Another Abe

Joke title, referring to Kafka's idea of another Abraham.  I am thinking of Kōbō Abe in fact as another Kafka. 

Because I was teaching Woman in the Dunes yesterday -- mainly the movie but also Abe's novel.  He  wrote the very faithful screenplay.  Among the writers Abe knew well was Kafka -- Abe had visited Prague a few years earlier (after the Hungarian revolution, whose suppression disgusted him), so roughly the time the movie and novel start, and when there he did the Kafka tour.

One of the important things I think he saw in Kafka was just how realistic Kafka is.  You're thrown into the world not your own and not yourself but the only world there will ever be for you now, and you live in it.  We all do.

So the explicit allusions to Kafka are at least these: the man in the movie (and novel) is an amateur entomologist, looking for a new kind of beetle (the tiger beetle), which is to say that Gregor Samsa might be there in the sand somewhere.  Well he is -- the easiest irony in the movie is that the man is just like the beetles he's collecting, trapped in the dunes as they in their jars. Eventually he becomes focused on the crows around the pit where he lives, trying to catch one (which he can't), to treat as an unimperial messenger, putting one in mind of Kafka's parable: "The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows."

As has long been pointed out, the word for crow in Czech is a pun on Kafka's name (the aphorism is in German, but his name does mean crow.  Murakami will do something similar with the character Crow in Kafka on the Shore).  And there's the complaint that the man makes that he is living "like a dog," Josef K's last words in The Trial.

But I think the most crucial connection may be in the moral of the story, which is never quite specific, although the man tells the woman that he has no desire to be in Tokyo, the place she imagines is so wonderful. If he'd liked Tokyo he wouldn't be doing entomology in the dunes.  The moral seems to be from Kafka, from the land-surveyor K's sublime rhetorical question: "Was hätte mich denn in dieses öde Land locken können, als das Verlangen hierzubleiben?“ - "What could have drawn me to this desolate land, if not the desire to stay here?"

That's what the entomologist realizes at the end, his desire to stay there.  The story is about his understanding that he's not the main character.  The woman is.  It's her sorrow, her need, her mourning, her experience that he must learn to take seriously.  So the absolute realism of the movie is this: it's a realistic portrait of a marriage -- of the best that a marriage can be, perhaps, or that human relations can be over time -- which is learning to commit yourself to what you've already been committed to, what circumstances, fate, life, being in the world, have committed you to.  A commitment to commitment in spite of everything.  To others in the same boat, wrecked (as in an early shot in the movie) on the dunes.

Unexpected Reunion

It just occurred to me that Johann Peter Hebel's amazing story "Unexpected Reunion" -- which Kafka famously called "the most wonderful story in the world -- is a version of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Or perhaps it might be called Eurydice and Orpheus, with all such a converse might apply.  At any rate it's the Eurydice figure who turns back, Eurydice who's been exiled in this world for all those years.

Ophuls' Black Orpheus, problematic as its real world construction is (for short: not the fact that it depicts an exotic celebration per se, but the exoticization of the actors), is still a brilliant and beautiful movie, and its most brilliant part is what Orpheus sees when he turns back: Eurydice as a very old woman.  What he sees is the truth of marriage, time, aging, death.  A truth, anyhow: the other truth is that these things are okay if one doesn't turn back, doesn't seek to turn back.  

In Hebel's story, too, the woman becomes very old, in her vast separation from her "young husband" ("θαλερὸς παρακοίτης," as Andromake calls Hektor).  But it is she who turns back to see his youth, and to mourn their lives and their parting, she who is more Eurydice than ever.

Sudden lit crit

I am thinking of some of the greatest short moments of literary criticism I know. I would mention Twitter, but that would corrupt the idea, and besides you tend to need the quotation, the literary sample, before the remark. Herewith a few such moments:

A scrap from Dickinson, about Antony's great speech in Antony and Cleopatra:

                            Since Cleopatra died,
I have lived in such dishonour, that the gods
Detest my baseness.

He's heard the (false) report of her death only about ten lines earlier. Dickinson writes three words: that engulfing since.

Empson on Hamlet, an absolutely great essay:

What is reckless about the speech is that it makes Hamlet say..."I have cause and will and strength and means / To do it", destroying a sheer school of Hamlet Theories with each noun.

Blanchot on Kafka, who in his journals describes the necessity for a writer to devote oneself to writing all one's life. "Toute sa vie." Trois mots exigeants.

Blanchot again on The Iliad. Achilles, remembering his own father, whom he will never see again, allows Priam to take Hector's body. Then he seeks to feast Priam (as the laws of hospitality demand), but Priam refuses. Achilles tells Priam, in a tone of quiet menace (say I) that he had better eat, for fear that Achilles should forget himself and kill Priam if he doesn't. This is the most elemental of alternatives: ou la parole, ou la mort. Either you accept human connection (as Achilles has done) or all there is is death. This is the meaning of the laws of hospitality. Blanchot's two word judgment of Achilles's speech: Parole sublime.

