Henry Adams, Eighteenth Century Boy

One found one’s self in a singular frame of mind,—more eighteenth-century than ever,—almost rococo,—and unable to catch anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate. London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading to another,—that the older men were more amusing than the younger,—that Lord Houghton’s breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill,—that there were fewer men one wanted to meet,—these, and a hundred more such remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity. For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him a guaranty against all education he had use for. He resented change. He would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He did not care to Americanise Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.
- The Education of Henry Adams

Perhaps no theme is more prevalent in the Education than the idea that time does not keep pace with itself. Henry Adams constantly sees himself as a figure of the eighteenth century--not only himself, but the entire mid-nineteenth century political world. Time as chronology does not match up with time as dynamic expression of the movement between unity and multiplicity. For Adams, this eighteenth-centuriness manifests in an almost instinctive longing for simplicity or order, as a vast familial inheritance given to him by his illustrious grandfather and the idea of Quincy (Henry Adams is very Proustian). And when he finally breaks through to chaos, to his dynamic theory of history, it is precisely the beginning of a movement away from that burden.

But I think Adams misjudged the entailment. The eighteenth century--even the Enlightenment Project--was not, as untrained postmodernists claim, about unitary subjects and rational ordering and the new philosophy; or rather not only about those things. When Henry Adams moved himself towards his twentieth-century multiplicity, he was really only moving to a different eighteenth century.

For education itself, as it is conceived of here, is an eighteenth-century ideal, and an attempt was made by nearly every philosophe to reach the sort of insight Adams sought. The breakdown of these attempts, the ultimate inadequacy of the task, always loomed in the background; the starkest expression was either Tristram Shandy, which widened the gap between education and practice until nothing of the latter remained, or the self-cultivation of George Washington. Washington memorized etiquette books; he strove to learn the ordered concept of the gentleman so that he could live it. When the disinterestedness of the gentleman began to conflict with his public spirit, the education proved inadequate as well.

The dynamic power of raw statistical numbers--the keystone of Adams' theory of history--is likewise the product of the eighteenth century. Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson relied on the transformative power of demographics; Adam Smith, on the power of scale and differentiation. Malthus, when he described the crisis of such a quantitative development, was merely the conclusion of a specifically eighteenth-century mania. The Physiocrats would have been unthinkable without it.

But most of all I think the affinity lies in his starkest passage, when Adams admits to himself that "he did not care whether truth was, or was not, true." It is, to be sure, a profoundly Nietzschean sentiment. But it belongs also to the eighteenth century; for one of its main differences from the seventeenth is that truth arrived at scientifically ceases to be an end in itself. How could it be? Hume wrote, "A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity." Truth was pragmatic, provisional, embraced for the sake of usefulness; and Adams was necessarily a Humean as much as a Darwinian.

Simplicissimus as Deleuzian Bildungsroman

For my part I said the German name Mummelsee sufficiently declared that there was about the thing, as about a masquerade, some disguise, so that none might fathom either its nature or its depth, which had never yet been discovered, though such high personages had attempted it ... I represented to myself how in that very place I had begun to be in place of a free man a slave of love, and how since then I had become from and officer a peasant, from a rich peasant a poor nobleman, from a Simplicissimus a Melchior, from a widower a husband, from a husband to a cuckold, and from a cuckold a widower again; moreover, from a peasant’s brat I had proved to be the son of a good soldier, and yet again the son of my old dad . Then again I reflected ... of the manifold changes which I had undergone in my lifetime, till I could no longer refrain myself from tears.
- Hans Johann Christoph Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus (1669)

The first thing that confronts us in reading Simplicissimus is that it is not in fact the story of an ingenu telling his simple truth to a deceiving world. The first third of the novel, with Simplicissimus playing the fool, indeed suggests an ironic Erasmian praise of folly. But in the rest of it, the titular vagabond has no trouble at all with adapting and internalizing the world's corruption. Where the folly of Erasmus has only two modes--as a negative worldly folly and as a positive Christian one--in Simplicissimus folly becomes a multiplicity. Some hint of that shows through in the very beginning, where Simplicissimus experiences no fewer than three abortive "educations"--he gives them their due but is fundamentally quite unmolded by the effort.

As a critique, Simplicissimus is distinguished from its descendants in the Bildungsroman genre by one startling attribute: the absence of a fundamental narrative cleavage between internal subjectivity and the external objective world. In most novels of this sort the dialogue between the two worlds is an ironic one: the subject observes the strange and unfamiliar ways of the world, critiques them, then transforms itself by constructing a satisfying, more or less cynical relationship between the external and itself. In Simplicissimus the subject is a part of the world: there is no stable subjectivity to comment on the world from outside, because the world itself constantly transforms the subject.

