I fed Book I of Plato’s Republic to the Adobe AI Assistant, and got this:
The text discusses the concept of the end and excellence of organs, such as the eyes and ears. It emphasizes that fulfilling an end requires possessing one’s proper excellence, as seen in the example of sight for the eyes. The text highlights the importance of each organ’s specific excellence in achieving its end.
Next time, I’ll try Joe Sachs instead of Jowett.
If errare humanum est, then I must be human. A few weeks ago I was pulling together a public lecture out of class notes and scattered photocopies, thinking mostly about how to translate a marvelous descriptive passage about dragging boats upstream and through brush in eighth-century Hunan, and credited the poem to the wrong guy. It was by Shen Quanqi 沈全期 (656-729), not Song Zhiwen 宋之問 (656-710), as I realized today when I looked the poem up again in a proper book. I hope nobody else is misled by my goof. I rather doubt anybody will notice. The poem is “Traveling from Changle Commandery Upstream to White Peak, Then Descending to Chenzhou” 自昌樂郡泝流至白石嶺下行入郴州 and reads in part:
茲山界夷夏，天險橫寥廓。
太史漏登探，文命限開鑿。
北流自南瀉，羣峯迴眾壑。
馳波如電騰，激石似雷落。
崖留盤古樹，澗蓄神農藥。。。。
匍匐緣修坂，穹窿曳長索。
礙林阻往來，遇堰每前卻。
救艱不遑飯，畢昏無暇泊。
濯溪寧足懼，磴道誰云惡。
我行山水間，湍險皆不若。
安能獨見聞，書此貽京洛。
This mountain lies on the border of China and alien parts,
Steep as the sky and boundless in its breadth.
The Grand Historian missed it in his survey of the realm.
The Great Yu neglected to pierce it in his labors.
A current from the north trickles out at the south,
Crowded peaks yield to huddled ravines.
Speeding waves leap up like lightning-flashes,
Crashing stones land like thunderclaps.
On the banks subsist trees of Pan Gu’s age,
In the cracks grow herbs for Shen Nong’s use….
Dangling creepers border the smooth slope,
The vault of heaven is hung with long ropes.
Blocking thickets impede all movement:
Encountering a weir, each struggles forward.
Our difficulty is such that no time is left to eat,
Till day’s end brings darkness no leisure to moor the boats.
Poling through the rapids is cause enough for fear,
Stone stairways no reason for displeasure.
We travel between mountain and water,
The rapids perilous like nothing seen before.
How can all this be left up to seeing and hearing?
I write it down for conveyance to the capital.
If I were to tell you that Western civilization was transmitted straight down from Greece and Rome to Victorian and Edwardian Britain, you might think I was pushing an impossibly old-fashioned line (and you might have plenty of choice epithets for it). It’s not the kind of thing that people would say out loud, outside of certain very reactionary milieux. But people go on writing books as if such were, in fact, the unquestionable pattern of history. The other day I learned about a book– quite possibly a good book, on its own terms and given its limited perspective– about the history of the chapter as textual and cognitive unit. After pointing out another scholar’s docta ignorantia about the origin of page numbers, today let me introduce Nicholas Dames, The Chapter. Take a look at the table of contents. One would never know from it that chapter divisions are found in Chinese books from a very early date (or why). Doesn’t the Chinese chapter have a history worth telling that is also part of the history of humanity?
Not only the Chinese chapter, of course– but it puzzles me that smart people can fall over themselves praising a book that didn’t ask some obvious questions — questions that were off the narrow and obligatory track that runs from Homer to Joyce.
I was on a flight yesterday and a mother across the aisle from me was distracting her child with that excellent illustrated book, The Gruffalo. And as one does, I thought back to the Stratagems of the Warring States, another good book for distracting children (and adults).
