Hesse on Happiness

 OT 

1949 

Man, the way God planned him and the way the poetry and wisdom of the people have understood him for many thousands of years, was created with a capacity for enjoying things even if they are not useful to him, with a sense for beauty. Mind and senses have always played an equal part in the joy man feels in beauty. As long as men are capable, in the midst of the distresses and dangers of their lives, of rejoicing in such things as these: the play of colors in nature or in a painting, an appeal in the voices of storm and sea, or in man-made music, as long as beneath its surface interests and necessities the world can be seen or felt as a whole, consisting as it does of interrelationships, from the curve of a young cat's neck to the variations of a sonata, from the touching eyes of a dog to the tragedy of a poet, an interconnection of a thousandfold riches of relationship, correspondences, analogies, and reflections, out of whose eternally flowing language their hearers derive joy and wisdom, entertainment and emotion—just so long will man again and again triumph over his ambiguities and be able to ascribe meaning to his existence. For “meaning” is precisely that unity of the multitudinous, or at least that ability of the spirit to perceive the chaotic confusion of the world as unity and harmony. For the true man, healthy, whole, unimpaired, the world justifies itself, God justifies Himself unceasingly through such marvels as these: with the coming of the cool of evening and the ending of the worker's day, there is also the reddening of the evening sky, and the magic, flowing transitions from rose into violet; or there is such a thing as the transformations of a human face when in a thousand nuances like the evening sky it is touched by the miracle of a smile. And there are such things as the spaces and windows of a cathedral, and the order of the stamens in a blossom. There are such things as a violin constructed from little boards, and the musical scale. So incomprehensible and delicate a thing, born from nature and mind, rational and at the same time suprarational and childish, as speech. Its beauties and surprises, its puzzles, its apparent immortality that nevertheless does not remove or protect it from the accidents, sicknesses, dangers to which all things mortal are exposed, these make it for us, its servants and pupils, one of the most mysterious and sacred phenomena on earth. 

Color and vampires on roller skates

 Indeed, when the ancients wrote about color, from Homer and Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, their terminology often seems decidedly foreign. Was the wine-dark sea really the color of a fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or did that refer to something about luster or sheen or some other visual quality? Nietzsche was convinced that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue or green and lived in a world of black, white, red and yellow.

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Because Lugosi never learned to drive, he got around Hollywood on rollerskates.

Vampira, in which she describes her first meeting with him: “I was a young girl window-shopping on Hollywood Boulevard. I was bending low to see the detail of some shoes and someone whizzed around the corner on rollerskates, almost bumped my fanny and crashed into me. ‘Pardon me,’ said he, and ‘Pardon me,’ said I. He was wearing an Ascot cravat and a beret. It was Bela Lugosi on rollerskates. He was on his way to a cigar store.”

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Stuart Hampshire on H James

Lewis is particularly authoritative and successful in placing the James family on their exalted social pinnacle against the more variegated and tumultuous background of ordinary American life. He is much less interested in Henry’s later life in England, and in his high standing among the distinguished and famous there. Originally Irish immigrants, the family became immensely rich through the real estate operations of Henry and William’s grandfather, Willam James Senior. His fortune in the 1830s was considered to be second only to that of 3.3. Astor in New York State, and “William James of Albany” was certainly one of the richest men in the country at that time. In Henry’s wonderful words, which Mr. Lewis quotes, most of the heirs of this tycoon were an “extravagant, unregulated cluster...handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all bust and curls.” 

Henry’s gift of inspired vagueness, as in “lurid uncles;” tells with wit all that needs to be told of most of the first William’s less enterprising descendants. Then with Henry James Senior’s dedication to the life of an Emersonian intellectual, to a spiritual quest, mere wealth was converted into another, and characteristically Amercan, kind of gentility: the gentility of old New York houses, of repeated cul__ tural journeys to Europe, of an intensely sustained literacy, of a turning away from the taint of commerce and of speculation, and of a controlled distaste for the social effects of more recent immigration, which would dilute the original stock. = 

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On Buster Keaton

 Is it a matter of geometric abstraction, of heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado, of a sublime and unsentimental hilarity shot through, in James Agee’s words, with “a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia”? Keaton has been likened to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Franz Kafka. At the end of his life, finally showered with artistic recognition, he confided to his wife his wariness of “that genius bullshit.” 