Thus we see the natural piety of Simplicissimus give way to lust and avarice with very little narrative transition to explain the shift; there is no internal monologue to explain how the teetotaler of the early stages becomes the ready drinker of the later part. In short, Simplicissimus changes constantly and irremediably: he moves from one army to its opponent, becomes a musketeer from a dragoon, a soldier from a vagabond and back again. Simplicissimus is a novel of Becoming and becomings--becomings-animal, becomings-female, becomings-noble. And because in no case is this becoming a transformation of some underlying stable self, it is always an assumption of different "external" masks or aspects. This is why Simplicissimus can only confront his subjectivity near a lake as deceptive as himself; and it is also why he is repeatedly compared to Empedocles, the philosopher who once said, "I have already been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a leaping journeying fish."

The end of Simplicissimus is increasingly frantic and unsatisfactory, for Grimmelshausen could not resolve the novel without making the Becoming of Simplicissimus "pay its debt to Nature," or Being (the repeated usage of "debt" in that sense is a distant allusion to Anaximander, who spoke of things giving recompense to one another through their destruction). But the nomadic flow of Simplicissimus's subjectivity cannot be smoothly reintegrated into the narrative structure of the novel, because he can never quite be a traditional dynamic character--the latter are in comparison very much static.

Simplicissimus is an unconquerable nomad, because he can immediately adapt to any requirements that power places on him and yet preserve his changeability. His is a character ideally suited for the anarchy of the Thirty Years' War, out of which the modern state was soon to be born. His most consistent literary descendant, a soldier making his way through the imagined chaos of another German war, is Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow, whose dissolution into several different personages at the end of the novel is merely a logical consequence of Simplicissimus' intractable nomadism. The Good Soldier Schweik, though a far more obvious successor, is only a bastard in comparison: Hasek's emplotting represents a return to an ironic but predictable Erasmian mode.

Gertrude Himmelfarb: History as Posture

What is wanted is not so much the exercise of the historian's moral imagination as a proper respect for the moral imagination of those contemporaries he is professing to describe. This, to be sure, takes an exercise of imagination on the historian's part--a sensitivity to ideas, a tolerance for beliefs that may not be his own, above all a respect for moral principles as such, so that he will not dismiss them too readily as rationalizations of interest, or deformations of vision, or evidence of an intellectual obtuseness that conceals from contemporaries those economic and social facts that are so obvious to the historian.
- Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old

Himmelfarb's book is, in many places, almost unbearably pompous. She is not content, as she claims to be, with attacking the social and psychoanalytic historians with the obvious methodological weapons; she also turns their intrusion into a Moral Issue For The Historian. What are we to make of this move? Every historian partakes of the spirit of her field. Himmelfarb has clearly imbibed the moral values of Victorianism--not merely as data, but as her own point of view.

Himmelfarb thinks that the perversions of social history represent a betrayal of an idealized Macaulayan history which pays Due Respect To The National Spirit of England. Her barbs are never more facile than when she is defending, with great pretensions to moral clarity, the admitted "dogmas" of Progress. Yet her penchant for trotting out one author for boos and another for hoorays tends to obscure the clear presentation of an argument on her part, besides a general Vaseline-smeared sentimentality about the good old days when people didn't deconstruct things or quantify them. Ultimately her answer to the New History is identical to Geoffrey Elton's: Political history in the Whiggish mode has to be the main subject of history, because I am unable to conceive of it as being anything else.

None of which is to say that the idiocies of psychohistory or social history are by and large much better (though she very much caricatures Erikson's admirable study of Luther). They are methodologically bankrupt, but worse, they're boring. Boring in data, boring in interpretation, boring in political implication. The Whigs were boring too, but a more tolerable, because better-written, sort of boring. Himmelfarb obviously likes Nietzsche (because he happened to live in the late nineteenth century), but not enough to acquire a subtle understanding of his work or even take to heart any of his lessons. Thus her attacks on the New History are always mulishly predicated on a rationalist will to historical truth; inevitably these attacks are backed up with appeals to Right-Thinking Historians Everywhere, which is the most tedious and insipid sort of argument and one that tends to make everything else insipid too.

One of the obvious things Himmelfarb misses--as a historian from a happier age--is the current professional dynamic of the field. There are now so many historians, especially unemployed ones, that writing a Macaulayan history is impracticable: too general, too unsexy, too many have already beaten you to the punch (of course there are still the antiquarian public historians). So it's not even as if the various New Histories are a methodological question being asked. They are a statement--"let a thousand flowers bloom," says the academic job market. By and large, the result is not wholly invidious: the terrain gets ever more complicated and unstable, so no one movement can keep itself orthodox for very long.