荊宣王問群臣曰:「吾聞北方之畏昭奚恤也，果誠何如?」群臣莫對。江一對曰:「虎求百 獸而食之，得狐。狐曰:『子無敢食我也。天帝使我長百獸，今子食我，是逆天帝命也。子 以我為不信，吾為子先行，子隨我後，觀百獸之見我而敢不走乎?』虎以為然，故遂與之 行。獸見之皆走。虎不知獸畏己而走也，以為畏狐也。今王之地方五千里，帶甲百萬，而 專屬之昭奚恤;故北方之畏奚恤也，其實畏王之甲兵也，猶百獸之畏虎也。」
《戰國策 · 楚一》
Xuan, king of Jing, said to his ministers: “I’ve heard that the Northerners fear my minister Zhao Xixie. Can this be true?” All were silent. Only Jiang Yi replied: “A tiger went out in search of animals to eat. He caught a fox, and the fox said, ‘Don’t even think about eating me! The Emperor of Heaven has named me chief of all the animals, so if you eat me, you will be violating the orders of the Emperor of Heaven. In case you don’t believe me, just walk behind me and watch to see if the other animals don’t flee at my approach. ‘ The tiger agreed and followed the fox, who started walking. And sure enough, all the other animals fled before him. The tiger didn’t understand that the fleeing animals were afraid of himself, he thought they were fleeing on account of the fox. Your majesty’s domain is five thousand miles square, with a million troops, and Zhao Xixie is its commander-in-chief; it is not Zhao Xixie that those Northerners fear, but your Majesty’s men in arms, just as the animals feared the tiger.”
Zhanguo ce, Chu, book 1
Set the Wayback Machine to the year 1100. The poet Su Dongpo, passing by the Jinshan Monastery in what is now Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu Province, sits for his portrait, or maybe encounters a previous likeness of himself hanging on the temple wall. It’s painted by Li Longmian 李龍眠, a painter known for his ability to catch the spirit and movement of his subjects with a few outlined traces. After examining the portrait, Su picks up a brush and inscribes it with a few lines of verse. His handwriting is famous throughout the empire, as is his mercurial, humorous, bon vivant, caustic personality. A little self-portrait in words begins to unfold on the margins of the painted image:
心似已灰之木，身如不繫之舟。問汝平生功業，黃州、惠州、儋州。
A mind like wood already turned to ash, a body like an unmoored boat.
If anyone asks you, what have you achieved in this life? “Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou.”
If the painted image, now lost, is the text, this little poem is the commentary. The first two lines tell us what we can’t directly see from looking, but can only surmise: what’s the inside story, what’s it like to be Su Dongpo? He tells us with two quotations from the magnificent, fanciful, joking-serious Daoist collection of parables known as the Zhuangzi: he has put aside all hope and desire, even the hope of self-improvement, and is like dead wood and ashes. “What is this? Can the body really be transformed into the likeness of dry wood, and can the mind really become as if dead ashes?” says a startled observer of deep meditation in that work. 何居乎？形固可使如槁木，而心固可使如死灰乎？Another dialogue in the same book includes the retort, “Those who are without ability have nothing to seek; they eat their fill and roam far and wide… Floating like an unmoored boat, they are empty and masterless.” 無能者無所求，飽食而敖遊，汎若不繫之舟，虛而敖遊者也. So in the first two lines, Su Dongpo is filling in whatever of his personality the painter had missed. He tells us that he is resigned but not disappointed, a lucid dreamer without aims, someone with no worldly ambition, both cast-off and free. These much-loved passages from Zhuangzi are exactly the right ones for expressing, with some modesty, the reclusive ideal as it must have appeared to thousands of retired scholars and officials. Then Su shifts to an external perspective in the third line, imagining that he is being asked by a stranger or a judging authority how to sum up his lifetime accomplishments. The answer comes in three place names: Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou.
