When we are young, we try to like the things which smart people are supposed to like. Then, we discover that most supposedly smart people are as stupid as shit. It's fine to like what you enjoy and dislike shite poseurs rave about.
A few years ago, the LARB published this essay excerpted from Amit Chaudhuri’s The Origins of Dislike, published by Oxford University Press.
Possible, Not Alternative, Histories: A Literary History Emerging from Sunlight
I’M LOOKING BACK at the title to remind myself of what it is. “Possible, not alternative, histories.”
A possible history is an alternative to another possible history.
I want to do something here that’s reckless because it’s very ambitious. I want to tell you about my reading.
That isn't ambitious at all.
And, in the process, I wish to describe or allude to glimpses or hiccups or revisions that are germane to a discussion on reassessment. And also talk about not only my history, but a possible literary history. By “possible” I don’t mean a history that doesn’t exist, but possible ways of looking at history.
In which case, what Amit means is 'possible theories of history' or 'possible historiographies'.
I also wish to distance myself from the term “alternative history”: it feels exhausted.
An alternative history is one which departs considerably from what is generally taught under that rubric.
Certainly, if somebody of my ethnic and cultural background spoke about it, they’d inevitably do so with a particular inflection and emphasis.
This is also the case for White peeps. WASPs are a ethnicity and have a cultural background. They are human beings just like darkies. They aint angels of the Lord of Categoricity or 'Naturality' or True Civilisation as opposed to some tribal culture.
I’m distancing myself from the idea of “alternative histories” in order to inquire into what histories it might be possible to speak about and describe, and in what way.
Sadly, Amit can't change his ethnic or cultural background. Nobody can. The histories people speak about reflect their own histories or their attempts to escape them.
In order to do this, one must first create and explore a space that one might call, for convenience’s sake, a “fictional” space.
This would be what is called in Mathematical Physics a 'configuration space'.
This “fictionality” facilitates a critique, a certain way of speaking, which wouldn’t be possible in a somber piece of academic writing.
If you are writing about fiction, the space you explore is itself fictional. This is true whether you are a somber academic or a gay moron.
There have been plenty of 'academics'- e.g. Tolkein, Sartre, etc- whose academic writing was on a par with their scholarly work in every respect save format.
Let me try to give you an example. I’m obviously not referring, when I say “fictional,” to writing about characters or telling stories. I mean a particular tone which you can’t reduce to irony,
You can reduce anything at all to irony. Theodicy itself is irony.
a tone that’s serious but at the same time indeterminate,
in which case it isn't wholly serious or wholly playful or wholly anything else
and most profound when parodying itself.
So, when Amit says 'fictional' he doesn't mean fictional. He means some bizarre sort of tone which becomes profound when it shows itself to be ludic and worthy of mockery
Borges was a great practitioner of this register;
Did it exist before him? If not, he didn't 'practice' it. He fucking invented it.
it’s moot as to whether his most significant critical insights occur in his mock-essays or in his essays proper.
This could be said of any author who wrote both essays and stories in which literary criticism featured. One might say that the author of 'Alice in Wonderland' gives us more significant insights there than in his mathematical work- especially on Social Choice Theory. (He supported proportional representation)
What is the difference between the first and the second?
There is no difference between a mock-essay and an essay. In England, Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus' is the locus classicus.
The instances of type one and type two that come almost randomly to mind from his oeuvre are “Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote”
Borges credited the underlying conceit to Carlyle. I think Mahatma Gandhi was the last Indian who claimed Carlyle as a Guru.
and “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” In “Pierre Menard,” the narrator points out that the eponymous author “did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”
However, the effect would have been the same if he had composed another Quixote set in medieval Spain and with a similar set of characters.
Famously, this mock-narrator goes on to quote from Cervantes’s Don Quixote and then from Pierre Menard’s, to analyze their differences, and showcase the latter’s originality:
The same thing happens when Tolkein or Umberto Eco write in the style of medieval writers.
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
Clio is the muse of history. Memory is called the mother of rhetoric- because in the old days people memorized their speeches, or those written for them. Cervantes is displaying Renaissance optimism of the sort taken further by the Enlightenment.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.
Borges is displaying an Anglophile's prejudice. The Spanish were Catholics and thus verbose when not utterly witless.
Menard, on the other writes:
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding.
No. It is the Humanism of the Renaissance which held that history could be reconstructed on an objective basis. It is customary to mention Vico at this point. Amit is too fucking ignorant.
The fact is, European 'Humanism' understood that Greeks and Romans, though pagan, discovered much which had since been forgotten during the dark 'age of Faith'. The 'Enlightenment' was less catholic- i.e. universal or charitable- in such matters.
Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as inquiry into reality but as its origin …
Borges had arrived at pragmatism via an excursion into Continental idealism. But, since Hegelian Logic is 'pre-suppositionless', what else could it be save Pragmatic? Moreover, Borges understood the Socratic 'palinode'- i.e. the manner in which though the 'intension' remains the same, the 'extension' changes depending on our knowledge base or simple utility.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard — quite foreign, after all — suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.
Cervantes moved from Renaissance pastoralism towards a baroque style. Don Quixote could be considered as incarnating the type of verisimilitude- ut pictura poesis- praised by Horace. Indeed, Cervantes mentions Aristotle and Horace. He also takes phrases or incidents from the Aeneid, and from Amadis and Orlando Furioso. This is literary Spanish rather than any current dialect. Borges knew this. He wants us to feel contempt for the pretentious Carlyean 'editor'.
The question of what gives to writing its modern or archaic or national characteristics comes up again in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” which, in the collection Labyrinths, is classified as an “essay” rather than, as “Menard” is, a “fiction.”
Because it is actually an essay. I suppose, if Borges had been writing an essay on the Quixote, he would have carefully distinguished the stages in Cervantes's literary development. What is interesting, for Borgesians, about Pierre Menard is that it appears to be an exception to Borges's rule that there should be no repetition in the unfolding of the universal mind which is that of the single solitary writer incarnated in every writer. But, he clarifies, 'interpretation' is different. This also solves the problem of his 'new refutation of Time' which, I believe, is also that of irreducible Markov chains having repeating states.
Borges, here, makes a series of proclamations that distinguish him from his Argentine contemporaries and what they take to be the attributes of Argentine tradition.
Initially, Borges was a champion of criollismo. Nothing distinguished any Argentine but thirst or aptness for distinction. They weren't bhadralok buddhijivi bores.
Among the better known of Borges’s statements are these: “What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily […] I believe our tradition is all of Western culture,
Borges expanded this to Islam, Hinduism, but also that China up to which, the Prophet said, we should seek knowledge.
and I also believe we have a right to this tradition,
Oikeiosis is the technical term
greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have.”
Borges's Argentina was rich. It attracted cultured migrants from every part of Europe and even the Levant.
In other remarks to do with the accouterments of culture, Borges observes: “Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color […] Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels;
actually the Camel is praised as a miracle of creation in the Holy Quran.
