Pale Fire and the Eighteenth Century

NB. I have attempted to avoid spoilers in the below, but readers who wish to experience this puzzlebox unsullied by my grubby hands are invited to go elsewhere.

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’
- James Boswell, Life of Johnson (the epigraph to Pale Fire)

Pale Fire cannot be fully appreciated within a contemporary interpretive context. That much is clear from reading Richard Rorty's preface to my copy; though his exposition is possessed of an admirable moral clarity, his satisfaction with having found the key to the book in Nabokov's thundering revelation at the end leaves one someone disappointed (not to mention that his narrative of just whom the reader is supposed to identify with is very much off-base). I think one particularly productive avenue of approach runs through the eighteenth century. The book suggests--nay, demands--we take it, what with the frequent evocations of Johnson and Pope, the references to Boswell, Swift, etc.

The most obvious point of comparison is, of course, Tristram Shandy. One need not be a Shandean to be a Shadean, but it certainly helps. After all, each book promises the life and opinions of one author, and delivers those of quite another; each book is an intense and witty study of the life emplotted, veering off in its narrative from the supposed grounding of fact it is held to be founded upon; each book delights in its Shakespeare references (Alas, poor YORICK!) and devotes pages to the study of names. But I don't think the analogy gives us much beyond the similarities; it is perhaps somewhat of an absurdity to use one notoriously tangled and obscure work to decode another.

No, the point of comparison should be Boswell. The Life of Johnson (which your ignorant author has only read in extract) is a curious text, for it contains essentially the whole of Boswell's literary career; his journals were unknown during this time. Boswell's an arrant thief, stealing his light from the much greater celebrity of Dr. Johnson (remember that in the end of the book, we are told that John Shade himself resembles Johnson--and note the initials: SJ/JS). Like Pale Fire's commentary itself, moreover, Boswell's hagiography incorporated much fiction and hearsay, and false imputation of direct experience.

But Boswell was also, like Kinbote, an outsider, an immigrant from another "distant northern land": Scotland. His experience is a movement from periphery to center, and his experiences in the London Journal suggest some of the same culture shock which no doubt accounts for Kinbote's reputation as a lunatic (actual lunacy notwithstanding).

If Zembla is a distant echo of Scotland, then we cannot avoid being reminded of a yet more famous invented poet's oeuvre: James MacPherson and his Ossian. "Pale Fire," indeed, is an almost perfect mirror of Ossian's works: the former is a 'real' poem written by a questionably real author that fails to describe the wonders of a questionably real northern land, and the latter consists of questionably real poems written by a questionably real poet really evoking the wonders of a real northern land.

Tentatively, this interpretation gives some support for the Kinbotean hypothesis. For what would Ossian be without the invented Scottish tradition he carries, implicitly?"Pale Fire," in a similar way, allows Kinbote a space for his Zemblan disquisitions...

The Frontiers of Philosophy

For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.

What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

- Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

The frontier, to Turner, is not a place. It is not even a heterotopia, though the spatial escape it offers suggests that association. The frontier is a process and a mentality, a way of doing things and thinking about things. The frontier is where human endeavor pushes to the limits of the known, ready to surrender itself to the unseen catalytic forces of a not yet phenomenal world; it is the birthplace of danger and of hope, a relentlessly pragmatic confluence of circumstances that pares away all that is not useful, meaningful, or adaptable in the dusty legacies of the old world.

But the frontier has closed, and the logic of endeavor is now more Luhmann-style differentiation than outward expansion. Not only in a spatial sense; though John F. Kennedy tried to open a "final frontier," the effort became irrelevant, because the frontier mentality was gone. The notion of a drive outward--the Transcendentalists discovering the self as Conestoga wagons rumbled west--is no longer a cultural assumption we can even comprehend. No doubt it had its hubris and its fatal flaws, the millions of virgin-soil victims standing as an ineluctable memorial against any such nostalgia. But as our science tweaks our genes, our state tacks on another agency, the global marketing machine comes up with a new brand name, the environment collapses another few notches, it is difficult not to feel a twinge of regret for a world in which aspiration had meaning.

Indulging in these sentiments is pointless. What relevance could some nineteenth century nonsense possibly have for us? After all, we did quite nicely after 1893, what with the cars and the nukes and the computers and all.

