Conservative

Apropos of the last posting: perhaps I have revealed my (always suspected) essentially conservative nature, since, as Zizek quotes Heidegger as saying:

“What is conservative remains bogged down in the historiographical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here mere subversion and destruction but an upheaval and re-creating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured...” (qtd on page 278, Parallax View)

But then again, perhaps it is ‘properly’ progressive to be called conservative by Heidegger?

two commonplaces?

There are no historical problems, only historiographical ones.

Or so I have come to believe.

Also, I’d like to record the passing thought that, given the sections of Lacan’s Seminaire XX on feminine sexuality that i’ve just listened to read out loud on a car trip, my vision of Lacan is significantly altered. Perhaps very tritely, I would now compare the text of his seminars (such tiny amount of it as i’ve heard) rather to the Recherche than to the great philosophical systematizers, or even to post-structuralist ‘philosophy’ like Derrida. It isn’t that he’s not philosophical, it’s only that when you add the deepest possible subjectivism (the only possible way to move past it, of course, is all the way into and through it) an equally abiding concern for language, and an extremely, to say the least, idiosyncratic personality, what you get is closer to pseudo-philosophical literature than anything else. It’s about character, texture, and reader-experience. This isn't to deny Lacan philosophical content, but rather to try to give content to the vague idea that he is genuinely post-philosophical.

history is...

Since I’m supposed to be professionally interested in this sort of thing, here is Modris Eksteins, in a recent TLS review (“Spirited,” Aug 24/31, pg 32, of Jon Savage’s, Teenage: The creation of youth 1875-1945). I’ll give most of the paragraph, as set-up:

But perhaps the avoidance of theory and connectivity is all to the good. Causality as historical enterprise seems dead anyway. History as explanation is passé. History today is all about feeling the past...

Thibaudet, Bell, Proust -- Anti-Semitism

So: I’ve been working towards a paper on Clive Bell’s Proust book. Clive Bell, especially later in his life, was objectionable elitist. Proust has, especially at the beginning, a light tone of genteel anti-Semitism. Marcel Proust is, for instance, an “exquisitely civilized Jew,” no doubt praise, but still we wince to read it today. These qualities, and the likelihood that Bell read Thibaudet, make the two treatments of Proust interesting to compare.

I’ve been reading the Nouvelle Revue Française memorial issue on Proust (Tome XX, 1923, no 1.). It is, taken as a whole text, fascinating, and deserves some study in its own right. Possibly I’ll write something about it here when I’m done. I have just now finished Albert Thibaudet’s contribution, which is called “Marcel Proust et la tradition française.” Bell must have read this little essay. First of all, Thibaudet claims that there are corners—“ces jardins secrets”—of every national literature into which foreigners simply cannot penetrate. Of course there are also very cosmopolitan gardens as well, into which greenhouse he puts Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. Bell mentions this book as well, echoing Thibaudet’s vocabulary, in the opening pages of Proust. He mentions it as part of a list of other books, possibly as great as the Recherche, “even Jean Christophe—which the French have put in the corner quite as much because it was written by a Protestant and a pacifist [note, in passing, that Clive Bell is himself both those things] as because it is written in a woefully undistinguished manner” (7-8). (As I copy out that quote, I notice the was/is written tense shift—because authorship is past, but the writing itself is always in the present).

For Thibaudet, though, the Recherche is clearly especially French, somehow unavailable to foreigners. Bell’s name (along with a clutch of other Bloomsberries) appears later in the volume appended to an awkwardly written “Hommage d’un groupe d’écrivains anglais” (248-9), which itself strongly suggests some of the themes Bell will later work on his own. Probably in reference to this, or at least this sort of activity, Thibaudet says, “de consiencieux Anglais ont fondé pour l’étudier une société Marcel Proust. Que le ‘monde’ français ait pu se faire aimer et admirer d’un Marcel Proust, cela doit bien étonner un romancier anglais. Cela ‘étonnera moins s’il cherche le fil qui relie Proust à une tradition authentique” (133).