Proust on Flaubert, long by these standards but worth it: un homme qui par l'usage entièrement nouveau et personnel qu'il a fait du passé défini, du passé indéfini, du participe présent, de certains pronoms et de certaines prépositions, a renouvelé presque autant notre vision des choses que Kant, avec ses Catégories, les théories de la Connaissance et de la Réalité du monde extérieur.

(This is all by way of celebration. The great negations are really all about The Excursion. Francis Jeffrey's This will never do. Mary Shelley after she and Percy read it aloud to each other: He is a slave.)

I think that in the twentieth century, a certain kind of novel learned to reflect on itself this way. Fitzgerald was particularly great at that, especially in Tender is the Night. This sort of self-reflection was arch in the nineteenth century (Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, for example), but became real literary criticism later on. Thus this moment from Tender is the Night:

The foregoing has the ring of a biography, without the satisfaction of knowing that the hero, like Grant, lolling in his general store in Galena, is ready to be called to an intricate destiny. Moreover it is confusing to come across a youthful photograph of some one known in a rounded maturity and gaze with a shock upon a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger. Best to be reassuring--Dick Diver's moment now began.

Denis Johnson does something very similar in The Name of the World. Mike Reed, the narrator, reflects on his narration and what he should say next, in the subtlest but most lucid of ways. These were originally Johnson's own notes on his MS as he was writing, and their incorporation into the narrative intensifies its narrator's exploration of the strange, and literary, experience that is all that is left to him.

I think Virginia Woolf might have originated this, maybe in Jacob's Room? The third person narrator reflecting on her materials, on the situations and settings of her novel.

Tasks and answers

(A short post to keep my hand in, while I write the two overdue things I'm writing and finish up the semester....)

One of the great and difficult things about King Lear is its fairy-tale quality.  Writing gripping and unmotivated situations - nothing seems easier, but nothing is harder. Even the Mariner's shooting of the albatross doesn't quite do it, as Coleridge himself acknowledged when Anna Letitia Barbauld complained of the story's want of moral point:

Mrs Barbauld tole me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the
Genii's son.

It's worth remembering that Barbauld was an innovative and charismatic teacher as well as poet, and that she wrote a good deal, and successfully for children. But Coleridge was after that near-impossible quality: gratuitous narrative that brings you in so quickly that you don't have time to wonder why or how such situations should ever arise.  To see what I mean notice how well Kafka achieves something akin to the great beginning of the Grimms's "Town Musicans of Bremen" --

A man had a donkey, who for long years had untiringly carried sacks to the mill, but whose strength was now failing, so that he was becoming less and less able to work. Then his master thought that he would no longer feed him, but the donkey noticed that it was not a good wind that was blowing and ran away, setting forth on the road to Bremen, where he thought he could become a town musician 

-- in the opening of the Metamorphosis:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.  He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely.  His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flimmered helplessly before his eyes. [Nabokov's modified translation of the Muirs with one reversion to their version; "flimmered" is his portmanteau of flickered and shimmered]

Shakespeare achieves what Coleridge doesn't at the beginning of King Lear.  His source -- the Chronicle History of King Leir -- has the King set the love contest up as a trick.  He is sure that Cordella will vow her absolute love and obedience to him, which will then enable him to require her to marry the husband he has picked for her rather than the man she loves (cf. the less fairy-tale-like Midsummer Night's Dream).  In Shakespeare's version, Lear simply asks the question:

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?

He means the question to set him up as the judge of their answers - a finely fatherly thing to do. But the question is deeper than that, I've just been realizing: it's the question of the play.  Which daughter will he say loves him most? And the answer comes only at the end, when he finally says that it's Cordelia.  That question is answered for us, but for her also: "Which of you?" The second person matters: it's when he says it to her that the question is answered.  We wait, and she waits, for the answer during the whole play. It is then that he gives the answer to the question he has unwillingly posed himself.  He had no idea that the question was not simply the catalyst of what comes next but the question of the play.  Will he say it? About Cordelia? When?

The "shall" turns out to indicate the whole temporal span of the play: Lear's fairy tale question and fairy tale crisis also shows him setting himself the task that it will take the whole play to fulfill: saying who loves him most.  And when he does that, everything's over.  But the second person also matters because he's setting her the task (in proper Proppian form): make him say it.  And that takes the whole play and her whole life, and his whole life too.

I think this is all obvious, and yet I think somehow it's not: that the story is simpler and deeped than anything in Tolstoy, which is why he (Tolstoy) disparaged it.  The best fairy-tale writer of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy's works have the fairy-tale slyness of the Chronicle History of King Leir.  Perhaps they sometimes rival the the austere complexity, that is to say the simplicity, of King Lear.  But it's King Lear that they rival.

Names of Works: Names ("Turn of the Screw," for example)

What does Reservoir Dogs mean?  Everyone knows: it's that movie that established Quentin Tarantino's reputation for gripping pulp violence, for a kind of pop pleasure in the interactions of large, primary-colored characters (figuratively as well as by way of their names) punctuated by violence, but where the violence isn't quite our central anxiety but part of the stakes in the story.  Before you go see the movie, you assume you'll find out the significance of its title in the movie; afterwards you do know the significance: it's the perfect title for that Quentin Tarentino movie.

