endnotes--in which pile of scat some of the book's best and most important passages are to be found.
8. The annotated filmography of James O. Incandenza in the multi-page note 24, for example, is a miniature comic-satirical masterpiece that brings Borges to mind. Incandenza is surely the greatest American avant-garde filmmaker never to have existed. Even if he hadn't created the fatally fascinating Infinite Jest V (and he didn't, of course, due to his aforementioned nonexistence) his reputation would've been secured by the Artaudianly cruel The Joke (two cameras trained on a cinema audience that watches itself onscreen until its self-consciousness turns into rage) and the dialectically mind-blowing Cage III - Free Show, synopsized thus:
The figure of Death...presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life...uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. (988 n.24)
It's Hegel's master-slave dialectic transferred to the society of the (sadistic) spectacle, resulting in American literature's most horrible reimagining of Emerson's transcendental 'transparent eyeball.' Romantic nature epiphany becomes sideshow horror in a world where spectation is all.
9. Because Infinite Jest is also a horror novel. Yes, it is screamingly funny at times, and it fits easily into the comic tradition of the novel from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Pynchon (a tradition we might as well call the 'history of the novel,' sidelining the nineteenth-century novel of 'high seriousness' and its social realist descendants as an important aberration, but an aberration nonetheless), but much of its comedy walks a black-comic tightrope and often tumbles into tragedy, and some other scenes give us sheer, unadulterated, nearly unbearable horror: Hal's nightmare of the 'face in the floor' (the novel's scariest moment, worthy of Stephen King at his best), the horrible death of Bobby C., the even more horrible death of Lucien Antitoi--impaled on a broomstick that's forced down his throat in a parody of fellatio and rammed through his gastrointestinal tract until its end protrudes from his anus like a surreal erection, a homophobic execution comparable to the finale of Marlowe's Edward II.
10. And while we're thinking about the nightmarish images of Infinite Jest, let's consider Orin's Magritte-ish oedipal dream in which his mother's disembodied head is bound face-to-Bergmanesque-face with his own, firmly tied like an unremovable phylactery (46-47). If we think about the subterranean connection between this dream and Orin's brother Hal's nightmare of being trapped on a gargantuan tennis court the lines of which demarcate "systems inside systems"(67) too convoluted to comprehend, we might come close to uncovering one of the most important secrets this novel asks about. (See note 10a below.) For IJ is an enormous "systems novel" that concerns itself with the various systems that form and inform the subjectivities of its characters (and by implication, its readers)--sports, the academy, addiction, AA, religion, social class, etc.--and the most fundamental of these systems, the one that the novel repeatedly indicts as the etiological site of psychopathology, is the modern nuclear family. Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" might as well be the epigraph to Infinite Jest:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
10a. The following quote from Kundera is probably apposite to any consideration of the relationship between the characters in Infinite Jest and their author:
The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. -- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
TO BE CONTINUED
 |
| David Foster Wallace and Gromit (image stolen from here, with ironic apologies to Michael Ward) |
2. First things second: You'll need two bookmarks to read IJ properly, one for the text and one for the endnotes. This fact places the novel in rather elite company upon my bookshelf: My only other two-bookmarks-absolutely-required books that I can recall at the moment are The Annotated Lolita and Allen Mandelbaum's great translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (available in three extensively footnoted paperbacks from Bantam Classics). It probably doesn't need to be said that both these works kick IJ's ass--but I said it anyway. And if you're trying to decide which English translation of Dante to read, take Hugh Kenner's advice and mine: choose Mandelbaum.
3. In the beginning is the end. The first scene of Infinite Jest (Hal Incandenza's ill-fated university admissions interview) is chronologically the last scene of the story. This perfect inversion of fabula and syuzhet is the sort of thing that would've caused the Russian Formalists to cream their jeans--if they had worn jeans, and if the Party had approved of cream--but Wallace is doing something more and riskier than mere formalist play. The fact that this scene is the end of the story is not made immediately clear and the reader cannot be certain of it until he has read the final page, but the realization/suspicion came to me somewhere around page 80, and it utterly transformed the tenor of that opening scene. What upon first reading seemed a fairly standard bit of postmodern dark comedy became a much darker and even tragic scene, a tragedy of postmodernity. This movement from comic to tragic recurs in many different scenes throughout the novel and should be considered one of its signature rhetorical devices. It's probably the most effective way in which Wallace critiques postmodern fiction even while writing it.
4. The opening interview scene and the lengthy Erdedy scene that follows hard upon show us, respectively, the best and worst of Wallace as a narrative artist. The interview scene effectively places the reader inside the monad called Hal Incandenza and permits us to feel the pathos of his crippling self-consciousness and surreal inability to communicate (both 'postmodern conditions' par excellence, the latter being one of the novel's major themes; I'm surprised, in fact, that Wallace doesn't explicitly quote Cool Hand Luke at some point, given that throughout Infinite Jest we have scenes of a tragicomic "failure to communicate." He probably does quote it, somewhere), and it achieves all of this in a prose that is both fluid and metaphorically rich. The Erdedy scene, by contrast, finds Wallace in full fallacy-of-imitative-form mode (a mode all too familiar to readers of his late story collection, Oblivion), evoking the obsessed, repetitive, boring life of a drug addict through deliberately boring and repetitive prose. Granted, we are inside Erdedy's consciousness, but the representation of oppressive boring obsession need not itself be oppressively boring. Only one passage in this entire section impressed me: Erdedy sees/imagines a bug crawling in and out of a hole on a girder that supports his stereo and thinks of his stoned self in terms of the bug: "It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question"(20). Here is the infinity of Erdedy's subjectivity bounded in a nutshell. His overwhelming desire is to disappear into the lack that defines his self, a lack he simultaneously acknowledges and refuses to examine, a refusal aided by the very substances that help him disappear. It's the first appearance of an idea crucial to the novel as a whole: characters seek oblivion in flight not only from the world but from the self, from the psychological traumas that they, Bartleby-like, prefer not to explore, the deep, individual, psychological factors beyond the reach of pop discourses of therapy and recovery. This is the scene's key passage; the rest might as well be silence. I suspect that Wallace places this scene--one of the work's most tedious--close to the beginning as a challenge to the reader. Only those readers who make it out of Erdedy's room can explore the riches hidden beyond.
5. Most of the time, Wallace's prose fails to impress me. I'm not a fan of his hyperactive transitional 'and so then but's, and his like totally like compulsive use of the word 'like' never ceases to annoy me. Even as I read some of Infinite Jest's best sections--and there are many amazing ones that stand out like prime numbers in the novel's endless but not insoluble equation--I usually heard Wallace's prose rattling and buzzing in my mental ear like a mild case of tinnitus. One aspect of the Wallacian style that I find interesting and worthy of deeper thought is its frequent deployment in free indirect narration of 'dictionary' words that the character upon whom the narration is focalized would never use. Poorly educated and unread drug thug Don Gately, for example, uses the adjective 'Nietzschean' at one point. A critic biased against Wallace (James Wood, to pick a name out of thin air) would interpret this as a failure of free indirect narration and congratulate himself on catching DFW in flagrante. But a complete reading of IJ shows us that something much more complex is going on here. Most of the time, Wallacian narration is an interplay of two distinct voices: the voice of the character represented via free indirect narration and the voice of the narrator (who both is and is not, must be and cannot be, Hal Incandenza). Wallace, that is, elaborately constructs a series of free indirect narrative voices only to deliberately puncture their fabrics with alien words. This creates a tension between the characters' and the narrator/author's voices that's more 'realistic' than the elaborate ventriloquism of free indirect or first-person narration. It foregrounds the constructed nature of the text, the linguistic foundation of all its representations. (It's also worth noting here that Wallace defuses potential criticism by foregrounding this very technique late in the book, when the feverish Gately is 'lexically raped' by the wraith of James Incandenza.)
6. One fruitful way to read Infinite Jest is to listen for those moments when it indirectly comments upon itself:
The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. (67)
The whole thing's unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. (1012 n.110)
...[I]s the puzzlement and then boredom and and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff? (947)
It is an index of Wallace's deliberateness as an artist, of the extent to which he knows exactly what he's doing, that some of the harshest criticisms to be levelled against IJ are to be found within the book itself.
7. To state the most obvious and scariest thing about this novel: it's fucking huge. Infinite Jest is a 'loose, baggy monster' (one of the Leavis siblings, I think, on Dickens's huge late works). It's baggier than a pair of hip-hop pants, and its individual parts are hypertrophied like its athlete characters' arms and legs. It has the body of a Dickensian megalosaurus, the oversized legs of a field goal kicker, and a brain the size of the M.I.T. student union. It's so enormous that it excretes almost a hundred pages of endnotes--in which pile of scat some of the book's best and most important passages are to be found.
