Pomo

- Michael Berube

Hip-hop and David Lynch have little else in common, but between them they do go to show that postmodernism isn’t merely a “style” located somewhere in cultural products; at a much greater reach, it involves new configurations of cultural transmission, the means by which artifacts (and “copies” thereof) circulate in the general culture. It isn’t that pomo gives you 30 per cent more modernism for your money (more uncertainty, more fragmentation, more playful self-consciousness), and it’s not that postmodernism is modernism’s evil dwarf twin, hell-bent on knocking down everything modernism took such a long time to build. Instead, what’s going on involves a more subtle and elusive cultural shift, in which it’s getting harder (and more challenging) to determine what it means that ostensibly ‘“‘avant-garde” cultural works are available in so many media so instantaneously. 

And these disseminations, these “new configurations,” are by no means limited to the work of our contemporary “avantgardes”; on the contrary, they include the retransmission of what was once the modernist avant-garde—which has, in the past 50 years, gotten itself distributed in such a way that it is now more likely to show up on the walls of corporate offices than in cafés or garrets. Yet when we try to gauge the  relation between mo and pomo, it doesn’t help to ask yet again what modernism was, because (as we'll see later on) even that’s a distinctively modernist question. Rather, what pomo wants to ask is this: how do we understand modernism’s circuitous route into our general culture, whereby The Waste Land wound up in every classroom and faux Piet Mondrian wound up in the packaging design of LOreal mousse and hair spray? And does the transmission of Eliot and Mondrian involve the same processes by which Lynch and hip-hop likewise became part of our cultural lingua franca? 

Of course, it’s easy to claim that postmodernism simply entails the corporate cooptation of everything in sight, since postmodernism seems to follow from (and accelerate) modernism’s own absorption into the general culture. As New German Critique editor Andreas Huyssen puts it, the irony here is that “the first time the U.S. had something resembling an ‘institution art’ in the emphatic European sense, it was modernism itself, the kind of art whose purpose had always been to resist institutionalization.” Why then should we be mourning the passing of the modernist avant-garde in the first place? In 1991, when you can’t tell anymore where the garde is, it’s a fair bet that you don’t know whether you’re avant of it or not. And as a result, “avant-gardism,” even in these troubled times, has come to seem gestural if not downright reactionary. 

This is what Huyssen means when he calls ours a “post-avant-garde” society. For Huyssen, as for a legion of younger cultural critics, it no longer makes any sense for artists or critics to claim positions on the “margin” or in the “center” of the culture, because the contemporary cultural landscape resists precisely such static confrontations. And if there are no margins and centers, there’s no vanguard; and if there’s no vanguard, there’s no site of authentic, unsullied, “pure” cultural production, immune to the technologies of economic and cultural reproduction. 

Them’s fighting words, you know, to people who continue to see themselves as “avant-garde.” Yet even if there were a bona fide, certified-authentic vanguard out there, who’s to say that its cultural work would be more important than—or even distinguishable from—the kinds of stuff we find in what we still call ‘“‘mainstream” media? It may yet come to pass that 30 years from now, when we look back at how the 80s replayed the 50s with a knowing but deceptive wink, we will care less about the "media image” photographs of Cindy Sherman than about Nick at Nite’s relentlessly campy promotions for its reruns of The Donna Reed Show , which fill your late night TV screen with a graphic style composed of equal parts early Jetsons and late John Waters. Besides, who needs artists and writers to ‘lay bare the device” of contemporary culture, when laying bare the device has become standard business practice anyway? As Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, the directors of High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, have written, ‘in the age of Joe Isuzu, a hardened knowingness about the value-emptied amorality of media culture, was, far from being the preserve of a small cadre of vanguard thinkers, the sour, commonplace cynicism of the whole commercial culture.” The High & Low show itself was brought to you by the folks at AT&T, who urge you to reach out and touch someone by giving the gift of modern art, the gift that keeps on giving. How did we get to this strange party? Who's responsible for these lousy hors d'oeuvres? Uh—can we come in again? 

Sure, we can always come in again; postmodernism means never having to say you’ve been here before. In fact, the word “postmodern” has been bruited about for over four decades now, by art critics as by Spy magazine and real estate agents, and in the process of going through a few demigenerational changes, it’s become a kind of “essentially contested” term that many people are just tired of contesting. Even Ihab Hassan, who had been using the word since way back in the 60s, when John Barth was Prince of Pomo and everybody was talking about the “literature of exhaustion”’—even Hassan recently dropped his pen in fatigue, writing, “I have already written enough of these matters, and I would let postmodernism rest.” (Thud. Snore.) 

Well, who wouldn’t be tired, confronted with all these postmodernisms, this L=A=N=G=U=A=GsE writing, MTV, ACT UP, e-mail, junk bonds, Madonna, smart bombs, poststructuralism, Reaganism, terrorism, colorization, Houstonization, and, if you order right away, much, much more? And as if this profusion weren't enough, we now have a number of constituencies fur whom the adjective “postmodern” signifies little more than a new brand name, as in the case of “Postmodern MTV,” a seemingly redundant phrase which, as one of my students suggested last spring, merely denoted “things that sound like Morrissey.” 

However, we do have some idea of why a unified field theory of “postmodernism” is neither possible nor desirable, and before I get to my own concerns about postmodernism and history, I want to suggest two reasons why postmodernism remains a cultural field distinguished by internal dissensus. 

For one thing, one man’s postmodernism is another woman’s poison. In some ways, all of post-1960s feminism is postmodern, because it has destabilized “universal” languages, questioned gender and subjectivity, and rewritten our dominant historical narratives. But then again, not every feminism wants to be postmodern, since the suspicion remains that pomo will dissolve all possibility for political resistance in a bubbling vat of textuality and ironic self-parody. In 1983, in an essay entitled “‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” the late Craig Owens convincingly charged his fellow theorists with sustaining a systematic neglect of feminism’s role in pomo, practice and theory; but six years later, in The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon claimed that postmodernism lacks any theory of agency, without which feminism is impossible. So either the question is whether pomo should acknowledge the feminists in its midst, or whether feminism should acknowledge the postmodernism sitting next to it on the bus and mumbling to itself about Max Headroom and identity politics. Does one of these isms bracket the other? You tell me. 

‘Thing number two has to do with “facts.” To wit, it’s hard to determine the relevant facts and features of pomo when so much of pomo has questioned how “facticity” js constructed. David Byrne opened the ’80s by intoning, in “Crosseyed and Painless,” that “Facts don’t do what I want them to/ Facts just twist the truth around.” Ronald Reagan, having been reportedly “brutalized” by facts before a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, closed the decade by stammering, “Facts are stupid things.” In the meantime, we switched over painlessly to’ a government by the photo op, of the photo op, and for the photo op, and the neofascist Institute for Historical Review offered $50,000 to anyone who could disprove its claim that the Holocaust never happened. In what may have been facticity’s last stand, in 1985 the IHR was defeated in court by a Holocaust survivor, Mel Mermelstein; nonetheless, the IHR’s director, Tom Marcellus (a man apparently immune to fact), replied that the defeat was “the best outcome we could have had,” since “we did not have to compromise any of our positions.” 

On another front altogether, 50 years of “theory” from people as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault have led the cultural left to argue that objects of knowledge are locally and historically specific, and that they become available for human understanding only within certain “language-games,” “paradigms,” or “discursive formations”—not that these are three names for the same thing, either. 

So we have multiple histories of postnodernism, which are themselves licensed ‘vy postmodernism’s multiplicity. And they're also a result of pomo’s propensity for searching out and destroying unitary, linear historical narratives—the kind that serve up clear origins and straight fdrward plot development (whether of rise dr decline}. This “antifoundationalist” aspect of postmodernism has sometimes been taken to be a potentially liberating tool, since it suggests that our beliefs and practices are culturally “contingent,” subject to ongoing revision, bound to no historical determinism. And by the same token, we've found that “proof” is a more slippery thing than we'd thought—something that depends more on rhetoric, power, consensus, and history than on “incontrovertible fact.” 

It’s not that there are no “facts” in pomo, or that anything goes so long as everybody’s happy; rather, it’s that pomo has paid acute attention to how various human communities go about deciding what will count as “facts.” As Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), revolutionary “paradigm-shifts” occur when one dominant theory supersedes another, but the new paradigm doesn’t simply “falsify” or “disprove” the older model. Instead, writes Kuhn, paradigm-shifts are matters in which “neither proof nor error is at issue,” because past scientific communities were simply seeing different “facts” even when they were looking at what we now think are the same phenomena: “theories, of course, do ‘fit the facts,’ but only by transforming previously accessible information into facts that, for the preceding paradigm, had not existed at all.” 

But even while pomo’s encounters with , antifoundationalism and feminism have rendered us unable to conceive of a single, monolithic thing called ‘‘History,” postmodernism has been acquiring a history of its own. And this alone should provoke us into some historical reflection, because, as far as I can see, the recent history of pomo’s shifting definitions can be charted largely in terms of how people have determined pomo’s relation to history. Perhaps nothing has been so widely misunderstood about pomo as this; indeed, in some cases, the postmodernism we thought to be lamely ahistorical has now been judged by some recent histories of pomo to be nothing leus than the very spur to revisionary historicism. Tb put matters another way: although postmodern historicism flaunts its inability | to capture the past “the way it really was,” it has also quite effectively exploded the claims of other historicisms (such as marxisms) to be able to do so either. 