Yet, if you've seen it you know that there's no reservoir, no dog, no reference to their concatenation in the movie.  Somehow the completely gripping story so fills your mind that when you've watching it, you don't notice that it skips the part where the meaning of the title gets explained.  By the end, it just means that Quentin Tarantino movie, Reservoir Dogs.

Tarantino does this so effectively that we can see something really wonderful: an idiom aborning.  The title has the same linguistic effect as an idiom: a piece of language that means the way words mean, but not by virtue of the combination that it comprises.  The whole phrase easily dissolves into the flow of meaning, just like any other word.  The hotly contested philosophical distinction between names and definite descriptions (cf. Russell, Kripke) comes undone in the case of what we could call the idiomatic name, the name that starts out looking like a description and then, after a while, doesn't.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about The Turn of The Screw, and what the title means.  Everyone knows, right? that Henry James novel, and also the sense of twist after possible twist.  But why "turn of the screw"? The phrase appears in the novel twice, in that strange way that James has of treating bits of language as though they're common coin, even though they're not ("hang fire" being perhaps the most notorious).  In the frame narrative, Douglas remarks about the ghost story that Griffin has just told,

"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?"

"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

And then later (though earlier in time), towards the end, the Governess describes yet once more the line she's had to pursue throughout her time at Bly:

Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

Sure, Douglas could have picked up the phrase from her, but that seems to be considering it too curiously, as though we're suddenly supposed to think back to the way she's influenced Douglas at this moment when she's praising the ordinary, confronting the ordinary against the ordeal.  It feels more as though the phrase itself has become virtuously, valorously, ordinary, idiomatic, something that people do, in that wonderful offhanded praise (so like James) of "ordinary human virtue."  What is a turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue? Even with just this context, these contexts, it means something like a tightening up of the apparatus, to make it more "rigid" (her word), more capable of resisting the stress or push it undergoes.

Anyhow, the phrase is not an idiomatic one before James made it one.  It does have an origin though: it's the title of a chapter in Bleak House ("A Turn of the Screw") in which Phil calls Joshua Smallweed "a screw and a wice in his actions."  Thus the turn of the screw is the gradual increase of pressure, tightening what is already tight, turning a structure into nothing but itself, the way an idiom comes to mean only that untranslatable thing that the idiom captures so well.

This is essentially Blanchot's reading of the story. His great insight (greater even than what he was the first to remark: that the story is studiously and relentlessly ambiguous, not only about the real existence of the ghosts, but about whether it's ambiguous at all, an ambiguity which requires Miles to die) - his great insight is the importance of the fact that the governess is the narrator.  What this means, he says, is not only that we don't know whether she's reliable, but that the subject of the story is its own narration, the narration of the fact that the narration is at issue. It's her story, which means that the content of the narrative is that it is a narrative: as with Proust it is, in the end, the story of the narrator as narrator.

Blanchot doesn't want to make this into some standard circular paradox of self-referentiality, any more than Proust does.  He wants to see this collapsing of the difference between narrative and thing narrated as the pressure of narrative itself, increased sufficiently to squeeze out of narrative everything inessential, everything that isn't, finally, narrative pressure, so that the pressure of narrative is finally what it is: a pressure to be found only in the irreality of fiction because no fact of the matter, no truth, can come to resolve and relieve that pressure.  The turn of the screw tightens the fiction to itself, makes of the work its own idiom or idiolect, a language you can learn but not one that you can translate, not in any literal, vulgar way, as we are warned from the start:

Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?"

"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.

"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"

"The story won't tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."

Waggish's recent post on MacGuffins put me in mind of this.   For Hitchcock (and others) the MacGuffin is the mechanical narrative rabbit (hence the rabbit's foot of MI 3, perhaps), that the greyhounds of plot baying after it.  But for Blanchot (and, if ironically, for Blumenberg) the MacGuffin isn't just (to change the metaphor) a catalyst, some reagent that gets things going and then withdraws.  It's the work itself, the fact of narrative or of fiction, the thing that fiction wants to be able to tell: the significance of its own existence.  And that's what it can't tell in any literal, vulgar way: if it could, its existence wouldn't be significant.  If you chase the MacGuffin in James, or in Proust, or in Kafka (Blanchot compares the three of them) you may indeed go over to the world of parable.  Is this in reality possible?  Of course not.  Only in parable.  You have to learn another language and make its idioms your own, even if they don't translate into anything in your native tongue.

Purgatorio XXVI: His body's not fictitious!

The terrace of the lustful - the last and least blameworthy of the sinners are near the top of Purgatory, just as the lustful have been near the top of Inferno.  After all, their crime is love!  So of course is everyone's, at every level, but the lustful love others, not themselves, and love those others to get what they conceive of as good: love the others to have the experience of love as well.  Lust is for Dante the most generous, the least perverted of sins.