Perhaps; but what if the idea that a frontier is a mentalité suggests immediately a history of mentalités? That a frontier implies and entails its own closing? Then we can say that this is not merely an American historical fantasy. Frontiers, indeed, are closing all around us.

Philosophy, and with it historiography itself, might be one of these frontiers. Carl Becker gloomily predicted in the early 20th century that history would soon be organized in "properly dull and documented monographs." We do not share that expectation; still, the ever-expanding ranks of an ever-less-employable professoriate suggest the question of how much original work there is really left to be done. For philosophy, like history, is a process of production, of manufacturing some interesting or coherent thesis from the raw materials of implication, premise, data. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and every decade the interpretations get more derivative or more implausible. How many ways are there to deny the concept of an a priori subjectivity? Is there anywhere left to go once we have killed off the capital-letter Abstractions of modernity?

Differentiation, not expansion, will soon become recognized as the ruling logic of intellectual thought. This means recombination, in interesting and occasionally even useful ways; it also means an endless resifting of already worked-over sand. No new paradigm or even, god help us, metanarrative has yet emerged to counteract this logic. If no new paradigms are possible--intellectual labor will be every bit the circle-jerk fraud the anti-intellectuals have always accused it of being. If this comes to pass--what choice do we have other than to aestheticize it?

Jules Verne: Writing the Taboo

All night I remained by the side of the poor fellow's corpse, and several times Miss Herbey joined me in my mournful watch.

Before daylight dawned the body was quite cold, and as I knew there must be no delay in throwing it overboard, I asked Curtis to assist me in the sad office. The body was frightfully
emaciated, and I had every hope that it would not float.

As soon as it was quite light, taking every precaution that no one should see what we were about, Curtis and I proceeded to our melancholy task. We took a few articles from the lieutenant's pockets, which we purposed, if either of us should survive, to remit to his mother. But as we wrapped him in his tattered garments that would have to suffice for his winding-sheet, I started back with a thrill of horror. The right foot had gone, leaving the leg a bleeding stump!
- Jules Verne, Survivors of the Chancellor (Le Chancellor)

Jules Verne was probably the earliest intellectual influence on my life. As a child, I had convinced myself that it was good and profitable reading, and I set to work on my grandmother's Zhyul Vern. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy with a vengeance. I must have spent half of my childhood curled up on the veranda couch with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or The Floating Island, eating sweet plums, dripping the juice all over the crackling Soviet pages. Mysterious Island was, of course, my favorite; one after another, the characters conquer the forces of nature with the power of science and human ingenuity, a million little triumphs. (If you read Mysterious Island parallel with Bouvard and Pécuchet, you will at last understand the nineteenth century.)

But Chancellor terrified me; I stopped reading for a while when I got to the above lines, the beginning of Chapter XLI. The pieces of the puzzle are clear: a shipwreck, the survivors floating on a raft amid open ocean, no food, no hope of rescue, a dead man's body whose leg has mysteriously disappeared. The conclusion is thus unavoidable: the survivors of the Chancellor have turned to cannibalism, eating the body of the noble Lieutenant to stay alive for a few more hopeless days. The instinctive association is confirmed by the long tradition of stories about such instances, as, for example, in the case of the real-life Brig Caledonia and the Mignonette.

But when I picked up the book again, things turned out differently. The lieutenant's leg did not become dinner--rather, it was apparently used as fish bait by the sinister boatswain, who soon turns out to be surprised that sharks have managed to eat the chunk of bloody flesh he hung off the side of the raft in the hopes of catching a "large fish." This implausible story shocks the young narrator, who puts his hand over the boatswain's mouth.

Why is there no actual cannibalism in Le Chancellor? Was Verne, perhaps, afraid to include such graphic scenes in his novel? But the way the chapter is written suggests that he intended the cannibalism to be there. Why else wedge the "fish-bait" issue into it? Corpse mutilation does little as a plotline on its own. Or maybe the cannibalism was supposed to be understood as having happened, but concealed from an unsuspecting reader (remember, the book is technically the diary of a passenger)? In that case, Verne would seem to have a much subtler grasp of form and content than he is given credit for.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