Su Dongpo was poet, calligrapher, painter, essayist, historian, but for most of his maturity he was gainfully employed as an official, and in that capacity he had more than the usual allowance of upsets. He could be sharp-tongued and impatient, and he was allied with one policy faction that was often aggressively suppressed by a rival faction. Because of his allegiances, he was demoted and banished from the capital on three main occasions, first to Huangzhou in present-day Hubei, then to Huizhou near Guangzhou, and finally to the remote island of Hainan, where he fully expected to fall victim to the tropical diseases that were endemic there. Fifteen or so years in all, out of his seventy-three years of life. A map of the Northern Song state’s territory gives us a graphic means of assessing Su Shi’s progress in offending his enemies: he was first exiled to a small town in the middle of the country, perhaps as a warning, on the next occasion to the very edge of the empire, a place that denizens of the capital would have considered uncouth and barbarous, and when that warning was insufficient he was sent to an island where the Chinese language was practically unknown, the risk of malaria was high, vermin were apt to eat one’s books during the endless rainy season, and the inhabitants were in the habit of slaughtering great numbers of cattle to propitiate the gods every time sickness or poverty threatened. Indeed, on this map drawn to illustrate the history of the Song Dynasty, Hainan Island is not even visible—although the source is of course nowhere near contemporary, we can take the absence of Hainan from it as an indirect witness to how eager the Wang Anshi faction was to remove Su Shi from every means of recovering his prior status and power. How easy to forget Hainan, and how desirable to forget Su Shi. By naming his three places of exile as his greatest achievements, Su Shi seems to be offering a bitter assessment of his years in government, as if to say, that’s what it all came to. Or—and this is not the exclusive “or,” rather the “or” that means “you have this choice as well”—he is permitting himself to glory in the extremity of his punishments. As if to say: you asked for my CV, here it is: Leavenworth, Sing Sing, Alcatraz. I am the guy they had to send all the way to Hainan: deal with it. When everyone aspires to a CV that reads, instead, “Harvard, Yale, Cornell,” you have to be pretty bold to reference the most exclusive penitentiaries. And that is particularly the case when you are by profession and identity usually classed in the company of people who can look back with pride on a set of life stages labeled with glorious and prestigious names. In truth, Su could have named the high points of his career instead. But he didn’t. And it is clear from the metrics that the quatrain was intended from the start to lead to that itinerary of hellholes. Six-syllable verse is not that common in Chinese poetry. Five-syllable or seven-syllable lines give a sharp caesura after the second or third syllable, imparting shape and tension to the verse. Six syllables sound flat, centerless, and prosy. But if what you really want to say consists of three two-syllable place names, there’s no other way.
One of the books lying around the house I grew up in was Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People (1936). I remember, from the time that I was small enough to be wondering about such hazy questions as whether it was better to be an optimist or a pessimist, the impression passages like this one made on me:
Taoism, in theory and practice, means a certain roguish nonchalance, a confounded and devastating skepticism, a mocking laughter at the futility of all human interference and the failure of all human institutions, laws, government and marriage, and a certain disbelief in idealism, not so much because of lack of energy as because of a lack of faith. It is a philosophy which counteracts the positivism of Confucius, and serves as a safety-valve for the imperfections of a Confucian society. For the Confucian outlook on life is positive, while the Taoistic outlook is negative, and out of the alchemy of these two strange elements emerges that immortal thing we call Chinese character. Hence all Chinese are Confucianists when successful, and Taoists when they are failures. … Taoism and Confucianism are the negative and positive poles of Chinese thought which make life possible in China.
It sounded like perpetual motion (an engineering puzzle somebody had put in my head): a way to draw energy from the unpredictability of success and failure and keep things cycling round.
So far we have been dealing with three of the worst characteristics that paralyze the Chinese people for organized action. These characteristics are seen to spring from a general view of life as shrewd as it is mellow, distinguished by a certain tolerant nonchalance. It is evident that such a view of life is not without its virtues, and they are the virtues of an old people, not ambitious nor keen to sit on the top of the world, but a people whose eyes have seen much of life, who are prepared to accept life for what it is worth, but who insist nevertheless that life shall be lived decently and happily within one’s lot. … They are tremendously interested in this commonplace world, and they have an indomitable patience, an indefatigable industry, a sense of duty, a level-headed common sense, cheerfulness, humor, tolerance, pacifism, and that unequalled genius for finding happiness in hard environments which we call contentment–qualities that make this commonplace life enjoyable to them.