8. The annotated filmography of James O. Incandenza in the multi-page note 24, for example, is a miniature comic-satirical masterpiece that brings Borges to mind. Incandenza is surely the greatest American avant-garde filmmaker never to have existed. Even if he hadn't created the fatally fascinating Infinite Jest V (and he didn't, of course, due to his aforementioned nonexistence) his reputation would've been secured by the Artaudianly cruel The Joke (two cameras trained on a cinema audience that watches itself onscreen until its self-consciousness turns into rage) and the dialectically mind-blowing Cage III - Free Show, synopsized thus:
The figure of Death...presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life...uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. (988 n.24)
It's Hegel's master-slave dialectic transferred to the society of the (sadistic) spectacle, resulting in American literature's most horrible reimagining of Emerson's transcendental 'transparent eyeball.' Romantic nature epiphany becomes sideshow horror in a world where spectation is all.
9. Because Infinite Jest is also a horror novel. Yes, it is screamingly funny at times, and it fits easily into the comic tradition of the novel from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Pynchon (a tradition we might as well call the 'history of the novel,' sidelining the nineteenth-century novel of 'high seriousness' and its social realist descendants as an important aberration, but an aberration nonetheless), but much of its comedy walks a black-comic tightrope and often tumbles into tragedy, and some other scenes give us sheer, unadulterated, nearly unbearable horror: Hal's nightmare of the 'face in the floor' (the novel's scariest moment, worthy of Stephen King at his best), the horrible death of Bobby C., the even more horrible death of Lucien Antitoi--impaled on a broomstick that's forced down his throat in a parody of fellatio and rammed through his gastrointestinal tract until its end protrudes from his anus like a surreal erection, a homophobic execution comparable to the finale of Marlowe's Edward II.
10. And while we're thinking about the nightmarish images of Infinite Jest, let's consider Orin's Magritte-ish oedipal dream in which his mother's disembodied head is bound face-to-Bergmanesque-face with his own, firmly tied like an unremovable phylactery (46-47). If we think about the subterranean connection between this dream and Orin's brother Hal's nightmare of being trapped on a gargantuan tennis court the lines of which demarcate "systems inside systems"(67) too convoluted to comprehend, we might come close to uncovering one of the most important secrets this novel asks about. (See note 10a below.) For IJ is an enormous "systems novel" that concerns itself with the various systems that form and inform the subjectivities of its characters (and by implication, its readers)--sports, the academy, addiction, AA, religion, social class, etc.--and the most fundamental of these systems, the one that the novel repeatedly indicts as the etiological site of psychopathology, is the modern nuclear family. Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" might as well be the epigraph to Infinite Jest:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
10a. The following quote from Kundera is probably apposite to any consideration of the relationship between the characters in Infinite Jest and their author:
The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. -- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
TO BE CONTINUED
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The Paris Review Interviews and KCRW's 'Bookworm' archive online
I've been spending altogether too much time recently digging around in a couple of amazing online literary interview archives. Most readers already know that a large number of the classic Paris Review Interviews can be read online at no charge. (More fool me for buying two volumes of these interviews a couple of years ago.) The Harold Bloom interview is especially enjoyable. I'll probably be reading my way at random through many of the others over the next several years.
Less well-known is the enormous online archive of audio interviews recorded for Michael Silverblatt's gloriously highbrow and unapologetically intelligent KCRW radio program "Bookworm." Here you can listen to twenty years worth of highly informative 30-minute interviews with the likes of W. G. Sebald (listen to his gorgeous Germano-British accent), Camille Paglia (who gives new meaning to the word 'motormouth;' she seems to have downed a bottle of amphetamines with a Jolt Cola chaser immediately before her 1993 interview), William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux, William H. Gass, and just about anyone else a serious reader wants to hear seriously interviewed. And Silverblatt is a very good interviewer, knowledgeable and impressively well-read. Just listen to the first two questions he asks Sebald, and then ask yourself, "Why doesn't this guy have a show on PBS?" (America's best writers deserve better than a few predictable minutes around Charlie Rose's big round table.) Check out the Bookworm archive--but be warned: it's a labyrinth of Daedalus, and you might not find your way out.
Less well-known is the enormous online archive of audio interviews recorded for Michael Silverblatt's gloriously highbrow and unapologetically intelligent KCRW radio program "Bookworm." Here you can listen to twenty years worth of highly informative 30-minute interviews with the likes of W. G. Sebald (listen to his gorgeous Germano-British accent), Camille Paglia (who gives new meaning to the word 'motormouth;' she seems to have downed a bottle of amphetamines with a Jolt Cola chaser immediately before her 1993 interview), William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux, William H. Gass, and just about anyone else a serious reader wants to hear seriously interviewed. And Silverblatt is a very good interviewer, knowledgeable and impressively well-read. Just listen to the first two questions he asks Sebald, and then ask yourself, "Why doesn't this guy have a show on PBS?" (America's best writers deserve better than a few predictable minutes around Charlie Rose's big round table.) Check out the Bookworm archive--but be warned: it's a labyrinth of Daedalus, and you might not find your way out.
Lezama, Arenas, Beauty and Dictatorship: A Quote for Egypt
Last night I watched from the safety of a television set half a world away as the citizens of Cairo fought for their freedom and--to put it bluntly--their lives against a mob of Hosni Mubarak's paid thugs. (And not particularly well-paid, either. According to news reports reaching the U.S., the going rate for a headbreaker in Cairo is half a chicken. That's exactly how much a human life is worth to Mubarak and his cronies.) As I watched the nighttime battle of stones and Molotov cocktails taking place around the massive Cairo Museum, one of the treasure houses of human civilization, the anti-Mubarak demonstrators on Tahrir Square impressed me as the most courageous people in the world right now. They are risking nothing less than everything in an increasingly desperate struggle to achieve the basic human rights that we in the liberal 'West' take for granted: the right to free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from being dragged to a torture chamber and electrocuted. If the defenders of Tahrir Square lose, their leaders will disappear one by one and reappear a few weeks later as broken men and women, the tortured 'confessors' at their own show trials. We have seen this sickening spectacle too many times in too many countries to sit back and watch it happen again--this time in the cradle of our culture. The citizens of Egypt are fighting today against an ugliness that will become even uglier before the present crisis ends. The ugliness of Mubarak's fascism is equivalent to the totalitarian ugliness Reinaldo Arenas writes against in his memoir, Before Night Falls, in a passage paraphrasing the great Cuban poet and novelist Jose Lezama Lima:
A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.
The anti-Mubarak protestors have now become soldiers of freedom, allies of beauty. May they always remain so--even after they win.
A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.
The anti-Mubarak protestors have now become soldiers of freedom, allies of beauty. May they always remain so--even after they win.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by Danilo Kis
On this fete de groundhog, this 129th anniversary of the birth of James Joyce, I've just finished reading the best-known work of Joyce's Yugoslavian reader, Danilo Kis. Somewhere in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, a character remarks upon the historical irony by which Kafka's darkest fantasies (an atmosphere of general paranoia, absurd accusations, arbitrary arrest and execution, secret attic rooms) became the reality of the next generation of European Jews. Kis (whose work was introduced to the English-reading world in the great Penguin 'Writers From The Other Europe' series, edited by Roth) comes at the tragedies of midcentury Europe from the other side. Instead of reading Kafka into reality, Kis tells ostensibly realistic tales in a style that evokes both Kafka and Kafka's Argentine disciple, Borges. And instead of focusing on the crimes of the Nazis (presumably a politically 'safe' subject in Tito's Yugoslavia), Kis here writes of the crimes of our late, unlamented century's other titanic ideological monster, Djugashvili the Terrible. With only one exception, all the stories in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich are variations on a single theme: the tragic irony of Stalinism. Kis explores the terrible ironies that result when an ideal for which you are willing to die is hijacked by people who are even more willing to kill you. (The one story that doesn't deal explicitly with Stalinism, "Dogs and Books," the tale of a 14th-century pogrom, is thematically related to the Stalinist tales and can be understood as an attempt, not entirely successful because too forced and explicit, to thematically expand the book into a more general statement on a 'tragic sense of history.') This is a necessary book--probably more necessary than brilliant. For Kis's variations are of uneven quality, and once you've read the first two, the rest are fairly predictable. Boris begins strongly, with two tales of impressive formal originality and moral force, "The Knife with the Rosewood Handle" and "The Sow that Eats Her Farrow." The next two, "The Mechanical Lions" and "The Magic Card Dealing," contain interesting passages but impressed me less. The title story is very good, an impressive Kafkazation of Koestler's Darkness at Noon with perhaps a dash of the later chapters of 1984 thrown in. The last two tales are shorter and lesser works, although the book's final line, on writing and testicular elephantiasis, is an instant classic. So while A Tomb for Boris Davidovich doesn't impress me as much as it impressed William Vollmann, for example, it's still artistically and historically important enough to demand to be read.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
ONLY YESTERDAY: AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE 1920'S by Frederick Lewis Allen
Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has aged remarkably well. This cultural portrait of manic Twenties America as seen from the depressive early Thirties remains an essential text for anyone who wants to understand the texture of life among (mostly white, mostly middle-class) Americans in the 1920s. And within that parenthesis is the rub. For Allen largely concerns himself with the white urban bourgeoisie, and his book seriously slights African-American culture, completely ignoring the Harlem Renaissance writers and only superficially mentioning jazz. The white working class is likewise marginalized, portrayed alternately as an either too-violent or too-complacent mob. This is not a work of 'history from above,' and Allen should be commended for breaking with that long-standing tradition, but nor is it Zinn-like 'history from below'; it's definitely written from and to the Oreo-white 'middle' of Twenties and Thirties America. These blind spots are mostly outweighed, however, by the book's journalistic immediacy. Penned soon after the facts it records, this is a 'first rough draft of history' that effectively puts the reader inside the 1920s, when Prohibition reigned and Al Capone ruled, when business boosterism reached levels of comic absurdity and 'Babbittry' became a word. Allen does a surprisingly large amount of debunking, for the myth of the 'Roaring Twenties' seems already to have been well-established by 1931, but Only Yesterday, with its manic energy--this is a work of nonfiction as readable and fast-paced as a best-seller (at least until the latter pages bog down in the minutia of the 1929 Wall Street crash)--also plays a part in the solidification of that myth. Yes, Lindbergh is debunked as a mere "stunt flyer," but the discussions of fads and fashions read like a long series of footnotes to Fitzgerald--and remain highly valuable as such. Long shelves of books have subsequently been written about topics that Allen (often rather impressively) dispatches in a page or paragraph, and as a popular history of the decade, Allen's work has been superseded by Geoffrey Perrett's amazingly good 1982 book, America in the Twenties, which deserves to be considered the standard comprehensive book on its topic, but Allen's book is valuable today not so much for its pioneering role in history writing (Perrett writes that "Only Yesterday virtually created popular social history in the English-speaking world."), as for its telling anecdotes and its inclusion of details that other historians exclude, such as the detailed description of how to start a Model T Ford, a complicated process that involved two controls on the dash, a crank on the front end, and a lot of luck. It's been almost a century since Allen's 'yesterday,' but in passages like this his book still has the power to take us there.
