Sacred History

I shall place first in this book a miracle that I experienced recently. We were sitting at dinner after a fast and eating, when a fish was served. The sign of the cross of the Lord was made over it, but as we ate, a bone from this very fish stuck in my throat most painfully. It caused me great distress, for the point was fastened in my throat and its length blocked the passage. It prevented my speaking and kept the saliva which comes frequently from the palate, from passing. On the third day, when I could get rid of it neither by coughing or hawking, I resorted to my usual resource. I went to the tomb and prostrated myself on the pavement and wept abundantly and groaned and begged the confessor's aid. Then I rose and touched the full length of my throat and all my head with the curtain. I was immediately cured and before leaving the holy threshold I was rid of all uneasiness. What became of the unlucky bone I do not know. I did not cough it up nor feel it go down into my stomach. One thing only I know, that I so quickly perceived that I was cured that I thought that some one had put in his hand and pulled out the bone that hurt my throat.

[...]

Pannichius, a priest of Poitou, when sitting at dinner with some friends he had invited, asked for a drink. When it was served a very troublesome fly kept flying about the cup and trying to soil it. The priest waved it off with his hand a number of times but it would go off a little and then try to get back, and he perceived that it was a crafty device of the enemy. He changed the cup to his left hand and made a cross with his right; then he divided the liquor in the cup into four parts and lifted it up high and poured it on the ground. For it was very plain that it was a device of the enemy.
- from Gregory, Bishop of Tours, Eight Books of Miracles

And it goes on like this. Gregory's History of the Franks, even the abridged version I read, is full of stories about miracles that don't deliver on their punchline. One goes like this: a woman is being coerced by Arians to be baptized into their heretical religion. She prays to God for deliverance. God obliges: "When she was being forcibly immersed in that filthy bath ... she stained the water with a worthy ointment, that is, she defiled it with excrement." Then the heretics behead her, divine intervention or no. Where is the miracle? Presumably if the poor woman was looking for martyrdom, she could have found it rather more easily. But that doesn't bother Gregory. You live, great; you die, so much the better.

There is a certain innocence to this style of historical delivery which keeps the book from being a mere compendium of pious stories. God, here, is not someone who conveniently steps in with a miracle whenever one of His more virtuous handmaidens comes down with some malady. He's more like a force of nature: any confluence of luck and virtue is interpreted as a divine act, but what happens afterwards is not His responsibility. In one unusually long strand of narrative, the son of a Frankish king rebels against him and strikes out on his own. By all accounts, he's a better person than his dad is. When he takes refuge with Gregory, though, he reads the omens and finds them to be unfavorable. Gregory purses his lips and says, in essence: sorry, buddy, you should have honored thy father and thy mother. For several chapters, he narrates the prince's grim and inevitable demise. So it goes.

The secular parts of the History aren't much better. A bewildering array of -rics and -bads slaughter, betray, and beget one another. A leader presented at first as a fair and competent man soon becomes a hunted and ridiculed pariah, with no pity from the historian. Bishops are as likely to be sniveling bootlickers as noble defenders of the faith. It is a world where even the kings have to fight simply to survive, despite all their pretensions to royal authority. The caprice of God and man makes for a world of utter nihilism; where Bede gloats, Gregory shrugs his shoulders.

His narrative thus occupies a place somewhere between the self-assured orderly progression of a Macaulay and the Hayden Whitean ideal of the unstructured chronicle ("Jan. 1: Half the monks died of the plague. Feb. 1: Sunny. Two lambs born"). As the book ends, Gregory implores his successors: "if you will not be condemned with the devil and depart in confusion from the judgment, never cause these books to be destroyed or rewritten, selecting some passages and omitting others, but let them all continue in your time complete and undiminished as they were left by us." The History is his own act of self-realization, an attempt at creating something permanent amidst all the blood and chaos--but it never takes itself for granted or concedes to the historian the authority of the world-builder. These are but the traces of authorship. So if he weaves his own life in with the rest, if he devotes space to his personal squabbles and little miracles as well as the affairs of kings and generals, we can forgive him. He's demonstrating the utility of history for life.