He knows that history professors do not love history because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is something that has come to pass; that they hate a revolution like the present one because they feel it is lawless, incoherent, irrelevant -- in a word, unhistoric; that their hearts belong to the coherent, disciplined, historic past. For the temper of timelessness, the temper of eternity-thus the scholar communes with himself when he takes his walk by the river before supper-that temper broods over the past- and it is a temper much better suited to the nervous system of a history professor than are the excesses of the present. The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.
- Thomas Mann, "Disorder and Early Sorrow"

This might be the only twentieth-century short story that has ever made me want to cry. Perhaps it hits a little close to home, or that it hits close to a mythic, imagined home--Carson McCullers wrote, "we are homesick most for the places we have never known." Pnin is an example of the former for me; I have been convinced for years that Nabokov wrote books specifically for academic Russian expatriates living in the United States, and that no one else can really understand his jokes and subtexts. But that's just my prejudice.

"Disorder and Early Sorrow" is a perfect moment--a scene frozen in a paperweight, preserved in amber. The encroaching financial havoc of Weimar is visible, lurking on the periphery, but the Cornelius family isn't doing badly; they're sticking to each other, they can afford to have a party even if a beer is 1% of Abel's salary. Even the latent Freudian conflict at the heart of the story seems to lack the trauma and bitterness we associate with such things. There are no violent emotions, no offenses that can't be made okay with a kiss. The war is barely a memory.

But this is 1925. Within a decade, Nazi thugs will make Professor Cornelius' idealistic individualism irrelevant--and make the "Germanic ideal" a much more sinister project. Within two decades, the quaintly volkisch Max Hergesell will probably be lying dismembered in a ditch outside of Tobruk, the Professor will be reduced to scavenging for black-market sugar, and Snapper will be among the cannon fodder of the Eastern Front. Within three, the prematurely aging Ingrid will be spending her declining years amidst the yellowing wallpaper and dusty parquet of the Warsaw Pact.

Like the books and pamphlets of the eighteenth century, this story appeals to me because of its innocence of the imminent and irreversible transformation of its world. Which brings me back to Cornelius' meditations on the temperament of a history professor. The words of the past are dead--but they never die a natural death. They are preserved, instead, as so many Snow Whites in a cave; eternally young, eternally uncorrupted.

Sheridan and the Publicity of Playwriting

A preface to a play seems generally to be considered as a kind of closet-prologue, in which—if his piece has been successful—the author solicits that indulgence from the reader which he had before experienced from the audience; but as the scope and immediate object of a play is to please a mixed assembly in representation (whose judgment in the theatre at least is decisive), its degree of reputation is usually as determined as public, before it can be prepared for the cooler tribunal of the study.

... As for the little puny critics, who scatter their peevish strictures in private circles, and scribble at every author who has the eminence of being unconnected with them ... there will always be found a petulance and illiberality in their remarks, which should place them so far beneath the notice of a gentleman, as their original dulness had sunk them from the level of the most unsuccessful author.
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan, preface to “The Rivals” (1775)

Sheridan, one of the sharpest wits of his age, seems to put his finger on something here. He distinguishes three settings, publics, or modes of publicness: the immediate “representation” subjected to the gaze of the theatrical public, the critical and intellectual analysis performed by the “cooler tribunal of the study,” and the wretched criticism of “peevish strictures in private circles.” None of these modes is surprising in and of itself. But each of them adds a dimension, and a layer of complexity, to the facts that serve as the basis for our understanding of the public sphere.

Most of the existing frameworks are not immediately adequate for connecting these three modes. Sennett's vision of the eighteenth-century public self relies on a continuity between the theater, the street, and the coffee house. But here, it seems as if the faculties and presuppositions at play in the representational mode are different, and belong to a different audience, than the sober intellectualism of those who will read the play rather than watch it. Similarly, Habermas sees criticism as a major wellspring of the public sphere; but here, the critics are maligned as private, as unabstracted from personalities. Furthermore, Sheridan is offering his play to two publics simultaneously: the reading public that will peruse the preface, and the public in representation that will determine the form of the printed play. There is hardly any normative difference between them; in Sheridan's expostulation, the two modes play off each other, each making the other possible. Mocking critics has been a favorite artistic pastime since, probably, Aeschylus; but the critics of the third mode are posed as a foil to the more “liberal” critics of the first two, and therefore Sheridan is clearly still adhering to some normative concept of publicness. But what, precisely, is it, if it isn't rational-critical nor merely aesthetic?