ZIZEK: FOLLOW THE FOLLOWER
There's a very astute, incisive and philosophically rigorous critique of the Zizek-Lacan critical theory cabal in the sixth chapter of Walter A. Davis's Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11. Davis does plenty of philosophical and psychoanalytic 'heavy lifting' there (in a chapter that also contains one of the clearest critical explications of Lacan I've ever read), so I'll limit this post to a couple of superficial thoughts about Slavoj Zizek's use of popular culture and his position as the reigning rock star of critical theory.
First, Zizek owes much of his Jimmy Page-like status to his use of 'easy' pop culture references to explicate concepts otherwise hidden in the notoriously obscure Amazonian jungle of Jacques Lacan's prose. (Lacan's prose is difficult enough to be worth a parenthetical digression. In one of the footnotes to the book mentioned above
, Davis offers this explanation for the difficulties and densities of the Lacanian style: "For Lacan every utterance must gesture in three directions simultaneously: contempt for other thinkers, self-aggrandizement, and the search for opacity.") In Zizek's works, a given theoretical concept--the "obscene supplement," desire, objet petit a--is exemplified via a critical reading of a movie or TV show or some other popular phenomenon. (One of Zizek's more ingenious examples of obscene supplementation involves a deconstructive reading of The Sound of Music that shows how the film's German villains are inscribed as anti-semitic caricatures of Jews while its heroic Austrians are inscribed using the imagery of fascist kitsch.) This is a fun and powerful way to teach Lacan, and Zizek has spent the past quarter-century producing book after book in which Lacan's ideas are exemplified via the works of everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Halldor Laxness. But all of Zizek's cultural references, high and low, are forced to follow an unwritten but adamantine commandment: Thou shalt only exemplify Lacan; Thou shalt never criticize Him. Once Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example, has served its Zizekian exemplary purpose, Zizek metals his pedal and speeds on to the next example before the complexities of Vertigo (or any other cultural artifact) lead him into reflections that might undermine Lacan or Hegel or Marx. Zizek takes big Quarter Pounder-size bites out of art, but he never allows artworks to bite back. This is the fundamental superficiality of Zizek's relationship to art: artworks are only and always exemplary; they can never be permitted to criticize the Master. (I hereby challenge anyone to find a single example in all of Zizek's work that proves this statement wrong. Show me one time--just one!--when Slavoj permits a work of art, or even a work of kitsch, to undermine or contradict or even critique a basic Lacanian-Zizekian concept.)
With regard to Zizek's Claptonesque status in Theoryland (Tito-era walls all over Slovenia must surely wear the graffito "Slavoj is God," n'est-ce pas?), I think that as a popularizer of Lacan and an original leftist thinker he deserves all the attention he can get. But he should not be considered a 'leader' of anyone or anything (or for that matter, of any Ding). Lacan was arguably a 'leading' figure; while he worked in the wake of Freud and would've had no career without his illustrious Austrian predecessor, his Structuralization of Freudian thought was a powerful and arguably revolutionary move--not revolutionary in Freud's 'Copernican' sense, perhaps, but at least it allowed him to credibly play the role of leader of a recognizable ecole. Zizek, on the other hand, never really rises above the level of Lacanian explicator. He's a born follower, and his academic followers around the world are all playing the time-honored game of Follow The Follower. Like a parody of Lacan's theory of language as an unending chain of signifiers, the Zizekians follow Zizek who follows Lacan who follows Freud, and all their reams of Zizekian signifiers, full of Lacanian sound and fury, signify--you guessed it--nothing much.
First, Zizek owes much of his Jimmy Page-like status to his use of 'easy' pop culture references to explicate concepts otherwise hidden in the notoriously obscure Amazonian jungle of Jacques Lacan's prose. (Lacan's prose is difficult enough to be worth a parenthetical digression. In one of the footnotes to the book mentioned above
, Davis offers this explanation for the difficulties and densities of the Lacanian style: "For Lacan every utterance must gesture in three directions simultaneously: contempt for other thinkers, self-aggrandizement, and the search for opacity.") In Zizek's works, a given theoretical concept--the "obscene supplement," desire, objet petit a--is exemplified via a critical reading of a movie or TV show or some other popular phenomenon. (One of Zizek's more ingenious examples of obscene supplementation involves a deconstructive reading of The Sound of Music that shows how the film's German villains are inscribed as anti-semitic caricatures of Jews while its heroic Austrians are inscribed using the imagery of fascist kitsch.) This is a fun and powerful way to teach Lacan, and Zizek has spent the past quarter-century producing book after book in which Lacan's ideas are exemplified via the works of everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Halldor Laxness. But all of Zizek's cultural references, high and low, are forced to follow an unwritten but adamantine commandment: Thou shalt only exemplify Lacan; Thou shalt never criticize Him. Once Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example, has served its Zizekian exemplary purpose, Zizek metals his pedal and speeds on to the next example before the complexities of Vertigo (or any other cultural artifact) lead him into reflections that might undermine Lacan or Hegel or Marx. Zizek takes big Quarter Pounder-size bites out of art, but he never allows artworks to bite back. This is the fundamental superficiality of Zizek's relationship to art: artworks are only and always exemplary; they can never be permitted to criticize the Master. (I hereby challenge anyone to find a single example in all of Zizek's work that proves this statement wrong. Show me one time--just one!--when Slavoj permits a work of art, or even a work of kitsch, to undermine or contradict or even critique a basic Lacanian-Zizekian concept.)With regard to Zizek's Claptonesque status in Theoryland (Tito-era walls all over Slovenia must surely wear the graffito "Slavoj is God," n'est-ce pas?), I think that as a popularizer of Lacan and an original leftist thinker he deserves all the attention he can get. But he should not be considered a 'leader' of anyone or anything (or for that matter, of any Ding). Lacan was arguably a 'leading' figure; while he worked in the wake of Freud and would've had no career without his illustrious Austrian predecessor, his Structuralization of Freudian thought was a powerful and arguably revolutionary move--not revolutionary in Freud's 'Copernican' sense, perhaps, but at least it allowed him to credibly play the role of leader of a recognizable ecole. Zizek, on the other hand, never really rises above the level of Lacanian explicator. He's a born follower, and his academic followers around the world are all playing the time-honored game of Follow The Follower. Like a parody of Lacan's theory of language as an unending chain of signifiers, the Zizekians follow Zizek who follows Lacan who follows Freud, and all their reams of Zizekian signifiers, full of Lacanian sound and fury, signify--you guessed it--nothing much.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
THE FIRST ANNUAL IMAGINARY FILM FESTIVAL
Harold Pinter's unproduced Proust Screenplay stands on a shelf near my writing desk and frequently leads me into reveries about great literary adaptations that were never made--or never even conceived. These are my imaginary films. There have been some brilliant cinematic adaptations of great books (Orson Welles' The Trial, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, James Ivory's Howard's End, Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds, Ken Russell's Women in Love, Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, and many others), but the films I have in mind are not included in the Criterion Collection and cannot be rented from Netflix. Here's the line-up for my First Annual Imaginary Film Festival, the only film festival not handicapped by the requirement that its films actually exist. Screen these literary adaptations in the cinema of your skull:
- The Stranger, directed by Robert Bresson. After watching Bresson's Pickpocket (in a beautiful print that is available from the Criterion Collection), I concluded that he was the only director who could have faithfully adapted Camus' l'Etranger. Camus' prototypical 'new novel' minimalism would've found its perfect objective correlative in the visual minimalism of Bresson, a director who knew the secret of capturing wordless angst on film. The actor who starred in Pickpocket would also have been a perfect Meursault.
