NYR
Updike on Ernst
It was all about dépaysement, according to McNab: the word translates literally as being outside your own country, but its meaning also encompasses exile and disorientation..... Dépaysement also defined a favored Surrealist mood, the feeling we all get when we arrive somewhere new for the first time, our senses sharpened by wonder and tinged with anxiety.
The exhaustion as well as the disorientation of travel was courted as a means to fresh perceptions. Surrealists walked from Paris to Blois, and took steamers to Cuba, the Amazon, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Freud had discovered a new territory within, the subconscious, and dreams, drugs, word games, séances, automatic writing, virtually random collage, and impulsive exotic travel were ways of exploring it. There was a political dimension to dépaysement. direct experience of France’s Pacific colonies confirmed the surrealists’ antagonism to the jingoistic, otten brutally exploitative colonizers, and to the European establishment.
Of course, breaking through the shell of reason and accepted order to protounder truths beneath is an idea as old as shamanistic trances, Greek oracles, and the mind-emptying exercises of yoga and zen. Rimbaud, along with Gauguin a stellar example of selfexile, in 1871 had famously asserted that the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and deliberate “déreglement de tous les sens.”
Gala, Ernst, and Eluard achieved a déréglement of social custom with their ménage and their escape to Saigon, where the three reassembled. Back in Paris, Eluard described it as a voyage idiot, a stupid trip, and in fact their triune rapport was never the same. Ernst returned later than the Eluards and took up separate residence in a Montmartre studio; Eluard entered a tuberculosis sanitarium, from which he wrote Gala longing letters.
Updike on Kierkegaard
This was no joke; Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. He offered himself as a corrective to idealism from Plato to to Hegel.
the assault of ridicule launched by the scurrilous journal The Corsair against not only Kierkegaard's ideas but his physical person, has descended to posterity the impression that the philosopher was conspicuously deformed. A series of caricatures in The Corsair by Peter Klestrup show a swaybacked, even hunchbacked, figure with a sharp nose, tall hat, stick cane, and comically thin legs, whose trousers, more comically still, are of unequal length. It was this last oddity that the populace of Copenhagen fastened upon as the subject of gibes and taunts, making Kierkegaard’s cherished daily perambulations in the streets a torment; jis spoke of “that slow death, being trampied to death by a flock of geese.” ‘The characterization was witty, but the experience was painful, remembered in his journals long after it had subsided as analogous “to the gladiatorial animal combat of pagan times.” If Christ were to return to the world, he wrote, “he would perhaps not be put to death, but would be ridiculed. This is martyrdom in the age of reason.”
“Yes, he was somewhat high-shouldered and his head tilted forward a bit, probably from all that reading and writing at his desk.” (In curious bitter retrospect, her ex-fiancé confided to his journal, “She did not love my well-formed nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet—nor my clever head—she just loved me, and yet she did not understand me.”) The reminiscences of others mention Kierkegaard’s “high shoulders, the restless, somewhat hopping gait,” whose zigzags made him difficult to walk beside, and claim that his back was “a bit curved.” The hospital examination soon after he was admitted recorded nothing abnormal about his spine. His enemy and admirer Aron Goldschmidt, the editor of The Corsair, left the most sensitive impressions of Kierkegaard’s physical aspect:
The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty. ... He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed.
Gopnik on Voltaire
... Voltaire’s sense of outrage may have been galvanized by the hideous execution in Paris of the would-be assassin of Louis XV, the mad Damiens, in 1757. Damiens was pulled apart alive, his limbs attached to four horses and the horses driven in different directions, for public instruction in the center of Paris. Voltaire was no fan of regicide. It was because he was for the execution that the public torture frightened him: it was a sign of how quickly civilities could disintegrate under threat. (“Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men,” he wrote. “The common people will always be fanatical.”) He coined his most famous phrase, Ecrasezl’in dme—‘Crush the horror’—and began to use it, in jauntily (and evasively) abbreviated form. Historians have fussed for centuries about exactly what Voltaire meant by it—the Catholic Church? the Court?—but it’s clear. The horror was the alliance of religious fanaticism with the instruments of the state, and the two combined for torture and official murder.