—he incarnated a superior but detached intelligence, making his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of earthly existence in ways baffling to the terrestrials among whom he found himself. He operated with the clear-eyed genius of avery serious child discerning formal likenesses between dissimilar entities and inventing new and undreamt-of uses for common objects. For all his fertility in superbly improbable inventions, what counted for Keaton was a sense of realness, an avoidance of the “ridiculous,” an adjective by which he indicated the disconnected gimmicks and anarchically unleashed aggression typical of Mack Sennett and Keaton’s own cinematic mentor, the ill-fated Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.” He insisted on gags that evolved logically, story lines “that one could imagine happening to real people”—imagine being the appropriate verb, and the logic in question being of a peculiar sort unique to Keaton. The predicaments of his heroes were made to seem not only plausible but inevitable, even when they involved being chased over hills and valleys by a mob of women in wedding gowns.

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This, of course, is not to say that fiction should be tidy and straightforward, or provide a means of escapism, or shy away from current events. It is simply to echo Henry James’s famous dictum: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” 

In most rapid-response novels, that circle is never drawn. There is simply a quick-fire accretion of harrowing data, together with the breathless, telegraphic commentary it inspires. For all its surface agitation, such fiction is actually founded on a complacent premise: that all that’s needed to achieve profundity is to write down what happens. How this material is shaped and ordered, by what geometry it is finessed into meaning, remains, at best, a secondary concern. 

Because of its formal fragmentation and ultra-contemporary subject matter, the rapid-response novel carries an aura of modernist innovation. Life itself has grown more manic and fractured (the implicit argument of these books seems to run), and novels ought to reflect this. Looked at another way, however, the genre could be seen as a capitulation. Working from the premise that readers today, conditioned by social media, have trouble focusing on anything for longer than thirty seconds at a time, the rapidresponse novelist decides to cater to their ravaged attention spans by writing brief, topical books comprised of tweet-like fragments generously set off by quantities of white space. 

Frank Kermode

 From Pieces of my Mind

The publishers describe this book by Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (2001) as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the price’. Its immediate predecessor was Underworld, at least seven times as long (or as fat). That book, as nearly everybody must know, begins with a chapter about a famous baseball game and a boy who retrieves the ball with which the decisive home run was scored. The Body Artist is about as long as the Underworld ball game. 

DeLillo is a serious and various writer, and we have to take these extremes as deliberately chosen to reflect different aspects of his talent. Underworld belongs to the category of the Great American Novel, to which all the really big writers aspire. Structurally it has some tesemblance to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and that thought prompts the reflection that Pynchon also wrote an exceptionally fine novella, The Crying of Lot 49. If there are two traditions of great American writing it is proper to show up in both of them. One of them may be said to originate with Hawthorne, the other with Melville, one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to Contain a world. On the whole the heavyweights have prevailed in recent years; one no longer hears much talk of, say, Glenway Westcott, a lean writer of whom Gertrude Stein remarked that ‘he has a certain syrup but it does not pour’. This memory came to me as I read The Body Artist. But here the syrup does, slowly, pour. 

Anthony Powell

 A Question of Upbringing 

About the house he was more noticeable than in the open air, because his voice was pitched high and he articulated poorly: as if tongue were too big for his mouth. 

This delivery made his words always appear to protest, a manner of speaking almost predictable from his face. In addition to that distinctly noisy manner of utterance, thick rubber reinforcements on soles and heels caused his boot~ he wore boots more often than what Stringham used to call ‘Widmerpool’s good sensible shoes’—to squeal incessantly: their shrill rhythmic bursts of sound, limited in compass like the notes of a barbaric orchestra, giving warning of his approach along the linoleum of distant passages; their sullen whining dirge seeming designed to express in musical terms the mysteries of an existence of toil and abnegation lived apart from the daily life of the tribe. Perhaps he sounds a grotesque and conspicuous figure. In excess, Widmerpool was neither. He had his being, like many others, in obscurity. The gap in age caused most of my knowledge of him to have come second-hand; and, in spite of this abrupt realisation of him as a person that took place on that winter evening, he would have remained a dim outline to me if he had not at an earlier date, and before my own arrival, made himself already memorable, as a new boy, by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat. 