I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.”
Borges was wrong. Still, what he said was funny.
In both the fiction, “Pierre Menard,” and in this essay, Borges is at his most incisive in complicating the business of cultural and historical markers:
Sadly, no. Pierre Menard is interesting because the notion of recreating a vanished milieu in one's mind appeals to our sense of wonder. As for the Argentine writer, we don't greatly care what their tradition might be provided they are entertaining.
he’s countering whatever it is we take to be the visible characteristics of a 17th-century Spanish work (Cervantes’s Quixote), a modern cosmopolitan text (Menard’s recreation of Cervantes’s novel), an Arab book (the Koran), and Argentine tradition.
But we know the conclusion he comes to- all books are by the same author.
For Borges, there are no clear or definite features that proclaim a work to be Spanish or Argentine or Arabic, although each is definitely what it is because it’s Spanish or Argentine or Arabic.
No. Borges wasn't stupid. If a book is written in Spanish it is a Spanish book. If it is written by an Argentine it is Argentinian. The Quran praises camels but what makes it an Arabic book is that its language is Arabic- that too of the best sort.
The register in which Borges explores this crucial insight (crucial to him and to the modern reader burdened with an overdetermined notion of culture) is the register of “fictionality”:
Borges says it is the register of Thomas Carlyle. Amit studied Eng Lit. He should know this.
there’s almost no difference, tonally, between the invented scholar who presents the reader with Menard and the “Borges” who begins his essay with “I wish to formulate and justify here some skeptical proposals concerning the problem of the Argentine writer and tradition.”
Nonsense! The 'invented scholar' is a bigot mindlessly repeating the conventional wisdom of a pre-War age. Borges is a professional writer- an erudite one- who combined a European education with strong roots in the native soil. For Borges, Carlyle was 'a universe'. He didn't want to be any such shit.
Who are we to take more, or less, seriously — the narrator of the Menard “fiction” or of the essay?
The essay. The story is a jeu d'esprit.
It’s worth adding here that, like Borges, Roland Barthes, too, is a writer whose work constantly inhabits the peculiar domain of fictionality; his provocations are enabled by tone:
Barthes was a cretin who couldn't understand even a pellucid author like Balzac.
“[W]e know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
He himself was brain-dead. I suppose trying to pose as a Marxist is the equivalent of undergoing lobotomy.
It’s as wrong to take this sentence from Barthes as a simple declaration, to divorce it from its narratorial voice, as it would be to do something similar with any of the remarks in “Pierre Menard.”
In which case Barthes was wrong. The author isn't dead though, in his own case, he had no brain to speak of.
It’s appropriate that Barthes, like Borges, must invent a particular authorial register in order to debunk the notion of the author’s continuing, reassuring presence.
Barthes thought 'semiotics' was sciencey and therefore Marxian. Take any author and read anything you like into him till you get tenure. After that, just repeat yourself endlessly.
To understand Barthes, you need to not only follow the argument, but to be alive to tonality.
No. You need to understand that the man was stupid and ignorant.
The tone of fictionality is not ironical; that is, it isn’t saying, “The opposite of what I’m saying is actually true.” It’s disruptive. It allows the critic to become fiction-writer, and say what it isn’t possible to in academic writing.
Thus if you have to teach Cervantes but all you know about is Calcutta, you start by pointing out that Cervantes had a dick. Worse, it was a white dick. Guess who else had a white dick? Job Charnock! He founded Calcutta which is why it is such a horrible shithole. Thus to understand the invagination of the catachresis of the constipation of the subaltern, you must understand that dicks are bad. They cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
My use of the word “possible” is meant to gesture toward “fictionality.”
but not in a rude or crude manner. I'm a nice Bengali boy.
The foundation and starting point of my account of certain shifts in literature in the last three decades refer to a particular turn in the 1980s that affected us all.
There was no 'shift in literature' in the Eighties.
This turn was taking place on various levels, and I will restrict myself to two — the emergence of the global novel, which encompasses what we used to call “magic realism,”
The term was gaining ground in the late Fifties. Marquez's 'One hundred years of Solitude' came out in 1967. Zulfikar Ghose gained acclaim for hhis magical realist Brazilian novels in the Seventies. Fellow Pakistani, Salman jumped on that bandwagon to greater effect.
novels to do with journeys,
like the Odyysey?
novels to do with maps and the way cultures come together.
like the Iliad.
The global novel proposed — I will use a perhaps harshly simplistic binary here — that a bourgeois domestic setting was integral to the conventional Western realist novel,
The West had novels before there was a bourgeoisie.
and the non-Western novelistic imagination implied the emigrant’s journeys, border crossings, hybridity, and cartography.
Nonsense! R.K Narayan and Lin Yu Tang sold well in their day. Indeed, so did Tagore. They didn't gas on about 'emigrant's journeys'. Homo Baba did come up with the term hybridity in the Eighties. But he was pretending to be a Marxist and was, in any case, as stupid as shit.
In other words, it’s difficult for the novels of “other” cultures, generically speaking, to be about a bourgeois apartment.
No Western novel is about a 'bourgeois apartment'. Perhaps Amit thinks Estate Agents' listings are actually novels. Still, it is true that 'War and Peace' is a loving description of Tolstoy's aunty's sofa and its hostility towards the dinner table.
There was also talk of polyphony. Since the global novel opens on to multiple cultures and the manner in which they encounter and mingle with each other, it necessarily must be home to, and echo with, a hubbub of many voices. It will be polyphonic.
And will feature a super-hero named Kamala Khan who is forced to commit suttee and thuggee, not to mention agarbatti.
This wasn’t entirely unrelated to the new and largely unprecedented interest in philosophy
shit philosophy
at the time in literature departments. Here, a particular version of Derrida came into being,
Derrida, I like to think, was a practical joke played by Harvard on Yale.
with a special style of interpreting his words, drawing attention to, for instance, his first work, Writing and Difference, where Derrida introduces the concept of play thus: “[T]he absence of the transcendental signified extends the play of the signifier to infinity.”
i.e. coz God is dead we can just play around with words till we get tenure. After that, we can stop pretending to have a brain. Is there any novelist influenced by Derrida? Helen Cixous- maybe. She wrote the Twilight series- right?
This unbridled incarnation of play segues, in fiction, into polyphony,
where? Derrida inspired no fiction whatsoever.
which segues into the global novel of the journey:
which was older than the fucking Odyssey.
the extension of “play” is also a new, political idea of narrative,
Coz Homer had a new, political, idea of narrative- right? Wrong. He was part of a tradition at least ten thousand years old.
a moving out from the shackles of realism into the limitlessness of globalization and its historical precursor, the discovery of the New World (the subject of “magic realism”).
But 'magic realism' begins with Gogol, Potocki and various unreadable German nutters. Magical realism only appeared in 'the New World' several centuries after Columbus.
I’m not saying that the philosophical and narrative turns are identical; but they come to occupy a particular tone — not only celebratory, but also triumphalist.