So it's appropriate that among the lustful, Dante's living body becomes an issue again.  (This after Statius's long and fascinating lesson in Purgatorio XXV about the meaning of the spectral bodies of the dead, the forms infused into the intellectual soul by the nature they once inhabited and absorbed and refined.)  Here are the lustful, and here is a man with a sexual body, not the mere shades who kiss each other turn by turn, in chaste conformity with Paul's rule in Romans, as they do their endless contra-dance.  A real body, and the lustful in their counterlustful flames can see him:

feriami il sole in su l'omero destro,
che già, raggiando, tutto l'occidente
mutava in bianco aspetto di cilestro;

e io facea con l'ombra più rovente
parer la fiamma; e pur a tanto indizio
vidi molt'ombre, andando, poner mente.

Questa fu la cagion che diede inizio
loro a parlar di me; e cominciarsi
a dir: «Colui non par corpo fittizio»;

poi verso me, quanto potean farsi,
certi si fero, sempre con riguardo
di non uscir dove non fosser arsi.  (XXVI. 4-15)

My shoulder stung by sunshine on the right,
I saw those rays already change the West,
its azure aspect now transformed to white;

my shadow caused strange glowing, for the crest
of flames shone brighter in the shade I cast --
those Shades to this strange sign their minds addressed.

So was it that they spoke to me; first massed
together they said, at this strange sight,
"His body's not fictitious!" From the blast

were certain who approached, as close as might
comport with keeping wholly to the fire:
nor for a moment sought they to take flight.

At the height of Purgatory the difference between allopathic punishment (the correcting "contrapasso" or counter-suffering by which Purgatory purifies you for heaven) and the Inferno's homeopathic punishment (you wanted this? You'll have it in spades, you'll have it to the nth degree), begins to vanish.  Heaven, like hell, gives its denizens what they always wanted in the way they wanted it.  At the end of Purgatory, the flames of purification and the flames of love become one (as do gay and straight: Dante is very clear about this).  And in those flames they burn to know more about Dante, whose real presence (in the theological sense too: "Colui non par corpo fittizio!") is what makes this frankly fictitious word one that matters.  It's no wonder that Dante is about to name himself.

The other to all worlds, says Blanchot about literary space.  And to that fictional world comes this non-fictitious person, like K. to the bleak world of the Castle ("what but the desire to stay here could have brought me to this desolate place?") and in it, in exile, he can find a home.  The love here is the love of the real for the fictional, which when strong enough is self-requiting.

(Of course this will interfere with the theology, so alas Virgil, fictional being and real purveyor of fictions, and who loves him most, is about to disappear, in favor of the Christian Beatrice, in the realm where there are no bodies, fictional or otherwise.)

Ghost stories

"Récit de fantôme où meme le fantôme est absent...."  --Blanchot ("Ghost story where even the ghost is absent")

"Schreiben aber heißt, sich vor den Gespenstern entblößen" --Kafka ("Writing means, denuding yourself before the ghosts")

"Frate, / non far, ché tu se' ombra e ombra vedi." --Dante (Virgil to Statius: "Brother, / don't [try to embrace my legs], for you are a shade, and are seeing a shade.")

As one of those quick heuristic claims, I found myself saying the other day that every good short story is a ghost story.  We'd done Turn of the Screw, so that was the context: ghost story or not, it's a ghost story.  So we quickly went through the syllabus of stories we'd read, proving the point and identifying the ghost.

"Hills Like White Elephants"? The fetus. Their love. Their past. Their future. (Of course: since the fetus represents all those things.)

"A Day's Wait": The boy. (His mother too: what do you say about two people and two ghosts?)

"Gift of the Magi": The hair, the watch.

"Miss Lonelyhearts": Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike.  "They were not worldly men." Sick-of-it-all's mother.  Mrs. Shrike's mother. Any of the letter writers. Christ.

"Slave on the Block" (Langston Hughes): The "wonderful colored cook and maid" who sleeps in the basement and takes sick and dies.

"Wash," Faulkner's short story version of the death of Sutpen: Sutpen himself, riding home from the War.  The past.  The missing daughter, the dead son.  And much, much more.

Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour": The dead husband.  Who turns out not to be dead.

Hammett's great pair of stories: "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money": Papadapolous.  The Old Man.

"The Swimmer"?  The swimmer.

Anything by Alice Munro: what more needs to be said?  Anything by Dennis Johnson: likewise.  Ditto Javier Marías.  And Bolaño.  Hawthorne.  Melville. Carver. Alistair Macleod, Borges.  Flaubert.  Chekhov.  Tolstoy.  Megadittoes to Isaac Babel. No need to mention Duras or Blanchot.

I wondered a little about comic stories - farce, really - but all you have to do is read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."  Or Saki.

Salinger: "See more glass" could be the epigraph to this entry.

Listing it like this makes the game too easy, maybe, but it shouldn't be quite that easy. The ghosts haunt the stories, come to haunt them, make the stories haunting.

That's as far as we got in class, but later I found myself trying to think in a literal-minded way. The lesson I thought this game taught me was that stories play off of an interesting juxtaposition of anecdotal specificity and the generic world.  Novels have time to invent their world, invent background and context for their characters. Unhappy families are represented as unhappy families in an unhappy world, in a world which reflects and explains their unhappiness.  But in stories, everyone else is just "reasonably waiting for the train."  So the juxtaposition between the characters and the generic world always, in one way or another makes the characters into survivors.