Between Banality and Postmodernism

Confessions of a Book Lover (1984)

I came to love books. Really love them. And I decided to assemble a library.
So I come to the bookstore:
"Have you got any Pushkin?"
"We don't have any Pushkin. We have Peshkin, a substitute for Pushkin. Aleksandr Peshkin, quite a respectable poet."
"Maybe you have Bunin?"
"There's Dunin. Evdokim Dunin. A substitute for Bunin."
Fine, Dunin it is. Peshkin it is. So I get all these substitutes together--nowhere to put them.
So I come to the furniture store:
"Have you got any bookshelves?"
"We don't have any bookshelves. Go to the post office," they advise me, "buy shipping crates, stack one on top of another, or hang them on a wall. There's some bookshelves for you."
I come to the post office:
"Do you have any shipping crates?"
"We don't have any shipping crates, we have substitutes for shipping crates. Take this rag, sew it around your package..."
"But how do I make a bookshelf out of that?"
I'm walking and thinking: how do I make a bookshelf out of a rag?
I come to a pharmacy:
"Have you got any heart medicine?"
"We don't have any heart medicine, take some stomach medicine instead. It's an irreplaceable substitute."
So I take the stomach medicine and call 911.
"I need a doctor!"
"There's no doctor. There's a substitute doctor. He's got a diploma, experience, it's all there."
So I die. I appear before God.
"And that," I say, "that was life?"
"What life?" God asks, surprised. "We ran out of lives a long time ago. That was a substitute for life."
I want to make a scene, but he smiles in a conciliatory way:
"What do you want? I'm not God, after all."
And then I remember: God doesn't really exist. As a book lover, I should have known that.
Dunin writes about it, and Peshkin writes about it...
There's no God. The position exists, though. And who occupies it? A substitute...
- from Felix Krivin, Simple Stories (Простые рассказы)

Felix Krivin is one of those Soviet writers who will never be translated--he will barely even be remembered. He was a resolutely middlebrow and mostly unfunny humorist, whose work almost never exceeded the narrow conceptual limits of Brezhnevist quasi-edginess. Mostly he is known for fantasias centered around the theme of the "secret life of things," vaguely endearing and slightly sad moral fables about household objects and animals and the like. Ideology appears only at a great distance, like a seagull seen from a lighthouse, and critique never shows up at all. (Although one of his Simple Stories is particularly brilliant: it's narrated by a cow which exists only on paper, invented in order to "fulfill" a production quota.)

In the halcyon days of the early '90s, when people were still listening to what Russian academics had to say, Mikhail Epstein argued that the Russians were almost ontogenetically well-suited for postmodernism. Image without substance has been the defining feature of Russian life: we have "democracy" without democracy, "communism" without communism, "progress" without progress. So it is unsurprising that so much of Krivin's work is formalistically obsessed with the distinction between reality and its image. The uncertain relationship between the two was the very prima materia of Soviet social existence.

What is particularly interesting, though, is the similarity between Krivin's work and trendy Western novels cast in the David Foster Wallace lost-in-the-supermarket mold. The orthodox story of postmodernism as a "cultural logic" always underscores its relationship to capitalism: glitzy, substance-free brand marketing, "reality" shows, abstract finance capital. But, just as Debord's spectacle was both a communist and a capitalist phenomenon, the same logic also reasserted itself in the East--much earlier, in fact. The difference was that Soviet postmodernism, the postmodernism of the banal, was not self-conscious. It was dramatically "under-theorized." If an image is gray and drab, is it any the less an image for not being coated in neon?

The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo and what-have-you, especially the older and better ones, are always written with a kind of look back to what they are not doing. They're not doing the linear narrative; they're not trying for moral rigor; they're not going for the modernist's eternal verities. Here, have a brand name! Have five! Soviet postmodernism is a different beast. Not only is it not written with any clear sense of what has been lost; it is also filled with the sense that no alternative can even be thought. In its unproblematic substitution of the postmodern for everyday life, it succeeds at doing what DeLillo only aspires to do.