You can't occupy a tone. You may affect it or imitate it or it may come naturally to you.
With “play” comes the notion of laughter.
Nope. Babies laugh before they have enough control over their limbs to play.
At this time, laughter emanates from Bakhtin too,
Fuck off! Nothing emanates from him. Some people may pretend to have read him but they are as stupid as shit.
with a specific political significance, a significance that immediately adheres to the ludic.
Lucian had already said eternity was but a child playing a game.
These developments announced the death knell of the apartment,
like Amit's 'strange and sublime address'?
and the view from the window. All of that had been rendered imaginatively peripheral by the turn in the 1980s.
Latin American fiction was big in the Sixties and Seventies. The Beidermeier novel was dead by about 1848.
Oddly, inappropriately, it was at this time (1986, to be precise) that I began to think about moving from poetry to writing my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which, in some senses, was a book about a house, and which I conceived of in spatial terms.
Amit was retarded even back then.
I want to give you a brief prehistory of this moment. I grew up in Bombay over the 1960s and 1970s. It was around 1978 that I became a poet-manqué; a modernist-manqué.
In which case he wouldn't have published any books of verse. I suppose he means he thought he would be a poet-manque because he wouldn't be able to get published. He overestimated the standard of publishability for buddhijivi shitheads. After all, they are needed to provide a merchantable template of stupidity, ignorance and utter ugliness so the MFA Ponzi scheme continue.
There must have been a sizable group of us from the middle and upper middle classes who, in that period of hormonal transformation, were angst-driven.
Apparently, the upper and the lower class are either not subject to 'hormonal transformation' or, this gives rise to no 'angst'.
Theories of misery excited us; there was a buzz around two words in particular. The first was “existentialism,”
by which was meant a rejection of the teleology of religion.
a term that everybody was familiar with in Bombay,
because religion said don't fuck everything in trousers or a skirt or whatever.
especially leading ladies like Parveen Babi and Zeenat Aman, who’d refer to it in interviews in magazines dedicated to film gossip.
The one was an alcoholic. The other a battered wife. Still, it's nice to know Bombay was only thirty years behind Hollywood. Come to think of it, John Ford asked Sartre to write the script for his Freud bio-pic.
The other word was “absurd.” Of course, we understood these words in the light of teenage self-interest. Life was absurd for us as teenagers.
Unless you were sleeping with the maid.
We found a great deal of our experience fell under the purview of the existential, of absurdity: we tended to adopt, at once, an interior and metaphysical way of looking at the world.
Maybe in Bombay. Elsewhere, we were terrified we wouldn't get into the Civil Service or Chartered Accountancy or professions more boring yet.
The moment we engaged with and immersed ourselves in this perspective and its language, we ceased to notice — simply weren’t interested in — the physical.
The rest of us were masturbating round the clock.
I was oblivious, for instance, to Beckett’s humor.
I wasn't. This was because I confused him with Benny Hill.
I was mainly concerned with the word that had associated itself with his oeuvre — “absurdist,” which sounded close enough to “absurd.”
Theatre of the absurd means the same thing as 'absurdist theatre'. Amit sees a distinction where none exists.
There were aspects of his theater which appeared to confirm that, in the second half of the 20th century, the contemporary imagination’s conception of both the world, stripped to its essentials, and of the proscenium was basically a post-Holocaust landscape, minimal, with few physical or living details.
Indians didn't care about the Holocaust. We thought Hitler was a nice guy because he had befriended Bose. A future President of India praised Hitler in Parliament. He was under the impression that Hitler was Indira's Uncle.
Then there were the terms that Sartre had put out there: “contingency,” for instance, which led back urgently to Camus’s “absurdity.”
Sartre and Camus were passe by the Seventies. Beckett and Pinter didn't exist for Indians. Oddly, there was a cult of Brecht. Perhaps the East Germans funded it.
Existence was contingent rather than pre-ordained; its lack of meaning or purpose made it “absurd.”
Not for Hindus. Ideas of karma are simply too ingrained.
The teenager in me would have seen this statement less as a celebration of the role of chance in creation and creativity than as a confirmation of the acute pointlessness of life that suddenly becomes clear to a 17-year-old.
Life is pointless if you have a dick but nowhere nice and soft to put it.
(Both Camus and Sartre were Frenchmen and literary writers, with the Surrealists as part of their intellectual antecedents:
Sartre attacked the surrealists. Camus was a French Algerian football player- i.e. not a big thinker.
so the idea of the contingency of existence carrying an echo of the joyously accidental provenances of creativity can’t be entirely dismissed.
No. Sartre and Camus were reacting against the collaborators who thought the Nazis were preferable to the Commies.
What in Camus and Sartre is tragic affirmation is preceded, in Breton and Aragon, by a sense of release regarding the same conditions of chance in relation to creativity.)
Camus and Sartre thought the right thing to do was join the Resistance and go kill Nazis. To be fair Breton and Aragon were banned by Vichy. The latter was part of the Resistance. Both were on the Left. I think Breton met Trotsky in Mexico.
Much of the academic interpretative apparatus around modernism
I suppose he means his own interpretative apparatus. Sadly he is stupid and ignorant.
still carries that teenage passion: it sees fragmentariness of form, Beckett’s minimalism,
Beckett was an occasionalist of an extreme type. If you don't know how you do a thing, you can't be said to be doing it at all.
and Kafka’s parables— to take three examples — as allegories of the 20th-century human condition.
Why only the twentieth century?
That is, its readings are mimetic,
write nonsense about stuff which makes no sense to you
its meanings metaphysical.
i.e. meaningless
It largely ignores the physical.
the historical. Beckett and Kafka can be understood well enough in their historical context.
The scenario I’ve sketched above would vanish by the mid-1980s with the upsurge of the ludic.
There was no such upsurge. There was no great change during that period. Trends observable in the Sixties and Seventies continued. Perhaps there was a bit more 'analytical' philosophy- e.g. Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace- in the Nineties. Some middle-brow novelists- Gore Vidal, John Fowles- did get a bit 'meta' in the Eighties but there was no big break with what had gone before.
Theory, postmodernism, the global novel: these would render the absurd and the existential obsolete, just as it had made a particular spatial sub-tradition within modernism — the view from the window in the apartment — marginal.
Where is this 'global novel'? I know of no such thing unless you mean Rushdie's endlessly parodying himself.
In my life, too, a change was taking place: it coincided with my parents moving to St Cyril Road in Bandra after my father’s retirement. It led to me discovering, during my visits back home from London and then Oxford, the flowering in these lanes on the outskirts of Bombay.
Flowering of what? Flowers?
For me, too, it became necessary, by the time I was 23 or 24, to leave the absurd behind.
By teaching stupid shit.
Thinking back, it wasn’t as if I was really aware, from the early to mid-1980s, of the changes to do with the postmodern novel, or with the poststructuralist conception of play.
Huizinga's Homo Ludens came out in 1938.