At this distance of time I cannot remember precisely what sort of an overcoat Widmerpool was said to have worn in the first instance. Stories about it had grown into legend: so much so that even five or six years later you might still occasionally hear an obtrusive or inappropriate garment referred to as ‘a Widmerpool’; and Templer, for example, would sometimes say: ‘I am afraid I’m wearing rather Widmerpool socks today’, or, ‘I’ve bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie to go home in’. My impression is that the overcoat’s initial deviation from normal was slight, depending on the existence or absence of a belt at the back, the fact that the cut was singleor double-breasted, or, again, irregularity may have had something to do with the collar; perhaps the cloth, even, was of the wrong colour or texture. 

As a matter of fact the overcoat was only remarkable in itself as a vehicle for the comment it aroused, insomuch that an element in Widmerpool himself had proved indigestible to the community. An overcoat (which never achieved the smallest notoriety) belonging to a boy called Offord whose parents lived in Madeira, where they had possibly purchase the garment, was indeed once pointed out to me as ‘very lik, Widmerpool’s’. There was on no occasion the slightes question of Widmerpool being bullied, or even seriously ragged about the matter. On the contrary, his deviation seems scarcely to have been mentioned to him, except by cruder spirits: the coat becoming recognised almog immediately as a traditionally ludicrous aspect of every. day life. Years later, if you questioned his contemporaries on the subject, they were vague in their answers, and would only laugh and say that he wore the coat for a couple of terms; and then, by the time winter came round again, he was found to possess an overcoat of a more conventional Sort. . 

This overcoat gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel. How fully he was aware of this reputation it was hard to say. His behaviour certainly indicated that he hoped for more substantial credit with other people than to be known solely on account of a few months gives over to out-of-the-way dress. If such was his aim, he was unsuccessful; 

Buyer's Market

Accumulations of unrelated objects brought together for auction acquire, in their haphazard manner, a certain dignity of their own: items not to be tolerated in any inhabited dwelling finding each its own level in these expansive, anonymous caverns, where, making no claim to individual merit, odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other, and with the general sobriety of background. 

Such precincts have something of museums about them, the roving crowd on the whole examining the assembled relics with an expert, unselfconscious intensity, not entirely commercial or acquisitive. 

On these particular premises almost every man-mad thing seemed represented. Comparatively new mowing machines: scabbardless and rusty cavalry sabres: ebony fragments of African fetish: a nineteenth-century type writer, poised uncertainly on metal stilts in the midst of a tea-set in Liverpool ware, the black-and-white landscapes of its design irreparably chipped. Several pillows and bolsters covered with the Union Jack gave a disturbing hint that, somewhere beneath, a corpse awaited burial with military honours. Farther off, high rolls of linoleum, coloured blue, green and pink, were ranged against the wall like pillars, a Minoan colonnade from which wicker arm-chairs and much-used pieces of luggage formed a semicircle. Within this open space, placed rather like an emblem arranged for worship, stood the washstand round which the pictures were grouped. On its marble top rested an empty bird-cage, two men-at-arms in lead, probably German, and a dogeared pile of waltz music. In front of a strip of Axminster carpet, displayed like faded tapestry from the side of a nearby wardrobe in pitch pine, a fourth painting stood upside down. 

&

 He was a great believer in insisting absolutely upon the minute observance by others of his own wishes.

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Finally, we were all left standing in the centre of the court beside Monsieur Orn, who had limited himself throughout the commotion almost entirely to monosyllables. He now began to speak in a deep, strident voice, which after a minute or two showed signs of shaking with emotion. At first Widmerpool and I were unable to grasp the root of the trouble, partly because Monsieur Lundquist’s lobbing technique was sufhciently common for none of the rest of us specially to have noticed it that afternoon: partly because at that age I was not yet old enough to be aware of the immense rage that can be secreted in the human heart by cumulative minor irritation.

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But suddenly as I hung up the receiver—think ing that perhaps I had left Short rather ruthlessly in the lurch so far as his evening was concerned—I found myself wondering whether I was still in love. Barbara’s voice had sounded so peremptory, and it was clear that someone else had failed her at the last moment. In that there was, of course, nothing to be taken reasonably amiss. Obviously I could not expect to sit next to her at dinner every night of our lives—unless I married her; perhaps not even then. And yet my heart seemed a shade lighter. Was the fever passing? I was myself still barely conscious of its declension. I had not at that time met Barnby, nor had opportunity to digest one of his favourite maxims: ‘A woman always overplays her hand.’ 