Survivors: those who outlive a world or space or time or community or family or love or hope in which they're in sync with the world.  The story begins when they're no longer in sync.  This idea is generically related (how else should it be related?) to Warshow's description of "the gangster as tragic hero":

Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only those ambiguous skills which the rest of us—the real people of the real city—can only pretend to have, the gangster is required to make his way, to make his life and impose it on others. Usually, when we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him, it doesn't matter which: we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is.

The short story character is faced with a generic world: a world become generic for him and her, however rich and specific it is for everyone else.  The rich and specific have become generic, and the character doesn't belong to that generic world.  It's a ghost for her or him, or the character is a ghost in that world.  Those two ideas are the same: the character's relation to the world is what's ghostly.  The ghost is the relationship, and whoever represents that relationship in the story: fetus or husband or dead first wife (Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed") or Shrike or Mr. Sappleton ("The Open Window) or Billie, the Oiler (Crane's "Open Boat"), or the child in the dream of the burning child reported to Freud is the ghost.

Anyhow, I was wondering whether this was fair and accurate.  Is that what a real ghost is like?

What a question!

Why would I even ask it?  Why would I think I could think about a real ghost? And the answer that came to me was that it's in stories that you interact with ghosts. These characters you interact with: they don't stay. And unlike lyric poetry, they don't repeat themselves either, in endless songs of love or longing or farewell.  Lyric is about the generic as the place we can continue to live, interact with, belong to, take comfort in.  But the stories are not our stories.  They're ghost stories.

Another grammar, another interlocutor

I was thinking about a post of Jeff's, on the last entry in Wittgenstein's Zettel (since you're no doubt already a FB friend of his, you should be able to read it).  That last entry reads:

"You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed". — That is a grammatical remark.

It's of some, though only some, importance to note that the clauses in quotation marks belong to the intermittently changing person conventionally known as the interlocutor (the narratee, the person who says what a student might say, or a teacher).  Wittgenstein's interlocutor is of immense importance, not as a straw man or "idiot questioner" (Blake) but as a figure who experiences language and the world and other people as one does, as we do.  Where he goes wrong, sometimes more than other times, is when he starts philosophizing. He tries to systematize his experience, and the value of this attempt is always in the first step that he takes, the immediate experience that he offers as premise for what follows.  (As the minor premise, I am thinking: the major premise is some philosophical truism that will then lead to an equally truistic conclusion.  The minor premise becomes its confirmation.  The syllogistic form would probably be the one called Bocardo.)

So the interlocutor notices -- remarks (bemerkt), that is, observes -- that you can't hear God speaking to someone else. By this he means to show something like a conventional view of privacy.  God has access to the innermost reaches of the soul, and a fortiori those reaches, that innerness, exists, inaccessible to the outside world.  So thinks the interlocutor, and this is the idea that Wittgenstein is undercutting.

For Wittgenstein, God is not a mind-reader.  Or to put it more accurately, he's no different a mind-reader than human beings are (though he might be better, sure).  God can't know, any better than you can, how I'll follow a rule.  (Not that he can't know: he just can't know better than you can know it.)  As Kripke more or less gets right, not only can't we tell whether I'm adding or quadding until our results diverge, God can't tell either.  (I'll note in passing that this is related to some profound remarks of Wittgenstein on forced mates in chess: the only "proof" of a forced mate is playing out all the possible moves.) It's not that mind-reading is impossible. That's what the interlocutor thinks, with God as the name for that impossibility.  No, mind reading goes so deep into the mode of possibility as to come out on the other end, in necessity.  It's something we all do, and all must do, by virtue of being human.

I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking.’ (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)

If we couldn't mind read we couldn't learn to speak. We learn to speak because we know what others are thinking.  That's the point of Wittgenstein's saying that the interlocutor's observation is grammatical. It's a remark about what we talk about when we talk about God.  And the point is that God is one of the things we talk about, and neither the origin nor privileged interpreter of our talk.


Which allows for a connection between this post and my previous. Jeff alludes to the great Abrahamic response to God: הנני (Hineni) "Here I am."  That's Abraham hearing God speak to him.  (And of course Isaac clearly hasn't heard God.) But Kafka imagines various Abrahams, including one who can't believe he's the one being summoned:

Aber ein anderer Abraham. Einer, der durchaus richtig opfern will und überhaupt die richtige Witterung für die ganze Sache hat, aber nicht glauben kann, dass er gemeint ist, er, der widerliche alte Mann und sein Kind, der schmutzige Junge. Ihm fehlt nicht der wahre Glaube, diesen Glauben hat er, er wurde in der richtigen Verfassung opfern, wenn er nur glauben könnte, dass er gemeint ist. Er fürchtet, er werde zwar als Abraham mit dem Sohne ausreiten, aber auf dem Weg sich in Don Quixote verwandeln. Über Abraham wäre die Welt damals entsetzt gewesen, wenn sie zugesehen hätte, dieser aber fürchtet, die Welt werde sich bei dem Anblick totlachen. Es ist aber nicht die Lächerlichkeit an sich, die er fürchtet - allerdings fürchtet er auch sie, vor allem sein Mitlachen - hauptsächlich aber fürchtet er, dass diese Lächerlichkeit ihn noch älter und widerlicher, seinen Sohn noch schmutziger machen wird, noch unwürdiger, wirklich gerufen zu werden. Ein Abraham, der ungerufen kommt! Es ist so wie wenn der beste Schüler feierlich am Schluß des Jahres eine Prämie bekommen soll und in der erwartungsvollen Stille der schlechteste Schüler infolge eines Hörfehlers aus seiner schmutzigen letzten Bank hervorkommt und die ganze Klasse losplatzt. Und es ist vielleicht gar kein Hörfehler, sein Name wurde wirklich genannt, die Belohnung des Besten soll nach der Absicht des Lehrers gleichzeitig eine Bestrafung des Schlechtesten sein.