- The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Robert Altman. Widely considered one of Brian de Palma's very worst films, this could have been one of Altman's masterpieces. Altman was at one time scheduled to direct the film of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (Milos Forman was the final choice), and while that might have been a beautiful film, Altman's Bonfire would've been a mind-blowing one. Imagine a 1980s New York Nashville or Short Cuts, a panoramic portrait of class, race, money, politics, media and crime. Altman's film would've been the Balzacian human tragicomedy that Wolfe's novel only pretended to be.
- A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, directed by Federico Fellini. The great social epicist of twentieth-century European decadence (see La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2) would've been the perfect director for Proust's anatomization of that society a few decades earlier. With a script by Pinter, this could've been the great masterpiece that's missing from Fellini's later years. Given the strength of the amazing "asa nisi masa" sequence in 8 1/2, I'm convinced that Fellini could've pulled a Proustian masterpiece out of his fashionably rumpled hat. As it stands, Raul Ruiz's fine and beautifully photographed Time Regained is probably as close as we will ever come to a 'comprehensive' film version of Proust's unfilmably large novel.
- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, directed by Ingmar Bergman. Who better than Bergman to film the unfilmable? Bergman would've transformed Rilke's plotless poetic novel of urban angst (a great Modernist novel that should be as widely read as those of Joyce and Woolf) into a visual poem in the Scandinavian Gothic mode of Persona and Hour of the Wolf. It would've been a great, grey song of death. Read the book and imagine how Bergman might have filmed the scenes.
- Ulysses, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Richard Ellmann tells us in his standard biography, James Joyce, that at some point in the 1930s, Joyce and Eisenstein met in Joyce's Paris apartment and discussed the possibility of a Ulysses film. Nothing came of the meeting except a literary footnote, but I've been fascinated for years by the fantasy of an Eisenstein Ulysses. What would it have looked like? The more naturalistic sections might've been filmed in the early style of Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but the "Circe" episode would've demanded the late, theatrical baroque of Ivan the Terrible. Two directors have attempted to film Ulysses and have produced two unavoidably uneven films (Joseph Strick's so-so Ulysses and Sean Walsh's superior Bloom) that leave out too much of the book. Eisenstein might've been more equal to the task.
- Under the Volcano, directed by Luis Bunuel. In his odd little autobiography, My Last Sigh, a rambling book in which the subject spends pages describing the perfect martini and almost entirely ignores his personal life, Luis Bunuel mentions that he was approached several times by various producers to film Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece, but all the proffered screenplays came to shipwreck on the same problem--in Bunuel's words: "...how can inner conflicts be translated into effective images on a screen?" John Huston (whom Bunuel liked and respected) ultimately filmed a simplified and unsatisfying version of the novel that is remembered today only for Albert Finney's superlative performance. I pine for the lost Bunuel version, a film that might've been more symbolist and poetic--and would surely have been more political--than Huston's unexceptional adaptation.
- Lolita, directed by Charles Chaplin. Nabokov approved of Kubrick's film, while Adrian Lyne's stayed closer to the book and boasted Jeremy Irons (whose voice will forever be 'the voice of Humbert' in my reading mind), but I have always fantasized about a version of the film directed by that noted lolitaphile Charlie Chaplin. More seriously, I think of the end of City Lights and imagine the complex mixture of irony and poignancy Chaplin might have achieved with the sad denouement of Nabokov's novel. But I doubt that even Chaplin would have been courageous enough to alienate his audience by casting an actress who looked Lolita's prepubescent age. (Sue Lyon and Dominique Swain, Kubrick's and Lyne's Lolitas, both looked importantly older than the character Nabokov created, thus lessening the visual impact of Humbert's crimes.)
- The Metamorphosis, directed by David Lynch. A decade or more ago, I read somewhere that David Lynch wanted to film Kafka's novella, and I remember thinking that it seemed a perfect match of director and material. This irruption of unimaginable monstrosity at the center of an ordinary family, this bizarre mixture of the mundane and the surreal, would be perfect for the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. I imagine it as an early 20th-century period piece set in an unspecified but vaguely threatening Eastern Europe of the mind. It would be filmed in black-and-white, of course, switching to color only for the final scene, when the parents, having destroyed their son, turn their attentions to their daughter.
- Crime and Punishment, directed by Orson Welles. If Welles had filmed Dostoyevsky's novel in the 1960s, as a pendant to his visually stunning adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, he would've given us the last great German Expressionist film, a dark, fast-paced psychological thriller composed and edited in a deliberately artificial style that produces a Brechtian alienation effect in the viewer. (This is exactly what Welles achieved in Touch of Evil, a great film that, like The Trial, Mr. Arkadin and the brilliant postmodern 'documentary' F for Fake, remains underrated.) Welles might even have had the chutzpah to alter Dostoyevsky's weak ending to something more unnerving and credible, something along the lines of the chilling end of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors.
- Naked Lunch, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. David Cronenberg's film of Naked Lunch was weird enough and good enough ("It's time for our William Tell game."), but compared to Burroughs's book it was also rather tame. ('Tame' may be an unusual adjective for Cronenberg's film, but transgression is always relative, and Cronenberg doesn't touch the level of outrageousness in the book.) The director of the fearlessly disturbing and disgusting satire Salo would've been a perfect match for Burroughs's text. Pasolini would also have emphasized the political bottom line that tends to be lost amidst the druggy Burroughsian phantasmagoria.
- Ficciones, directed by Peter Greenaway. This is an adaptation of five short stories by Jorge Luis Borges: "The Library of Babel" (in which all five stories--and all others--are found), "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Death and the Compass," "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" and "The Book of Sand." The film begins in the library, where Jorge, the blind librarian of Babel, narrates the first tale and leads us into books containing the central three tales, which are set outside the library in a clearly imaginary, artificial world. Jorge returns to narrate the final tale. Greenaway's Prospero's Books showed him to be our most Borgesian director; it's time for him to direct Borges.
- Blood Meridian, directed by Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah didn't live long enough to film Blood Meridian, a novel that seems partly influenced by the violently poetic Southwest (and Northern Mexico) depicted in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. There has been talk of an adaptation for several years now, but the only living director of Westerns capable of doing justice to both the violence and the lyricism of Cormac McCarthy's novel, Clint Eastwood, hung up his spurs about 20 years ago upon completion of his one undeniable masterpiece of the genre, Unforgiven. (It's always good to quit while you're ahead, or as Clint might say, "A man has to know his limitations.") Besides, who could possibly play Judge Holden? The obvious choice would be a talented actor who died tragically before his time and would've been a revelation in the role: John Candy. (If you doubt Candy's dramatic chops, check out his all too brief cameo in Oliver Stone's JFK. Yes, he could've played the Judge, and he would've been terrifying.)
In Defense of Fredric Jameson's Prose (really)
Because I quoted Fredric Jameson in my last post, I feel compelled to say something about his oft-derided prose style. Jameson, America's best-known Marxist literary theorist and critic, is usually mentioned in polemics attacking the turgidity of academic writing. Exhibit A is sometimes the first few sentences of his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications.
OK, that's pretty tough. It's argued on a highly abstract level, but it's not beyond the understanding of anyone who gives it a college try. I suspect most non-academic readers stumble over the somewhat jarring phrase "think the present historically," but this use of 'think' to mean 'think about' or 'conceptualize' is Standard Academic English. The reader should also know that whenever a Marxist like Jameson uses the words 'history' or 'historically' he is almost always referring to the Marxist dialectical theory of history, in which artworks and ideologies 'reflect,' by way of a highly complex system of mediations, the socioeconomic facts of their historical moments. (Much of what is admittedly dry and tedious in Jameson's works--I'm thinking specifically of the long longueurs in The Political Unconscious--is an attempt to rigorously work out the mediating factors.) Finally, it's important to note the ironic tone of the above passage, signalled most obviously by the quotes around 'expresses' and 'represses' and less obviously by the passage's third word. For a serious critic, the 'safest' way to grasp something is usually the worst way. So this entire passage, which expands upon the 'safest' interpretation of postmodernism, exists under a sign of extreme irony.
When these three factors are taken into account, the notorious passage becomes fairly understandable. But even if the reader fails to grasp it, the sentences that follow make these opening lines more clear. Interestingly, I have never seen any of Jameson's critics quote the entire passage. Here is the rest of it:
Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed," as Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change. The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more 'distracted,' as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images.