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As I have already said of Mrs. Andriadis’s party, such latitudes are entered by a door through which there is rarely if ever a return; and, in rather the same manner, that night at Mr. Deacon’s certain matters seemed to crystallise. Perhaps this crystallisation had something to do with the presence there of Members and Quiggin, though they themselves were in agreement as to the displeasure they both felt in the company assembled. 

‘You must admit,’ said Members, looking round the room, ‘it all looks rather like that picture in the Tate, of the Sea giving up the Dead that were in It. I can’t think why Mona insisted on coming.’ 

Quiggin concurred in finding Mr. Deacon’s guests altogether unacceptable, at the same time paying suitable commendation to the aptness of the pictorial allusion.

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While I was making some temporising answer to these reassurances on Mrs. Widmerpool’s part regarding her inclination towards literature, Miss Walpole-Wilson was announced, who excused her lateness on the grounds of the chronic irregularity of the bus service from Chelsea, where her flat was situated. She was wearing a mackintosh, of which, for some reason, she had refused to divest herself in the hall; exemplifying in this manner a curious rai common to some persons of wilful nature, whose egotism seems often to make them unwilling, even incapable, of shedding anything of themselves until they can feel that they have safely reached their goal. She now removed this waterproof, folding and establishing it upon a chair—an act watched by her hostess with a fixed smile that might have signihed disapproval—revealing that she, too, was wearing a richly-coloured coat. It was made of orange, black, and gold silk: a mandarin’s coat, so she explained, that Sir Gavin had given her years before. 

The Acceptance World

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be. 

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I intend no cheap cynicism,’ Barnby said. ‘It is merely that in print the truth is not credible for those who have not thought deeply of the matter.’ 

‘That is true of almost everything.’ 

‘To some extent. But painting, for example—where women are concerned—is quite different from writing. In painting you can state everything there is to be said on the subject. In other words, the thing is treated purely gsthetically, almost scientifically. Writers always seem to defer to the wishes of the women themselves.’ 

‘So do painters. What about Reynolds or Boucher?’ 

‘Of course, of course,’ said Barnby, whose capacity for disregarding points made against him would have supplied the foundation for a dazzling career at the Bar. ‘But in writing—perhaps, as you say, chiefly writing in this country —there is no equivalent, say, of Renoir’s painting. Renoir did not think that all women’s flesh was Jiterally a material like pink satin. He used that colour and texture as a convention to express in a simple manner certain pictorial ideas of his own about women. In fact he did so in order to get on with the job in other aspects of his picture. I never find anything like that in a novel.’ 

‘You find plenty of women with flesh like that sitting in the Ritz.’ 

‘Maybe. And I can paint them. But can you write about them ?? 

No real tradition of how women behave exists in English Writing. In France there is at least a good rough and ready Convention, perhaps not always correct—riddled with every form of romanticism—but at least a pattern to which a Writer can work. A French novelist may conform with the convention, or depart from it. His readers know, more of less, which he is doing. Here, every female character ha to be treated empirically.’ 

‘Well, after all, so does every woman,’ said Barnby another of whose dialectical habits was suddenly to switch round and argue against himself. ‘One of the troubles, | think, is that there are too many novelists like St. John Clarke,’ 

‘But novelists of the first rank have not always been attracted to women physically.’ 

If of the first rank,’ said Barnby, ‘they may rise above tt If anything less, abnormal novelists are, I believe, largel responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour. 

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The meal passed off, therefore, with more success than might have been expected from such oddly assorted company. I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary. This party’s singular composition was undoubtedly enhanced by the commonplace nature of its surroundings. At the same time it was evident that the Templers themselves saw nothing in the least out-of-the-way about the guests collected round their table for Sunday luncheon 

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But now everything is “bourgeois ~ Liberalism, I have no doubt, most of all. As a matter of fact, his politics were the only liberal thing about him.’ 

‘And it began as soon as he met Quiggin?’ 