By far the best self-consciously postmodernist fiction I've ever encountered is written by Victor Pelevin and a number of similar authors. In fact, "postmodernism" in Russia denotes primarily a literary genre. Pelevin's career, like that of Sorokin and the others, only took off after the fall of the Soviet Union. It makes sense: a truly self-conscious postmodernism could not have coexisted with the likes of Krivin. But it would also have been unthinkable in Russia without its predecessor, the postmodernism of the banal. Pelevin can only realize postmodernism because he has lived it, more than even DeLillo has.

Shit Poetry

Now fairest village of the fertile plain,
Made fertile by the labours of the swain;
Who first my drowsy spirit did inspire,
To sing of woods, and strike the rural lyre:
Who last should see He wand'ring from thy cells,
And groves of oak where contemplation dwells.
Wou'd fate but raise me o'er the smaller cares,
Of Life unwelcome and distressful years,
Pedantic labours and a hateful ease,
Which scarce the hoary wrinkled sage cou'd please.
Hence springs each grief, each long reflective sigh,
And not one comfort left but poetry.
Long, long with her I could have stray'd
To woods, to thickets or the mountain shade;
Unfit for cities and the noisy throng,
The drunken revel and the midnight song;
The gilded beau and scenes of empty joy,
Which please a moment and forever die.
Here then shall center every wish, and all
The tempting beauties of this spacious ball:
No thought ambitious, and no bold design,
But heaven born contemplation shall be mine
In yonder village shall my fancy stray,
Nor rove beyond the confines of to-day;
The aged volumes of some plain divine,
In broken order round my hut shou'd shine;
Whose solemn lines should soften all my cares,
And sound devotion to th' eternal stars:
And if one sin my rigid breast did stain,
Thou poetry shou'dst be the darling sin;
Which heav'n without repentance might forgive,
And which an angel might commit and live.
- Philip Freneau, "The American Village"

Pastoral has its uses. A particularly important one is to give embittered intellectuals something to aspire to. "The civilized world is so ungrateful! Commercialism is offensive! Once I betake myself to rural life, its idiocy will purify and fulfill me! Deus haec nobis otia fecit!" I admit there is something to this; it's hard not to aspire to clean air, manly work, and sound sleep if the only alternative one has ever known involves reading Gawker and riding the subway. But why, if the image it paints is so welcome, is pastoral poetry so uniformly terrible? Nature poetry in the hands of anyone other than Robinson Jeffers always risks being a sad joke--but pastoral poetry (especially in the eighteenth century) is its own species of bad. Few genres have made more use of unimaginatively repeated tropes, empty moralism, stale sentimentality, and hackneyed rhymes. The few pastoral poems we still read (Goldsmith?) manage to wring a smigden of compelling emotional content out of their meager capital, but they are the exception and not the rule.

In fact, pastoral poetry is shit because the internal logic of pastoral demands that it be (almost) literally shit--the largely irrelevant undigested byproduct of some kind of more beneficial activity. In the game of pastoral, the poet retreats to the country because of its moral, intellectual, and physical benefits; there, he can achieve perfect "contemplation," which is either a kind of rarefied omphaloskepsis or a practice of pious meditation on God's perfections. What role could poetry possibly play in all this? If your contemplation is truly perfect, of what use is publishing your scribbles? At best, poetry offers itself as a vehicle for advertising the Pastoral Way of Life, which also seems unnecessary. There's no purpose for it at all. One contemplates. While one is contemplating, one produces poetry, because that is the sort of thing one does with one's contemplative time--but the benefit of such production ceases when one has stopped contemplating. The quality of the resulting work is entirely orthogonal to its process of production, and the subject matter is necessarily limited to the poet's dwindling stock of experiences. If I write a hymn to God, I will presumably try to make it a good one. But if I'm a good pastoral contemplator, I have no reason to do so whatsoever. Notice how Philip Freneau, one of the better pastoral poets, characterizes his own writing. It's the "darling sin," the blot-that-is-not-a-blot on the escutcheon of pastoral righteousness. By its own logic, it shouldn't be permitted; yet it exists, and no justification is given for it. The need to write poetry is a kind of encumbrance that enables the poet to maintain human shape and not simply go spherical from self-absorption.