Thus Jameson presents, by means of a simple contrast, an explanation of what he means by postmodernism's contradictory effort to 'think the present historically.' Taken in context, the opening lines are not nearly so difficult as they appear when wrenched out of it. This, as I insinuated above, is probably why the rest of the passage is never quoted by critics of academic writing. To indict Jameson on the basis of his first few sentences is nearly as absurd as accusing Joyce of infantilization on the basis of the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I spent the past week reading Jameson--The Prison-House of Language, The Political Unconscious, some of the essays in The Modernism Papers--and I found him to be a much better and clearer writer than his critics would have us believe. If they can quote selectively, so can I. Here is Jameson at his best:
The history of thought is the history of its models. Classical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first used to organize our understanding of the natural world, have then been called upon to illuminate human reality. -- The Prison-House of Language
[T]here are no preexisting laws that govern the elaboration of the novel as a form: each one is different, a leap in the void, an invention of content simultaneous with the invention of the form. -- The Prison-House of Language
...History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. -- The Political Unconscious
Now, in the catastrophe of the postmodern, most of these canonical groupings--like the old-fashioned tableaux of nineteenth-century or seventeenth-century paintings--have disintegrated, leaving the surviving figures--Joyce, Proust, Kafka--visible like the occasional lone high-rise in a landscape of rubble. -- The Modernism Papers
The canvasses [of De Kooning] give me proof of the fragmentation of the modern senses and of the modern body. In the thinking part of my mind, I know where this fragmentation comes from; Schiller, Marx, Lukacs, Weber, tell me how the development of capital enforces a kind of psychic "division of labor," the advanced form of which can be observed in just this reification and autonomization of the various senses from one another. In front of the paintings, however, all I know is that the eye finds a space of sheer colored paint before it, in which it can lead a life of its own, beyond hearing and taste, and beyond the clock time of everyday life. -- The Modernism Papers
These examples are all perfectly clear and comparable in their lucidity to the prose of Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty. With so many truly atrocious academic writers out there, it's time to stop using Jameson as a whipping boy.
That said, I must state that I prefer my Jameson bottled, not booked. I'm raising a shot glass to Marxy Fred right now.
It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications.
OK, that's pretty tough. It's argued on a highly abstract level, but it's not beyond the understanding of anyone who gives it a college try. I suspect most non-academic readers stumble over the somewhat jarring phrase "think the present historically," but this use of 'think' to mean 'think about' or 'conceptualize' is Standard Academic English. The reader should also know that whenever a Marxist like Jameson uses the words 'history' or 'historically' he is almost always referring to the Marxist dialectical theory of history, in which artworks and ideologies 'reflect,' by way of a highly complex system of mediations, the socioeconomic facts of their historical moments. (Much of what is admittedly dry and tedious in Jameson's works--I'm thinking specifically of the long longueurs in The Political Unconscious--is an attempt to rigorously work out the mediating factors.) Finally, it's important to note the ironic tone of the above passage, signalled most obviously by the quotes around 'expresses' and 'represses' and less obviously by the passage's third word. For a serious critic, the 'safest' way to grasp something is usually the worst way. So this entire passage, which expands upon the 'safest' interpretation of postmodernism, exists under a sign of extreme irony.
When these three factors are taken into account, the notorious passage becomes fairly understandable. But even if the reader fails to grasp it, the sentences that follow make these opening lines more clear. Interestingly, I have never seen any of Jameson's critics quote the entire passage. Here is the rest of it:
Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed," as Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change. The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more 'distracted,' as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images.
Thus Jameson presents, by means of a simple contrast, an explanation of what he means by postmodernism's contradictory effort to 'think the present historically.' Taken in context, the opening lines are not nearly so difficult as they appear when wrenched out of it. This, as I insinuated above, is probably why the rest of the passage is never quoted by critics of academic writing. To indict Jameson on the basis of his first few sentences is nearly as absurd as accusing Joyce of infantilization on the basis of the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I spent the past week reading Jameson--The Prison-House of Language, The Political Unconscious, some of the essays in The Modernism Papers--and I found him to be a much better and clearer writer than his critics would have us believe. If they can quote selectively, so can I. Here is Jameson at his best:
The history of thought is the history of its models. Classical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first used to organize our understanding of the natural world, have then been called upon to illuminate human reality. -- The Prison-House of Language
[T]here are no preexisting laws that govern the elaboration of the novel as a form: each one is different, a leap in the void, an invention of content simultaneous with the invention of the form. -- The Prison-House of Language
...History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. -- The Political Unconscious
Now, in the catastrophe of the postmodern, most of these canonical groupings--like the old-fashioned tableaux of nineteenth-century or seventeenth-century paintings--have disintegrated, leaving the surviving figures--Joyce, Proust, Kafka--visible like the occasional lone high-rise in a landscape of rubble. -- The Modernism Papers
The canvasses [of De Kooning] give me proof of the fragmentation of the modern senses and of the modern body. In the thinking part of my mind, I know where this fragmentation comes from; Schiller, Marx, Lukacs, Weber, tell me how the development of capital enforces a kind of psychic "division of labor," the advanced form of which can be observed in just this reification and autonomization of the various senses from one another. In front of the paintings, however, all I know is that the eye finds a space of sheer colored paint before it, in which it can lead a life of its own, beyond hearing and taste, and beyond the clock time of everyday life. -- The Modernism Papers
These examples are all perfectly clear and comparable in their lucidity to the prose of Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty. With so many truly atrocious academic writers out there, it's time to stop using Jameson as a whipping boy.
That said, I must state that I prefer my Jameson bottled, not booked. I'm raising a shot glass to Marxy Fred right now.
THE SYSTEMS NOVEL: SOME THOUGHTS TOWARD A DEFINITION
The best way to begin any generic definition is to list several members of the presumptive genre. Here, then, is a list--exemplary but hardly exhaustive--of systems novels:
The deeper justification for the use of the linguistic model or metaphor [Jameson is writing about the 'linguistic turn' in 20th-century philosophy, specifically Structuralism] must, I think, be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific validity and technological progress. It lies in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which offer the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs. There is therefore a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today.
The systems novel takes as its explicit subject matter "that systematized and disembodied nightmare" of contemporary life, depicting a world in which human beings are formed, informed and deformed by ideological systems that compete, collide and collaborate across a novelistic canvas that can sometimes seem as vast as the world--or even the universe. (I should perhaps clarify that when I speak of "ideological systems" I mean not merely the commonly understood 'political' ideologies, but also 'ideology' in the broader Barthes-ian sense of "what goes without saying" at a given cultural moment. The dominant ideology of our time, for example, is neither Conservatism nor Liberalism but a Corporatism that contains them both. We have difficulty seeing this for the same reason that an intelligent fish would have no concept of "wetness." Corporate capitalism is not a ballot line; it is the matrix in which we live. American Conservatism and Liberalism are, respectively, its fundamentalist and pragmatic political manifestations.) The ideological systems these novels focus upon are as diverse as their authors: the military-industrial system (Pynchon), the corporatist-technological system (early Vollmann, Wallace, Gibson), the tragically routinized, systematic lifestyles of addiction (Burroughs, Wallace), politico-religious totalitarianism (Zamyatin, Orwell, Atwood), the highly-insular system that is the art world (The Recognitions), the world capitalist system (JR), the hermetically sealed absurdity of military systems (Catch-22), the nightmarish 50-year battle of mutually exclusive imperial systems that was the Cold War (DeLillo). All these diverse fictions are united, however, in their focus upon the essentially dehumanizing effect of the systems that define our world. Given this emphasis, the affinity between the systems novel and the science fiction genre should come as no surprise. Many systems novels might be categorized as science fiction (most of Pynchon's work, Vollmann's Angels, Infinite Jest, Burroughs), but it's probably more interesting to note that almost all science fiction novels can be classified as systems novels. Since science fiction is one of the ways in which our culture thinks about our technological world, and since that world is defined by its systems, this too should come as no surprise. We might consider science fiction the ur-genre of the systems novel, the pulpy matrix from which it emerged into 'serious' literature. The obvious influence of pulp SF on the generically seminal works of Burroughs and Pynchon seems to confirm this idea. The best SF works of Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, et al. can be added to the above list. And this thought leads to an overwhelming question: Do we need the category of the "systems novel" at all? Isn't "systems novel" simply a literary snobs' euphemism for science fiction, akin to the absurd 'graphic novel,' a phrase invented for people afraid to admit that they read comic books? The answer to the second question would seem to be 'not entirely' (The Recognitions and Catch-22, for example, have little of SF about them), so I think the abstraction "systems novel" is justified as a way of expressing the quality that unites all the novels and novelists mentioned above. More importantly, the idea of "systems" foregrounds the important element of cultural criticism in these works. To read them as critiques of our systematized world--rather than as clever fantasies, surreal comedies or brainy literary games--is to release their most radical energies.
(My list of exemplary systems novels is almost entirely American. Is this a result of personal prejudice, or are the most obvious examples of the systems novel American novels because America is the paradigmatic corporate capitalist state? What are the major non-American, non-English language systems novels?)