But I needed to abandon a world defined by a sense of the self and its penumbral shadow subsuming everything in its interiority.
Amit can't write about what happened to global literature. His view from the window of his apartment is only of himself reflected in the glass.
For me, this interiority was partly the legacy of a teenage misreading of modernism and Continental philosophy.
Or just the fact that Amit was an imbecile. Smart Bengalis study mathematical physics. Stupid ones do Literature.
I had to step out. This resulted in a remaking of myself, whose consequence was my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address,
about his boyhood visits to relatives in Calcutta
a book unlike the poems I’d been composing from my late teens to the beginnings of my 20s, quasi-modernist testimonies to the tragedy of the contemporary world.
His tragedy was that he was stooopid. This would have been cool if he were Punjabi and was making money hand over fist dealing in agricultural machinery. But the boy was bhadralok.
The subjects of my novel were not only a house and a street in Calcutta, but joy.
City of Joy was published in 1985. Suddenly Bengalis discovered it might be okay to be proud of their storied city.
In spite of this embrace of joy and play, my turn was unconnected to the cultural untrammeling I delineated earlier, which characterized the new fiction and philosophy.
Which new fiction and philosophy? Beckett and Joyce were influenced by scholastic philosophy from centuries ago. Kafka was engaging with the Talmud.
For me it had to do with reading D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.
Which could have been written by a contemporary of Hardy.
Lawrence’s novel gave me what I hadn’t found in my own misreadings of modernism.
Freud? The Oedipus complex?
At that time — the early 1980s — T. S. Eliot was still to fall into disrepute.
He had a dick. Dicks cause RAPE! Also he was White. Whitey be debil.
He was viewed as the founding father of modernism in Anglophone poetry, but, as importantly, his work contained features that could be misread, and which lent themselves to, and, in my mind, converged with the melancholic history to do with the existential and absurd.
This is odd. Most people read the Four Quarters immediately after 'the Wasteland'. Hindus find Eliot very accessible because he knew Sanskrit and was steeped in Vedanta and Buddhism.
His use of Dante in the epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as well as in strategic insertions in The Waste Land provided an impetus for an allegoric reading of modernist poetry — formally, verbally, thematically — as if it were somehow a metaphysical representation of the human condition.
Since the human condition surpasses the physical, its representation must include the metaphysical. Still, Prufrock is easy to read but difficult to teach. We imagine that there are sexual things in it which it was perhaps not prudent to reveal at that time. My own intuition was that far from being a 'Boston Brahmin', Eliot was actually from Ludhiana and was having an affair with a buffalo.
The epigraphs and quotations, especially as they derive from the Inferno, set a frame for reading. So did remarks such as these, where Eliot invokes a cultural mimesis that makes us see modernism as a symptom, an allegory, of historical or personal extremity: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.”
Eliot's or Joyce's mimesis is not 'cultural'. They are seeking to capture the stream of consciousness. There's was an intensely psychological age. Moreover, the old Newtonian certainties had been overturned. The world had become too complex to be comprehended by any single mind. We can have no Sophocles who sees life steadily, and sees it whole.
When I was 16, and until I was 23, I believed modernism was, on one level, a formalist representation of the fragmenting of human, of Western, civilization, and the tragedy of that fragmenting (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”).
Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the sentiment is ancient. Contemporary life always appears to have become vastly more complicated than the world which faced our ancestors.
This reading was inextricable from a metaphysical position on value: that it, like meaning or meaningfulness, must come from elsewhere (in this case, it emanated from a unitary Western civilization that was now lost).
Again, this is an acceptable view- more especially for a young Indian to have. We think of Islam or Confucian China as having been unitary even if, nowadays, all sorts of discordant notes are struck in everyday living.
In Sons and Lovers, I found no attempt to summon an extraneous source of value; there was no civilizational sense of loss.
No. The older generation were passionate and at ease with their own carnality. Education had expelled youth from that Eden.
I was astonished by it. Sons and Lovers carried within it a polemic which emerged from its anti-metaphysical position: its writing returned me radically to the significant fact of physicality, the fact of living in the “here and now,” and of living this life.
Metaphysics does concern itself with breaking bookish habits and dispelling the sort of sophistry and hypocrisy which disguises our true motives from ourselves.
Sons and Lovers is an early work, but its polemics are prescient of the provocative claims Lawrence made in a work he wrote not long before he died: Apocalypse, his eccentric gloss on the Revelations, which begins: “Whatever the unborn and the dead might know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh.”
Nor can we know anything about what they know. Still, Lawrence was pretty consistent in his views. I suppose initially it was hoped he would become a great sociological novelist and perhaps end up as an advisor to the Coal Board.
Sons and Lovers is saying the same thing many years before he formulated those words in Apocalypse. The “unborn and the dead” is, among other things, Lawrence’s euphemism for Western tradition and its inheritance;
The unborn have no tradition. The dead can not receive an inheritance.
“being alive in the flesh” a reference to a moment in literary history that’s ameliorated by a radical idea of value.
But England's 'literary history' had once been very fucking 'alive in the flesh'. There's a lot of sex in Chaucer.
This arc is important to me; it enacts an ongoing rejection on behalf of the physical which I first accessed through Lawrence and which I could not access in my misunderstanding of modernism or the existential.
Because Amit thought Modernism and Existentialism were concerned with Actuarial Science. He didn't notice that people fucked and shat in both.
This refutation of interiority
human beings have interiority even when they are shitting or fucking
has to be distinguished from the postmodern and poststructuralist turn.
both simply mean 'don't be a boring Marxist cunt. Write something interesting for fuck's sake.'
Now, where did Lawrence get this from?
Everyone was getting something like this at that time. The sociological novel could take up sexual questions by situating them in a more working class setting. Hardy and Gissing had set the stage. Lawrence's great gifts were recognized by Ford Madox Ford. But Lawrence would not be the petted poodle of the Edwardian upper class.
Possibly from the Nietzsche of The Gay Science.
I think this was translated into English only a couple of years before Sons and Lovers was published. I suppose Lawrence's wife would have been familiar with it.
How important The Gay Science is to literature, as is the Nietzsche that says “yes” to life, who exhorts us, “Embrace your fate!” Why is he saying this? Perhaps it might be connected to the fact that — like Lawrence, for whom the encounter with Italy and sunlight was a transformative experience — for Nietzsche too, the idea of Italy and the encounter with it comprise a revaluation.
This was an old idea for Germans- e.g. Winklemann, Goethe etc.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks repeatedly of Italy, and Genoa. He also refers to the luxury of a summer afternoon. In other words, Nietzsche’s sense of the release from interiority is happening through sunlight. Sunlight is not a metaphor for the enlightenment; it’s a way of speaking about “being alive in the flesh” — physical existence — but it’s also a way of broaching the dissolution of the self upon its encounter with sunlight.
The Brits and the Germans may be big fans of sunlight. In India we have too much of it.