There's another interesting line in Freneau's work--the one about the "aged volumes of some plain divine." Freneau, here, is making a somewhat obvious move: identifying a lack of intellectual, cultural, and rhetorical sophistication with distance from civilized society. This has two consequences. The first is that, by its own standards, pastoral poetry has to be bad. It is always a courtly and urban genre, never more so than in the eighteenth century; if all Freneau has are the volumes of a plain divine, he will simply be unable to produce good pastoral poetry. (He resolves this by contradicting himself on the very next page and providing himself with copies of Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and the pinnacles of Augustan courtliness, Pope and Addison.) But by the same token, the opposite happens too. The fact that poetry-writing has survived as a parasitic remnant of civilization is a sign that contemplation is still imperfect, that there's still more retreating to the country to be done.

Bear in mind that the distinguishing feature of eighteenth-century pastoral is its intense focus on the conditions of poetic production. It dissects the poet's intellectual, cultural, economic, and physical environment in more detail than other traditional forms could even imagine. When we see that this total investigation leaves out or conceals its central point--poetry itself--we can see how pastoral unfolds as a permanently unstable self-undermining system. Thus, the commonplace (dating back to the second Epode) of the city boy who abandons his pastoral experiment after a few months has its roots in a fairly deep problem. It's not that city boys are spoiled. It's that their system of assumptions dooms them to failure.

And what is Freneau's solution? A simple, and honest, way out:

Now cease, O muse, thy tender tale to chaunt,
The smiling village, or the rural haunt;
New scenes invite me, and no more I rove,
To tell of shepherds, or the vernal grove.

It was that easy. After "The American Village," he never wrote another pastoral--and it's hard to say that his work suffered for it.

The End of the Picnic

Man is born in order to think (there's Kirill at last!...). But it's just that I don't believe that. I didn't believe it before, and I don't believe it now. What man is born for--I don't know. He was given birth to, so he's born. He feeds himself as best he can. May we all be healthy, and they can go die. Who is "we"? Who is "they"? I can't understand a thing. Things are good for me--they're bad for Barbridge, things are good for Barbridge--they're bad for the Geek, things are good for Khripatiy--they're bad for everyone else, and for him too, but he thinks, the fool, that he'll be able to get out of it somehow...my Lord, what a mess! ...

He finished the rest of the brandy and threw the empty flask on the ground as hard as he could. The flask bounced, glinting in the sun, and rolled away somewhere. He promptly forgot all about it. Now he sat, shielding his eyes with his hands, and tried, not to understand or imagine anymore, but simply to see something as it should have been, but once more he saw only snouts, snouts, snouts... green... bottles, piles of rags that had once been human, columns of numbers... He knew that all this had to be destroyed, and he wanted to destroy it, but it occurred to him that if it was all destroyed, there would be nothing left but flat bare earth. In his impotence and despair he wanted to lean on something again, throw his head back, but he got up, brushed his pants off reflexively and began his descent into the gorge.

The sun was blazing, red spots floated in front of his eyes, the air at the bottom of the gorge trembled, and this trembling made it seem as if the Sphere were dancing up and down like a buoy in the waves. He walked past the dipper, superstitiously raising his feet higher and trying to avoid the black spots, and then, sinking in the soft ground, dragged himself through the whole gorge to the dancing and winking Sphere. He was covered in sweat, choking from the heat, and trembled with cold at the same time. He shook spastically, as if hung over, while bland chalkdust ground in his teeth. And he no longer tried to think. He only repeated to himself, in desperation, like a prayer: "I am an animal, you see, an animal. I have no words, I was not taught words, I don't know how to think, those scum never let me learn how to think. But if you're really like that...all-powerful, almighty, all-knowing...figure it out! Look into my soul, I know that everything you need is there. It must be. After all, I never sold my soul to anyone! It's my own, my human soul! Pull from me everything that I want--since it can't be that I desire evil! Oh, damn it all, since I can't think of anything besides these words of his: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYONE, FREE, AND LET NO ONE WALK AWAY DISAPPOINTED!"
- Arkadiy and Boris Strugatsky, "The Roadside Picnic"