I first noticed the change when he persuaded me to join in what he called “collective action on the part of writers and artists’*—going to meetings to protest against Manchuria and so on. I agreed, first of all, simply to humour him. It was just as well I did, as a matter of fact, because it led indirectly to another job when he turned his back on me. You know, what St. J. really wants is a son. He wants to be a father without having a wife.’ 

‘I thought everyone always tried to avoid that.’ 

‘In the Freudian sense,’ said Members, impatiently, ‘his nature requires a father-son relationship. Unfortunately, the situation becomes a little too life-like, and one is faced with a kind of artificially constructed Oedipus situation.’ 

‘Can’t you re-convert him from Marxism to psychoanalysis?’ 

Members looked at me fixedly. 

‘St. J. has always pooh-poohed the subconscious,’ he said. 

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When you are in love with someone, their life, past, “ present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life; and yet, at the same time, since two separate human entities in fact remain, you merely carry your own prejudices into another person’s imagined existence; not even into their ‘real’ existence, because only they themselves can estimate what their ‘real’ existence has been. Indeed, the situation might be compared with that to be experienced in due course in the army where an officer is responsible for the conduct of troops stationed at a post too distant from him for the exercise of any effective control. 

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‘But not in the future,’ he said, breathing inward hard. ‘{’m changing my trade. 

‘<j heard rumours.’ 

‘Of what?’ 

‘That you were joining the Acceptance World.’ 

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ 

Widmerpool sniggered. 

‘And you?’ he asked. 

‘Nothing much.’ 

‘Still producing your art books? It was art books, wasn’t ? 

. ‘Yes—and I wrote a book myself.’ 

‘Indeed, Nicholas. What sort of a book?’ 

‘A novel, Kenneth.’ 

‘Has it been published?’ 

‘A few months ago.’ 

‘Oh.’ 

His ignorance of novels and what happened about them was evidently profound. That was, after all, reasonable enough. Perhaps it was just lack of interest on his part. Whatever the reason, he looked not altogether approving, and did not enquire the name of the book. However, probably feeling a moment later that his reply may have sounded a shade flat, he added: ‘Good ... good, rather in the manner of Le Bas himself, when faced with an activity of which he was uninformed and suspicious, though at the same time unjustified in categorically forbidding. 

‘As a matter of fact I am making some notes for a book myself,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Quite a different sort of book from yours, of course. So we may be authors together. Do you always come to these dinners? 

Boredom from Bellow

 From Humboldts Gift

I had a lively time in the vast jurors’ hall going over boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right. In modern times the question had been dealt with under the name of anomie or Alienation, as an effect of capitalist conditions of labor, as a result of leveling in Mass Society, as a consequence of the dwindling of religious faith or the gradual using up of charismatic or prophetic elements, or the neglect of Unconscious powers, or the increase of Rationalization in a technological society, or the growth of bureaucracy. It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world—either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance, the power of performance, the keenness of faculties, the creativity in their hysterical fits as they had in their quiet periods. Or as William James put it, human beings really lived when they lived at the top of their energies. Something like the Wille zur Macht. Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. (I try to guard against falling into the social-science style on these mental occasions.) Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention—all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest. This insight I owe to Von Humboldt Fleisher who showed me how it was done by James Joyce, but anyone who reads books can easily find it out for himself. Modern French literature is especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom. Stendhal mentioned it on every page, Flaubert: devoted books to it, and Baudelaire was its” chief poet. What is the reason for this peculiar French sensitivity? Can it be because the ancien régime, fearing another Fronde, created a court that emptied the provinces of talent? Outside the center, where art philosophy science manners conversation thrived, there was nothing. Under Louis XIV, the upper classes enjoyed a refined society, and, whatever else, people didn’t need to be alone. Cranks like Rousseau made solitude glamorous, but sensible people agreed that it was really terrible. Then in the eighteenth century being in prison began to acquire its modern significance. Think how often Manon and Des Grieux were in jail. And Mirabeau and my own buddy Von Trenck and of course the Marquis de Sade. The intellectual future of Europe was determined by people impregnated with boredom, by the writings of prisoners. Then, in 1789, it was young men from the sticks, provincial lawyers scribblers and orators, who assaulted and captured the center of interest. Boredom has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life. When Trotsky spoke of permanent revolution he really meant permanent interest. In the early days the revolution was a work of inspiration. Workers peasants soldiers were in 4 state of excitement and poetry. When this short brilliant phase ended, what came next? The most boring society in history. Dowdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings boring discomfort boring supervision a dull press dull education boring bureaucracy forced labor perpetual police presence penal presence, boring party congresses, et cetera. What was permanent was the defeat of interest. 