Her understanding of Marx, above and beyond her own vague idealism, is unbelievably primitive. When she references Marx she does it with uncomplicated single sentences expressing Cliffs-Notes level insight into his philosophy: production relations determine ideas! Private property is bad! She condemns him for not understanding Carlyle or the earlier socialists, which suggests that the responsibility is on her for not having read The German Ideology. Marx himself is not the issue, though; the truly reprehensible consequence of all this is her facile and dull personal attack on E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, lifting her lips in a petty-bourgeois sneer at their reluctance to attack the CPSU. I am no Marxist, but there is much to learn from "The Group."

But I am grateful to Himmelfarb for introducing me to Michael Oakeshott, whom I will read at first opportunity. Judging from what she writes--not quite sympathetically--I have been a Oakeshottian historical necrophiliac all my life. Now I have to reconcile that with Nietzsche.

Occultism and Rationalism in Enlightenment Historiography

Hermetic philosophical currents turn up in seventeenth-century Scottish texts that relate the Mason's Word, the secret password of lodge members, to the practices of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians. Some masonic writings also make reference to the sun in language that is Hermetic and mystical. Not least, early eighteenth-century opponents of the order, among them the Papacy, linked it to the 'Rosy-Crucians and Adepts, Brothers of the same Fraternity, or Order, who derived themselves from Hermes Trismegistus' ... These mystical philosophical traditions, grafted onto a craft of medieval origin, only made it more interesting, undoubtedly providing one explanation of why some gentlemen with philosophical interests sought to join it.
- Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment

Margaret Jacob's monograph on the Freemasons is a careful and well-drawn analysis. Its pages, however, reveal a constant struggle: the author wants, needs, to delve into the very mystical foundations--or, at least, apparatus--of Freemasonry. But she cannot, because she is committed to an academic historiographical tradition that must reject or treat with gloved hands any fanciful stories about transmission of ideas or hidden conspiracies. In the above section, she is attempting to connect the Freemasons to the older mysticism of the Rosy Cross. She stumbles: committed as she is to historical rationalism, she is unable or unwilling to draw the story further back, to the Knights Templar and their hay wain (she can also discuss a man named Moray, of all things, without noting the resemblance to poor old Grand Master Jacques de Molay) . The situation, then, is one where history demands what pure rationalism cannot offer.

Does one need to be Umberto Eco to be a historian of Freemasonry? Leo Strauss never tired of saying that in order to be a true historicist, you must be able to think ahistorically when a particular historical moment demands ahistoricism. (It wasn't any more elegant when he said it. Sorry) In this case, the traditional narratives of conspiratorial mysticism--specifically, the Freemasons' favorite story about their founding by refugee Templars and hence their connection to the Temple of Solomon--is a supremely valuable piece of historical data, even though it is quite alien to historical method. Jacob always mentions that long-destroyed Temple parenthetically, as it were, but it is in fact the anchor-stone of masonry.

A relevant point. Before the mid-19th century, many people were not sure if Jerusalem actually existed. There were skeptics who denied the actual, physical existence of any of Christendom's supposedly fundamental monuments (which do in fact still exist). In a world where historical and geographical knowledge was so inherently tenuous, the freemasons' stories about themselves revealed much about their creation of a link to some determinate history--a Long March from Roman Palestine through medieval Europe, studded with all the trappings of masonic symbolism as reminders of that historical experience.

In part, this self-understanding derived from a need to legitimate themselves as a corporate body. The city-corporations, guilds, and parlements of early modern Europe frequently drew on a quantified history of freedom or privilege. The freemasons could not quite borrow the story of the boring old masons' guild from which they emerged, for obvious reasons, so the Templar heritage provided the rhetorical foundation for their corporativeness. And as such, it was a story not much crazier than any number of other such invented traditions, from the supposed republicanism of the Germanic tribes to the saintly stonemason of San Marino.

Taking the story of the hay wain and de Molay as a provisional form of truth provides some alternate explanations even within the context of Jacob's argument. Where else than the Freemasons, she asks, could other conspiratorial groups get the nomenclature of Knights and Grand Masters? The Knights Templar present themselves immediately, though the monograph only alludes to them, and a more fit attention to their symbolic importance could potentially have changed Jacob's evolutionary tree of conspiracy groups.

But the broader point is this: myths can have more importance than facts. Perhaps even more than the Foucauldian sense, where they are only narratives, can allow: they can be ways of constructing reality, and only looking through that lens can the reality be reconstructed. History demands nothing less.