When, in Apocalypse, Lawrence exhorts us that “whatever the dead or the unborn might know, they cannot know the marvel of being alive in the flesh,” he’s rejecting an extraneous meaning that comes from “elsewhere,” and derives its validity from a source, universe, or epoch outside our own.
Is he though? Apocalypse- which means 'rending of the veil'- is Biblical. If there is no God or Hell or Heaven it would be foolish to speak of the marvel of being able to fart in the flesh.
He’s rebutting the kind of superstructure on which not only is religion built, but the idea of meaning too.
No. He is saying that one can improve upon the religious world view by appreciating the gift of life to the full. Apparently, there was a son of a carpenter in Palestine who said something similar some two thousand years ago.
Lawrence wrote well. He didn't rebut the idea of meaning. He showed how to use language so that the thing is more abundant. Horace with say he combines 'dulce' with 'utile'.
There are overlaps here with what Derrida made a case for in, say, De la Grammatologie.
Lawrence wasn't a philosopher. Thus he could not have suffered from a delusion which Derrida says afflicts only continental philosophers. Did Lawrence think texts were derivative from speech. Probably. His prose does not smell of the lamp. I imagine his command of his native tongue was such that he could have dictated his books without ending up sounding like the Old Pretender- Henry James.
But what’s happening with Nietzsche and Lawrence is quite specific and singular, because it involves a particular physical encounter with the sun.
With sunlight- sure. You will burn up very quickly if you try to physically encounter the sun.
Lawrence reminds us in Apocalypse, when pointing out that “the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters,” of what the encounter involves: dissolution.
Yet the mind exists even on a moon-less night. Lawrence may have been a great writer but he wasn't a great thinker.
The tradition or lineage of renewal I’m establishing here includes Goethe.
who read Winklemann and was read by Nietzsche who was ready by Lawrence's wife who thought her hubby, like Winklemann, was gay.
Italian Journey, Goethe’s record of his wanderings in and around Rome, Naples, and the Italian countryside, is not only an account of architecture but of weather and of the sun, of the difference of the European South from the Nordic darkness from which value is supposed to derive.
Goethe was Teutonic, not Nordic. Also, Germany does have sunny days.
The memory of Italy never leaves him. He’s reported to have asked, before he died, for “more light, more light.” Apparently, his actual words were closer to: “Could you pull down the second shutter so that more light might come in?” That’s a very specific instruction.
He was asking for more light. Had it been night, he would have asked for more candles to be lit.
Tagore, in the 1890s, when he’s in his 30s and journeying up and down the Padma on a houseboat, overlooking his father’s estates,
overseeing not overlooking.
writes to his niece Indira Devi, “Like Goethe, I want more light, more space.”
The Germans were initially greatly taken with Tagore.
Goethe is probably invoking Italy on his deathbed, attempting to return to that sunlit moment.
Due to Sun is not shining in Germany.
Tagore’s memory adorns Goethe by adding space. “More light, more space” — space takes us back to the self’s dissolution into emptiness.
In Sanskrit the letter 'Kha' stands for both space, which is that which is illuminated, and suṣumṇā-nā or the void at the dark center of the heart.
So light (which we can only perceive within space) and emptiness are connected both to each other and to the self’s dissolution, while simultaneously affirming physical existence.
No. One can affirm physical existence is 'maya'- or illusion.
This is an unrecovered tradition in the West which counters Western metaphysics.
No. Western metaphysics has the same varieties of shite as Indian metaphysics.
Its origins are uncertain, but it goes back at least to Diogenes. Here is a philosopher who instructs Alexander (when he goes to him to honor him and asks, “What can I give you?”), “Could you stand back? You’re blocking the sunlight.”
Diogenes meant that he needed nothing. Alexander should take the hint and fuck the fuck off.
This is a gesture toward all the traditions to which sunlight is not a pure metaphor for enlightenment but a reiteration of the immediacy of the physical now and the dissolution of the psychological world of value (“What can I give you?”).
There is no such tradition. Amit pulled it out of his arse. The physical 'now' exists at night. Nothing dissolves 'the psychological world of value' while yet there is life. Even Diogenes wants something- viz. Alexander to fuck the fuck off.
Diogenes’s response is unhesitant
It is self-defeating. Alexander has the power to have him thrown into a dark dungeon. It won't be in his power to procure even sunlight for himself.
because the rejection of the metaphysical,
Diogenes rejected money which aint metaphysical at all- which is why I don't have any.
of meaning that comes from another source (and which other source of meaning might be more powerful than the Emperor?), is an urgent matter before the unmediated quality of sunlight.
Plants need it. They also appreciate shit as fertilizer.
In Tagore, the exclamation to do with “more space, more light” must be viewed in the context of what’s often, where he’s concerned, a Nietzschean position on saying “yes” to life.
Nietzsche was in the position of having to say yes to syphilis.
The first two lines of his song “jagate ananda jagnye amar nimantran, / dhanya holo, dhanya holo manaba jiban” (“I’ve been invited to the world’s festival, / Human life has been blessed”)
The dude had to take over from his dad as the head of a religious sect. God created life. If we don't enjoy it, he may get mad at us.
appear to contain a startlingly egotistical observation: they actually comprise an assertion. There’s an odd implicit hiatus between the first and the second lines, so that they could function as independent statements about “embracing [one’s] fate”: “I’ve been invited…”; “Human life is blessed.” Tagore doesn’t even bother to use “so” or “therefore” — tai in Bengali — at the beginning of the second line to connect it, explanatorily, to the first (ah, so that’s why human life is blessed — because I’m here); he could have, easily. Both lines become standalone proclamations about the miraculous contingency of “being here,” “alive in the flesh […] only for a time.”
Life is nice coz God is nice. If you hate your life, God probably thinks you are real shitty and wants you to feel horrible.
But to believe that one’s been invited to participate in existence, and to call existence a “festival of joy” (Tagore composed the song in 1909), is an extraordinary as well as an extraordinarily obdurate thing to say for a man who’d suffered many untimely bereavements in his family.
If someone must die, let it not be me.
There was his wife Mrinalini’s death in 1902, his daughter Renuka’s in 1903, and his younger son Samindranath’s in 1907 of cholera at the age of 10. Tagore’s song is the most unexpectedly Nietzschean instance of poetry saying “yes” to life.
Amit didn't notice that Tagore had a big beard and ponced around in a kaftan. This was because he was the head of a religious sect. You have to pretend that God is being real nice to you otherwise people think your sect is shit.
(So, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored…” In another song by Tagore that I know because it was my mother’s first recording, something like Nietzsche’s disorienting insight — “then you have said Yes too to all woe” — is presented in a variation: “dukhero beshe esechho bole tomare nahi doribo he. / jekhane byathha tomare sethha nibido kore dharibo he” — “I won’t fear you because you’ve come to me in the guise of sorrow. / Where there’s pain, there I’ll clutch you intimately.”)
Tagore was a pussy-grabber. Who knew?