I think the most significant dynamic at play in this work of Sheridan's is not the creation of a debate, but the consumption of texts. His own characters—Lydia Languish, defined by her reading matter in the form of romantic novels, and the famous Mrs. Malaprop, who can't quite translate her vocabulary into adequate usage—are defined by this consumption. Sheridan's readers are offered the chance to constitute themselves as a market for his text, just as Lydia is part of a demographic that reads romances. In this way, a “counterpublic”--in scare quotes because there's neither an opposition nor, really, any broader discourse to be resisted—is formed, as Michael Warner has suggested, as a interpretive community of readers, shaped by their responses to texts. There is no broader public that can judge Sheridan's play in the mode of representation, because, as he points out in the preface, the audience of the first nights is unique:

It is usual, I believe, to thank the performers in a new play, for the exertion of their several abilities. But when (as in this instance) their merit has been so striking and uncontroverted, as to call for the warmest and truest applause from a number of judicious audiences, the poet's after-praise comes like the feeble acclamation of a child to close the shouts of a multitude. The conduct, however, of the principals in a theatre cannot be so apparent to the public.

The mode of critical analysis is thus necessarily removed from the action; it is forced to judge a case already decided. It is in the close-knit counterpublic environment that the real evaluation takes place. Perhaps, then, counterpublics, or the diverse and exclusive markets of textual consumption that made up a large part of eighteenth-century culture, go first, before any of the public sphere's rational-critical resources can be brought to bear, and should therefore possess some comparable analytic priority.

What is Francis Bacon Hiding?

47. Concerning Government, it is a part of knowledge secret and retired, in both these respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter. We see all governments are obscure and invisible:

Totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

Such is the description of governments. We see the government of God over the world is hidden, inasmuch as it seemeth to participate of much irregularity and confusion: the government of the soul in moving the body is inward and profound, and the passages thereof hardly to be reduced to demonstration. Again, the wisdom of antiquity, (the shadows whereof are in the poets,) in the description of torments and pains, next unto the crime of rebellion, which was the giants' offence, doth detest the offence of futility, as in Sisyphus and Tantalus. But this was meant of particulars: nevertheless even unto the general rules and discourses of policy and government there is due a reverent and reserved handling.

- Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

Elsewhere in AL, Bacon mentions the "enigmatical and disclosed" method, "the pretence whereof is, to remove the vulgar capacities from being admitted to the secrets of knowledges, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil." It was, he suggests, "used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients, but disgraced since by the impostures of many vain persons who have made it as a false light for their counterfeit merchandises."

It might seem as if Bacon is condemning the "enigmatical" method. After all, he founded modern science, with its emphasis on openness, sharing of information, publicity; a science which separated itself from alchemy and magic specifically by not pretending to esotericism. But, in that case, why has he found no better way to criticize it than merely by association with "many vain persons"? He certainly knew how to criticize, as his blistering denunciation of the "idols" in the New Organon demonstrates. No; what he is saying is that the method is improperly used, not in itself objectionable.

And this leads to the second conclusion: how can we explain the above paragraph 47 at all without concluding that Bacon is in fact writing a Straussian text? His description of the enigmatical method corresponds almost exactly to Strauss' argument in Persecution. So Bacon's affirmative silence on the topic of government implies two things: first, that there is an esoteric knowledge to be discovered in this book--but evidently not in this section--and second, that the knowledge in question may be puzzled out with the appropriate method.

I have not achieved the kind of hermeneutic skill that this sort of excavation requires, and most likely will never be able to do so. But I think I have some idea of what is being concealed here. Adorno and Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, identify Bacon as one of the points when the Enlightenment is materially transformed into an instrument of domination. I think this is the key that unlocks this traité à clef. For The Advancement of Learning is a text addressed to King James, aiming to demonstrate the necessity of encouraging "learning."

So, while it never quite says so explicitly, AL aims to establish science broadly defined as an instrument of power. One of the Straussian silences of the text concerns Bacon's lengthy expostulation upon the Book of Proverbs. He explains this digression with a "desire to give authority" to the text; but that doesn't seem to follow, since Bacon generally establishes authority with a single line from a classical or scriptural source, though generally multiple sources. But Solomon is a very particular king: unlike almost every figure in the Bible endowed with secular authority, he is able to successfully rely on his own intelligence and wisdom (admittedly at least partly of divine origin--which Bacon mentions), rather than the aid of God, to govern his kingdom (1 Kings 4:30-34). In other words, precisely what is being suggested here.