OK, I know this one takes some explaining, so let me back up a second and fill in the details. 

For much of the first half of the 1980s, critics from Left and Right spent a good deal of their time forming two neat, separate lines to take turns bashing postmodernism. On the Left, Charles Newman found pomo to be facetious, pointlessly playful, and possessed by an attitude toward history not unlike that of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; on the Right, Hilton Kramer found pomo to be facetious, pointlessly playful, and possessed by an attitude toward history not unlike that of Total Recall. Ageless modernist torchbearer Denis Donoghue complained that “postmodernism is content to let a thousand discrepancies bloom,” because in pomo, “no artist’s desire reaches out for spontaneity or an original relation to the world”; and the earl of Duke, Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, proposed that postmodernism and late capitalism had bequeathed us “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles.” Donoghue and Jameson? Kramer and Newman? Golly, it finally looked as if something had gotten these boys to stop fighting and play nicely—and that something was pomo. It was a happy time, and soon “rock” musicians stopped suggesting that they wanted to die before they became old enough to do 25th Anniversary Reunion _ Tours, and started singing instead that they _ were working out ’most every day, and watching what they eat. 

Just as it was getting hip to be square, _ squares were getting hip to whimsical Left_ Banker Jean Baudrillard’s notion (first advanced in 1983) that our era is distinguished by what he called “the precession of simulacra.” In the era of the simulacrum, Baudrillard declared, when “the map engenders the territory” and everything is a 20th-generation copy of everything else, we find a suspiciously compensatory cultural reflex—‘“‘a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality .. . a panic-stricken production of the real and referential.” This Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal,” and no doubt it’s here to stay, since we hear so frequently that real people purchase real food for real people and drink beer that’s as real as it gets, cause you can’t beat the real thing. Except maybe if you have 200 Elvis impersonators ringed around a replica of the Statue of Liberty. ’ Baudrillard’s essay has now become _ something of a postmodern classic, so much so that it’s been invoked to explain everything from the art of Jeff Koons to the Iran-Contra hearings: simulacra of roadside kitsch, simulacra of parliamentary “justice.” And in an appropriately Baudrillardlan way, “The Precession of Simulacra” has itself had a significant impact on postmodern writers and artists whose work Baudrillard’s theories are then called upon to explain, in rather circular fashion. 

' Yet I think Baudrillard’s essay—and its influence—may be remembered less as a definitive description of postmodernism than as an index of what the pomo debate looked like in the mid-1980s. For it wasn’t hard to see, even five or six long years ago, that what people feared or celebrated about postmodernism had to do with issues of tangibility and thinginess. Hence all the apocalyptic rhetoric about the disappearance of the referent, the death of Man, the end of philosophy, the death of the author, the dissolution of the subject, and the impossibility of apocalyptic rhetoric. In a 1986 lecture, Jameson opined, almost off the cuff, that word processors were to postmodernism what the typewriter was to modernism: that is, in the breaking point between mechanical reproduction (keys, ink, hammers, machinery, industrial economies, sweaty Socialist Realist men in overalls) and electronic transmission (laser printing, modems, microchips, information economies, Steve Jobs on the cover of USA today) lay the distinction between mo and pomo. Sort of like the diflerence between pinball and video, and who wouldn't be nostalgic for the dava when pinball games had no microchips, no sound effects, and a top score of 99,999? 

The only problem was that while the Right hated pomo for fairly obvious reasons (having never even learned to play pinball, the Right naturally figured that Space Invaders was the death knell of reflective thought), the Left—including Baudrillard—seemed paralyzed by dreams of days when things were better, days when things were thingy. You know, when the proletariat and the haute-bourgeoisie wore recognizable uniforms, and sat down facing each other at heavy, wooden tables, and argued about real wages—silver dollars, doubloons, and florins. None of this “simulacra” nonsense, none of these credit rollovers and reinvested pension funds, and most of all, none of these dang teleconferences. 

Of course, not all of the Left felt this way. But perhaps it was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities, and variously queer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so many men on the antipostmodernist Left fell victim. Or perhaps it wasn’t until pomo began to come to grips with the various social liberation movements of the past generation that it began to take stock of what it might mean to retheorize recent history from the vantage point of plural, discontinuous, multiply constituted “public spheres.” Surely, it is hard to imagine any group other than white male intellectuals who would be in the position to tell stories about exhausted literature, or about our decline and fall from the Golden Age of the public intellectual; and in this sense, “‘history” simply wasn’t available for postmodern scrutiny until the disenfranchised showed up and put it on the table. As Barbara Ehrenreich has recently said, one reason we shouldn’t make the mistake of confusing “multiculturalism” with the Left is that “the left is not sufficiently multicultural to deserve being confused with multiculturalism, at least not yet.” 

Either way, in the past few years, it seems that only a few pointed words from people like Nancy Fraser, Gayatri Spivak, Douglas Crimp, and Cornel West have gotten most of what remains of the Left to check its books and think again about the project of going back to the future. As for the rest of the erstwhile antipomo “Left,” the mugged-liberal crowd who thought social justice was a good thing so long as they didn't have to get their own coffee, live in bad neighborhoods, or put up with men kissing each other in public . . . well, the less said about that bunch the better. 

Besides, I don’t mean to revive the false dichotomy between postmodernism and the Left; my point is simply that the Left has had a number of misgivings about pomo’s alleged erasure of materiality, and about its relation to history. If, for instance, postmodernism has troubled the distinction between consumption and production (as it certainly has}, then the Left has some reason to say that pomo is no different in this respect from consumer capitalism, in which consumption has itself become a kind of “production” (and notoriously so in the merger-mad ’80s). Obviously, the same can be said for much of recent literary and cultural theory, especially “reception theory,” which, in its more interesting formulations, maintains that cultural artifacts are “produced” only by means of their continued consumption. 

But pomo isn’t just consumerism with a veneer of theory—not in hip-hop (which “consumed” disco only to spit it back out in scratching and sampling), and not in the work of artists like Hans Haacke. When Haacke foregrounds the means of cultural transmission, he doesn’t do so in order to glorify consumption; on the contrary, Haacke’s work rigorously interrogates the socioeconomic conditions of art’s “ownerphip,” and contests the corporate reprivatization of the arts: From the perspective of 

Haacke’s Left-postmodernism, you could say that what makes Philip Johnson’s famous AT&T building postmodern is not its funny Chippendale top, but its tax-abatement “plaza,” which, as Herbert Schiller noted in Culture, Inc. (1989), is marked by a revealing sign of the times: 

PUBLIC SPACE 

Owned and Maintained 

By AT&T 

550 Madison Avenue, N.Y.C. 

In AT&T's “public space,” as in the critical reception of Haacke and hip-hop, we find that postmodernism isn't without enemies in its reconfiguration of the means of cultural transmission; even as pomo culture spans the globe and appears in your living room, the global culture of “free-market” capitalism is doing its best, often (and paradoxically), to restrict circulation, to reprivatize culture, to recapture public spheres, museums, airwaves, and Xerox machines, and to reinforce the laws of copyright, ownership, and Authorship. In pomo’s future tenses, Right and Left will very likely duke it out over the availability of “public” information; and postmodernism’s politics will involve a struggle for control—nat over the means of production, but over the means of replication. Who cares about the funny Chippendale top? Not me. 

What’s crucial here is that whenever we speak of “the means of cultural transmission,” we're also speaking of the processes of historical transmission. And no one theorist illustrates the recent history of postmodernism’s history so well as Fredric Jameson, who’s spent most of the last decade calling pomo the “cultural dominant” of our era. Jameson’s latest brief, a gorgeously produced 400-page document (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991), begins by suggesting that “it is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgatten how to think historically in the first place.” That sounds like a prescnption for heroic failure to me, however beset by cultural amnesia we may be. But in the opening pages of his hundred-page “Conclusion,” Jameson takes issue with the mistaken notion that he is either a “vulgar Marxist hatchet man” or & “nostMarxist” who’s stopped worrying and learned to love the boom. “I write,” he now writes, as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism, at least of some parts of it: I like the architecture and a lot of the newer visual work, in particular the newer photography. The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video. 

All well and good. Still, the first versions of Jameson’s argument do sound pretty dour in retrospect. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983), he’d held that postmodernism could only attempt pastiche, rather than parody, because “there remains somewhere behind all parody the feeling that there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modernists can be mocked.” Whereas today, thanks to our cultural fragmentation and hypertrophy of cultural styles, we have no linguistic norm, and “that is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible.” Pastiche, then, is like everything you’ve had before, all mixed up—but “without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter.” 

To Jameson, pomo pastiche was most painfully evident in “nostalgia” films like Star Wars, which evoked without irony the era of Saturday afternoon serials. But in his suggestion that the movie Body Heat is a “distant remake” of Double Indemnity, Jameson sounded an ominous note: 

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though, for some reason, we were. unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. 

In Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), a massive chemical spill (the novel calls it an “airborne toxic event”) gives people a false sense of déja vu—that is, it makes them think they have déja vu even though they don’t. Such is the world Fredric Jameson once described; DeLillo’s point, and Jameson’s, was that we had plenty of evidence that consumer capitalism’s frenetic production of new, improved I-forget-whats does in fact work to erase our sense of, um, did I mention Total Recall yet? 