A great number of Tagore’s songs, in one form or another, praise light.
He also thought space was nice.
Light is not only synonymous with consciousness, but with the contingency — the chance occurrence — of being alive.
Amit does not know that we are alive even on moonless nights.
To acknowledge light is also an act of affirmation.
Which is why it is important to say 'Hello light!' when you wake up. Also, you should read out some of your poetry to it. That way it will start avoiding you.
How does this love of light come to one who belongs to a climate in which it’s freely available?
In Germany, you are having to pay lot of money to get the Sun to shine. In India, nobody needs electric lights because the thing is supplied for free at every hour of the night.
Shouldn’t one, in such a context, cease to notice it? Maybe we who live in countries such as the one Tagore and I belong to — where there’s more of the sun than where Nietzsche or Goethe or Lawrence lived —
No. There is less heat in England but the same Sun is available. Indeed, during Summer, England gets more hours of sunlight than India.
still develop, at a certain point in our lives, the same sense of being a migrant, a visitor, in the way Nietzsche did when he was in Italy. That is, we, who live in climates that are less dark, still can’t take the sun for granted.
Which is why we should bribe it suitably.
Maybe it’s just the interruption of night — I can’t vouch with certainty for the reason — but, at some point, like migrants, we become aware of the sun.
Migrants to southerly latitudes may notice it more. But plenty of migrants remain on the same latitude.
Historically, as we notice in the early Sanskrit texts, the poets began to praise it in direct relation to the fact of existence.
The Vedas also praise Ratri, Night, as a goddess.
I place myself in that tradition. Unlike the global novelists who left behind the melancholy of the absurd — often in the interests of the “play” which was so wonderful in Derrida
Derrida was less Marxist than his contemporaries and thus 'post-modern'
but took on a slightly sterile expression in postmodernity — for me there was something else: I was allying myself with another lineage by the mid-1980s (possibly because my student days in London hardly had any summer days in them), involving sunlight.
As a student in London, Amit had not been able to afford sunlight. So he allied with another lineage. Presumably this involved renting out his rectum.
This brings me, finally, to two shifts in fiction and in reading — instances of critique — that defined the 1990s.
Game of Thrones came out in 1996. Harry Potter followed it the next year.
These were significant shifts, I think, but never clearly mapped or described.
The first had to do with nostalgia. I think that, in the time of the global novel,
i.e. stuff everybody reads- like Harry Potter
there grew in many a longing for a value that emanated not from the energy of globalization and the free market, and the fiction it was generating, or from the polyphony of the postcolonial novel, but from a European idea of seriousness.
Fuck off! Nobody gave a toss about Europe because it was boring and shitty.
Let me discuss, very briefly, three novelists whose reputations represent this longing; then move swiftly to three other writers connected to what I have been saying about sunlight. All of this happened from the 1990s to the early 21st century. The first three novelists — W. G. Sebald,
we can't get enough of the Holocaust
J. M. Coetzee,
tell us what you really think of darkies- if you dare
and Roberto Bolaño
who correctly pointed out that sub-continental novelists are shit
— emerged in a particular way, the reputations occasionally related to posthumousness, untimely death, or silence: in concordance with our desire for something from the prehistory of the global novel.
Novels by furriners aint 'global'. Harry Potter is global.
To be perfectly clear, I’m not talking about their achievements, but the manner in which they were often read and valued.
by shitheads.
Sebald seems to be prized primarily as an impossibility: that antediluvian beast, the European modern.
Old fashioned German bore
Susan Sontag
once highly rated
sets the tone in the two questions with which she begins an essay — an act of championing crucial to the shift mentioned above — published in 2000 in the Times Literary Supplement: “Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.”
A second rate academic. If you have to read boring shit, it better be by a bona fide genius.
The adjective she uses to describe the ill-fitting nature of his enterprise is “autumnal.”
I suppose autumn can be very boring particularly if it has a German accent.
It’s no surprise, then, that, for Sontag, Sebald is powerful at this moment within the flurry of global Anglophone publishing because he’s “both alive and, if his imagination is the guide, posthumous.”
You don't need to use your brain while reading his boring shite so you can pretend it is profound.
His provenance is decidedly European in a classic 20th-century sense:
or nineteenth century sense
his “passionate bleakness” has a “German genealogy.”
Because he was German and wrote in German.
This essay is a vivid testament to Sontag’s own millennial yearning.
Everybody assumed she was dead.
Her essays on other Europeans — Barthes, Benjamin — are
evidence she was stooooopid
extraordinary portraits of temperament: both of personality and of an age they might embody without intending to.
Neither had any importance for their contemporaries.
Her piece on Sebald is as much about the impossibility of Sebald as it is about him.
She was reminding us that she was alive. We felt it would have been politer of her to take a fucking hint and just kick the bucket already.
It articulates an anachronistic need — unaddressed by the triumphalism of the postmodern and the postcolonial — for the European’s sense of tragedy.
i.e. gassing on about Hitler or the Holocaust or the fact that German doner kebabs are pants.
Of course, Europe is actually irrelevant. Unlike Sontag’s other essays, she’s less concerned with Sebald’s “genealogy” than — through the compulsions of her need — with his singularity.
One Sebald is bad enough. What if there were a whole host of boring Teutonic pedants writing stupid shite?
J. M. Coetzee
has talent. Lots of South Africans do. I suppose they will all end up emigrating.
satisfied a different, and equally profound, requirement, and one that seemed to have no place in the ethos of the literature of globalization: that of a person who, in the midst of extreme politics, should either be completely silent or speak only in figurative language. Coetzee is, for us, Coetzee precisely because he’s not André Brink or even Nadine Gordimer, because he refuses to speak in their language and terms, or in a directly interventionist way.
He did his bit, when it actually mattered.
Asked to address a crowd of more than a thousand at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Coetzee refused to either say anything
not even 'Modi is Hitler'.
or engage in conversation. Instead, he read out a story before the rapt audience. Coetzee satisfies the crowd’s deep longing — a residue of modernity — for silence
in which case Coetzee should have read his story silently.
and allegory in a literary universe that, since the 1980s, gives a political meaning to polyphony, to the act of “giving voice” to something.
Alan Paton did that in 1948 with 'Cry the beloved country'.
The value of the kind of gesture now synonymous with Coetzee is extraneous to his actual work. It’s seemingly out of sync with the time, and appeals to a seriousness within ourselves that’s out of sync with globalization.
Coetzee is a fine linguist. He wants to turn back the tide of 'Globish'.
The third figure, Roberto Bolaño, reminds us — inappropriately, in the new millennium — of a tradition to do with failure, elusiveness, and a resistance to the sort of “boom” that García Márquez and other practitioners of the global novel came to represent.
Bolano died young just when fame was coming his way.
Bolaño’s world — often to do with obscure little magazines and the intensity of the literary in marginal locations — descends from Borges and Pessoa, weird Anglophile writers, whose tonality, as I said at the beginning, is unclassifiable, cannot be part of any boom, and actively militates against participating in a tradition of national characteristics.