This is only one of the curious indications that the text gives of its purpose. Leaving those aside, what would it mean to say that AL is a Straussian text? I can't yet say; perhaps it implies a continuation of the esoteric tradition within the Enlightenment framework, perhaps it is merely the mark of a transition point from hermetic to open domination.

Medieval Postmodernism and the Future of Philosophy

Whereas under sovereign juridical regimes of power, monopolising the taking of life helped demarcate the territorial integrity of the sovereign whose power was infinite, under biopolitics the very eventual ‘taking place’ of life now becomes the locus of a power for which infinite flux of immanent contingent change is central. ... New tabulations of life, as contingent adaptation whose very circulation amplifies and intensifies all the systemic hazards, risks, dangers, pathologies and epidemics to which it is subject, engender a new space and time of biopolitical existence for the 21st century. Hence: the widespread medicalisation of security discourse and practices – from asymptomatically ill beings and preventative medicine to asymptomatically dangerous beings and preventative war. Hence also: the securitisation of medicine as integral part of the strategy of national resilience for dealing with catastrophic event and terroristic attack ....Thus has the modern been morphing into a new hypersecuring liberal biopolitical positivity in which - the ‘cult of man’ erasing itself biopolitically - the odds on species extinction continue in lethal paradox to shorten remorselessly.

Michael Dillon is the apex, the ne plus ultra of contemporary philosophical discourse. Why? It is not because of the subject matter of his work, which is a sort of warmed-over, trendified Foucault (oddly enough, he seems to confuse 'biopower' with 'biopolitics'). No, it is possible to decode the passage, if one invests enough time and labor into such a project. The point is that the subject matter is irrelevant: it serves only as a shaky but sufficient foundation for a cathedral of words. If Homi Bhabha is Romanesque--his impregnable edifices are too dark, too simplistically impenetrable--Dillon is undoubtedly Gothic. His usage of words--long, flying strings of adjectives, occasional grotesque outcroppings of frippery, the sharp and striking peaks of phrase--recalls and reverses Panofsky's insight that Gothic cathedrals were based on the structure of Scholastic argument. Here, the solidity of logic gives way to lightness, to leaping over the abyss. New towers spring up at random next to edifices already established, ancillary chapels accrete in later ages over once-simple apses. Occasionally, a stained-glass window with familiar themes strives vainly to illuminate each nook and cranny of the temple, but its incomprehensible positioning and strange colors only cast it into more darkness. Dillon's cathedrals are grotesque carnivals of bizarrerie.

Like Bakhtin's carnival, Dillon's "medieval postmodernism" (to paraphrase Michael Trachtenberg) dethrones the King, if only for a day. "We do not need argument anymore," it seems to be saying, "for we have perfected the art of saying nothing with words." It is, of course, deficient, because it is still plagued by the vestigial scholarly apparatus of introduction, body, conclusion. In other words, it still pretends to be saying something. But perhaps this chaff, this heritage of earlier days, can be the foundation of new cathedrals. The basilica was shaped like a cross; the later Gothic churches retained the vague outline of this shape with hardly a hint of its original reference. But how much beautiful expression could be drawn from these irrelevant transepts, these fading narthexes!

The postmodernism of the future will embody the spirit of Gothic religion. It will say to us humble seculars: do not trouble yourself with the interpretation of Scripture, for you have other cares and you will get it wrong anyhow. Enjoy, instead, this brilliant, shining monument, which embodies our faith and elevates the heart of everyone concerned! Deleuze has been adopted as an evangelist, and thank God for that; his merging of poetry and philosophy will serve as a way forward for the aesthetic, as an inspiration and as a basis.

For it is merely prejudice to reduce philosophy to argument. If nothing remains to be said, then is it not a greater crime to say something and thus be banal, than to say nothing at all and thus offer the reader some fleeting but fundamental joy? The alternative is politics, the reduction of philosophy to harangue--and this is dangerous and vile in an age which has lost forever the art of rhetoric. Let our structures be ungrounded by such plebeian appeals. We must cultivate consciously the art of saying nothing, but saying it beautifully. That is our only justification.