Godwits, Kiwis, and Swallows

You have heard of the kiwi: flightless, nocturnal, shortsighted, but very well acquainted with the forest floor on which it lives. There is another bird, known in English as the godwit, which every year assembles in great flocks on the northern beaches and migrates from New Zealand to Siberia and Alaska. Which to be? To risk never leaving Ithaca, or to risk never coming back? ... It depends on what one wants: a history which is one's own, or a history in which one can move freely; the island or the ocean, the landfall or the voyage. Beyond that, however, lies the understanding that one can't choose finally, and that that's what history is about.
- JGA Pocock, Valedictory Lecture (1994)

Only British historians can be great. Americans must be satisfied with being clever, perhaps brilliant; the French, unstereotypically, methodical. But that quiet sacerdotal judiciousness, that literary style which today even the litterateurs have forgotten—it makes for books of wisdom, and history can rarely deal in anything else. Richard Southern, E. P. Thompson, even crotchety Eric Hobsbawm writes in a way that says “great” in gilt lettering on morocco leather. It's hard to help thinking they have it easy; almost as if Hume, writing his History of England with his feet up on his desk, has started a tradition.

Pocock thinks of historiography as a directed flight or crawl, a god(wit)'s eye reconnaissance or a molelike feeling for the soil. He knows, far better than I, what he is talking about; but I don't quite agree with him. I wrote a few months ago about Montaigne and his rivers, and the flow of history; today I want to write about riding on that flow. For it is easy, for some people, to take flight and not get swept up in the flow: history is
about things dead, after all, and the living owe them nothing.

But I can't be a godwit, flying to Siberia with the cities of man so much scenery below. I must read someone's words and feel with her, peel away the human rawness and bewilderment and indignation from the mannered curlicues and classical dross. I must—I suppose—swim with the current.

There is an old Russian story about an old man who saves rabbits from a spring flood; he moves up and down the riverbank, pulling the drowning creatures out of harm's way. I find myself, against my better judgment, wishing I could do the same. I figure out quickly whom I sympathize with, I see a man after my own heart even through centuries. So I end up hoping, or rather wishing, that somehow that blind and stupid torrent delivers him some happiness before dashing him against the rocks. I am often disappointed.

But I don't have a sense of native soil either. I can smell it from afar, of course, but I'm a piss-poor kiwi. I neither stay in Ithaca nor return; I am Odysseus in transit, from island to island following those same invisible delineations. I get bored and restless if I stay home, with the familiar coffee-shop crowd, with their thrice-read papers and sarcastic diaries. Some swallows, I've heard, migrate to the same eaves for years and then—they're gone.

There is a well-known fable, popularized perhaps by Borges, about the Simurgh: thirty birds who go searching for the mythical sovereign Simurgh, and find out that “Simurgh” means “thirty birds”... So much history has now been written that it seems as if we historians are ourselves becoming what we are, we have long shaped the history we study. There is room, then, for godwits and kiwis, for waxwings and Kinbotes, for swallows.

Margaret Cavendish and a Dialogic Science

Then the Empress asked them, Whether by their Sensitive perceptions they could observe the interior corporeal, figurative Motions both of Vegetables and Minerals? They answer'd, That their Senses could perceive them after they were produced, but not before; Nevertheless, said they, although the interior, figurative motions of Natural Creatures are not subject to the exterior, animal, sensitive perceptions, yet by their Rational perception they may judg of them, and of their productions if they be regular: Whereupon the Empress commanded the Bear-men to lend them some of their best Microscopes. At which the Bear-men smilingly answered her Majesty, that their Glasses would do them but little service in the bowels of Earth, because there was no light....

- Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World (1668)

Why is The Blazing World so hard to read? It doesn't seem to be simply the author's nutty preoccupation with following every narrative thread wherever it goes. Neither is it a matter of the story's weird, conflict-less structure, where every wish the author's (multiple!) personas might have is instantly and excessively gratified (a whole paragraph is spent inserting various jewels and precious metals into the protagonist's clothing). All of these things, certainly, impede reading, but fundamentally it is because The Blazing World is a work of science--even bound together with Cavendish's Observations on Experimental Philosophy.

It is a very special kind of work. If it were a treatise, it would be easier to follow; if it were a dialogue, a point of argument or identification might be determined. Instead, it is more like a conversation. The Empress of the Blazing World rules over all sorts of animal-men, whom she deputizes to be scientists. Over half the book is filled with the scientists' reports on their discoveries, reports which are staged as dialogue but in which the Empress expresses no consistent position (not even Cavendish's own). Sometimes she disagrees with the scientists and is correct; sometimes she disagrees with them and is proved wrong; sometimes she agrees provisionally for purposes of harmony. Sometimes she declares a whole branch of work meaningless.