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Against the Day.
- Don DeLillo, White Noise, Libra, Running Dog, Underworld
- William Gaddis, The Recognitions, JR
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
- William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
- George Orwell, 1984
- Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
- William Gibson, Neuromancer
The deeper justification for the use of the linguistic model or metaphor [Jameson is writing about the 'linguistic turn' in 20th-century philosophy, specifically Structuralism] must, I think, be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific validity and technological progress. It lies in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which offer the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs. There is therefore a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today.
The systems novel takes as its explicit subject matter "that systematized and disembodied nightmare" of contemporary life, depicting a world in which human beings are formed, informed and deformed by ideological systems that compete, collide and collaborate across a novelistic canvas that can sometimes seem as vast as the world--or even the universe. (I should perhaps clarify that when I speak of "ideological systems" I mean not merely the commonly understood 'political' ideologies, but also 'ideology' in the broader Barthes-ian sense of "what goes without saying" at a given cultural moment. The dominant ideology of our time, for example, is neither Conservatism nor Liberalism but a Corporatism that contains them both. We have difficulty seeing this for the same reason that an intelligent fish would have no concept of "wetness." Corporate capitalism is not a ballot line; it is the matrix in which we live. American Conservatism and Liberalism are, respectively, its fundamentalist and pragmatic political manifestations.) The ideological systems these novels focus upon are as diverse as their authors: the military-industrial system (Pynchon), the corporatist-technological system (early Vollmann, Wallace, Gibson), the tragically routinized, systematic lifestyles of addiction (Burroughs, Wallace), politico-religious totalitarianism (Zamyatin, Orwell, Atwood), the highly-insular system that is the art world (The Recognitions), the world capitalist system (JR), the hermetically sealed absurdity of military systems (Catch-22), the nightmarish 50-year battle of mutually exclusive imperial systems that was the Cold War (DeLillo). All these diverse fictions are united, however, in their focus upon the essentially dehumanizing effect of the systems that define our world. Given this emphasis, the affinity between the systems novel and the science fiction genre should come as no surprise. Many systems novels might be categorized as science fiction (most of Pynchon's work, Vollmann's Angels, Infinite Jest, Burroughs), but it's probably more interesting to note that almost all science fiction novels can be classified as systems novels. Since science fiction is one of the ways in which our culture thinks about our technological world, and since that world is defined by its systems, this too should come as no surprise. We might consider science fiction the ur-genre of the systems novel, the pulpy matrix from which it emerged into 'serious' literature. The obvious influence of pulp SF on the generically seminal works of Burroughs and Pynchon seems to confirm this idea. The best SF works of Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, et al. can be added to the above list. And this thought leads to an overwhelming question: Do we need the category of the "systems novel" at all? Isn't "systems novel" simply a literary snobs' euphemism for science fiction, akin to the absurd 'graphic novel,' a phrase invented for people afraid to admit that they read comic books? The answer to the second question would seem to be 'not entirely' (The Recognitions and Catch-22, for example, have little of SF about them), so I think the abstraction "systems novel" is justified as a way of expressing the quality that unites all the novels and novelists mentioned above. More importantly, the idea of "systems" foregrounds the important element of cultural criticism in these works. To read them as critiques of our systematized world--rather than as clever fantasies, surreal comedies or brainy literary games--is to release their most radical energies.
(My list of exemplary systems novels is almost entirely American. Is this a result of personal prejudice, or are the most obvious examples of the systems novel American novels because America is the paradigmatic corporate capitalist state? What are the major non-American, non-English language systems novels?)
Sunday, January 9, 2011
NOAM CHOMSKY ON DERRIDA, FOUCAULT, LACAN AND POSTMODERNISM
In the mid-1990s, Noam Chomsky posted the following statement on an online bulletin board. Since it's rather hard to find, and because it's Chomsky's only extended statement on the subject of postmodernism--and because watching Noam call Lacan "a perfectly self-conscious charlatan" is just good clean fun--I'm reprinting the entire post here:
CHOMSKY: I've returned from travel-speaking, where I spend most of my life, and found a collection of messages extending the discussion about "theory" and "philosophy," a debate that I find rather curious. A few reactions --- though I concede, from the start, that I may simply not understand what is going on.
As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I, Mike, and maybe others don't have "theories" and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to "theory" and "philosophy" and "theoretical constructs" and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world. I won't speak for Mike. My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before "postmodernism" had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: "if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret," despite much "pseudo-scientific posturing."
To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call "theory" and "philosophy," but little that I can detect beyond "pseudo-scientific posturing." That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies (Rawls's important work is the case I mentioned, in response to specific inquiry).
The latter fact has been noticed. One fine philosopher and social theorist (also activist), Alan Graubard, wrote an interesting review years ago of Robert Nozick's "libertarian" response to Rawls, and of the reactions to it. He pointed out that reactions were very enthusiastic. Reviewer after reviewer extolled the power of the arguments, etc., but no one accepted any of the real-world conclusions (unless they had previously reached them). That's correct, as were his observations on what it means.
The proponents of "theory" and "philosophy" have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a "secret" to me: I'll be happy to look. I've asked many times before, and still await an answer, which should be easy to provide: simply give some examples of "a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to" the kinds of problems and issues that Mike, I, and many others (in fact, most of the world's population, I think, outside of narrow and remarkably self-contained intellectual circles) are or should be concerned with: the problems and issues we speak and write about, for example, and others like them. To put it differently, show that the principles of the "theory" or "philosophy" that we are told to study and apply lead by valid argument to conclusions that we and others had not already reached on other (and better) grounds; these "others" include people lacking formal education, who typically seem to have no problem reaching these conclusions through mutual interactions that avoid the "theoretical" obscurities entirely, or often on their own.
Again, those are simple requests. I've made them before, and remain in my state of ignorance. I also draw certain conclusions from the fact.
As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return.
These are very easy requests to fulfill, if there is any basis to the claims put forth with such fervor and indignation. But instead of trying to provide an answer to this simple requests, the response is cries of anger: to raise these questions shows "elitism," "anti-intellectualism," and other crimes --- though apparently it is not "elitist" to stay within the self- and mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals who talk only to one another and (to my knowledge) don't enter into the kind of world in which I'd prefer to live. As for that world, I can reel off my speaking and writing schedule to illustrate what I mean, though I presume that most people in this discussion know, or can easily find out; and somehow I never find the "theoreticians" there, nor do I go to their conferences and parties. In short, we seem to inhabit quite different worlds, and I find it hard to see why mine is "elitist," not theirs. The opposite seems to be transparently the case, though I won't amplify.
To add another facet, I am absolutely deluged with requests to speak and can't possibly accept a fraction of the invitations I'd like to, so I suggest other people. But oddly, I never suggest those who propound "theories" and "philosophy," nor do I come across them, or for that matter rarely even their names, in my own (fairly extensive) experience with popular and activist groups and organizations, general community, college, church, union, etc., audiences here and abroad, third world women, refugees, etc.; I can easily give examples. Why, I wonder.
The whole debate, then, is an odd one. On one side, angry charges and denunciations, on the other, the request for some evidence and argument to support them, to which the response is more angry charges --- but, strikingly, no evidence or argument. Again, one is led to ask why.
It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.
Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.
Specific comment. Phetland asked who I'm referring to when I speak of "Paris school" and "postmodernist cults": the above is a sample.
He then asks, reasonably, why I am "dismissive" of it. Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion --- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.
Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I've met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible --- he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven't met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones --- the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I've dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish. When I proceed as I do in other areas where I do not understand, I run into the problems mentioned in connection with (1) and (2) above. So that's who I'm referring to, and why I don't proceed very far. I can list a lot more names if it's not obvious.
For those interested in a literary depiction that reflects pretty much the same perceptions (but from the inside), I'd suggest David Lodge. Pretty much on target, as far as I can judge.
Phetland also found it "particularly puzzling" that I am so "curtly dismissive" of these intellectual circles while I spend a lot of time "exposing the posturing and obfuscation of the New York Times." So "why not give these guys the same treatment." Fair question. There are also simple answers. What appears in the work I do address (NYT, journals of opinion, much of scholarship, etc.) is simply written in intelligible prose and has a great impact on the world, establishing the doctrinal framework within which thought and expression are supposed to be contained, and largely are, in successful doctrinal systems such as ours. That has a huge impact on what happens to suffering people throughout the world, the ones who concern me, as distinct from those who live in the world that Lodge depicts (accurately, I think). So this work should be dealt with seriously, at least if one cares about ordinary people and their problems. The work to which Phetland refers has none of these characteristics, as far as I'm aware. It certainly has none of the impact, since it is addressed only to other intellectuals in the same circles. Furthermore, there is no effort that I am aware of to make it intelligible to the great mass of the population (say, to the people I'm constantly speaking to, meeting with, and writing letters to, and have in mind when I write, and who seem to understand what I say without any particular difficulty, though they generally seem to have the same cognitive disability I do when facing the postmodern cults). And I'm also aware of no effort to show how it applies to anything in the world in the sense I mentioned earlier: grounding conclusions that weren't already obvious. Since I don't happen to be much interested in the ways that intellectuals inflate their reputations, gain privilege and prestige, and disengage themselves from actual participation in popular struggle, I don't spend any time on it.