This authentic ‘tradition française’ in terms of which Thibaudet wants to situate Proust is, first, Saint-Simon, the diarist of the court of Louis XIV, and then, Montaigne. Again, Bell will follow Thibaudet. The comparison with Saint-Simon is instructive, “Proust comme Saint-Simon est de ces écrivains qui, ne voyant et ne sentant pas simple [qui n’a rien à voir avec la simplicité], ser refuseraient comme à une trahison à écrire simple. Il faut que chaque phrase conserve la complesité, l’épaisseur, l’intensité émotionnelle ou la joie descriptive, qui étaient au principe des pensées et des images” (135). Compare that to Bell’s “Proust wanted to speak his mind, and his was a mind not easily spoken” (21). Bell’s idea, that style is, or should be, radically determined by process of thought even to the point of rupturing the surface of ‘good writing’ (characteristic, I think, of Bloomsbury), is also Thibaudet’s, who says, describing Proust’s writing: “Un tel style est vraiment consubstantiel à la chose pensante et vivante. Trop consubstantiel pour être clair et correct, dira-t-on. Et le fait est qu’il tient plutôt à la main et au corps de l’écrivain, qu’à la pointe délié de la plume” (136).

The conclusion, the ‘punt,’ of Thibaudet’s little contribution is fascinating. It is, I think, probably an example of some of the best that liberalism had to offer in the 1920s. Thibaudet has been describing Proust’s affinities to Montaigne, an interesting comparison because Proust writes very much about and from his own memory, while Montaigne is famously bad at remembering, and confined entirely to the present of his own writing. Thibaudet, having just called established the dynamism, the process-orientation, of this writing, pauses, and says, “On aura reconnu dans ces dernières ligns des expressions bergsoniennes, et elles nous amènent à des vues suggestives que j’introduis avec quelque réserve” (138). Before quoting, at length, the next paragraph, I wanted to pause and note the hesitance, almost trepidation, which marks Thibaudet’s plunge out of pure stylistic analysis, and into blood.

“Ces analogies entre Proust et Montaigne, leur singulier mobilisme à tous deux, ne seraient-elles pas en liaison avec un autre genre de parenté? Il est certain que la mère de Montaigne, une Lopez, était juive. Montaigne, voilà le seul de nos grands écrivains chez qui soit présent le sang juif. On connaît l’hérédité analogue de Marcel Proust. Et telle est également l’hérédité mixte de grand philosophe que je viens de nommer...[mentions other examples]...Je songe à cette mobilité, à cette inquiétude d’Israël, à ces tentes dont Bossuet, dans le Serment sur l’Unité de l’Eglise, fait le symbole du peuple de Dieu...l’Odyssée, a cristallisé, lui-même, comme l’a montré Bérard, autour de doublets gréco-sémitiques. Un Montaigne, un Proust, un Bergson, installent dans notre complexe et riche univers littéraire ce qu’on pourrait appeler le doublet frano-sémitique, comme il y a des doublets littéraires franco-anglais, franco-allemand, franco-italian, comme la France elle-même est un doublet du Nord et du Midi. Mais ne prenons cela que de biais, et, nous aussi, en une mobilité qui n’appuie pas. La tradition française à laquelle nous devons rattacher un Marcel Proust, c’est une tradition vivante, imprévisible, singulière, une tradition en mouvement irréguliere, en ligne serpentine, en tours et en retours, qui, comme une phrase même, comme une page de Proust, dépasse toujours sa matière précise par son élasticité intérieure et par la profusion de son débordement” (138-139).

So this little chunk of text, which I’ve edited down a bit, first postulates a link between heredity and style—but as is typical of humanist racial discourse, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the exact mechanism of transmission of these stylistic traits. Clearly, style is here an expression of the functioning of the writer’s mind, we might now say personality, or perhaps character. Style of writing is closely linked to style of thought. (But also, in the quote from pg 136, it is close to the writer’s body). This style of thought is linked to blood, which is a way of saying what, exactly? Historical experience is tied up in this (the tents of Israel—simple metaphor, or is this the content of the claim? To what register, we might ask, does this image belong?)

Thibaudet then mentions the Odyssey, which everyone agrees is a foundation of ‘our’ civilization, and which, according to the French hellenist (Victor?) Bérard, is a greco-semitic ‘doublet.’ From this point on, we have a theory of hybridization circa 1920. (We might notice that, as generous as he is with his doublets, they all start ‘franco-...’). This hybridization takes place strictly between national-linguistic groups, which makes it sound, I think, more obsolete than it is. This vision of mixing blood (understood to mean national, in the mystic sense, tradition) is profoundly progressive. The French tradition is living and vibrant, elastic and always overflowing its boundaries—this is a result of all the mixing, especially the Jewish blood.