But in another sense, the moment for this kind of historical despondency is itself a part of pomo’s past; one might even venture to say, these days, that there’s reason to be cheerful. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we thought postmodernism was a world of sheer depthlessness and virtual reality, where presidents confuse World War II with World War II movies, and the torched tenements lining the Cross Bronx Expressway get plastered with Slum-Kote, a space-age facading polymer designed to make unsightly urban blight vanish in seconds. But lo, postmodernism has turned out to have developed a critical edge after alland you know, it even takes a serious attitude toward history (now understood to be the sum of the processes of historical transmission). It hasn’t fixed the Bronx, but it has brought some of the Bronx to my own MTV, and what's more, it’s forced us to rethink just what it is we're postin the first place. 

According to Andreas Huyssens surefooted negotiations of mo and pomo, “post modernism is far from making modernism obsolete. On the contrary, it casts a new light on it and appropriates many of its aesthetic strategies and techniques, inserting them and making them work in new constellations.” And one of the things we may now understand about our modernist legacy is that our century's art need not necessarily proceed, as do missile delivery systems, capitalisms, or the works of James Joyce, developmentally into systems of ever-increasing complexity. For if we read “postmodernism” with less emphasis on the dismissive prefix and more on the presence of the name-within-the-name. we can position pomo against modernism without having to claim that postmodernism is either new or improved. What looks to one person like a rehashed pastiche of hi-modernist panache, therefore, may appear to another (me, say) as a trenchant reworking of traditional modernist tropes and aesthetic strategies. 

As I mentioned earlier, item one on this agenda is the question of whether modernism was truly, always and everywhere, an avant-garde movement after all. Since we can’t very well rope together T.S. Eliot, Dada Berlin, Djuna Barnes, André Derain, Isadora Duncan, and Igor Stravinsky, maybe we should go back up to the attic, sort through this pile of boxes our great-grandparents left us, and try to determine whether all this stuff is as oppositional and corrosive as its labels claim. And here, we have to ask not only about the modernists themselves, but also, and more crucially, about modernism's publicists and promoters. 

Modernist promoter Philip Rahv once claimed that even Eliot's Four Quartets should by rights be ascribed to the “venturesome spirit” of “the avant-garde which must be given credit for the production of most of the literary masterpieces of the past hundred years.” But by the time Rahv wrote that sentence, Eliot was a conservative Anglican royalist on his way home from picking up the Nobel Prize. And ever since then, many American critics have been embroiled in the non-dispute over who “owns” modernist poetry—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens. The correct anewer is none of the above, but just the same, even if literary modernism were reducible to the venturesome work of one ultraconservative white man, what does it mean for us in 1991 that modernism has 80 long been classic? Again, this is not the same question as the question of what modernism “was”: nor can it properly be asked from “within” modernism, for when modernist theorists ask how modernism became so routine in our daily lives, they just can’t see around their own edifice. 

In a 1983 article entitled “The Making of the Modernist Canon,” for instance, Hugh Kenner concluded that the modernist canon, far from being the construction of critics like Kenner, was organically grown “chiefly... by the canonized themselves.” Ker ner was seconded a few years later by fellow modernist fan Helen Vendler, who averred in the face of all evidence to the cut trary that “canons are not made by governments, anthologists, publishers, editors, or professors, but by writers.” So vou call try to ask modernist critics and apologists about who transmitted modernism—but theyll only shake their heads. look at you quizzically, and reply with knotted brow that modernism simply transmitted itself. And—now here’s the catch—modernists will claim also that when modernism transmitted itself into the cultural center, it died. For those of you who were wondering why the avant-garde is dead. you may take comfort in knowing that the question is older than many of the people asking it, and that it just doesn't have an intelligible answer outside of modernist assumptions about centers and margins. Probably the best case in point is Anglo-American modernist literature, which, having established itself in the academieSand anthologies in the 1940s and 1950s, was at once retrospectively theorized as an avant-garde whose force lay in its resistance to institutionalization, and whose success was therefore its failure. In a famous 1957 Partisan Review essay, entitled “The Fate of the Avant-Garde,” Richard Chase wrote that “the insurgent movement in this country which defended ‘modernism'—that is, the aesthetic experimentalism and social protest of the period between 1912 and 1950—has expired of its own success.” Chase concluded by charging that modernism “has been institutionalized by the universities and the publishers. which by definition means that in its modern phase it has to come to an end.” Modernism, in other words, has no shelf life: its expiration date is by definition the date when it first shows up in a central store. Fair enough; by the 50s Anglo-American modernism had indeed been “‘institutionalized” in those tiny little padded cells known as “classrooms,” and by 1965 Lionel Trilling could write that the teaching of modern lit effectively kills its subject, by making The Abyss into something every well-rounded person should encounter in college. But isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Look again: in the passage above, Richard Chase’s canonical “modernism” allows him to conflate aesthetic experimentalism and social protest under one sign, that of an “insurgent movement” which ‘defended ‘moderniam.’" Chase's account leaves no room for avant-garde social/ aesthetic protest that attacked (or was at best ambivalent about) modernism, no room for New Masses, the early-’30s Edmund Wilson of Axel’s Castle, the militant Suffragette campaigns in prewar Britain, or any of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. (Surely, no one in the Harlem ReNaissance wound up expiring of success.) The lessons here, then, are that not all of modernism was “insurgent,” that not all insurgents liked modernism, and—most of all—that most of our truly insurgent modernisms were, as Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery (1989) has shown, utterly obliterated from the cultural record when, in the postwar years, “modernism” was incorporated under the sign of Eliot/Pound Enterprises. But then the inevitable question follows: who impoverished and monologized “modernism” and why? 

The pomo jury is still out on this one, but Andrew Ross has offered one explanation I | find persuasive. In No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), Ross tackles the various intellectual formations that sought to “contain” mass culture after the collapse of the Old Left in the late 1930s. For what really “consolidated” modernism, in the 1940s and 1950s, was a conglomeration of strange modernist bedfellows, as critics of the anti-Stalinist Left lined up with critics of the Right in a bior multipartisan agreement that nothing could resist the twin evils of fascism and mass culture—nothing except the transcendent masterpieces of the modernist ‘‘avantgarde.” Over the soul-saving virtues of modernism, even the liberal/socialist lambs and the agrarian-conservative lions were agreed: Clement Greenberg and T.S. Eliot, F. O. Matthiessen and Cleanth Brooks, Lionel Trilling and Allen Tate. As Ross puts it, 

' “the mass society critique was first advanced on the left as an explanation for the failure of socialist movements, and the growing successes of fascism....As a result, the picture of mass culture as a profitable opiate, synthetically prepared for consumption for-a society of automatons, won | favor among the anti-Stalinist, and mostly Trotskyist, intellectuals grouped around the little magazines like Partisan Review, Politics, and Dissent.” 

Therefore, there could have been no passing of the modernist cultural moment, in these terms, until we saw the realignment | of “high art” and “mass culture,” a realignment provoked by Pop Art, television, feminism, roadside architecture, camp, the Black Arts movement, deconstruction, and | a contradictory host of critical forces dedicated to the common cause of asking whether modernism and mass culture actually were polar, binary opposites in the first place. In other words, modernism didn’t die when it was absorbed into the university and the supermarket; it was cryogenically preserved amid the mass culture it affected to despise, living on into an era which no longer needs (or finds it possible) to maintain a binary opposition between the High aa ithe Mass. From the ‘twin peaks of pomo, indeed, it’s come to look as if modernism and masscult were the yin and yang of the early 20th century—or, in Huyssen’s words, as if “their much heralded mutual exclusiveness is really a sign of their secret interdependence.” For Huyssen, postmodernism works to destabilize the high/ mass opposition from within; and for Andrew Ross and critics working out of the British Cultural Studies tradition, what’s most important to postmodernism is the passing of the “coercion” theory of masscult, the dogged notion that masscult’s consumers (of, for example, TV, pornography, and romance novels) are purely passive potatoes. 

The current upshot of reassessments of the “culture” in mass culture, concludes Ross, is that today, an “intellectual activism” disconnected from “the vernacular of information technology and the discourses and images of popular, commercial culture have as much leverage over the new nomination of modern social movement as the spells of medieval witches ‘or consultation of the J Ching.” If this means that academics and policy consultants have to stop quoting Eliot and start. watching The Simpsons, so be it: either our self appointed intellectual and artistic vanguards Jearn what Ross calls “lessons about the business of contesting popular meanings without speaking from above,” or read my lips they can eat my shorts. 

The landscape looks exciting, and the field of critical inquiry (like the field of cultural and artistic production) has expanded considerably if not downright vertiginously: the passing of ‘“avant-gardism” has left us a world in which cultural subversion and political quietism may turn up anywhere on the dial, even hand in handand a world in which yesterday’s subversions can very easily become tomorrow’s quietisms. Such a state of affairs should keep us up at night pretty regularly, but let me tell you, it beats watching The Donna Reed Show. 