Schreckliche Dinge - genug.

Terrifying things: enough indeed.  Another Abraham who always wants to do the right thing and has the right temperament for the situation, but can't believe that he's the one who's meant, he and his grubby young man.  He has true belief, but fears that on the way with his son he'll be transformed into Don Quixote, and that everyone will make fun of him, that the teacher is punishing him for being the class dunce by exposing him to his fellow-students' laughter.


The very idea of laughter is the social. There is no God without language, and no language without other people.  This Abraham knows that it's a grammatical, not an ontological, remark to say "You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed."  If he's a bad student he might not get the grammar right ("glamour," as in its original meaning of supernatural or magical powers, is a corruption of grammar, which the literate scholars know). God is a game in our language, and like many games, the one in which God calls on you can be cruel, with the punishment for grammatical error humiliation in front of the whole class.

He feels just like his "schmutzig" son, who risks becoming grubbier still, and so he imagines himself sitting at his schmutzig desk in at the back of the class.  This Abraham fears God and protects himself and his son by refusing to believe in his exceptional, his private importance.  Grammar is about how we speak to others.  He stays in the back of the class, with his son, with the others.

Tragedy, farce, and other, rarer modes: a post on Kafka

In almost any interesting narrative, everything happens at least twice. The first time to set the rules of this here kind of fictional event, so that the second time its stakes and its moves are intelligible to the audience. That intelligibility may be necessary to the protagonist too -- the first time may occur as practice, in the Smersh training circuit, on the flight simulator, in the dojo, in the school yard (no less in The Wire or in Buffy than in the opening of Abel Gance's Napoleon). Or it may be only there for us, as when Chigurh flips his coin to determine his suppliants' fate in No Country for Old Men.

It's really hard to think of a story with an interesting plot that doesn't rhyme incidents in this way: Madame Bovary, Proust, Austen, Waiting for Godot, any Shakespeare play, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoy (well, maybe not Tolstoy: there may be something of Kafka in him). It's the principle of revenge stories as of love stories. It is to be found in every fairy tale. Hansel drops stones and the children find their way home. The second time he drops bread-crumbs and they don't. The wolf blows down two of the pigs' houses, and then he fails.

There's one obvious reason, to which I plan to return in a later post, for this repetition (sometimes multiple repetition as in the story of the three little pigs as well as the story of Goldilocks). Events in narrative had better be doing at least double duty. They are interesting in themselves, but they also convey information crucial to the set-up of later and still more interesting events, events that make the narrative particularly interesting, events that particularize the interest of this narrative. Narratives have to teach you the rules of the game they're playing (or in genre fiction the rules of the variant of the game that they're playing), for you to appreciate the moves made according to those rules. A Swedish client of my father's visited the U.S. in 1956 for the first time, and his host took him to see Game 5 of that year's World Series. The client was bored out of his mind. Nothing happened, that he could see: every Dodger batter who went to the plate returned to the dugout.  Don Larsen retired every single one, pitching the only perfect game in World Series history. But the Swedish client didn't know the rules, and he missed the unbelievably exciting experience that he was present at.

If a narrative doesn't set up its own rules early, and then follow the constraints imposed by those rules, you get only chronicles, what E. M. Foster calls plot as opposed  story. Such constraints don't only include whether people can fly in this fictional world or not; whether animals can talk or not; they include subtler things like establishing the balance between consistency and freedom in a character, between a character's capacity to act surprisingly and gratuitously and our sense that a character is acting plausibly, consistently with what we know about her and what she has become at some point in a narrative. Such rules will also include psychological rules about how much time or experience can change characters: is their psychology Jamesian? Dickensian? Woolfian? Proustian? Is remorse or repentance or degeneration or despair possible in their fictional world?

An interesting vignette about such a change, early on, will sound the note for the possibilities of such changes over the course of the narrative. As with so much of Eliot, the opening two of Daniel Deronda makes the point explicitly:

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.


Was she beautiful or not beautiful?

The first paragraph tells us how to read the question that opens the second: we are at an arbitrary moment that nevertheless tells us that there are four different directions, towards four quadrants in the narrative field, that the curve of the story might trace. We know both that a character might be difficult to pin down, and, what's more, that he might be difficult to pin down because he has difficulty pinning another character down.  Daniel's difficulty says something crucial both about Gwendolyn and about himself, and the possibilities of their respective adventures are given by the narrative anecdote with which the book opens, and by the narrative vignette with which that anecdote opens.