Candide is said to have been occasioned by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a tsunami-like event, and is meant to satirize the optimism associated with Leibniz. It is also usually said to be unfair to Leibniz, a great philosopher, who was among the inventors of calculus. Leibniz’s view, after all, was not that everything was good but that our world was the best possible. Given that God could have considered every world before he made it, he must have chosen the best one—so that if there is suffering and evil in it, these things must have a cause in the mind of God. Given that the deity is benevolent, small-scale pain must be part of some universal balance, or, as Pope puts it in his “Essay on Man,” “All discord harmony not understood; / All partial evil, universal good.” Leibniz and Pope after him are arguing not that life will always be happy but that the world is optimally designed. Suffering is explicable—not defensible but explicable.
But Voltaire was not unfair to Leibniz. He understood exactly what Leibniz was saying, and has Pangloss say it. On the tutor's first appearance, he gives the classic instance: pigs are made to be eaten and so we have pork. It seems hard only from the narrow point of view of the pig. “Those who have suggested that everything is good have spoken obtusely,” Pangloss explains, in Kaffel's rendering. “What they should have said is that everything is for the best.” Voltaire’s point was that the two ideas are, in concrete terms, the same idea. Insisting that everything is for the best means finding the best in everything. To subsume individual suffering or pain within a larger equilibrium is to accept the logic of the slaughterhouse. The pig has a right to his protest.
Voltaire’s target throughout “Candide” is not optimism in the sense of fatuous cheerfulness but optimism in the sense of optimal thinking: the kind of bland reassurance that explains pain with reference to a larger plan or history. In this way, the Christmas tsunami cannot have for Voltaire’s readers today anything approaching the force that a natural disaster like the Lisbon earthquake had for the eighteenth century. Few people any longer believe in a benevolent naturemuch less a benevolent nature sitting in for a providential God. We can feel comfortably superior to Leibniz’s particular brand of optimism, which is centered on natural law of this kind, since we no longer believe that nature is part of an inherently balanced or benevolent system.
On E Wilson
The marriage to McCarthy was a mistake that neither side wanted to be first to admit. When they fought, he would retreat into his study and lock the door; she would set piles of paper on fire and try to push them under it. Wilson's fourth marriage, to Elena Mumm Thornton, came closest to conventional domesticity, but they did not live all the year together, and Wilson still pursued other women, with whom he achieved varying degrees of sexual intimacy,
Wilson was an intent observer of anatomical detail, and he left written records of quite a few pudenda.
Denby on Sontag
In that same piece, she quoted Walter Benjamin's remark that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” Godard, Bergman, Syberberg, and Fassbinder, it turned out, had reached a series of stunning dead ends, dissolving not only genres but criticism, too. Sontag had run out of aesthetic revolutions. And the culture that supported revolutionary work had changed. “Stripped of its heroic stature, of its claims as an adversary sensibility,” she wrote in 1979, “modernism has proved acutely compatible with the ethos of an advanced consumer society.” She was talking, of course, about what soon came to be known as postmodernism. “Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions—of the unlimited proliteration, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself.” Her hopes had fallen victim to the dismaying larger trend in which every radical development in modernism degenerated into routine: by the eighties, avant-garde techniques from the films of the sixties were showing up in commercials and music videos. Art had not only become commodified, as the Marxists like to say; it decorated corporate culture. The breaking of forms had led not to an agonized “reorganization of sensibility” but to an amiable shrugging off of seriousness in art and the levelling of all cultural activity. Like her long-ago mentors among the New York intellectuals, she had come to the end of the redemptive capacities of the avant garde. When the breaking of forms no longer enlarged the soul, she gave up writing about movies—that was the disappointment behind the 1995 farewell to criticism.
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