In fact, for my money, the only unambiguously regrettable development in all this is the sad fate of poor old modernism. Where once the stuff had the power to disturb, shock, transform, and energize its audiences, it’s now fallen into the hands of the sorriest bunch of cultural reactionaries you'll ever want to see, people like Hilton Kramer at The New Criterlon—the kind of critics who appear without fail, every generation, staff in hand, to grouse volubly about how culture took a fatal turn for the worse precisely 10 years before they were born, and how the art of “our” past can sustain us in these trivial times if only we venerate it sufficiently. What do you think happens to people like Kramer when pomo points out that their “classic” modernism and mass  culture have something to do with each other? Well, it isn’t pretty. All Kramer has to do is walk into the High & Low exhibit, and the popping of his blood vessels becomes downright audible: ‘We know straight away,” if we’re a we, “that in ‘High & Low’ “we are in the presence of one of the most unconscionable intellectual swindles we have ever seen in a serious museum.” But surely this too is to be expected: as ““classicity” touches everything from Braque to Coke, there will be a growing number of reactionaries who'll resist any historical inspection of the Real Thing. Soon, no doubt, the same curmudgeonly people who complained about pomo’s playfulness will be screeching that pomo is Politically Correct. And by then, we can expect two things. Thing one will be that postmodernism’s complex and indeterminate projects of cultural critique, wherever on the dial we find them, will have drawn some blood from the vastly complacent culture they inhabit. Thing two is that postmodernism will shortly thereafter be defended by next century’s reactionaries as the scale of classicity in which future generations will once again be weighed and found wanting. 

And by then, if memory serves, pomo’s institutionalization will look to us like it’s déja vu all over again. | 

Nabokov, Diderot and other things from the papers

 NYRB:  This isn’t to say that there hasn’t been good writing about Nabokov: to my mind, one of the most enlightening literary-critical books of recent years was Michael Wood’s 1994 study The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. In it, Wood both made a convincing case for the centrality of the idea of loss in Nabokov’s life and fiction and proposed a tool for reading Nabokov that I find I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since. Wood talked about the distinction between what he called “signature” and “style” in writing, with special reference to Nabokov. “Signature” was his term for writing marked by its author’s voice, immediately and unmistakably his; “style” his term for a less immediately identifiable, richer, subtler thread in the work: 

A literary signature would then be the visible shorthand for a literary person; a style would be a more complex but still legible trace of that person’s interaction with the world. Writers usually have more signature than style, I think. Signature is their habit and their practise, their mark; style 1s something more secretive, more thoroughly dispersed among the words, a reflection of luck or grace, or of a moment when signature overcomes or forgets itself. 

Nabokov’s signature is a small part of what his fans like about him; I confess that I am one of them. It’s also, perhaps, part of what can put non-fans off. One example might be from one of Nabokov’s most famous flashes of brilliance, Humbert Humbert’s memory of his mother in Lolita: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” It’s hard not to be dazzled by the parenthesis, which is pure signature; but the heart of the sentence, its moment of style, is in the quieter and much less prominent word “photogenic.” You realize that Humbert knows his mother only from photographs. The sentence’s quiet poetry is the poetry of loss. 

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More commonly, the portrait of someone grieving revealed the shadowy existence of the dear departed. These were double exposures; the photographer would secretly photograph an accomplice first, then use the plate again for the sitter. When the picture was developed, the person in the first exposure would loom like a shadow, the flesh being weak but the spirit willing. 

MaNY PEOPLE, struggling with the religious doubts of the time, greeted these photographs with awe, though skeptics rushed to express their doubts in print. It was something of a drawback that the ghosts in the images did not always resemble their namesakes. An inscription on the back of one spirit photograph at the gallery notes that the gentleman it depicts failed to recognize the lady intruding on his portrait but confessed that he was old and had a wretched memory. The most successful spirit photographer, not represented here, was William H. Mumiler of Boston, who took a picture of Mrs. Lincoln with an ectoplasmic Abe putting his arms about her neck as well as one of a music critic with the spirit of Beethoven hovering symphonically above. But in 1869, Mumler was sued for fraud by a client unhappy with the ghostly portrait of his father-in-law, the news of whose death, it turned out, had been greatly exaggerated.

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Thereafter he was released and wrote Lettre sur les sourds et ley muets (Letter on the Deaf and the Mute), his second clever essay on the theory of knowledge. Exaggerating the empirrcism of John Locke, who had denied that there could be innate ideas independent of experience and perception, Condillac in his Traité des sensations had traced all knowledge back to its alleged foundation in the association of ideas, which had their origin in the separate senses of sight, touch, and hearing. But how are the data of the separate senses coordinated to form some stable and coherent picture of the external world? Is there not an assumption of a unitary self which coordinates? Against Condillac and the pure empiricists, the so-called “sensualist philosophy,” Diderot was always to insist that it is of the nature of mind to be active in its interaction with the external world, and that it is bad philosophy to represent our minds as just passive and receptive in perception—as empty buckets. This, he held, could not be true of any organism in the natural order. 

Determinism was one of the many issues on which he followed Spinoza. The multiplicity of causes in the common order of nature, he argued, is inexhaustibly complex and, for all human purposes, determinism is therefore irrelevant to our lives and to our morals. Successes and failures, particularly in the arts, present themselves to us as matters of chance as much as of skill On the other hand if belief in free will is the belief that persons are Originating causes, it is an illusion and a harmful illusion. You can dissolve the apparent contradiction between free will and determinism If, and only if, you always remember that human knowledge, and particularly self-knowledge, is pathetically limited, and that it always will be. - 

One reason for this anti-Cartesian conception of thought is to be found in Diderot’s philosophy of nature. For Descartes, still a Christian philosopher, the individual human soul or mind stands outside, and above, the natural order, to which it is attached only by its association with a body. 

Hence the splendor and majesty of the declaration Cogito, ergo sum: my unique existence as a thinking creature is known, but known not through any of the fallible channels of natural knowledge. When we are thinking, and thinking methodically, Descartes and you and I are transcendent beings, not caught up in the accidents and complexities of the natural order, which we loftily observe and inquire into. Diderot reversed this metaphysics consistently and Spinozistically in all his writings, including in his fiction and in his moral speculations. His deepest conviction, the clue to his own way of life as well as to his art and thought, was that human beings are inextricably parts of nature (which he called le tout) and, physically and mentally, are subject to all its unpredictable contingencies. This is the kernel of what was later called his materialism, and it was this so-called materialism that made him one of the saints in the old Marxist calendar. But it was a materialism with a difference, not the reductive, rather lumpish materialism of his contemporarics La Mettrie, Baron Holbach, and others, which survived throughout the nineteenth century and which flourishes in the US even today.

The actor who stands apart from the emotion which he carefully enacts. — Like Lichtenberg writing about Garrick, Diderot sees in acting an exaggeration of the duality of the self and of multiple personalities, which he takes to be the normal conditions of human wholeness. It is natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others because it is natural first to enter into disputes with oneself. The mind works by contradiction. That is why in Le Neveu de Rameau there are the characters Moi and Lui. In a person’s inner life actors move on a crowded stage where contrary passions come and go, masked and in disguise. 

Scientific theory and fiction were equally interpretations of Nature for Diderot. La Religieuse (The Nun),  postumously published, is the greatest of his pure fictions. It was written to deceive a friend who, in a cruel and unpleasant hoax, was meant to take the story as a true story and to try to rescue the heroine. He was in fact deceived. Recounting this episode Mr. Furbank is remarkably uncensorious, perhaps because this kind of cruel mockery of the feelings of friends was accepted as normal in its day. Diderot continued to work at intervals on the novel, which developed into a vivid and subtle study of passion uncontrolled, a lesbian passion in which maturity and innocence are brought into conflict. As a philosophical materialist, always at war with Descartes’s mind-body dualism, sexuality and physical passion are for Diderot the central knot of personality, 

Were self-awareness and sensuality are intertwined. Society’s efforts to confine sexuality within general rules and conventions will, he wrote, often end in disaster. This moral is elaborated in the dialogue Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, which compares the generous and philoprogenitive sexuality of the Tahitians, who are free from all possessiveness, with the jealous and stifled impulses of a visiting Christian gentleman. On the whole the Tahitians in their arcadia come out better than the damp and inward-looking Christians, who admittedly have an advantage in learning, but have lost their feeling for natural happiness. 

Bu Diderot was not committed to a naive dichotomy between natural impulse and the thoughtful artificialities of high culture, which is sometimes implied in Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality.” Human beings for Diderot are by nature comedians, poseurs, prone to art and to artificiality, and their impulses are not simple and uncorrupted by circumstance. Any return to nature is also a return to conflicts and to contradiction. The power of reflection and thought is part of the nature of organisms which are as complex in structure as human beings and which are also pliable and adaptable, each in a singular way. We shall therefore encounter possessive and imprisoning passions, like that of the Mother Superior in The Nun, as naturally as the passions that are associated with liberation and with escape from repression. The opposition between good and bad is not between Nature and Civilization, two universals, but fiways between happy and unhappy adaptations of individuals to their particular surrounding conditions. When individual natures are in harmony with the particular conditions to which they are responding, then happiness supervenes: as Diderot himself was happy when plotting his publications with Grimm in Madame d Epinay s garden, or arguing with Abbé Galiani at dinner with the Baron D’Holbach, or making a philosophical point in a letter to his lover Sophie Volland, or at home with his daughter Angélique, or in his conversation at any hour of day or night with the Empress Catherine in St. Petersburg. 

In the spirit of Montaigne, Diderot took it to be evident that the soul, or self, was in constant flux, transforming itself just as the cells of the body are constantly changing within a constant structure. His favorite image of identity, and particularly of personal identity, was a swarm of bees, which holds together and preserves its identity in the way that a human personality, with its myriad thoughts and sensations, still holds together. We can distinguish within the swarm of any individual’s memories and passions the contrary desires and conflicting beliefs that keep the swarm alive and in motion. Diderot’s moral and aesthetic attitudes, and even the direction of his own life, depended upon this doctrine of the insubstantial self as well as on his materialism. The integrity of a person was like the integrity of the swarm, and not that of a block of marble, a material that he particularly disliked. “Marble does not laugh.” 