I probably missed the point, for Lin was engaging in a description of “the character of the Chinese,” and I read him as proposing a solution to the problem of how to live. I concluded that I wanted to live among people like that.
Years later, having absorbed and forgotten Lin Yutang, I was reading and reciting Parker Huang’s Twenty Lectures on Chinese Culture, written as a second-year language textbook for Yale. In one chapter Huang mentioned the existence of dozens of ethnic minorities in China, each of them having its own language and culture. But the biggest nationality, he said, was the Han, who were 一個愛和平，講禮貌，能吃苦的民族 (“a peace-loving people, sticklers for politeness, who can endure a lot”) — never mind what this implies about the other 民族. The bell of reading reminiscence rang and I said to myself again that these were definitely my people.
As on the day when I read an article about feminism and realized that everything it said was self-evident to me, I was already on the team mentally but no membership card ever arrived in the mail.
Nan Z. Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia UP, 2018)
Madhumita Lahiri, Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone (Northwestern UP, 2021)
Adhira Mangalagiri, States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2023)
Do I detect a theme here?
So, the current Italian Fascists, who will now run the country, cut their teeth on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Pseudo-medieval derring-do always works in the same way. Two centuries ago, it was Sir Walter Scott whose Ivanhoe beguiled the Southern planter’s son.
The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951), Kurosawa’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868-69), opens with a snowy, murky image of the smokestack of a steamer on its way to Hokkaido. According to the script, this is a ferry taking passengers from Aomori to Hakodate on a December night of one of the postwar years which could be placed anywhere between 1945 and 1951. Within seconds the image is invaded by the sound of a foghorn and swallowed up by clouds of steam. The next shot is a close-up of an ice-covered porthole with worn shoes stuck on the sill – a telling detail of the harsh and shoddy conditions of postwar transportation. The camera meanders slowly downstairs, tracking the angled bars of a banister through which one glimpses a crowd of sleeping passengers spread across the floor of the lower deck. The sudden glimpse of a chaotic mass of prone and prostrate bodies cannot but evoke memories of war: dead bodies left on a battlefield, wounded bodies in a hospital at a military camp, or bodies numb with fear, cowering in bomb shelters. In 1951, an overcrowded underdeck would have vividly reminded viewers of the frantic escape of Japanese settlers from China and other colonial territories in anticipation of the allied armies’ arrival. The overcrowded trains of the South Manchuria Railway and ferry transports from Dalian to Japan stayed embedded in cultural memory as desperately chaotic passageways to survival.
Continue readingSholom Auslander, “Let’s Pass Over God,” New York Times, 4/15/2022
I am not learned as Mr. Sholom Auslander is. I never had the opportunity to go to a yeshiva; the closest was my synagogue’s Hebrew School. But, yes, God does and has done many disagreeable things. In 1670, Baruch Spinoza wrote a book on this subject that Clarence Darrow might have cribbed for his arguments in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. It is not commonly read these days.
Strangely, people often do not get the God they deserve. Our history is of brutality, persecution, and wars of annihilation (see the Book of Joshua). Our Hebrew Bible speaks in the idioms of violence and comfort; retributive, collective violence, as flashy as a Dirty Harry movie, that drives Mr. Auslander’s classmates wild; comfort in a time when God should be helping human beings pick up the pieces, but is instead smashing the pieces into dust.
When the verse “Pour out thy wrath” comes in the Haggadah, it is an expression of frustration and disappointment that God has not saved us by doing violent deeds on our behalf. It is a wish for a Dirty Harry end to history, where God strikes down the wicked one by one, with a witticism every time. We still have such wishes. 25% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats believe that this country can only return to a true path by exterminating the members of the other party. The two numbers flip every time the Presidency changes party. This is a very Godly solution.
The other solution is Moshiach, whom the Passover Seder prefigures. When God slays the Angel of Death, it may spark in Him a change of heart. The late Rabbi Steinsaltz, in his book on the Lubavitcher Rebbe, says that the Messianic Era will mark a period when the world gets so much better that a couple of decades later, it will segue into the World to Come. All the unfinished business about what God did and what we did will be dropped in favor of love. It will be a universal armistice and reparation. We know that God can act as we do. Still, can’t we posit that we both could learn before it’s too late, before there are no more human beings in the human experiment?