There's a chaotic dialectic between randomness and determinism in good narrative, a dialectic itself stabilized by the practice of repetition, often as with Eliot in the mode of self-similarity, where repetitions occur across different orders of magnitude.  A good narrative approximates a Koch Curve:

From Wikimedia: as we zoom in on the curve you can see its every part is made up of similar parts

To take some obvious narrative examples, in a trust narrative, a character must learn either trust or suspicion.  She'll learn them on the basis of an early narrative experience, and the mode may either be once burned, twice shy or first antagonistic, later life-saving.  The second schema is to be found in any number of heart-warming narratives, from Huck Finn to Lisbeth Salander's relation to Mikael Blomqvist.  Of course you can get various combinations of the two, meta-versions where modes of repetition are themselves repeated with a difference.

Indeed the second story probably requires the first: "Once burned, twice shy" is the reason a character may start out antagonistic; if she becomes life-saving afterwards, what's happened is that once burned, twice shy has been repeated with a difference.  If the once burned, twice shy part of the story is itself well told, so that trust leads to distrust, the return to trust will require all that much more narrative invention, force, resourcefulness, and management of the relation between the audience's desire and its knowledge.  These are things that Dickens and Homer do particularly well.  The rightly suspicious Achilles trusts Priam in the end, and Priam trusts him; the rightly suspicious Odysseus trusts Penelope, and she trusts him.

If we put this very schematically, we can describe Frye's four basic narrative arcs in terms of such repetitions.  The replacement of a sad event with its happy repetition is comedy.  The replacement of a happy event with its sad repetition is tragedy.  Happy to happy is farce.  Sad to sad is melodrama.  Again, these things can occur on meta-levels, some more self-similar, some less, again with different emotional outcomes.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about Kafka's fairy tale openings.  They're so hard to write -- no one trusts themselves any more with this kind of unexplained directness, which seems a feature of oral memory, not of meditation and invention. In the twentieth century maybe only Kafka ever wrote them convincingly.  Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect: so do fairy tales begin.  The Emperor has a message for you.

All the fairy tales that open in this way would repeat their incidents in a way that advanced towards some conclusion with a difference.  You wake up as a bug and later on, when you wake up as a tree your experiences as a bug will help you negotiate your new, arboreal circumstances.  The Emperor's message comes, or doesn't, and later on when you hear a more important message has been sent, you'll know how to insure that you receive it in time this time.  Leopards break into the temple, and later on they'll become a part of the ceremony.

But, in Kafka, what almost always happens -- this is the rarer mode -- is that things only happen once.  You wake up as a bug, and that's it.  You stay a bug and nothing rhymes with that experience.  You don't get the message.  You don't get to the next village. The first part of the book will be about getting to the Castle.  K. never gets there.  Or it will be about waiting for the trial.  But the climax never comes. Once you pass the first stage and enter the doorway of the Law, that's when things will get complicated.  But you never enter the doorway.  God calls unto Abraham to sacrifice his son!  Abraham assumes some other Abraham was meant: he can't be important enough for this test.  Fairy tales without the repetition that offers narrative satisfaction: that's the amazing thing in Kafka.

Patriarch or Old Clothes Dealer?

In an earlier post I brooded on how the end of literary transference is represented in and as a literary moment.  The child turns to the parent for comfort, but the parent cannot offer that comfort.  The need for comfort is what I (elsewhere) once described as literary need, the kind of thing one goes to literature for when there is nowhere else to go.

One thing I was thinking about there, but didn't explore, was the difference between turning to a parent, or to a spouse or erotic partner, or to a child.  Dante and, really, Achilles, turn to parents, whose fragility they see and mourn; what they mourn is that the parents aren't their parents.  Virgil is like a mother ("quale"); Priam in his frailty and need reminds Achilles of his own father.  Of course the scene will often involve "real" parents as well: Isaac, the burning child, Griffin's child.  But that last example shows that the real parents are turning into non-parents: Griffin's child is replaced (in Turn of the Screw) by Miles and Flora, whose parents are dead, whose uncle has absolutely foresworn all contact with them, and whose only quasi-parental protection is to be sought from the Governess, or from the ghosts.

The ghosts: the same is true in Hamlet as well: he does not know who his father is, who the dilapidated king of shreds and patches turns out to be.

That's the sadness of the Freudian transference: we transfer onto others because our own parents are no longer parental figures for us.  The transference, Freud says, is a tribute to what they once were for us.  But are no longer.

So in Gertrude's closet, the only scene in Shakespeare* (as Neil Hertz once pointed out) to show the nuclear family whole and alone - father, mother, child - the family romance is entirely mangled: the father is a ghost, while a real father lies dead behind the arras; the son may be insane; the mother has no inkling that the father may be there; the son has no idea what his father wants from him, but nevertheless senses the ghost's powerlessness, and therefore the erosion of the ghost's comforting authority to demand that Hamlet set justice right.  The scene is itself the echt-tragic scene of the end of the family romance: and of course if Claudius is Hamlet's father, he too has become risible by now.  (Kafka's "The Judgment" is a kind of redo of this scene, or of Hamlet, though maybe in reverse order.)