According to Spinoza’s materialism, human beings perceive and interpret nature, including human nature, in two distinct ways: teleologically, in terms of desires, beliefs, and the selfconscious pursuit of ends; mechanically, in terms of laws of motion. Nature (“the whole”) is inexhaustible and forever exceeds our knowledge and understanding. The duality of the two orders resides in us as embodied observers. Observing the plucking of the strings of a musical instrument, I may attend to the physical motions occurring or I may attend to the tune: the same event in the natural order, but different interests. 

This is Diderot’s example. As a theorist of portrait painting and of dramatic art and of sculpture, and a theorist also of sexuality, Diderot recognized that human bodies, unlike machines, are visibly animated by changing thoughts and passions: he was always thinking, as a novelist, dramatist, art critic, and physiologist, of the changing expressions in a person’s eye, the tone of a voice, the harmony of colors of fruit and glass on a table in a Chardin, the thought that entered into the sculptor Falconet’s carving and molding. Blind and deaf persons are compelled to think more abstractly. For purposes of explanation, as physicists and physiologists, we also need to think more abstractly, looking for laws and generalities. But we talk with whole persons, irreducibly singular, and we find friendship, and therefore happiness, in noticing and dwelling on particularities; particularities of place and of the countryside as well as of persons. ( Diderot took his place in the line that passes from Democritus through Lucretius to Spinoza, and that Marx sometimes, and in spite of his Hegelian obfuscations, claimed to continue. Philosophy was for all of ' them demystification; they were the metaphysicians of fearlessness, who . refused to be haunted by anything that could not be felt or seen, or that could not be heard as natural sound or as  man-made music: no ghosts and no mysteries, except the mystery of human genius. The melody is waiting in the 2 strings of the instrument, and even the inspiration of a poet exists also as an excited physical state, from which the poet’s words and rhythms emerge.  For Diderot, as for Spinoza, Nature is a seamless whole (“le tour”), one all inclusive system of systems of systems... ad infinitum: nothing supernatural and transcendent can conceivably exist, and we must restore in our own CONSCIOUSNESS a Sense of acting within the undivided universe, and by this means restore also a sense of personal, mind-body wholeness. Our morality comes from our passions, and not from any anthority and therefore  Its prescriptions are not in their nature absolute they need to be modified and adapted to circumstance.

But Mr. Furbank does convey an impression of the superabundance of his subject as well as of the enduring charm and gaiety of the man who was not without his darker premonitions. Perhaps Diderot’s charm has stood in the way of his thought, casually sophisticated and unpretentiously profound as it was. There was no onesidedness, no fanaticism in his thinking, and no Voltairean dryness either. After Diderot came the thunderous emphases and the overweening spirituality of the German Enlightenment and of German Romanticism and its aftermath. Charm was suppressed in philosophy, and tentative dialogues were replaced by grand and solemn monologues, some of them predicting that the world must come to an end with German philosophy. It is delightful to be taken back behind all that by Mr. Furbank, to an_ unsystematic philosopher, who can almost be heard talking. 

Darwin

Lewontin 2009 NYRB

Why do we call the modern theory of organic evolution “Darwinism”? Charles Darwin certainly did not invent the idea of evolution, that is, of the continuous change in time of the State of some system as a fundamental property of that system, or even the idea that a process of evolution had occurred in the history of life. The study of the evolution of the cosmos itself was founded in Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science in 1786 and Laplace’s nebular hypothesis of 1796. Sadi Carnot’s second law of thermodynamics, the principle that over time all differences in energy between bits and pieces of the universe decrease, was published in 1824. The idea that the various geological formations observed on earth were not the result of a unique catastrophe or Great Flood, but the consequence of repeated and continual geological processes still going on at present, was postulated before the turn of the nineteenth century by James Hutton and long since accepted by 1859. 

By the time of the appearance of the Origin, the physical sciences had become thoroughly evolutionary. Living beings were not seen as an exception. In 1769, Diderot had his dreaming philosopher d’Alembert wonder what races of animals had preceded us and what sorts would follow. He provided the motto of evolutionism as a worldview: “Everything changes, everything passes. Only the totality remains.” Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, in his epic The Temple of Nature of 1803, invokes his Muse to tell “how rose from elemental strife/Organic forms, and kindled into life,” and the Muse completes the evolutionary story by telling him that even “imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,/... Arose from rudiments of form and sense.” By the younger Darwin’s time, the idea of organic evolution had become a common currency of intellectual life. Two years before the publication of the Origin, Herbert Spencer argued for a belief in organic evolution on the basis of the agreed-upon universality of evolutionary processes: 

It is now universally admitted by philologists that languages, instead of being artificially or supernaturally formed, have been developed. And the histories of religion, of philosophy, of science, of the fine arts, of the industrial arts, show that these have passed through stages.... If, then, the recognition of evolution as the law of many diverse orders of phenomena has been spreading, may we not say that...evolution will presently be recognized as the law of the phenomena we are considering? 

If Darwin (and Wallace) did not invent the idea of evolution or its application to the history of life, then at least it might be claimed that they invented a natural historical theory of the cause of that evolution. But they were not the first to do so Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in a succession of works between 1801 and 1809, provided a biological theory of adaptive organic evolution based on the supposed inheritance of changes acquired by organisms in the course of their Individual lives, The example often cited is the roughly six-foot increase in the length of giraffes’ necks from their ancient origin as deer-like animals. If giraffes in any generation stretched their necks, even slightly, to feed on leaves higher up in trees, and if that slight increase in length were passed down to their offspring, then over many generations the cumulative effect would be the extraordinary shape of the modern giraffe. 

Lest the sophisticated readers of The New York Review of Books regard this as a hopelessly outmoded nineteenth century view of biology, it should be pointed out that until about fifteen years ago a neo-Lamarckian institution affiliated with the University of Paris, the Laboratoire d’Evolution des Etres Organisés, carried out scholarly research on evolution that took seriously the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 

The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles: 1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the “principle of variation). 2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability). 3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).

 It seems amazing that two naturalists could independently arrive at the same articulated theory of evolution from a consideration of the characteristics of some species of organisms in nature, their geographic distribution, and their similarities to other species. This amazement becomes considerably tempered, however, when one considers the social consciousness and economic milieu in which the theory arose, a milieu marked by the rise of competitive industrial capitalism in which individuals rose in the social hierarchy based, presumably, on their greater entrepreneurial fitness. 

Darwin’s' maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, started life as a potter’s apprentice and rose to be a member of the circle of new Midland industrial magnates along with James Watt, James Keir, and Matthew Boulton. While the nineteenth-century theory that some rose and some fell in society depending on their personal strengths and weaknesses is often referred to as “social Darwinism,” we would be much more in agreement with historical causation were we to call Darwinism “Biological Competitive Capitalism.” The perceived structure of the competitive economy provided the metaphors on which evolutionary theory was built. 

One can hardly imagine anything that would have better justified the established social and economic theories of the Industrial Revolution than the claim that our very biological natures are examples of basic laws of political economy. How else are we to explain the immediate and continued commercial success of Darwin’s books? The entire first edition of 1,250 copies of the Origin was immediately snapped up by booksellers. The expectation of public interest is revealed by the fact that a circulating library took five hundred copies.’ The sixth edition, only thirteen years later, sold 11,000 copies. One cannot understand the origin and the immediate success of the Origin outside of the social and economic setting in which it was conceived, nor have historians of science ignored the question. The pages of the Journal of the History of Biology have certainly not been devoid of papers on the subject. Yet what we have been provided with in 2009 is biography and annotations on the Origin. Perhaps it is time for a socioeconomic analysis of our own preoccupations. 

The parallel between the arguments for natural selection and nineteenthcentury economic and social theory, however, misses an extremely important divergence between Darwin and political economy. The theory of competitive sociocconomic success is a theory about the rise of individuals and individual enterprises as a consequence of their superior fitness. But even though the Industrial Revolution resulted eventually, at least in some countries, in a general rise in material well-being, the number of immensely successful entrepreneurs is evidently limited precisely because their success depends on the existence of a large mass of less successful workers. No population can consist largely of people like Henry Clay Frick. 

The theory of evolution by natural selection, in contrast, is meant to explain the adaptation and biological success of an entire species as a consequence of the disappearance of the less fit. Provided that a species does not become so numerous as to destroy the reSources on which it depends, there is no structural reason why every individual of that species cannot be highly fit. I we seek a true originality in the unde standing of Darwin and Wallace, it is to be found in their ability to adapt a theory meant to explain the success of the many, even though the many may be competing for resources in short supply. Whether they were conscious of this divergence of the theory of evolution by natural selection from the reigning economic and social theory is a question. 

Despite the intuitive appeal of the theory of evolution by natural selection, there is a deep flaw in it as it was conceived in the nineteenth century, a flaw that was potentially fatal: it lacked an understanding of heredity. This problem was first pointed out in 1867 by a Scottish engineer, Fleeming Jenkin, but it does not seem to have had any effective force. From the observations that Darwin (and breeders) made about domesticated animals and plants, the most likely basis for the inheritance of characteristics seemed some sort of mixture of an internal fluid. If, for example, a large-bodied variety was mated to a small-bodied one, the usual outcome was offspring of intermediate size. 