Amit doesn't realize there was a big Borges cult.
Pessoa, of course, remained largely invisible as a poet during his lifetime; and even his posthumous fame is based on the invisibility of Pessoa,
No. It is based on his having written some shite. Invisibility wasn't his super-power which is why he wasn't asked to join the Fantastic Four.
since we can’t say who this seemingly ordinary person, divorced from the heteronyms through which he wrote poetry, might be.
Yes we can. He was Pessao- not Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, or Ricardo Reis.
Bolaño became famous in Latin America just when he was dying in 2003 at the age of 50.
Because he wrote well not because he was invisible or dead.
His fame in the Anglophone world — related to this anomalous need for invisibility in the midst of visibility,
which dead people often evince. That is why most ghosts are transparent.
for failure where writing was newly, and exclusively, in union with success
Amit hasn't been a success. Why do people want to read exciting books about wizards or dragons?
— came later. According to Larry Rohter in The New York Times, “Bolaño joked about the ‘posthumous,’ saying the word ‘sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated.’”
Postumus was a common first name. Postumia was a surname. There probably were gladiators with that namee.
In what way these writers’ works perform in the traditions they’re implicitly or openly associated with is another matter, and not my concern here.
Because Amit is shit at his job.
Nor am I going to dwell on whether they bring back to the contemporary world the legacies of Benjamin, Kafka, or Borges.
Legacies are what dead people leave in the world. They don't need to be brought back to it.
Their reputations satisfy a counter-need in the ethos of the global novel; and those reputations exist in the space in which the global novel does.
Amit is jealous that these other dudes are considered great whereas he is considered a cretin. Probably it is because they have super-powers like invisibility or being dead or, what's just as bad, being Boer rather than a Bengali bore.
They now exemplify a type of singularity, prickliness, and recalcitrance — very different from the loquaciousness of a Rushdie or the exuberance of García Márquez — created within, and fashioned by, globalization.
Dead people, like Bolano, should be more talkative. But Marquez too is dead while Rushdie might get knifed again any day now.
I end this “possible history” with four people connected, for me, with a quiet reassessment that took place in the world, or at least in me, in the 1990s.
Infinite Jest came out in 1996. Buffy the Vampire Slayer started the next year. The quiet reassessment most of us made was that literary fiction could go fuck itself.
It was a time (we have forgotten this now) when we discovered that some artists — especially those we hadn’t thought of in that way — loved sunlight.
and moonlight and roses and memories of you
The first comes from the very center of that older tradition, and carries my sense — maybe misprision — of what the absurd is. The occasion was the posthumous publication of The First Man by Camus. The book appeared in France in 1994, and in Britain in the following year.
Nobody gave a shit. Also, by the Nineties people had finally made the connection between sunlight and skin cancer.
It was out of place in at least three spheres: his own sphere of stoic despair;
which was cool because he was a cheese eating surrender monkeys
in the dominant tone set in the 1980s by Grass, García Márquez, Kundera, and Rushdie
fuck them. The big novel of the Eighties was 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. The Europeans were boring shitheads. The Latins were boring, violent, shitheads. In America, at least there was money.
of textual, cultural, and political exuberance (and play); and in the alternative tone of a paradoxically postmodern modernism being established then by Sebald and Coetzee (Bolaño would come almost a decade later), of melancholy, reticence, and posthumousness.
and being as boring as fuck
The posthumous nature of The First Man couldn’t be fetishized:
Amit thinks his books would fly off the shelves if everybody could be sure he was dead
it confirmed not the author’s tragic attitude to existence (as Sebald’s death did) but a startling refutation of the deep metaphysical unease that was synonymous for many with his work.
Sartre had taken Camus's pants down. He was wrong-side-of-the-Meditteranean white trash. Did you know Algeria is in Africa? How good could a degree in Philosophy from an African college actually be? What if Camus was the French equivalent of Jerry Lewis?
The refutation had less to do with poststructuralism’s critique of “Western metaphysics” than with the sun.
Sun is very important. Everybody kept telling Amit to stick his books where the sun don't shine. This was critique of Western metaphysics- innit?
It was extraordinary to find that Camus had a body, and that he was aware of it.
Because Sun was shining on it. Sartre didn't have a body. Sun took one look at him and ran away.
The awareness arose in The First Man the moment — as with Diogenes — sunlight touched the skin.
Sun is touching Amit's skin. Sadly, due to Western metaphysics, he still doesn't have a body. Fuck you Western metaphysics! Fuck you very much!
This is an acknowledgment of the sun quite different from — in fact, it’s a rebuttal of — the allegorical colonial “heat” of The Stranger:
killing an A-rab is almost as good as killing a niggah- right?
“It was a blazing hot afternoon.” In The First Man, sunlight makes the narrator conscious of Paris (the home of the human as intellectual) as a place of exile, of his homesickness for Algeria and his love of existence, and the consciousness comes to him as he approaches Algiers again, just as Nietzsche was moved to embracing his fate after his experience of Italy:Jack was half asleep, and he was filled with a kind of happy anxiety at the prospect of returning to Algiers and the small poor home in the old neighborhood. So it was every time he left Paris for Africa, his heart swelling with the secret exultation, with the satisfaction of one who has made good his escape and is laughing at the thought of the look on the guards” faces. Just as, each time he returned to Paris, whether by road or by train, his heart would sink when he arrived, without quite knowing how, at those first houses of the outskirts, lacking any frontier of trees or water and which, like an ill-fated cancer reached out its ganglions of poverty and ugliness to absorb this foreign body and take him to the center of the city, where a splendid stage set would sometimes make him forget the forest of concrete and steel that imprisoned him day and night and invaded even his insomnia. But he had escaped, he could breathe, on the giant back of the sea he was breathing in waves, rocked by the great sun, at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered, to the secret of the light, of the warm poverty that had enabled him to survive and to overcome everything.
Fuck. That's terrible. Still, with practice Camus could have shaped up to be the second Jacqueline Susanne.
To read this passage in 1995 was to register, with shock,
that Camus was as thick as shit
what it had made newly available. “His last novel luxuriates in the […] sensuality of the sun,” said Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books. “Nowhere else in Camus’s writing is one so aware of his pleasure in such things, and of his ambivalence toward the other, cerebral world in which he had chosen to dwell.”
because he was as thick as shit. Why was this not always obvious? I suppose the English equivalent of Camus was Colin Wilson who went off to Graves's Majorca. But Wilson wrote the Space Vampires the first book to explain Husserl to Sixth Form students.
Judt hints at, but doesn’t fully explore, what the “escape” from Paris described above constitutes,
it involves leaving it.
and what it means both to the legacy of Continental philosophy
it was shit
and to the ubiquity, at the time, of the global novel.
Nope. What was ubiquitous was Friends, the Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I’m not dismissing the latter, and nor am I negating the importance of the Derridean critique I so admire.