This sort of talk is reprehensible for what seem to me obvious reasons. The Nazis (or even, Thibaudet’s contemporary and the object of one of his studies, Charles Maurras) have only to say exactly the same thing as Thibaudet—and they are able to use it to justify doctrines of racial purity. The logic is, I think, exactly the same as in the argument about the Jews as a modernizing force in the economy of Europe. ‘Progressive’ historians, a number of them Jewish, re-wrote the history of European capitalism with Jewish bankers in the staring role, from the middle ages on. Everyone loves capitalism, right? But as politics radicalize, especially, I think it must be said, with the rise of radical socialist ‘scientific’ re-valuation of bourgeois society and its capitalist/industrialist underpinnings, the very narrative which had been understood to praise ‘the Jews’ (I introduce quotes now, because the category becomes problematic) is widely available to damn them. All this is what was discussed at Julie Mell’s IHS session, but grows out of many sources. I don’t think Arendt puts it quite this way, but it is in her spirit.

So Thibaudet is, in literature, doing the same kind of thing that liberal, philosemitic historians did. His discourse is inside the same frame as Maurras’s, even as they disagree. Where does Bell stand in relation to this? Probably not far off.

VIII

Reading the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I feel as though I belong to a long tradition of left-leaning students constantly reliving a moment assumed to have been radical. If there isn’t yet a journal/magazine/blog/political organization named “Thesis Eight,” there should be. It reads, from the Penguin Early Writings, as follows:

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Franco on form

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. (London: Verson, 2005.)

Graphs, Maps, Trees seems significantly more interesting and worthwhile to me now than it did a year and a half ago when I first looked at it. I guess that means the education is working. I came across it in the process of writing on a Barthes essay on literature and literary history from which, incidentally, Moretti pulls a sentence or two to comment on one of the graphs in the first chapter. At the time I thought it was sort of hare-brained. What has happened since then? I’ve spent a further one and a half years in graduate school, read up on my Marxist literary criticism and (this is the sort of thing to which I’d like to pay attention) heard Moretti’s work briefly discussed at the AHA round-table in honor of Roger Chartier. So now he has the approval of the professional organization to which, one day, I will probably be obliged to belong. More important, I have a pretty good idea of what tradition he means to evoke when he says, at the end of his little, pumice-polished book,

“Were I to name a common denominator for all these attempts, I would probably choose: a materialist conception of form.” Is this reminiscent of the Marxist ‘60s and ‘70s? “Yes and no. Yes because the great idea of that critical season—form as the most profoundly social aspect of literature: form as force, as I put it in the close to my previous chapter—remains for me as valid as ever. And no, because I no longer believe that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system...” (92)

Certainly, Moretti is Marxist-inflected. Happily, I’m hearing about Marx on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from Fred Jameson this semester, so when I read Moretti: “As long as a hegemonic form [of genre] has not lost its ‘artistic usefulness’, there is not much a rival form can do” (17), I hear an echo: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed...” (426, Early Writings). This points to a major theoretical issue that I have with Moretti, which I suppose he, Marxist-inflected as he is, does not think is a problem. I mean that he takes for established fact that the role of literature (or, prose fiction, anyway) is to help its readers somehow ‘think’ society. From a footnote on the same page as the above quote: “a genre exhausts its potentialities...when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality” (17). The representative quality of the novel is crucial because he invokes the troubled idea of the ‘generation’ in order to explain his data about the life-cycle (usually 20-25 years) of the genre: “if what attracts readers is the drama of the day, then, once the day is over, so is the novel” (30). No doubt this question is worked out elsewhere. But it rankles for Moretti to be so cavalier about this when scholars like Lyon-Caen (see previous post) take such trouble to demonstrate the particular historical conditions under which it is indeed the case the people use the novel to read their social world. Moretti needs a more sociological explanation.

Which is odd, because his project is largely to bring sociology to literary history. He describes, on the very first page, his project this, “Within that old area territory [literary history], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs [graphs, maps, and trees]...in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading’...where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection”(1).