The problem is that if inheritance proceeds by a blending mechanism, then new variants in a species would rapidly be lost by dilution through mating with the common form. Suppose a variant individual appeared that was larger than normal. That individual would necessarily mate with the normal type and their offspring would be intermediate. When those few intermediate offspring mated it would almost certainly be with the vastly more numerous normal form so that the next generation of this family would be yet closer to the usual type. After a few generations of this process of dilution by crossing, there would be no detectable variation on which natural selection could operate, even if a larger type would be of some selective advantage. The reduction of variation by half with each generation is a vastly more powerful force than any biologically reasonable countervailing difference in reproductive fitness. 

The Darwinian mechanism would, in fact, not work in a world of blending inheritance. Unknown to Darwin, Wallace, or any of the enthusiasts for the claim of evolution by natural selection, work by an obscure monk in the Kénigenkloster at Brno in Moravia would turn out to save the theory. Mendel’s experiments on peas demonstrated that inheritance was not based on the blending of some fluid-like material, but by the passage of particles that maintained their individual properties even when mixed together in a hybrid. Thus, in future generations, variant properties would reappear even though what we now call the genes for those variants were temporarily mixed with the normal gene forms in hybrids, 

The journal of the Briinn Society of Natural Science in which Mendel’s research was published would never have been read by the English scientific establishment, nor indeed by anyone in the major centers of nineteenth-century natural science. lt was not until 1900 that Mendels work was rediscovered as a consequence of the appearance of new scientific results on crossing plants. In full historic justice, if we are to personalize our modern explanation of evolution we shauld call it not “Darwinism,” nor even“Darwin-Wallacism,” but “Darwin-Wallace-Mendelism.” 

The present understanding of natural selection of chance variants—variants produced through mutations of genes—as the basis for adaptive evolution obscures the historical fact that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolution was accepted as a reality but other scientific explanations for it existed and came into competition with “Darwinism.” Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was certainly coherent given the ignorance of the basis of heredity, and was, in a Sense, more nearly complete than Darwin’s precisely because it included and depended on a definite theory of inheritance. A direct challenge to Darwin appeared in 1860 in an article in the prestigious journal Edinburgh Review, Although unsigned, it is generally accepted that its author was Richard Owen, a zoologist of considerable fame and prestige whose Hunterlan Lectures on zoology were attended by Queen Victoria and Darwin himself. Exhibiting a typical hardworking professional's disdain for the amateur, Owen writes that Darwin has long been favourably known... 

by the charming style [of his] observations.... Of independent means, he has full command of his time for the prosecution of original research.... The same pleasing style which marked Mr. Darwin's earliest work, and a certain artistic disposition... have had the result that “several, and perhaps the majority, of our younger naturalists have been seduced into the acceptance” of his theory.‘ 

Owen’s personal attack aside, he points out, quite correctly, that neither Darwin nor anyone else knows what the underlying phenomena of heredity and development really are and that the transformation and divergence of organisms over time might simply be the manifestation of some hidden laws of development. Moreover, similar species that Darwin would claim as having evolved from a common ancestor might simply be developmental variants produced in response to different environments. J must confess that in reading Owens essay I found myself over and over nodding my head ‘n agreement. Given the state of ignorance of basic biological processes in 1860, Owen might well have been right. 

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An important property of adaptive evolution is that it is usually a slow process. Certainly there are cases where a single genetic change can mean the difference between life and death in a hostile environment. The classic cases are the mutations that give pathogenic microorganisms the ability to resist antibiotics or mutations that allow crops to resist pathogens, for example insects or herbicides. But these are not representative models for how species adapt, by accumulation of mutations of small effect, to changes in food availability, temperature modifications, and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to. The usual small differences in fitness among genotypes are therefore manifest as detectable evolutionary change only after thousands of generations. This deliberate tempo has presented the human species with a problem of adaptation. With a human generation of about twenty-five years, there have been roughly only one hundred generations since the founding of the Roman Republic. Yet the changes in the human environment caused by changes in human activity have been enormous. Changes in diet, habitation, working conditions, the pollution of air and water, and especially the considerable increase of lifespan that result in major alterations and breakdowns in the bodily machinery have all been too rapid for genetic adaptation. 

Indeed for environmental changes that have their effect after the age of reproduction, it is not clear that natural selection can operate at all. The constant exposure to high doses of solar radiation that is experienced by surfers on the California beaches might induce an eventually fatal skin cancer, but the cancer death almost always occurs well after reproductive age, so there is no opportunity for selection to act. The general result is that parts of the human genome are out of correspondence with the conditions of modern life. 

The Scarlet Letter

In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and trpping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham‘fight with the Indians; of scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Peat saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaint: ance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a Witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue. 

Prince Andrei's Death

 “Love? What is love?” he thought “Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is connected only by that. Love is God, and to die means that I, a part of love, return to the common and eternal source.” These thoughts seemed comforting to him. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, there was something one-sidedly personal, cerebral—there was no evidence. And there was the same uneasiness and vagueness. He fell asleep. 

In a dream he saw himself lying in the same room in which he lay in reality, but he was not wounded, but healthy. Many sorts of persons, insignificant, indifferent, appear before Prince Andrei. He talks with them, argues about something unnecessary. They are preparing to go somewhere. Prince Andrei vaguely recalls that it is all insignificant and that he has other, more important concerns, but he goes on, to their surprise, speaking some sort of empty, witty words. Gradually, imperceptibly, all these people begin to disappear, and everything is replaced by the one question of the closed door. He gets up and goes to the door to slide the bolt and lock it. Everything depends on whether he does or does not manage to lock it. He walks, he hurries, his feet do not move, and he knows that he will not manage to lock the door, but still he painfully strains all his force. And a tormenting fear seizes him. And this fear is the fear of death: it is standing behind the door. But as he is crawling strengthfessly and awkwardly towards the door, this terrible something is already pushing against it from the other side, forcing it. Something inhuman—death—is forcing the door, and he has to hold it shut, He lays hold of the door, strains in a last effort to lock it is already impossible-—just to hold it shut; but his attempts are weak, clumsy, and, pushed by the terrible thing, the door keeps opening and shutting again. 

Once more it pushes from the other side. His last supernatural efforts are ir gain, and the two halves open noiselessly. It comes in, and it is death, And prince Andrei died. 

But in the same instant that he died, Prince Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and in the same instant that he died, he made an effort with himself and woke up. 

“Yes, that was death. I died —-I woke up. Yes, death is an awakening.” Clarity suddenly came to his soul, and the curtain that until then had concealed the mknown was raised before his inner gaze. He felt the release of a force that previously had been as if bound in him and that strange lightness which from then on did not leave him. 

When, having come to in a cold sweat, he stirred on his sofa, Natasha went over to him and asked what was the matter. He did not answer, and, not understanding her, gave her a strange look. 

That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Marya’s arrival. Since that day, the doctor said, the wasting fever had taken a turn for the worse, but Natasha was not interested in what the doctor said: she saw those dreadful moral signs, which were more unquestionable for her. 

Since that day, there began for Prince Andrei, along with his awakening from sleep, an awakening from life. And it seemed no slower to him, in relation he length of life, than an awakening from sleep in relation to the length of a dream.

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More Samuel Butler

 From the Way of All Flesh

As for the child himself, he was naturally of an even temper; he doted upon his nurse, on kittens and puppies, and on all things that would do him the kindness of allowing him to be fond of them. He was fond of his mother, too, but as regards his father, he has told me in later life he could remember no feeling but fear and shrinking. Christina did not remonstrate with Theobald concerning the severity of the tasks imposed upon their boy, nor yet as to the continual whippings that were found necessary at lesson times. Indeed, when during any absence of Theobald’s the lessons were entrusted to her, she found to her sorrow that it was the only thing to do, and she did it no less effectually than Theobald himself; nevertheless she was fond of her boy, which Theobald never was, and it was long before she could destroy all affection for herself in the mind of her first-born. But she persevered. 

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In the meantime his father and mother were rolling along the muddy roads, each in his or her own ‘corner of the carriage, and each revolving many things which were and were not to come to pass. Times have changed since I last showed them to the reader as sitting together silently in a carriage, but except as regards their mutual relations, they have altered singularly little. When I was younger I used to think the Prayer Book was wrong in requiring us to say the General Confession twice a week from childhood to old age, without making provision for our not being quite such great sinners at seventy as we had been at seven; granted that we should go to the wash like table-cloths at least once a week, still I used to think a day ought to come when we should want rather less rubbing and scrubbing at. Now that I have grown older myself I have seen that the Church has estimated probabilities better than I had done. 

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if they were to appear now for the first ime, WOKLL, 2 SIUMID think, either fall dead or be severely handled by the critics. I wish to know whether it is I who am in fault in this matter, or whether part of the blame may not rest with the tragedians themselves. 

How far, I wonder, did the Athenians genuinely like these poets, and how far was the applause which was lavished upon them due to fashion or affectation? How far, in fact, did admiration for the orthodox tragedians take that place among the Athenians which going to church does among ourselves? 

This is a venturesome question considering the verdict now generally given for over two thousand years, nor should I have permitted myself to ask it if it had not been suggested to me by one whose reputation stands as high, and has been sanctioned for as long time as those of the tragedians themselves, I mean by Aristophanes. 