Phetland suggests starting with Foucault --- who, as I've written repeatedly, is somewhat apart from the others, for two reasons: I find at least some of what he writes intelligible, though generally not very interesting; second, he was not personally disengaged and did not restrict himself to interactions with others within the same highly privileged elite circles. Phetland then does exactly what I requested: he gives some illustrations of why he thinks Foucault's work is important. That's exactly the right way to proceed, and I think it helps understand why I take such a "dismissive" attitude towards all of this --- in fact, pay no attention to it.
What Phetland describes, accurately I'm sure, seems to me unimportant, because everyone always knew it --- apart from details of social and intellectual history, and about these, I'd suggest caution: some of these are areas I happen to have worked on fairly extensively myself, and I know that Foucault's scholarship is just not trustworthy here, so I don't trust it, without independent investigation, in areas that I don't know --- this comes up a bit in the discussion from 1972 that is in print. I think there is much better scholarship on the 17th and 18th century, and I keep to that, and my own research. But let's put aside the other historical work, and turn to the "theoretical constructs" and the explanations: that there has been "a great change from harsh mechanisms of repression to more subtle mechanisms by which people come to do" what the powerful want, even enthusiastically. That's true enough, in fact, utter truism. If that's a "theory," then all the criticisms of me are wrong: I have a "theory" too, since I've been saying exactly that for years, and also giving the reasons and historical background, but without describing it as a theory (because it merits no such term), and without obfuscatory rhetoric (because it's so simple-minded), and without claiming that it is new (because it's a truism). It's been fully recognized for a long time that as the power to control and coerce has declined, it's more necessary to resort to what practitioners in the PR industry early in this century -- who understood all of this well -- called "controlling the public mind." The reasons, as observed by Hume in the 18th century, are that "the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers" relies ultimately on control of opinion and attitudes. Why these truisms should suddenly become "a theory" or "philosophy," others will have to explain; Hume would have laughed.
Some of Foucault's particular examples (say, about 18th century techniques of punishment) look interesting, and worth investigating as to their accuracy. But the "theory" is merely an extremely complex and inflated restatement of what many others have put very simply, and without any pretense that anything deep is involved. There's nothing in what Phetland describes that I haven't been writing about myself for 35 years, also giving plenty of documentation to show that it was always obvious, and indeed hardly departs from truism. What's interesting about these trivialities is not the principle, which is transparent, but the demonstration of how it works itself out in specific detail to cases that are important to people: like intervention and aggression, exploitation and terror, "free market" scams, and so on. That I don't find in Foucault, though I find plenty of it by people who seem to be able to write sentences I can understand and who aren't placed in the intellectual firmament as "theoreticians."
To make myself clear, Phetland is doing exactly the right thing: presenting what he sees as "important insights and theoretical constructs" that he finds in Foucault. My problem is that the "insights" seem to me familiar and there are no "theoretical constructs," except in that simple and familiar ideas have been dressed up in complicated and pretentious rhetoric. Phetland asks whether I think this is "wrong, useless, or posturing." No. The historical parts look interesting sometimes, though they have to be treated with caution and independent verification is even more worth undertaking than it usually is. The parts that restate what has long been obvious and put in much simpler terms are not "useless," but indeed useful, which is why I and others have always made the very same points. As to "posturing," a lot of it is that, in my opinion, though I don't particularly blame Foucault for it: it's such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to his credit, he distanced himself from it. As for the "corruption" of this culture particularly since World War II, that's another topic, which I've discussed elsewhere and won't go into here. Frankly, I don't see why people in this forum should be much interested, just as I am not. There are more important things to do, in my opinion, than to inquire into the traits of elite intellectuals engaged in various careerist and other pursuits in their narrow and (to me, at least) pretty unininteresting circles. That's a broad brush, and I stress again that it is unfair to make such comments without proving them: but I've been asked, and have answered the only specific point that I find raised. When asked about my general opinion, I can only give it, or if something more specific is posed, address that. I'm not going to undertake an essay on topics that don't interest me.
Unless someone can answer the simple questions that immediately arise in the mind of any reasonable person when claims about "theory" and "philosophy" are raised, I'll keep to work that seems to me sensible and enlightening, and to people who are interested in understanding and changing the world.
Johnb made the point that "plain language is not enough when the frame of reference is not available to the listener"; correct and important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent "theories." Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that might be considered, all in plain language. I've never found that a problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it's true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll. Johnb says that outside of circles like this forum, "to the rest of the country, he's incomprehensible" ("he" being me). That's absolutely counter to my rather ample experience, with all sorts of audiences. Rather, my experience is what I just described. The incomprehensibility roughly corresponds to the educational level. Take, say, talk radio. I'm on a fair amount, and it's usually pretty easy to guess from accents, etc., what kind of audience it is. I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and "frame of reference" issues because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us. With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to disentangle lots of ideological constructions.
It's certainly true that lots of people can't read the books I write. That's not because the ideas or language are complicated --- we have no problems in informal discussion on exactly the same points, and even in the same words. The reasons are different, maybe partly the fault of my writing style, partly the result of the need (which I feel, at least) to present pretty heavy documentation, which makes it tough reading. For these reasons, a number of people have taken pretty much the same material, often the very same words, and put them in pamphlet form and the like. No one seems to have much problem --- though again, reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement or professional academic journals don't have a clue as to what it's about, quite commonly; sometimes it's pretty comical.
A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.
End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered.
It's clear that Chomsky doesn't understand Derrida and probably doesn't want to, that what Chomsky dismisses as Derrida's "misreading" is actually the deliberate "misreading" of deconstructive interpretation, i.e. reading against the grain of standard interpretations. (In this case, Chomsky's opening profession that he may not understand what's going on should be understood as something other than Socratic irony.) Many of Chomsky's other criticisms are both highly arguable and eminently understandable. His caveat about independently confirming Foucault's historical research may be the most valuable passage in the entire statement. The David Lodge book Chomsky twice refers to is surely Small World, Lodge's comic 'academic conference picaresque' novel set in the critical theory milieu ca.1979. It's a funny, smart, well-made novel, a superior follow-up to Lodge's Changing Places, the book that taught the world how to play 'Humiliation.' I recommend both.
CHOMSKY: I've returned from travel-speaking, where I spend most of my life, and found a collection of messages extending the discussion about "theory" and "philosophy," a debate that I find rather curious. A few reactions --- though I concede, from the start, that I may simply not understand what is going on.
As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I, Mike, and maybe others don't have "theories" and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to "theory" and "philosophy" and "theoretical constructs" and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world. I won't speak for Mike. My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before "postmodernism" had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: "if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret," despite much "pseudo-scientific posturing."
To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call "theory" and "philosophy," but little that I can detect beyond "pseudo-scientific posturing." That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies (Rawls's important work is the case I mentioned, in response to specific inquiry).
The latter fact has been noticed. One fine philosopher and social theorist (also activist), Alan Graubard, wrote an interesting review years ago of Robert Nozick's "libertarian" response to Rawls, and of the reactions to it. He pointed out that reactions were very enthusiastic. Reviewer after reviewer extolled the power of the arguments, etc., but no one accepted any of the real-world conclusions (unless they had previously reached them). That's correct, as were his observations on what it means.
The proponents of "theory" and "philosophy" have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a "secret" to me: I'll be happy to look. I've asked many times before, and still await an answer, which should be easy to provide: simply give some examples of "a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to" the kinds of problems and issues that Mike, I, and many others (in fact, most of the world's population, I think, outside of narrow and remarkably self-contained intellectual circles) are or should be concerned with: the problems and issues we speak and write about, for example, and others like them. To put it differently, show that the principles of the "theory" or "philosophy" that we are told to study and apply lead by valid argument to conclusions that we and others had not already reached on other (and better) grounds; these "others" include people lacking formal education, who typically seem to have no problem reaching these conclusions through mutual interactions that avoid the "theoretical" obscurities entirely, or often on their own.
Again, those are simple requests. I've made them before, and remain in my state of ignorance. I also draw certain conclusions from the fact.
As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return.
These are very easy requests to fulfill, if there is any basis to the claims put forth with such fervor and indignation. But instead of trying to provide an answer to this simple requests, the response is cries of anger: to raise these questions shows "elitism," "anti-intellectualism," and other crimes --- though apparently it is not "elitist" to stay within the self- and mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals who talk only to one another and (to my knowledge) don't enter into the kind of world in which I'd prefer to live. As for that world, I can reel off my speaking and writing schedule to illustrate what I mean, though I presume that most people in this discussion know, or can easily find out; and somehow I never find the "theoreticians" there, nor do I go to their conferences and parties. In short, we seem to inhabit quite different worlds, and I find it hard to see why mine is "elitist," not theirs. The opposite seems to be transparently the case, though I won't amplify.