P.S. – If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the argumentum ab intra — the meteorologist who doesn’t believe in wind, the infectious disease doctor who doesn’t believe in vaccines, and, yes, the favorite of the evangelical chicken dinner circuit, the Jewish convert to Christianity who explains why Judaism isn’t “true” from his “insider” perspective. Even though Mr. Auslander has the unrestricted right to denounce his own faith and become an apostate, I worry that Jews and non-Jews alike will get his message but not the context. “Turn it around, turn it around, for everything is in it,” said Rabbi ben Bag-Bag, referring to the Torah. It is all in there, good and bad.
There’s a kind of writing– I’d call it Pninian– that challenges translation in its specificity. Not, as some theories of the untranslatable would have it, because it calls on utterly singular and irreplaceable qualities of the language it uses, but because it is made of the interweaving of two languages at a specific moment of their histories. In Nabokov’s Pnin, it’s the combination of 1950s American English and early-twentieth-century émigré Russian that creates the discordia concors. In Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer, a new novel I unwisely bought for a friend who was seeking to raise the level of her French, it’s the overlay of Spanish and French, or the revelation of the Spanish hidden in French, that brings the savor. I particularly loved the device whereby the narrator makes this stylistic effect a sign of both character and plot (motivirovka, the O.PO.JAZ would have called it):
Depuis que ma mère souffre de troubles mnésiques, elle éprouve un réel plaisir à prononcer les mots grossiers qu’elle s’est abstenue de formuler pendant plus de soixante-dix ans, manifestation typique chez ce type de patients, a expliqué son médecin… Elle qui s’était tant évertuée, depuis son arrivée en France, à corriger son accent espagnol, à parler un langage châtié et à soigner sa mise pour être toujours plus conforme à ce qu’elle pensait être le modèle français (se signalant par là même, dans sa trop stricte conformité, comme une étrangère), elle envoie valser dans ses vieux jours les petits conventions, langagières et autres. (82-83)
This gives such sentences as:
Et moi je grite encore plus fort: Je me fous qu’on m’ouit, je veux pas être bonniche chez les Burgos, j’aime mieux faire la pute en ville!… Plutôt morir! (14)
To translate this into, say, English, one would have to either imitate the effect of Spanish-tinged French– by appropriating the characteristics of Spanglish, say; but this kind of similarity soon points up the dissimilarity of associations between the two kinds of interlanguage. French-speakers readily recall the influx of Spanish-speakers following the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, but the associations of North American Spanglish have to do with different conditions of migration and resettlement. Another, braver, method would require finding an analogous situation valid for the relation of Spanish and English and then rewriting, or restating, the whole novel as a function of that. Does anyone want to reimagine Pas pleurer as a story of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans (etc…) residing in San Diego as a consequence of their difficult history?
Lydie Salvayre, Pas pleurer. Paris: Seuil, 2014. Awarded the Prix Goncourt.
The French paperbacks that I used to buy always contained a little card from “La Maison des Bibliothèques,” rue Froidevaux, Paris. The card showed a wall covered with shelves all crammed with books, the commercial assumption being, if you were the sort of person who would acquire modern fiction in the collection “J’ai Lu,” you would sooner or later fall for the products of La Maison. I was a nomadic boy then, but used to imagine that one day I would have an apartment somewhere with walls covered with shelves, each shelf crammed with books, and me feasting my eyes on print as long as the light lasted.
Eventually, it happened. I had plenty of walls and got them covered with shelves, then packed the shelves with books, and sat reading day in and day out. That should have been the happy ending of the story– the closed circuit of desire– but no one can ever leave well enough alone. Now here I am thousands of miles away from those hard-won shelves, thinking about a book that contains a piece of information I need, complemented by a sheet of scribbled paper wedged in at exactly the page where that information resides. But thinking doesn’t make it come back; it’s a material thing, that scribbled note, and I can’t quite make myself think again the thought it contains. And from the book I surreptitiously glanced at in a bookstore today, hoping to substitute for the missing information in my all-too-physical book at home, there fell out a colorful advertisement for “La Maison des Bibliothèques.”