Numbers, weight of authority, and time, have conspired to place Aristophanes on as high a literary pinnacle as any ancient writer, with the exception perhaps of Homer, but he makes no secret of heartily hating Euripides and Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only praises Aeschylus that he may run down the other two with greater impunity. For after all there is no such difference between AEschylus and his successors as will render the former very good and the latter very bad; and the thrusts at Aeschylus which Aristophanes puts into the mouth of Euripides go home too well to have been written by an admirer. 

It may be observed that while Euripides accuses Aeschylus of being pomp-bundle-worded,”” which I suppose means bombastic and given to rodomontade, Aeschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a “gossip gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag stitcher,” from which it may be inferred that he was truer to ththlife of his own times than Aeschylus was. 

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He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Emest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities. 

Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action indeed anything, there being an unity in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever people’s heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well knew that he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it was. 

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At first he had not suspected that his friends were wanted with a view to Charlotte; it was understood that Charlotte and they might perhaps take a fancy for one another; and that would be so very nice, would it not? But he did not see that there was any deliberate malice in the arrangement. Now, however, that he had awoke to what it all meant, he was less inclined to bring any friend of his to Battersby. It seemed to his silly young mind almost dishonest to ask your friend to come and see you when all you really meant was, Please, marry my sister.”’ It was like trying to obtain money under false pretences. If he had been fond of Charlotte it might have been another matter, but he thought her one of the most disagreeable young women in the whole circle of his acquaintance. 

She was supposed to be very clever. All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative. Ernest never knew what particular branch of study it was in "which she showed her talent, for she could neither play nor sing nor draw, but so astute are women that his mother and Charlotte really did persuade him into thinking that she, Charlotte, had something more akin to true genius than any other member of the family. Not one, however, of all the friends whom Ernest had been inveigled into trying to inveigle had shown the least sign of being so far struck with Charlotte’s commanding powers, as to wish to make them his own, and this may have had something to do with the rapidity and completeness with which Christina had dismissed them one after another and had wanted a new one. 

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...‘if you begin with the Bible,” was the rejoinder, “you are three parts gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you know where you are. The Bible is not without its value to us the clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling-block which cannot be taken out of their way too soon or too completely. Of course, I mean on the supposition that they read it, which, happily, they seldom do. If people read the Bible as the ordinary British churchman or churchwoman reads it, it is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care—which we should assume they will if we give it them at all—it is fatal to them.” 

“What do you mean?” said Ernest, more and more astonished, but more and more feeling that he was at least in the hands of a man who had definite ideas. 

“Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don't read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely.”  

&

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, in nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogethet we die. In quiet, uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes. 

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object—external and internal—being unified as much as everything else. This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to be knocked over by something. 

Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation between internal and external—subject and object—when we find this convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient. This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical. It is faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience sake. Take any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from some palpable folly. 

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Emest had such a note-book always with him. Even when he was at Cambridge he had begun the practice without anyone’s having suggested it to him. These notes he copied out from time to time into a book, which as they accumulated, he was driven into indexing approximately, as he went along. When I found out this, { knew that he had the literary instinct, and when I saw his notes I began to hope great things of him. 

For a long time I was disappointed. He was kept back by the nature of the subjects he chose—which were generally metaphysical. In vain I tried to get him away from these to matters which had a greater interest for the general public. When I begged him to try his hand at some pretty, graceful, liccle story which should be full of whatever people knew and liked best, he would immediately set to work upon a treatise to show the grounds on which all belief rested. 

“You are stirring mud,’ said I, “or poking at a sleeping dog. You are trying to make people resume consciousness about things, which, with sensible men, have already passed into the unconscious stage. The men whom you would disturb are in front of you, and not, as you fancy, behind you; it is you who are the lagger, not they.” 

He could not see it. He said he was engaged on an essay upon the famous quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus of St. Vincent de Lerins. This was the more provoking because he showed himselfable to do better things ifhe had liked. 

I was then at work upon my burlesque, ““The Impatient Griselda,’ and was sometimes at my wits’ end for a piece of business or a situation; he gave me many suggestions, all of which were marked by excellent good sense. Never. theless I could not prevail with him to put philosophy on one side, and was obliged to leave him to himself. 

For a long time, as I have said, his choice of subjects continued to be such as I could not approve. He was continually studying scientific and metaphysical writers, in the hope of either finding or making for himself a philosopher’s stone in the shape of a system which should go on all fours under all circumstances, instead of being liable to be upset at every touch and turn, as every system yet promulgated has turned out to be. 

He kept to the pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp so long that I gave up hope, and set him down as another fly that had been caught, as it were, by a piece of paper daubed over with some sticky stuff that had not even the merit of being sweet, but to my surprise he at last declared that he was satisfied, and had found what he wanted. 

I supposed that he had only hit upon some new “Lo, here!” when to my relief, he told me that he had concluded that no system which should go perfectly upon all fours was possible, inasmuch as no one could get behind Bishop Berkeley, and therefore no absolutely incontrovertible first premise could éver be laid. Having found this he was just as well pleased as if he had found the most perfect system imaginable. All he wanted, he said, was to know which way it was to be—that is to say whether a system was possible or not, and if possible then what the system was to be. Having found out that no system based on absolute certainty was possible he was contented. I had only a very vague idea who Bishop Berkeley was, 

&

Anyone who was used to writing could see at a glance that jiterature was his natural development, and I was pleased at seeing him settle down to it so spontaneously. I was less pleased, however, to observe that he would still occupy himself with none but the most serious, I had almost said solemn, subjects, just as he never cared about any but the most serious kind of music. 

I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it. 

He said: ““Oh, don’t talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got £5 for ‘Paradise Lost.’ 

“And a great deal too much,” I rejoined promptly. “ would have given him twice as much myself not to Lave written it at all.” 

Ernest was a little shocked. “At any rate, he said laughingly, “I don’t write poetry.” 

The Sheltering Sky

 She was no more disturbed by other people as such, than the marble statue is by the flies that crawl on it; however, as possible harbingers of undesirable events and wielders of unfavorable influence in her own life, she accorded other people supreme importance. She would say: “Other people rule my life,” and it was true. But she allowed them to do it only because her superstitious fancy had invested them with magical importance regarding her own destiny, and never because their personalities awoke any profound sympathy or understanding in her. 

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When there was no more sound, she sat down on her pallet for a while, presently lying out flat with her head on the pillow as if to sleep. But her eyes remained open, staring upward almost as fixedly as those beside her. These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her. The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden surfeit of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an clement become too rich and too plentiful to be consumed, and thereby made meaningless, nonexistent. 

&

“No, no,” he said. “Cry a little while, but not too long. A little while is good. Too long is bad. You should never think of what is finished.” The words comforted her, although she could not remember what was finished. “Women always think of what is finished instead of what is beginning. Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you’re climbing. It makes you sick.” The gentle voice went on; finally she lay down again. Still she was convinced that this was the end, 

Humboldt's Gift

Rinaldo, or Ronald, may have had no standing in the underworld but he had done terrible things to my Mercedes Whether his rage was a real hoodlum’s rage, natural or contrived, who could say? But he was evidently one of those proud sensitive fellows who give so much trouble because they are passionate about internal matters of very slight interest to any sensible person. 

America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. 

 My mind was in one of its Chicago states. How should I describe this phenomenon? In a Chicago state I infinitely lack something, my heart swells, I feel a tearing eagerness. The sentient part of the soul wants to express itself. There are some of the symptoms of an overdose of caffeine. At the same time I have a sense of being the instrument of external powers. They are using me either as an example of human error or as the mere shadow of desirable things to come.

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Well, he may have been right. But at least I wasn’t crucifying anyone. Apparently life had not happened to me as it had happened to other people. For some indiscernible reason it happened differently to them, and so I was not a fit judge of their concerns and desires. Aware of this I acceded to more of these desires than was practical. I gave in to George’s low-life expertise. Now I bent before Cantabile. My only resource was to try to remember useful things from my ethological reading about rats, geese, sticklebacks, and dancing flies. What good is all this reading if you can't use it in the crunch? All I asked was a small mental profit. 

&

I wish I knew why I feel such loyalty to the deceased, Hearing of their deaths I often said to myself that I must carry on for them and do their job, finish their work. And that of course I couldn’t do. Instead I found that certain of their characteristics were beginning to stick to me. As time went on, for instance, I found myself becoming absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher. By and by it became apparent that he had acted as my agent. I myself, a nicely composed person, had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some of my longings. This explained my liking for certain individuals, Humboldt, or George Swiebel, or even someone like Cantabile. This type of psychological delegation may have its origins in representative government. However, when an expressive friend died the delegated tasks returned to me. And as I was also the expressive delegate of other people, this eventually became pure hell. 

Carry on for Humboldt? Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn’t have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date. The radiance he dealt in was the old radiance and it was in short supply. What we needed was a new radiance altogether. 

Yes, he spent much time with lawyers and doctors. Lawyers and doctors would best appreciate the drama of wrongs and the drama of sickness. He didn’t want to be a poet now. Symbolism, his school, was used up. No, at this time he was a performing artist who was being real. Back to direct experience. Into the wide world. No more art-substitute for real life. Lawsuits and psychoanalysis were real. 

As for the lawyers and the shrinkers, they were delighted with him not because he represented the real world but because he was a poet. He didn’t pay—he threw the bills out. But these people, curious about genius (which they had learned from Freud and from movies like Moulin Rouge or The Moon and Sixpence to esteem), were hungry for culture. They listened with joy as he told his tale of unhappiness and persecution. He spilled dirt, spread scandal, and uttered powerful metaphors. What a combination! Fame gossip delusion filth and poetic invention. 