What could be more boring than the long dinners Stalin gave, as Djilas describes them? Even I, a person seasoned in boredom by my years in Chicago, marinated, mithridated by the USA, was horrified by Djilas’s account of those twelvecourse all-night banquets. The guests drank and ate, and ate and drank, and then at 2 a.m. they had to sit down to watch an American Western. Their bottoms ached. There was dread in their hearts. Stalin, as he chatted and joked, was mentally picking those who were going to get it in the neck and while they chewed and snorted and guzzled they knew this, they expected shortly to be shot. 

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. 

There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza. tion, of the realiration of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense, The human being, more and more op. pressed by the peculiar terms of hist existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistencet Foy people who crave continual interest and diversity, Of how boy. ing death will bel To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful! 

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technologicalbureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever—by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,”’ of ““Denmark’s a prison.” 

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” I must tell you that I enjoyed Szathmar in this vein. As he was giving me the works like this his eyes kept turning to the left, where no one stood. If someone were standing there, some objective witness, he would support indignant Szathmar. Szathmar’s dear mother had this same trait. She too summoned justice from empty space in this outraged way, laying both hands on her bosom. 

&

 And she and her client, the big potent-looking lady in the polka-dot poplin, said, ‘Ciao, so long.”” And there was the handsome russet and glass skyscraper, and there was the insignificant Picasso sculpture with its struts and its sheet metal, no wings, no victory, only a token, a reminder, only the idea of a work of art. Very similar, I thought, to the other ideas or reminders by which we lived—no more apples but the idea, the pomologist’s reconstruction of what an apple once was, no more ice cream but the idea, the recollection of something delicious made of substitutes, of starch, glucose, and other chemicals, no more sex but the idea or reminiscence of that, and so with love, belief, thought, and so on. On this theme I rose in an elevator 

&

He hammered them with this, he said they should be proud to have a client like me so of course they detested me sight unseen. The quintessence of their prejudice was once expressed by Szathmar himself when he lost his temper and shouted, “You’re nothing but a prick with a pen!” He was so sore that he surpassed himself and yelled even louder, “With or without a pen you're a prick!” But I wasn’t offended. I thought this was a whopping epithet and I laughed. If you o1 put it right you could say what you liked to me. Howeveff knew exactly how I made Tomchek and Srole feel. From their side they inspired me with an unusual thought. This was that History had created something new in the USA, namely crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor. America had always been very upright and moral, a model to the entire world, so it had put to death the very idea of hypocrisy and was forcing itself to live with this new imperative of sincerity, and it was doing an impressive job. 

&

 “The quenching of my thirst is not something that begins in my mouth. It begins with the water, and the water is out there, in the external world. So with truth. Truth is something we all share. Two plus two for me is two plus two for everyone else and has nothing to do with my ego. That I understand. Also the answer to Spinoza’s argument that if the dislodged stone had consciousness it could think, ‘I am flying through the air,’ as if it were freely doing it. But if it were conscious, it would not be a mere stone. It could also originate movement. Thinking, the power to think and to know, is a source of freedom. Thinking will make it obvious that spirit exists. The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit’s ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. Every perception causes a certain amount of death in us, and this darkening is a necessity. The clairvoyant can actually see that when he learns how to obtain the inward view. To do this, he must get out of himself and stand far off.” 

“All this is in the texts,’ says Dr. Scheldt, “I can’t be sure that you have grasped it all, but you’re fairly accurate.” 

“Well, I understand in part, I think. When our understanding wants it, divine wisdom will flow toward us.” 

Then Dr. Scheldt begins to speak on the text, I am the light of the world. To him that light is understood also as the sun itself. Then he speaks of the gospel of Saint John as drawing upon the wisdom-filled Cherubim, while the gospel of Saint Luke draws upon the fiery love the Seraphim—Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones being the three highest spiritual hierarchy. I am not at all certain that I am following. “I have no experience of any of this advanced stuff, Dr. Scheldt, but I still find it peculiarly good and comforting to hear it all said. I don't at all know where I’m at. One of these days when life is quieter I’m going to buckle down to the training course and do it in earnest.” 