To add another facet, I am absolutely deluged with requests to speak and can't possibly accept a fraction of the invitations I'd like to, so I suggest other people. But oddly, I never suggest those who propound "theories" and "philosophy," nor do I come across them, or for that matter rarely even their names, in my own (fairly extensive) experience with popular and activist groups and organizations, general community, college, church, union, etc., audiences here and abroad, third world women, refugees, etc.; I can easily give examples. Why, I wonder.
The whole debate, then, is an odd one. On one side, angry charges and denunciations, on the other, the request for some evidence and argument to support them, to which the response is more angry charges --- but, strikingly, no evidence or argument. Again, one is led to ask why.
It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.
Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.
Specific comment. Phetland asked who I'm referring to when I speak of "Paris school" and "postmodernist cults": the above is a sample.
He then asks, reasonably, why I am "dismissive" of it. Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion --- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.
Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I've met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible --- he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven't met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones --- the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I've dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish. When I proceed as I do in other areas where I do not understand, I run into the problems mentioned in connection with (1) and (2) above. So that's who I'm referring to, and why I don't proceed very far. I can list a lot more names if it's not obvious.
For those interested in a literary depiction that reflects pretty much the same perceptions (but from the inside), I'd suggest David Lodge. Pretty much on target, as far as I can judge.
Phetland also found it "particularly puzzling" that I am so "curtly dismissive" of these intellectual circles while I spend a lot of time "exposing the posturing and obfuscation of the New York Times." So "why not give these guys the same treatment." Fair question. There are also simple answers. What appears in the work I do address (NYT, journals of opinion, much of scholarship, etc.) is simply written in intelligible prose and has a great impact on the world, establishing the doctrinal framework within which thought and expression are supposed to be contained, and largely are, in successful doctrinal systems such as ours. That has a huge impact on what happens to suffering people throughout the world, the ones who concern me, as distinct from those who live in the world that Lodge depicts (accurately, I think). So this work should be dealt with seriously, at least if one cares about ordinary people and their problems. The work to which Phetland refers has none of these characteristics, as far as I'm aware. It certainly has none of the impact, since it is addressed only to other intellectuals in the same circles. Furthermore, there is no effort that I am aware of to make it intelligible to the great mass of the population (say, to the people I'm constantly speaking to, meeting with, and writing letters to, and have in mind when I write, and who seem to understand what I say without any particular difficulty, though they generally seem to have the same cognitive disability I do when facing the postmodern cults). And I'm also aware of no effort to show how it applies to anything in the world in the sense I mentioned earlier: grounding conclusions that weren't already obvious. Since I don't happen to be much interested in the ways that intellectuals inflate their reputations, gain privilege and prestige, and disengage themselves from actual participation in popular struggle, I don't spend any time on it.
Phetland suggests starting with Foucault --- who, as I've written repeatedly, is somewhat apart from the others, for two reasons: I find at least some of what he writes intelligible, though generally not very interesting; second, he was not personally disengaged and did not restrict himself to interactions with others within the same highly privileged elite circles. Phetland then does exactly what I requested: he gives some illustrations of why he thinks Foucault's work is important. That's exactly the right way to proceed, and I think it helps understand why I take such a "dismissive" attitude towards all of this --- in fact, pay no attention to it.
What Phetland describes, accurately I'm sure, seems to me unimportant, because everyone always knew it --- apart from details of social and intellectual history, and about these, I'd suggest caution: some of these are areas I happen to have worked on fairly extensively myself, and I know that Foucault's scholarship is just not trustworthy here, so I don't trust it, without independent investigation, in areas that I don't know --- this comes up a bit in the discussion from 1972 that is in print. I think there is much better scholarship on the 17th and 18th century, and I keep to that, and my own research. But let's put aside the other historical work, and turn to the "theoretical constructs" and the explanations: that there has been "a great change from harsh mechanisms of repression to more subtle mechanisms by which people come to do" what the powerful want, even enthusiastically. That's true enough, in fact, utter truism. If that's a "theory," then all the criticisms of me are wrong: I have a "theory" too, since I've been saying exactly that for years, and also giving the reasons and historical background, but without describing it as a theory (because it merits no such term), and without obfuscatory rhetoric (because it's so simple-minded), and without claiming that it is new (because it's a truism). It's been fully recognized for a long time that as the power to control and coerce has declined, it's more necessary to resort to what practitioners in the PR industry early in this century -- who understood all of this well -- called "controlling the public mind." The reasons, as observed by Hume in the 18th century, are that "the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers" relies ultimately on control of opinion and attitudes. Why these truisms should suddenly become "a theory" or "philosophy," others will have to explain; Hume would have laughed.
Some of Foucault's particular examples (say, about 18th century techniques of punishment) look interesting, and worth investigating as to their accuracy. But the "theory" is merely an extremely complex and inflated restatement of what many others have put very simply, and without any pretense that anything deep is involved. There's nothing in what Phetland describes that I haven't been writing about myself for 35 years, also giving plenty of documentation to show that it was always obvious, and indeed hardly departs from truism. What's interesting about these trivialities is not the principle, which is transparent, but the demonstration of how it works itself out in specific detail to cases that are important to people: like intervention and aggression, exploitation and terror, "free market" scams, and so on. That I don't find in Foucault, though I find plenty of it by people who seem to be able to write sentences I can understand and who aren't placed in the intellectual firmament as "theoreticians."
To make myself clear, Phetland is doing exactly the right thing: presenting what he sees as "important insights and theoretical constructs" that he finds in Foucault. My problem is that the "insights" seem to me familiar and there are no "theoretical constructs," except in that simple and familiar ideas have been dressed up in complicated and pretentious rhetoric. Phetland asks whether I think this is "wrong, useless, or posturing." No. The historical parts look interesting sometimes, though they have to be treated with caution and independent verification is even more worth undertaking than it usually is. The parts that restate what has long been obvious and put in much simpler terms are not "useless," but indeed useful, which is why I and others have always made the very same points. As to "posturing," a lot of it is that, in my opinion, though I don't particularly blame Foucault for it: it's such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to his credit, he distanced himself from it. As for the "corruption" of this culture particularly since World War II, that's another topic, which I've discussed elsewhere and won't go into here. Frankly, I don't see why people in this forum should be much interested, just as I am not. There are more important things to do, in my opinion, than to inquire into the traits of elite intellectuals engaged in various careerist and other pursuits in their narrow and (to me, at least) pretty unininteresting circles. That's a broad brush, and I stress again that it is unfair to make such comments without proving them: but I've been asked, and have answered the only specific point that I find raised. When asked about my general opinion, I can only give it, or if something more specific is posed, address that. I'm not going to undertake an essay on topics that don't interest me.
Unless someone can answer the simple questions that immediately arise in the mind of any reasonable person when claims about "theory" and "philosophy" are raised, I'll keep to work that seems to me sensible and enlightening, and to people who are interested in understanding and changing the world.
Johnb made the point that "plain language is not enough when the frame of reference is not available to the listener"; correct and important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent "theories." Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that might be considered, all in plain language. I've never found that a problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it's true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll. Johnb says that outside of circles like this forum, "to the rest of the country, he's incomprehensible" ("he" being me). That's absolutely counter to my rather ample experience, with all sorts of audiences. Rather, my experience is what I just described. The incomprehensibility roughly corresponds to the educational level. Take, say, talk radio. I'm on a fair amount, and it's usually pretty easy to guess from accents, etc., what kind of audience it is. I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and "frame of reference" issues because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us. With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to disentangle lots of ideological constructions.
It's certainly true that lots of people can't read the books I write. That's not because the ideas or language are complicated --- we have no problems in informal discussion on exactly the same points, and even in the same words. The reasons are different, maybe partly the fault of my writing style, partly the result of the need (which I feel, at least) to present pretty heavy documentation, which makes it tough reading. For these reasons, a number of people have taken pretty much the same material, often the very same words, and put them in pamphlet form and the like. No one seems to have much problem --- though again, reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement or professional academic journals don't have a clue as to what it's about, quite commonly; sometimes it's pretty comical.
A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.
End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered.
It's clear that Chomsky doesn't understand Derrida and probably doesn't want to, that what Chomsky dismisses as Derrida's "misreading" is actually the deliberate "misreading" of deconstructive interpretation, i.e. reading against the grain of standard interpretations. (In this case, Chomsky's opening profession that he may not understand what's going on should be understood as something other than Socratic irony.) Many of Chomsky's other criticisms are both highly arguable and eminently understandable. His caveat about independently confirming Foucault's historical research may be the most valuable passage in the entire statement. The David Lodge book Chomsky twice refers to is surely Small World, Lodge's comic 'academic conference picaresque' novel set in the critical theory milieu ca.1979. It's a funny, smart, well-made novel, a superior follow-up to Lodge's Changing Places, the book that taught the world how to play 'Humiliation.' I recommend both.
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