Even then shrewd Humboldt knew what he was worth in professional New York. Endless conveyor belts of sickness or litigation poured clients and patients into these midtown offices like dreary Long Island potatoes. These dull spuds crushed psychoanalysts’ hearts with boring character problems. Then suddenly Humboldt arrived. Oh, Humboldt! He was no potato. He was a papaya a citron a passion fruit. He was beautiful deep eloquent fragrant original—even when he looked bruised in the face, hacked under the eyes, half-destroyed. And what a repertory he had, what changes of style and tempo. He was meek at first, shy. Then he became childlike, trusting, then he confided. He knew, he said, what husbands and wives said when they quarreled, bickerings so important to them and so tiresome to everyone else. People said ho-hum and looked at the ceiling when you started this. Americans! with their stupid ideas about love, and their domestic tragedies. How could you bear to listen to them after the worst of wars and the most sweeping of revolutions, the destruction, the death camps, the earth soaked in blood and fumes of cremation still in the air of Europe. What did the personal troubles of Americans amount to? Did they really suffer? The world looked into American faces and said, “Don’t tell me these cheerful well-to-do people are suffering!” Still, democratic abundance had its own peculiar difficulties. America was God's experiment. Many of the old pains of mankind were re. moved, which made the new pains all the more peculiar and mys. terious. America didn’t like special values. It detested people who represented these special values. And yet, without these special values—you see what I mean, said Humboldt. Mankind’s old greatness was created in scarcity. But what may we expect from plenitude? In Wagner the giant Fafnir—or is it a dragon?sleeps on a magical ring. Is America sleeping, then, and dreaming of equal justice and of love? Anyway, I’m not here to dis. cuss adolescent American love-myths—this was how Humboldt talked. Still, he said, I’d like you to listen to this. Then he began to narrate in his original style. He described and intricately embroidered. He worked in Milton on divorce and John Stuart Mill on women. After this came disclosure, confession. Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out. He crossed the universe like light. He struck off X-ray films of the true facts. Weakness, lies, treason, shameful perversion, crazy lust, the viciousness of certain billionaires (names were named). The truth! And all of this melodrama of impurity, all these erect and crimson nipples, bared teeth, howls, ejaculations! The lawyers had heard this thousands of times but they wanted to hear it again, from a man of genius. Had he become their pornographer? 

Ah Humboldt had been great—handsome, high-spirited, buoyant, ingenious, electrical, noble. To be with him made you feel the sweetness of life. We used to discuss the loftiest things...what Diotima said to Socrates about love, what Spinoza meant by the amor dei intellectualis. To talk to him was sustaining, nourishing. But I used to think, when he mentioned people who had been his friends, that it could be only a question of time before I too was dropped. He had no old friends, only exfriends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying. 

To meditate, and work your way behind the appearances, you have to be calm. I didn’t feel calm after this summary of Humboldt, but thought of something he himself liked to mention when he was in a good humor and we were finishing dinner, a scramble of dishes and bottles between us. The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” ‘The keen old prof replied, ‘And who is asking?” 

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Of course Cantabile couldn’t bear his elation. Last night he naturally had to tell someone what he had done. As Humboldt after his triumph with Longstaff ran straight to the Village to get on top of Ginnie so Cantabile had roared off in his Thunder. bird to spend the night with Polly, to celebrate his triumph and my abasement. It made me think what a tremendous force the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA. This is why Americans can’t keep secrets. In WW II we were the despair of the British because we couldn’t shut our mouths. Luckily the Germans couldn’t believe we were so gabby. They figured we were deliberately leaking false information. And it’s all done to prove that we’re not so tedious as we seem but are running over with charm and inside information. 

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In the mental discipline I had recently begun, and of which I already felt the good effects, stability equipoise and tranquillity were the prerequisites. I said to myself, “Tranquillity, tranquillity.” As on the racquet ball court I said, “Dance, dance dance!” And it always had some result. The will is a link which connects the soul to the world as-it-is. Through the will the soul frees itself from distraction and mere dreams. But when Renata told me to tune out and meditate she struck a note of malice. She was needling me about Doris, the daughter of Dr. Scheldt, the anthroposophist from whom I had been getting instruction. Renata was terribly jealous of Doris. “That baby bitch!” Renata cried. “I know she couldn’t wait to jump into your bed.” But this was Renata’s own fault, her very own doing. She and her mother, the Sefiora, had decided that I needed a lesson. They shut the door in my face. By invitation, I came to Renata’s apartment for dinner one night and found myself locked out. Someone else was with her. For several months I was too depressed to be alone. I moved in with George Swiebel and slept on his sofa. I would sit up suddenly in the night with a crying fit, sometimes waking George who came out and turned on a lamp, his wrinkled pajamas baring powerful legs. He made this measured statement: “A man in his fifties who can break up and cry over a girl is a man J respect,” 

William James in the Maelstrom

  William James no longer believed if he ever had — in a fixed world built on a solid foundation. The earthquake was for him a hint of the real condition of things, the real situation. The earth. quake revealed a world (like James’s own conception of consciousness) that was pure flux having nothing stable, permanent, or absolute in it. 

James had four years to live after the earthquake of 1906, and his work was far from done. In 1909 he was still trying to make sense of some of his most challenging and sweeping ideas in a book called A Pluralistic Unj. verse. Here he firmly rejects what he calls the “stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection.” He rejects, that is, the idea that everything will finally be seen to fit together in one grand, interlocked, necessary, benevolent system.' For James there are many centers of the universe, many points of view, many systems, much conflict and evil, as well as much beauty and good. It is, he said, “a universe of eaches.”” 

James’s universe is unimaginably rich, infinitely full and variegated, unified only in that every bit of it is alive. Citing the German thinker Gustav Fechner for protective intellectual cover —a common maneuver for the canny enthusiast whose intoxicated admiration extended outward to writers and thinkers in all directions — James speaks approvingly of “the daylight view of the world.” This is the view that “the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious.” In Pragmatism, published a year after the quake, he wrote, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.” 

James’s understanding of how each of us operates in the world is like George Eliot’s description of the pier glass and the candle in Middlemarch. “Your pier glass or extensive surface of polished steel,” Eliot writes, “rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of ilJumination and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable,” she concludes. “The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person.” For William James, too, the world as a whole is random, and each person makes a pattern, a different pattern, by a power and a focus of his own. There is no single overarching or connecting pattern, hidden or revealed. “We carve out order,” James wrote, “by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.” 

Eliot’s image also suggests something important about James’s own life. Just as his early career plans careened wildly from civil engineering to painting to chemistry to being a naturalist to becoming a physician or a researcher in physiology, so any biography that undertakes to locate or exhibit the central James, the real James, the essential James, or that tries to make a shapely five-act play out of his life, runs the risk of imposing more order than existed — like the medieval hagiographer who gave the world what a modern scholar summarized as “all and rather more than all that is known of the life of St. Neot.” 

We have at least three main reasons to remember William James. First, as a scientist, a medical doctor, and an empirical, laboratory-based, experimental physiologist and psychologist, he was a major force in developing the modern concept of consciousness, at the same time that Freud was developing the modern concept of the unconscious. James was interested in how the mind works; he believed mental states are always related to bodily states and that the connections between them could be shown empirically. 

Second, as a philosopher (psychology, in James’s day, was a branch of philosophy and taught in the philosophy departments of universities), James is famous as one of the great figures in the movement called pragmatism, which is the belief that truth is something that happens to an idea, that the truth of something is the sum of all its actual results. It is not, as some cynics would have it, the mere belief that truth is whatever works for you. It must work for you and it must not contravene any known facts. James was interested more in the fruits than in the roots of ideas and feelings. He firmly believed in what he once wonderfully called “stubborn, irreducible facts.” Written in readable prose intended for both the specialist and the general reader, James’s books, in the words of one colleague, make “philosophy interesting to everybody.” 

 James tells a story from an essay by Robert Lewis Stevenson in which Stevenson describes a curious game he in the school friends used to play.

 Towards the end of September Stevenson writes when school time was drawing near and the nights were already black we would begin to sally forth from our respective [houses], each equipped with a tin bull’s eye lantern.” ... We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled nojsomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull’s eye lantern under his top-coat asked for nothing more. 

When two of these [boys] met, there would be an anxious “Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified “Yes!” . . . It was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a fishing boat or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s eyes discovered, and in the checkering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by the rich steam of the toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or the scaly bilges of the fishing boat and delight themselves with inappropriate talk. 

But the talk, says Stevenson, was incidental. “The essence of this blis. was to walk by yourself on a black night, the slide shut, the top-coat but. toned, not a ray escaping ...a mere pillar of darkness in the dark, and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your heart, to know you had a bull’s eye at your belt, and to sing and exult over the knowledge.” 

“The ground of a person’s joy,” says James, is often hard to discern. “For to look at a man is to court deception ... and to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies any sense of the action. That is the explanation, that is the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the Lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless.” 

The great Hasidic masters say that we each have a tiny spark in us waiting to be blown into a fire. Jean-Paul Sartre said there are really no individuals, only universal singulars. William James would say that each of us is alone, but each of us has a lantern. Without the lantern, the interior spark, we are in the position of the old man who was observed by a reporter, a few minutes after the San Francisco earthquake, standing in the center of Union Square, and who was, “with great deliberation, trying to decipher the inscription of the Dewey monument through spectacles from which the lenses had fallen.””