Given this structure of the book, it might be worthwhile to draw attention to the scientific vision it implies, rather than to its more obvious feminist import (there's even lesbianism!). Her whole life, Cavendish strove in vain to be accepted among the scientists of the Royal Society--and, of course, was never taken seriously. In large part, this was because she was a woman; but it was also because the men of the Royal Society, with their elaborately recorded asphyxiation of small animals, had a spirit quite alien to Cavendish's free-flowing narrative, systematic only by necessity.

What would science have looked like had Margaret Cavendish's dialogic science won out? Besides her conventional, somewhat Cartesian physics, she had a strong distaste for experimental apparatus; this wasn't a crazy belief, given the unbelievably unreliable telescopy of the earlier part of the century. But more broadly, a Cavendishian kind of science would have much in common with Feyerabend. Cavendish does not create a theory which then acquires solid borders and clashes with other, equally hermetic schemes. She picks and chooses what seems right to her, and she eagerly abandons interpretations she begins to find unconvincing.

Perhaps a science like Cavendish's would give Thomas Kuhn far less ammunition, and perhaps an Einstein could not have arisen in such a heavily applied environment. Yet her science is also much less susceptible to scientism, much more flexible and adabtable to human needs. More importantly, it encourages debate rather than consensus, questions rather than answers.

There are, no doubt, feminists who would argue that this is a feminine vision of science. That is, I think, far too essentialist. A more plausible reading would imply that science itself, with its penetration of nature's recesses, is a patriarchal project (in which case Cavendish's work represents a kind of false consciousness). The broader lesson, though, is that groups excluded from the scientific narrative acquire a more nuanced and multiplicitious vision of the scientific world simply by virtue of being outside the ivory tower. Cavendish's work might serve to demonstrate the appeal of their approach.

The Nouveau Roman and the Persistence of the Subject

The aid of a knife has no doubt been necessary in order to dig into the layer upon layer of superimposed posters and enlarge the widest of the cracks made by the wood as it warped. The ocher circus ring has come unglued and rolled back on itself on one edge, baring the preceding poster. In the narrow triangle thus revealed, one can see a brick wall against which two silhouettes are locked in embrace. The light-colored mortar between the bricks in the wall, shown in perspective, runs off toward the left in converging lines.
- Claude Simon, Triptych

Is it possible to speak of the nouveau roman--Claude Simon's Triptych in particular--as having a definite narrative standpoint? It is tempting to think of the entire genre as an elaboration of the third person omniscient, a kind of dramatic reaction to Proust. After all, the clinical descriptions (which, to drive the point home, tend to depict sex and vomit and blood), the replacement of action with flat, affectless "data," imply a transcendent subjective gaze, a view from nowhere.

Triptych does not permit us to reach that conclusion. The narrative, such as it is, maintains an attitude of objectivity, but it is constantly, unremittingly being undermined by the description itself--for every scene is eventually revealed or recast as a representation on a postcard, a film strip, a circus poster, which then unaccountably acquires motion and activity. The same voice pretends that the scene is real and then switches to an art-critical vocabulary of composition, color, texture, never forgetting to remind the reader that the color or arrangement is the deliberate choice of some unknown artist. It undermines itself.

The reader's need to choose between the clinical gaze and the art-critical gaze might then imply a third-person limited stance. But that doesn't fit either. The novel does not really offer that choice at all: the scenes described are unavoidably both real and represented. The most adequate interpretation would suggest a schizophrenic first-person point of view, disembodied but real in its perceptions.

Perhaps this novel should then become a critique of scientific objectivity; but it doesn't let us do that either. Triptych cannot include a step outside the world of the gaze. We are forced to accept the scientific and the art-critical as the basic phenomenological facts of our experience, however fatally flawed. This phenomenology is brought out by the repeated use of one specific trope: the objectively-described scene revealed as the product of a fundamentally limited gaze--through a window or a crack in the barn wall.

The pseudo-first-person narration of the story is schizophrenic because it lacks the ability to harmoniously integrate its conflicting gazes into a common picture. It is that schizophrenia, however, which makes the real implication clear: the subject, so laboriously elided, persists in the fragmentation of its gaze.

The failure--if you can call it that--of this elision has some interesting consequences for contemporary philosophy. The nouveau roman might be the most sustained attempt at a literary death of the subject. If the subject is nonetheless reborn--then might it not be a nomad that has merely eluded us, not disappeared?