“When will life be quieter?” 

“I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.” 

“You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.” 

He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true. 

Moreover, there were the dead to think of. Unless I had utterly lost interest in them, unless I were satisfied to feel only a secular melancholy about my mother and my father or Demmie Vonghel or Von Humboldt Fleisher, I was obliged to investigate, to satisfy myself that death was final, that the dead were dead. Either I conceded the finality of death and refused to have any further intimations, condemned my childish sentimentality and hankering, or I conducted a full and proper investigation. Because I simply didn’t see how I could refuse to investigate. Yes, I could force myself to think of it all as the irretrievable loss of shipmates to the devouring Cyclops. I could think of the human scene as a battlefield. The fallen are put into holes in the ground or burned to ash. After this, you are not supposed to inquire after the man who gave you life, the woman who bore you, after a Demmie whom you had last seen getting into a plane at Idlewild with her big blond legs and her make-up and her earrings, or after the brilliant golden master of conversation Von Humboldt Fleisher, whom you had last beheld eating a pretzel in the West Forties. You could simply assume that they had been forever wiped out, as you too would one day be. So if the daily papers told of murders committed in the streets before crowds of neutral witnesses, there was nothing illogical about such neutrality. On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone in the world had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and this murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these Same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice. Convinced of this, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to Dr. Scheldt to talk about Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones and Dominions and Exousiai and Archai and Angels and Spirits, 

I said to Dr. Scheldt at our last meeting, “Sir, I have studied the pamphlet called The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History, and it contains a fascinating passage about sleep. It seems to say that mankind doesn’t know how to sleep any more. That something should be happening during sleep that simply isn’t happening and that this is why we wake up feeling so stale and unrested, sterile, bitter, and all the rest of it. So let me see if I’ve got it right. The physical body sleeps, and the etheric body sleeps, but the soul goes off.” 

“Yes,” said Professor Scheldt. ““The soul, when you sleep, enters the supersensible world, or at least one of its regions. To simplify, it enters its own element.” 

“T’d like to think that.” 

“Why shouldn’t you?” 

“Well, I will, just to see if I understand it. In the supersensible world the soul meets the invisible forces which were known by initiates in the ancient world in their Mysteries. Not all the beings of the hierarchy are accessible to the living, only some of them, but these are indispensable. Now, as we sleep, the pamphlet says, the words that we have spoken all day long are vibrating and echoing about us.” 

“Not literally, the words,” Dr. Scheldt corrected. 

“No, but the feeling-tones, the joy or pain, the purpose of the words. Through the vibrations and echoes of what we have thought and felt and said we commune as we sleep with the beings of the hierarchy. But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, language has become so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, that the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials—the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can hear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and the air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can’t influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation, Have I got it right?” “Yes, by and large.” 

&

“Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off, tells us that the creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge. I have never suffered from a knowledge handicap. The donnée for this treatment comes from the gossip columns, which I have always read faithfully. Verbum saptentiae—I think that’s the dative. The original is apparently true. 

Joseph Mankiewicz

 Pictures Will Talk

Myers only perceived the comic sound of the name, which is a German literary “in joke” devised by Mankiewicz for the delectation of his father. Klopstock, an early German romantic poet, was one of the idols of the young Goethe, and in the famous love scene of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Werther, the lovers, Werther and Charlotte, manifest their “elective affinity” by simultaneously uttering “Klopstock,” whom they both revere. 

&

One of Mankiewicz’s favorite weekend diversions was to drive over to the then sparscly populated San Fernando Valley, across the Hollywood Hills, where many vaudeville families had quartered in the hope of breaking into the entertainment medium that had supplanted theirs. In order to maintain their acts in the event of a vaudeville revival, and to pass on their craft to their children, they devoted their weekends to practicing in their backyards. The vista of swarms of jugglers, acrobats, and the like was a spectacle that appealed to Mankiewicz’s delight in the theatrical. 

& delivers the now classic Mankiewicz line, “I don’t need matches. I can make a fire by rubbing two Boy Scouts together.” 