I've just finished reading B. F. Egorov's recently published Russian Utopias: A Historical Guidebook (Российские утопии: исторический путеводитель), which is a fantastic and quite instructive book. Egorov doesn't limit his consideration of Russian utopias to the obvious candidates--the Gastevs et al of the 1920s. Rather, he traces utopian thinking to the seventeenth century and beyond, a depth that demonstrates the profound significance of imaginary worlds as an outlet for unrealizable visions of reform. This enormously broad scope enables us to look at utopia not simply as a generic form, but also as a collection of imagined structural relationships. In a sense, utopia validates traditional structuralism: what is key in utopian writing is not the content of the utopian world as such (its geography, demography, and so on) but its structural position with respect to other utopias (agrarian or technocratic, individualistic or collective) as well as to the actually existing world (spatial or temporal distance, accidental or deliberate construction). This is the approach Egorov himself seems to favor, and it gives him some fairly significant theoretical leverage--unfortunately, the "guidebook" format vitiates any attempt at realizing this potential.

Thinking about Russian utopianism, I decided that this would be a good occasion to discuss the Strugatsky brothers, which I've been wanting to do for a long time. The Strugatsky brothers were postwar Russia's best science fiction writers--probably the best Russian science fiction writers, period. They were also utopian universe-builders: almost all their works are set around the "noontime of humanity" in the 22nd century. But where the vast majority of Western SF structures its utopias and dystopias around ideologies (as does, for instance, the redoubtable Heinlein), the utopia of the Strugatskys is a Communist world stripped of all its ideological assumptions. It is clear that their rose-tinted Communist future was a necessity for getting around the censors--but it is particularly interesting that Communism circa 2150 is a pure technocracy founded on scientific achievement, a high standard of living, and occasional acts of individual valor, not class or Lenin or revolution. In other words, the Strugatskys recapture the Marxist obsession with utopia and reenact the "end of ideology" within it.

As many writers have noted, the central challenge of the Strugatskys' style is the problem of sustaining dramatic impetus within a theoretically conflictless world. Often, their solution is the Star Trek one: conflicts take place around the undeveloped frontiers of utopia. That's all well and good, but it is hardly a unique approach. The strategy evolved in The Predatory Things of the Age (Хищные вещи века) and Waves Extinguish Wind (Волны гасят ветер) is much more compelling. Here the central conflict is not the incompleteness of utopia but rather a gnawing, permanent anxiety at its core. Something isn't right, and we seem to be powerless to fix it; we don't even know what it is, and when we find out we cannot accommodate the answer anyway. In order for us to resolve this anxiety, we have to transcend being human--but almost none of us will be chosen, and the ones that are, cannot so easily abandon their humanity. Utopia is a crisis disguised as fulfillment.

It's crucial that the Strugatskys are not dystopianists. Dystopia is nothing but a negation of utopia, a perpetually purblind genre: where the utopianist says "Arrange your society like so, and everyone will be happy," the dystopianist answers, "If you listen to him, everything will suck!". 1984 and Brave New World describe societies that are bad as the result of particular political and economic choices, so they are powerless even to engage the broader question. The Strugatskys give the utopianist everything he wants, then ask: "Now what?" Their experiment is in many ways much more relevant to our own experience than the perennially popular dystopian classics. Assuming we manage to escape the climate apocalypse, we may well be able to achieve the wet dream-world of the Transhumanists--but there will always be a "now what?".

"The Roadside Picnic," the novella that gave us Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, is perhaps their most acute and sensitive portrayal of these anxieties. The bit I've quoted is from the very end, but the whole text is concerned with its central question--is it possible to wish universal happiness? What happens afterwards? The story won't say, but the ambiguity of its interpretation of human experience destroys any possibility of a simplistic utopia. It echoes the classic story about the legalistic genie who grants precisely what the wisher demands, but it seems to tell us that there is no good way of phrasing the question. "LET NO ONE WALK AWAY DISAPPOINTED" is certainly a nice try. But to experience the realization of this wish, one needs to be a different kind of being--not the kind of vermin that scavenges wish-fulfillment from the scraps of an alien's roadside picnic.