Dante, or rather the place where will and act are one, replaces Virgil with Beatrice, the erotic object, whose power over him Dante felt first as a child, then as now "sister and mother and diviner love," since in both cases she replaces the lost mother.  Likewise Albertine, her kiss, explicitly replaces the narrator's mother as the latter morphs more and more into her own mother, his dead grandmother, which means his mother is now in the frail and mortal role of his grandmother whose death has been so devastating a part of the book.

Transference on to a suitable erotic object (Albertine, Beatrice, the King of France, Ferdinand) is the way it's supposed to work, according to Freud.  In poetic terms such a (relatively) good outcome is what Harold Bloom means by poetic election: the love you learned from elsewhere, in imitation and in awe, becomes a love you make your own.  Milton's Sonnet 23 has something of this, despite its sadness.  His late espoused Saint comes back to him, inclines towards him even as she leaves him, and his need for her when she's gone is the occasion of his poetry, the delineation of all our woe.  Notice that she too is a maternal figure: she being mortal of her child has died, and so comes to him washed from spot of childbed taint - comes to him as the dead and purified mother, not another Eve ("I waked to find her or forever to deplore her loss," says Adam, and he does find her), but another Calliope ("nor could the Muse defend her son").  Another Calliope. The dead mother as spouse, the dead spouse as mother: for Milton that's what the muse or origin of poetry is. Adam is not a poet.

For Freud a successful transference (on to an appropriate erotic object) and the end of transference are the same.  Psychoanalysis seeks a successful end to the transference, that is to say it seeks to give the analysand the capacity for successful erotic transference. For the elegist, transference and its ending are the same too, but in a darker key.  Poetry is what's left when the erotic object is just as gone as the parent is.

But what happens when the turn is to the child? That's what happens in the dream of the burning child, in Wordsworth's greatest sonnet, "Surprised by Joy", or in Ben Jonson's elegy on his son, what you could imagine (as Kafka does, as Kierkegaard sort of does) in "another Abraham."  This is what Freud calls the defeat of parental narcissism, and what we could call, in the context of literary vocation, the defeat of that vocation.  The poem is not worth the candle.

Stephen Dedalus's reading of Hamlet: which is about Shakespeare's desperate wish that he were the ghost, whom he played, and that his dead son Hamlet or Hamnet had survived him, might go some way towards a reading of the play as attempting to save literary vocation as a supreme fiction in which the young can still believe: Joyce wants Stephen to believe; the ghost wants Hamlet to have a vocation, even if the only one he can come up with is violent revenge.

These are all cases, you might say, of poetic dis-election, what Wordsworth is already noticing, though in gladness, in "Resolution and Independence":

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

He's ready for this, ready for the glad confrontation with mortality and loss, rejoicing in his own power to face the utter loss of his power.  That's what transference and poetic election is: choosing to give it all up for love, being able to make that choice for the poetic power it creates (like Thamuris in Balaustion's last adventure), which is a rearticulation of the gladness in Wordsworth's poem.  He's ready for it too in that great earlier sonnet about the arbitrary joy of transference or election:

WITH Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;
Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
A goodly Vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
This Ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look;
This Ship to all the rest did I prefer:
When will she turn, and whither? She will brook
No tarrying; where She comes the winds must stir:
On went She, and due north her journey took.

His soul is mistress of its choice, and chooses this big boat, the right one, it is clear, since she goes due north.  But of course due north is towards cold and death, despondency and madness.  But where else would a poet like Wordsworth seek to travel, with his earthly freight?

It's when the utter loss of power comes that you wake up to the dead child, carried away by a muse infinitely more exigent than the Rumpelstiltskins of our childhoods.

All of this was prompted by reading a great poem by Franz Wright in this week's New Yorker, "Recurring Awakening" (you need to be a subscriber: you can google the title and author for some messed-up versions of the poem, but it's worth it to go buy the issue).  The title's a kind of summary of Lacan's thoughts on the dream of the burning child.  The poem is addressed by its mortal speaker to a dead friend, or lover, or parent, or self.  (Wright volunteers, a lot, at a center for teenagers who have lost their parents.)  The poem ends with his dream of the person he's dreaming of

........stepping
sideways in time
to some slow stately dance
hand in hand
with the handless
in their identical absence
of affect, lips moving in unison.
I can't hear a thing, but it's said
the instant of being aware we are sleeping
and the instant of waking are one
and the same--and thus, against delusion
we possess this defense.
Only if you refuse
to respond, if I can only write you,
and write on black wind-blurred water, what's the use?

"I turned to share the transport": that's the moment of poetic inspiration.  But the despondency comes when the only question that remains is Wright's: "what's the use?"

Nothing sadder than this: read it while you're young and can still take pure joy in it.^†

------
* Well there's one trivial exception, in Richard II, and probably it's an interpolation.

^† "An indescribable joy always rushes out of great books, even when they speak of ugly, hopeless, or terrifying things." --Deleuze, when young.  He committed suicide at 70.