&

Dunne relates that Maxwell Perkins, the famous Scribners editor, could not bring himself to utter the offending word in a line from Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not: ““A man alone hasn’t got a fucking chance.” Hemingway asked what word was causing him such distress, and the editor wrote “fucking” on his appointment calendar. Hemingway then inquired, “What word do you use when you want to convey that meaning?” and the editor replied, “I don’t use any.” (Dunne gave Hemingway's question to the ghost and the editor’s reply to Mrs. Muir.) When Hemingway and the editor returned from lunch, publisher Charles Scribner came into the Office, saw the notation on the editor’s calendar, and said, “I had something for you to do the afternoon, but I won't bother you as I see you are otherwise employed.” Hemingway ; offending line was amended to “A man alone ain’t got no chance.”

&

According to Gielgud, Paul Scofeld, who was first considered for Brutus and would have been ideal in the role, had just been wigged and togaed to test for Antony when word came down to the sound stage that the MGM management had approved the most surprising piece of casting suggested by Mankiewicz and Houseman—Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Mankiewicz recalls that when he had first suggested the part to Brando in New York, the famed mumbler and paragon of the Actors’ Studio naturalistic style responded, “Oh, my God!” and made no further comment for a month. 

Brando finally invited Mankiewicz to his apartment (“a filthy pad on Fifty-seventh Street that bore the remnants of many broads,” Mankiewicz recalls) to play him the tape-recorded results of a month’s intensive study of every recorded Shakespearean actor from Barrymore to Olivier. “You sound exactly like June Allyson,” was Mankiewicz’s dismaying verdict. Brando’s reading obviously improved, because when Mankiewicz played a tape of the funeral oration for Dore Schary, the studio head was at first convinced it was a hoax and exclaimed, “I love Brando, but I can’t believe it’s him.” The columnists were equally skeptical, and nightclub comics made the prospect of a loutish Stanley Kowalski reading of “Friends, Romans, countrymen” a staple of their routines. 

&

james Mason’s Brutus, the central character of the drama, seems distinctly colorless. In fact, the casting of Brando, the male sex symbol, antihero of his day who had succeeded in making even the brutal Stanley Kowalski sympathetic, prejudiced the audience to side with Antony and commiserate little with the tragedy of Brutus. (It is a rare Julius Caesar in which Antony bests Brutus at funeral oratory through famboyance rather than cleverness.) 

The director’s task in any production of Julius Caesar is to delineate Brutus’s position in the center of Shakespcare’s triptych of male portraits. He must make us empathize with Brutus as he arrives at the dificult decision to commit his knife and tongue to the assassination conspiracy and face the dire consequences. 

As Gielgud, a Shakespearean scholar as well as actor, points out, “Brutus is the most difficult part in the play. He is Shakespeare’s first sketch for Hamlet and Macbeth, and he should be fascinating. The problem is that Brutus is almost always overshadowed [in performance] by the effectiveness of the parts of Cassius and Antony.” 

James Mason as Brutus compounds the problem because his personality is not inherently good-natured, and his bitter, unsympathetic quality, though muted, continually works against the domestic pathos of his scenes with his wife (Deborah Kerr) and his surrogate son, Lucius, his boy attendant and minstrel. The qualities that made Mason a star in the forties—the arrogance and coldness that made him ‘“‘the man you love to hate’—are wrong for Brutus, and Mason rightly suppresses them. But the result is a performance restrained to the point of self-effacement. 

Mankiewicz’s miscalculation of Mason’s aptitude for Brutus may have been influenced both by the actor’s splendid performance in Five Fingers and by Joe’s closeness to Mason and his wife, Pamela, with whom Joe frequently socialized during this period. The Masons and Mankiewicz were seen together so often that they became a gossip column item and the subject of malicious conjecture in the Hollywood colony. 

John Gielgud says of Mason, “There is something a bit murderous about him, and [Brutus] should be the last one you’d think [to be a murderer].” Gielgud recalls that Mason, in his years at the Old Vic usually playing opposite Charles Laughton, was “a very good Shakespearean actor in rather an understated way. He had great intelligence, but he hadn’t really big guns.” 

&

 For 24 years Mimi's muff still rolled across the stage, though sometimes because of the corpulence of the soprano there was no lap for it to fall from and it was posthumously flung into the air,  wrote Mankiewicz, much like a football

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. 

&

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.