An article in Le Monde supplies background to the latest French best-seller, a work of cultural polemics that whines about the eclipse of “la vieille France,” bemoans the rise of feminism and makes excuses for Vichy. The purpose of this sad amalgam, which apparently pleases enough people that it is close to outselling Modiano, the recent Nobel laureate, is to make respectable the positions of the far-right Front National. And why are we even hearing about it? Because of such cultural entrepreneurs as this:
Catherine Barma, a formidable business-woman… daughter of the star producer of the French Radio-Television Network, ex-party girl, no great student, cultivates the big names of the time and picks the participants of her TV panels like the counter of a bar. She knows how clashes that make for “le buzz” on YouTube and those who sigh that ‘you can’t say anything today’ are beloved by the 21st century.
When asked to explain her support for this Eric Zemmour who minimizes the issue of extermination camps and champions Pétain and Le Pen, Catherine Barma reads from prepared cards her excuse that “I haven’t read Robert Paxton [the historian who made it impossible to keep sweeping pétainism under the rug]. In general, when there is a conflict, I’m always on the side of the oppressed.”
And in the magical world of French TV, the “oppressed,” we are to infer, are the reactionaries. So this man who owes his existence to the egalitarian institutions of the Fifth Republic inasmuch as he would have been cheerfully exterminated by Vichy now exploits his good fortune to complain about the fact that Pétain’s “nationalist revolution” is no longer in favor. I really have no polite words to designate such trash, so will simply roll my eyes and make the international gesture for vomiting.
And a PS for Ms. Barma: if you don’t have the time or energy to read Robert Paxton, perhaps you or one of your assistants could read his Wikipedia page. Or here, I’ll make it even easier for you by pulling out a few high points:
Paxton bouleverse la lecture de l’histoire du régime de Vichy en affirmant que le gouvernement de Vichy a non seulement collaboré en devançant les ordres allemands : il a aussi voulu s’associer à l’« ordre nouveau » des nazis avec son projet de Révolution nationale…. Pétain et Laval ont toujours recherché la collaboration avec l’Allemagne nazie, et multiplié jusqu’au bout les signes et les gages de leur bonne volonté à s’entendre avec le vainqueur, allant souvent spontanément au-devant des exigences allemandes.
Loin d’avoir protégé les Français, le concours de Vichy a permis aux Allemands de réaliser plus facilement tous leurs projets — pillage économique et alimentaire, déportation des Juifs, exil forcé de la main-d’œuvre en Allemagne.
This is what you “haven’t read,” and a fair outline of what, by your choice of protagonists, you’ve chosen to support. Ignorance is no argument. Even if, as people say, “nobody reads any more.”
(For “The Novel as a Form of Thought,” a conference commemorating Joseph Frank, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, May 15-16, 2014.)