Then again at the end:

“Three chapters; three models; three distinct ‘sections’ of the literary field. First, the system of novelistic genres as a whole; then, ‘the road from birth to death’ of a specific chronotype; and now, the microlevel of stylistic mutations. But despite the differences of scale, some aspects of the argument remain constant. Fist of all, a somewhat pragmatic view of theoretical knowledge...In the second place, the models I have presented share a clear preference for explanation over interpretation...” (91)

This is all very sociological. Indeed, I found myself turning back to Randall Collins in the later part of the book, during Moretti’s discussion of Sherlock Holmes. Moretti is attempting to arrive at an evolutionary chart for a particular genre—in this case, the detective story, through treatment of the clue, as presumably, today, a determining feature of the genre.

(I might as well say here—I also find it odd that Moretti discusses collections of stories and novels proper as though they were indistinguishable. A central problem of any quantitative history is the definition of terms—where does Moretti draw the line? What about history-as-literature, which it was most of the way through the 19^th century—indeed, ‘non-fiction’ titles still sometimes outsell fiction, right? Where would I get numbers about this?).

This is fine, and tries to take in to account readership and market forces (pgs 72-77). It seems to me, though, that Collins’s idea of ‘attention space’ would be quite useful here. Perhaps Moretti feels that ‘market’ implies ‘attention space.’ Survival in the market means commanding a certain share of it, certainly—but I would think that especially where literary sub-genres are the subject, a sufficiently full attention-space could, in a manner of speaking, split, and spawn new niche markets. That is, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were good enough that other writers, who treated the material differently to a sufficient degree, were pushed out of this market, and into another? That doesn’t sound so good, but I’d like more of a treatment of this sort of question from Moretti.

‘Graphs’ is polemic about the 99% of novels written that critics ignore (must, by simple numbers), but it’s downhill after that. ‘Maps’ manages to squeeze a bit more ideology out of what you might call the virtual geography of certain village stories, but forgets his own sensible advice from the previous chapter to find questions to which he hasn’t already got the answer. The last chapter, ‘Trees,’ is unconvincing with Sherlock Holmes, and then, when we get to free indirect discourse, it sounds to me simply like old-fashioned (good, mind you, but still old-fashioned) literary history. A few books, here and there, which typify a way of writing, through time.

The interesting thing about Moretti’s three ‘models’ is that they are all tied to physiological life processes. He himself refuses to believe “that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system,” and he does not use any such framework. Yet the analysis of his graphs turn on generations of readership, that is, human life-times. His maps are also of vectors of human movement, and take, for the most part, a comfortable walk as a basic measure. ‘Trees’ assumes genealogy for novels as clear as that for living beings. The very model is deeply biological, even if he tries to hide it behind technology. So is it all about the body? Is not the individual human body the only possible locus for a genuine cultural materialism? Or do I only think this because I read the first part of Fiction of a Thinkable World?

Harpham on Zizek

Harpham, Galt. "Doing The Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge." Critical Inquiry Volume 29, Number 3, Spring 2003.

All in all, much less exciting than the title might lead you to believe, but not a terrible polemic-by-way-of-introduction.

“If we took Zizek as a guide to the real character of conventional academic methods and practices, we would be forced to revise--actually, to discard--all our assumptions about academic work and indeed about rational thought as such. For if Zizek's practice were to be universalized, the result would be the destruction of the very idea of a field, a specialized professional discourse that arrives at a true account of a limited domain by progressive and rational means. It would mean the end of life as we know it.”

Harpham also says, “Much of Lacan's mystique derives from the fact that he grounds his hypotheses about the mind in a science of language, giving them authority, scope, and profundity. But, as we have seen, Lacan relied on Saussure for that science...” and it may be true that the mystique comes from this ‘structuralist veneer,’ but it is also the case (as Harpham says) that Lacan botched or radically altered Saussurean lingusitics. Isn’t a more sensible reading of the relationship between the two that in 1957 Lacan knew Saussure was huge, knew that everyone was saying these things, and proceeded with his own, rather un-Saussurean understanding of language? He is often nasty, often ironic—why not here? Certainly, Zizek is very clear in Sublime Object of Ideology that he does not consider Lacan to be any kind of structuralist.

dunno what's going on with the formatting. it's what i get for cutting-and-pasting from html.