Amit has crush on Gayatri Aunty.
But here is something else, which I’d encountered when I’d read Sons and Lovers; a lineage opened up surreptitiously in the 1990s with the discovery of The First Man.
Amit discovered that if he squeezed and squeezed his pee-pee then his students complained. That sort of thing should be done surreptitiously.
The second node in this lineage resurfacing at the millennium’s end is represented by Orwell’s essays.
Which had lost relevance with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Their rediscovery qualified the allegorical Orwell: it took our gaze away from the metaphysical terrain that dominated our idea, from school onward, of the “Orwellian,” as exemplified by the slightly absurdist proscenium space of Animal Farm and especially 1984.
Orwell was against Stalinism. His 'allegories' weren't subtle.
With the essays, it’s not only a question of sunlight — it’s a question of love. I suppose this is the word I’ve kept out of my discussion, which Camus mentioned in the context of his numbness in Paris and his love for Algeria and for the sun. Orwell’s love of everyday aspects of English culture included even its food.
Back then, pussy was not on the Old Etonian's menu. Cock was. Lots and lots of cock.
At one time, to champion English food
pre-War English food was fine. Orwell was writing in 1945. Sadly rationing would get worse not better under Clement Atlee.
was to take up a shockingly provocative position that, in Orwell, becomes an embrace of the physical and the un-grandiose, of “all things […] entangled, ensnared, enamored.”
that's Nietzsche. Orwell's shtick was being down to earth
English tea,
and biscuits. Our wheat is good for bikkies but not so good for bread.
English food,
bangers and mash- what's not to like?
English secondhand bookshops,
filled with detective novels owned by maiden aunts who got murdered by their butlers
“dirty” postcards on an English beach
good old fashioned British smut never turned anybody gay who wasn't born that way
— the very joyous absurdity of Englishness becomes an argument against the absurdist, metaphysical, parable-like shape of 1984.
Churchill had drunkenly suggested to radio audiences that Labor would impose a Gestapo type regime. Orwell, in 1948, put flesh on this absurd suggestion. Incidentally, Orwell thought the Government would try to censor Animal Farm to keep Stalin happy.
As with Camus, the reappraisal of Orwell, who expended no more than five to six or seven hundred words on these subjects, was unexpected and sank in slowly.
Because Amit was slow-witted. Camus and Orwell were against Stalinism but had a soft spot, in the head, for the Left.
Its significance to the post-globalization era is still not clearly delineated.
It had none. Stalinism perished long ago.
My third reassessment is a personal one, related once more to my search for a refutation of the metaphysical, but in a way that had little connection to the various critiques raised by Derrida, Said, and postmodernism.
Like Sartre, Derrida had studied Husserl who was not known, at that time, to be stupid. Back then, Heidegger was considered even smarter than Husserl.
I realized — again, in the 1990s — that Ingmar Bergman, whose cinema, when I was a teenager, seemed integral to the penumbral darkness we took so seriously in the 1970s, was not so much a proponent of allegory as an artist of physical existence.
Coz lots of us play chess with Death in between getting a tan at the beach.
I had seen Smiles of a Summer Night, but somehow not noticed it.
Because the dude didn't do nudity till 1963. I recall queuing up for cinema tickets for the international film festival in Delhi. The thing was a lottery. You'd get something Swedish but it might have no sex. I got a Brazilian film which featured gang rape. Sadly it was the gang rape of a dog by other dogs. So not worth it.
When you’re responding to allegories of the human condition, you fail to see the physical. It was as if I’d watched Smiles of a Summer Night daydreaming about what the word “Bergman” signified,
Ingrid with her knickers off
and missed the carnality and mischief, Bergman’s promiscuous love of sunlight and joy.
Fuck sunlight. We wanted bare boobies and maybe a beaver shot.
Once I began to notice these details in the film in the 1990s, it was if the lineage of the sun, and of physical, sensory experience, had revealed itself — as in Camus — in the heart of the metaphysical and of the dark.
Most kids who went to British universities in the Eighties had a cheap beach holiday and lots of sex and sangria. Amit had to discover sunlight and carnality through European books and films created before he was born.
I saw how much of a presence sunlight, and the joy it bestowed upon the moment, had been in Wild Strawberries; again, it had passed me by completely when I’d viewed it, in the late 1970s, as the work of an agonized allegorist dealing in symbols. Even The Seventh Seal, about death, medieval mythology, and the winter, was, I now saw, essentially a comic work, its bleak but clear light illuminating the dance of death at the end as it might a dance of life.
The same was true of Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein.
My final example of reassessment is the author who was recruited, from the start, ever since his posthumousness defined the 20th century, as the arch parable-writer and prophet of absurdity: Kafka.
When he was young, Amit thought he'd grow up to become Kafka or Beckett. Sadly, he turned into a typical Bengali bore.
It’s only in the last 15 years that I’ve paid more attention to the anecdote that relates how the friends who listened to him read from his stories doubled up in laughter at what they heard.
Laughter is good. It suggests your audience is awake. What I hate is people who start fisting themselves as you read out your latest masterpiece. It is fundamentally disrespectful though, obviously, when it comes to creative writing classes, you get what you pay for.
About two decades ago, revisiting The Metamorphosis, I marveled at Kafka’s devotion to physical detail.
Nabokov pointed out that Gregor had turned into a type of bug which could fly. Fuck was he lying in bed for? He should have flown around shitting on the Kaiser.
I marveled, too, that I’d ignored these details on earlier readings of Kafka’s writing as allegory.
Amit is constantly marveling at sunlight and shadow and bodies and the fact that once read a classy book or a film which didn't star Amitabh Bachchan
The appeal of the metaphysical had made his exactness redundant. Here is an account of Gregor’s sister trying to figure out what might appeal to her brother after his appalling transformation:She brought him, evidently to get a sense of his likes and dislikes, a whole array of things, all spread out on an old newspaper. There were some half-rotten vegetables; bones left over from dinner with a little congealed white sauce; a handful of raisins and almonds; a cheese that a couple of days ago Gregor had declared to be unfit for human consumption; a piece of dry bread, a piece of bread and butter, and a piece of bread and butter sprinkled with salt.
We get it. Bugs eat garbage. Sisters tend to have a low opinion of their brothers.
The juxtaposition of bones, sauce, bread, and newspaper, the dry and understated poetry of the list, the hilarious but wrenching double-edged positioning of the cliché, “unfit for human consumption,” comprise, together, an example of how a sentence might embrace fate. Once I discovered it, I found Kafka untethering himself from the remnants of teenage interiority.
Amit doesn't get that the sister had just served her brother garbage. It's the sort of joke most siblings make at some time or another. You get your sister a bale of hay for her birthday- because she is a silly moo. She suggests your main source of protein is hobo jizz.
I suppose Amit was an only child. After Kafka untethered himself from the remnants of his teenage interiority, he fucked him in the ass. But only allegorically because of Western metaphysics.
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