Joseph Frank was fully developed before he came to the Committee on Social Thought. His essay “Spatial Form,” first published in the Sewanee Review in 1945, is an astonishing piece of synthesis when you consider the state of play at the time. Joe Frank, born in 1918, had already at age 27 the stylistic authority and the full deck of reference that we find in his older contemporary Clement Greenberg, for example; but Greenberg, who preceded Joe at Erasmus Hall High School, had a proper BA (Phi Beta Kappa) from Syracuse, whereas Joe cobbled together his few semesters of college education between bouts of paid work and was largely educated through talking with freelance or underemployed intellectuals. Later, joining the class of underemployed intellectuals as a copy writer for the Bureau of National Affairs in Washington D.C., Joe was again walking in Greenberg’s footsteps; Greenberg’s non-academic jobs were with various federal agencies until he became a full-time editor at Partisan Review and The Nation in the 1950s. And like Frank, Greenberg made a strong impression with an early essay, in his case “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), which showed him to be fully up to date with the conversation about art, ethics and politics then underway in what would later be known as the Frankfurt School.[1]
Joe’s biography is too big a subject for me today. My reason for enumerating these facts and making the parallel with Greenberg is this. For people who came of age in the 1930s and 40s, art mattered in a way that we can hardly recover, even as a theme for nostalgia. It was important to discern what made modern literature and art modern, because in the adequate description of those representational artifices lay, one thought, a diagnosis of the spirit of the age, and it was important to get that right. Part of the reason lay in the contending teleologies of the day, theories of history with vastly divergent political formations behind them, structures of intention that claimed the power to determine one’s day-to-day actions and options. How we got where we are today, in a much weakened state of mind, onlookers if not scroungers at the remote edges of a frightfully well-financed commercial culture, is a complicated story. You have heard the recurrent laments for the demise of the public intellectual, specifically the sub-species of public intellectual whose habitat was outside the universities. From a U.S. point of view, the relative but steady rise in living standards, the massification and commodification of university education, and the cultural assimilation of previously excluded groups must all have had something to do with it, as these generally good things both undermined the cause of the Left as people of the 1930s understood it and broke down the difference between high culture and mass culture. If “Spatial Form” had been published in 1965, it would have been an academic, formalist exercise, and it’s often been mistaken for one since.
…When and how did ‘oral literature’ become an object of discourse? To that question I have an answer—the curious history I promised you.
Presumably oral literature itself goes back as far as language. Oral literature becomes something that people write about at moments when their written culture bumps up against a non-written culture that for some reason impresses or frustrates it. You wouldn’t find a lot of attention given, in ancient Greek and Roman texts, to the fact that the villagers of Boeotia don’t spend their evenings curled up with a good book. The illiteracy of the peasantry is absolutely taken for granted. The relative literacy of urban dwellers in the ancient world does get some attention—usually when someone has a complaint about it. The following text from Julius Caesar’s narration of the Gallic Wars is exceptional and I will linger over it for a while:
The lore [disciplina] of the Druids is thought to have been transmitted to Gaul from Britain, where it originated. Those who most eagerly wish to acquire it go there for the sake of study…. There, they are said to learn by heart a great number of verses, and not a few of them spend up to twenty years in study. Nor is it considered in keeping with divine law to commit these verses to writing, though [the Gauls] use Greek letters for almost all other kinds of public or private business. It seems to me that this rule was established for two reasons: one, that they did not wish this lore to be acquired by the common people, and two, that they did not wish the learners to rely on letters and therefore apply themselves less strenuously to memorization, as generally happens to those who, through the help of writing, lose their facility of learning and their memory.
Ernest Renan (whose enormous body of work stands heaped in front of your correspondent) was “one of the few nineteenth-century writers to think on a planetary scale,” observes Simone Fraisse (“Péguy et Renan,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 73 [1973], 264-280, at 269). But planetary scale and prophetic futurity do not equal being a nice guy. Some excerpts from Renan’s Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (1876), with translation below:
From the New Yorker‘s reportage on the MOOCs that people (well, the stockholders of Coursera and the like, anyway) claim will make the brick-and-mortar university obsolete:
“I could easily see a great institution like Harvard having a dynamic archive where, even after I’m gone—not just retired but let’s say really gone, I mean dead—aspects of the course could interlock with later generations of teachers and researchers,” Nagy told me. “Achilles himself says it in [Iliad,] Rhapsody 9, Line 413: ‘I’m going to die, but this story will be like a beautiful flower that will never wilt.’ ”
The speaker is Gregory Nagy, a scholar I’ve been reading for at least thirty-five years and who’s been personally encouraging to me; and I can’t help feeling there’s something sad about the quotation. Greg Nagy has been covered with every honor the world of American learning can dream up. He was tenured and promoted to full professor at Harvard at a young age, he has been the director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, been lauded, fêted, cited, and nonetheless has time to go out for coffee with random visitors and talk about ideas for books that may never be written. Among his many students are some of the most lively minds in Classics; they have generally done pretty well on the perilous career path of that always menaced field. He doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as a dead language. For what it’s worth, I like him immensely. And yet when he thinks about the shortness of life, about the recompense that Achilles received for his early death in battle– undying fame through Homer’s songs– he envisions his own berth in the Elysian Fields as a set of computer videos, chunked into twelve-minute segments, each followed by a quiz: his MOOC on the Greek hero.
If Bildung comprises a reactionary alternative to revolution, it shares this pacific spirit with modern human rights law. The French declaration of rights similarly articulated, after the event, how the revolution could have been avoided, and how future revolutions might be avoided through the reproductive mechanics of popular sovereignty. Although they emerged from the context of revolution, both human rights law and the Bildungsroman are reformist, rather than revolutionary… both human rights law and the Bildungsroman project individualized narratives of self-determination as cultural alternatives to the eruptive political act of mass revolt…
Both human rights and the Bildungsroman are tendentially conservative of prevailing social formations. Plotting novelistic and social evolution as an alternative to civil and political revolution, the idealist Bildungsroman narrates the normative constitution of the modern rights subject…. What emerges from the process is a socially contingent personality imagined to prevent certain antiestablishment collective and collectivizing revolutionary actions.
(Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., pp. 115, 135, 136)
Working my way through Conor Friedersdorf’s collection of 2012’s best nonfiction, I have come across a piece by Joshua Foer on a man named John Quijada, who has invented a language, Ithkuil, that attempts to fulfill the age-old dream of a perfect language.
At one point Foer describes what happened after Quijada read Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By:
For Quijada, this was a revelation. He imagined that Ithkuil might be able to do what Lakoff and Johnson said natural languages could not: force its speakers to precisely identify what they mean to say. No hemming, no hawing, no hiding true meaning behind jargon and metaphor. By requiring speakers to carefully consider the meaning of their words, he hoped that his analytical language would force many of the subterranean quirks of human cognition to the surface, and free people from the bugs that infect their thinking.
“As time went on, my goal began changing,” he told me. “It was no longer about creating a mishmash of cool linguistic features. I started getting all these ideas to make language work more efficiently. I thought, Why don’t I just create a means of finishing what all natural languages were unable to finish?
The piece is fascinating (though Foer’s prose is only really average, if by “average” you’ll allow me to refer to the general high quality of New Yorker prose). But it does go to show that dreaming big almost always means dreaming crazy. Quijada’s story is wonderful, and Foer includes just enough of the history of invented languages (you can get more, and have more fun, reading Arika Okrent’s book) to give the whole thing context.
Some flavor of both the lovely, bold, joyful craziness of it all and the desperate grasping for control that accompanies it can be gathered from these two paragraphs, which succeed one another immediately and appear three-quarters of the way through the piece:
He opened a closet and pulled out a plastic tub filled with reams of graph paper documenting early versions of the Ithkuil script and twenty-year-old sentence conjugations handwritten in marker on a mishmash of folded notepads. “I worked on this in fits and starts,” he said, looking at the mass of documents. “It was very much dependent on whether I was dating anyone at the time. This isn’t exactly something you discuss on a first or second date.”
Human interactions are governed by a set of implicit codes that can sometimes seem frustratingly opaque, and whose misreading can quickly put you on the outside looking in. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity: these are the ingenious instruments that allow us to mean more than we say. But in Ithkuil ambiguity is quashed in the interest of making all that is implicit explicit. An ironic statement is tagged with the verbal affix ’kçç. Hyperbolic statements are inflected by the letter ’m.
The wonderful Cabinet magazine hosted a performed bestiary one recent afternoon at the New Museum. For 4.5 hours, a small group of writers, artists, professors, curators, and others talked about a series of creatures in order from smallest (ant) to largest (whale). We each had 10 minutes. It was an absolute blast.
To represent my creature, the phoenix, I wrote and read a short story based on the birds featured in a 19th century text about Mongolian drugs. The key here is to try to shift the way you’re seeing the pages of the text: the words and names and images all become part of a common landscape. Try to see the words not as descriptions, but as a living part of this tiny cosmos. The images are crucial.
It’s a love story, and I’ve read it for you here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIlCdhrxYI&feature=youtu.be