Requiem for the Neutral Ground

It was near the close of the year 1780 that a solitary traveler was seen pursuing his way through one of the numerous little valleys of Westchester. The easterly wind, with its chilling dampness and increasing violence, gave unerring notice of the approach of a storm, which, as usual, might be expected to continue for several days; and the experienced eye of the traveler was turned in vain, through the darkness of the evening, in quest of some convenient shelter, in which, for the term of his confinement by the rain that already began to mix with the atmosphere in a thick mist, he might obtain such accommodations as his purposes required. Nothing whatever offered but the small and inconvenient tenements of the lower order of the inhabitants, with whom, in that immediate neighborhood, he did not think it either safe or politic to trust himself.

The county of Westchester, after the British had obtained possession of the island of New York, became common ground, in which both parties continued to act for the remainder of the war of the Revolution. A large proportion of its inhabitants, either restrained by their attachments, or influenced by their fears, affected a neutrality they did not feel. The lower towns were, of course, more particularly under the dominion of the crown, while the upper, finding a security from the vicinity of the continental troops, were bold in asserting their revolutionary opinions, and their right to govern themselves. Great numbers, however, wore masks, which even to this day have not been thrown aside; and many an individual has gone down to the tomb, stigmatized as a foe to the rights of his countrymen, while, in secret, he has been the useful agent of the leaders of the Revolution; and, on the other hand, could the hidden repositories of divers flaming patriots have been opened to the light of day, royal protections would have been discovered concealed under piles of British gold...
- James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821)

The Spy has the rare virtue of being both a self-consciously nationalistic pseudo-epic and a damn fine novel. But--whatever one might think of nationalism in general and American nationalism in particular--these two qualities constantly conflict. (My edition was released in the '70s by Progress Publishers, the English arm of the Soviet publishing industry. The notes and introduction are in Russian, and are much more sympathetic to the cause of American nation-building than a contemporary American edition would have been. Go figure.) When it starts to be perfectly clear who the good guys and bad guys are, the book becomes less and less interesting, although it is to Cooper's credit that this happens a lot less often than one might think. Most of the action takes place in a sort of haze where allegiances and characters remain persistently unclear.

The canvas Cooper picked for his story, revolutionary Westchester County, is actually what allows the book to redeem itself. I've written (and, recently, published!) on Loyalism and the revolution in Westchester and New York; The Spy reflects the Westchester experience better than almost any primary source I've encountered. Westchester, more than any other part of the Northeast, was a liminal border zone where the population could not be relied upon to be either Loyalist or Patriot. It was also among the most looted and ravaged areas in all of the thirteen colonies. To the extent that the Revolution was a civil war, it was most acutely felt precisely here.

In fact, I would make an even bolder claim. Westchester represented the transition from an estate-based form of social organization to a leveling nationalist one. By "estate," I mean something similar to "class"--but with the crucial caveat that the features of each estate are differentiated on the basis of function rather than hierarchical difference. In England, it was easy to conflate the two: "hereditary peers->rural gentry->middling sort->mechanics and laborers" looks awfully like a class hierarchy. But in New York, the great mercantile families did not consider their stature to be any lower than that of the pseudo-aristocratic landowning patroons. As a result, estates and professions became much more internally coherent than they would otherwise be: the merchant generally thought of himself as a merchant first and a New Yorker or a Presbyterian second. Mercantile allegiance trumped national allegiance; the great fur traders in upstate New York, English as well as Dutch, felt no compunctions about trading with the enemy French. And the provincial aristocracy, such as it was, never stopped trying to play the part. 1775 threw these allegiances into a caustic soup of regular and irregular military action, and what emerged when it was all over was a people much more American than class-bound. (It helped that many of the local grandees were forced to relocate to Halifax after the war.)

How this worked out during the Revolution is described in several great books (social history really did a number on New York in the '60s and '70s), most recently Judith Van Buskirk's Generous Enemies. But how does The Spy fit into this context? I would say that as an early attempt at a Great American Novel, its nationalistic agenda is pushed through primarily in the reenactment of the Westchester transition. In the beginning of the novel, we know very little about the true feelings of the main characters--Westchester is a neutral zone where one is unlikely to find an open and unwavering Patriot or Loyalist. All we have knowledge of are the appurtenances of their estates, which are described in detail throughout the text. Estate, at first, provides a convenient escape from the war: royal as well as Continental officers attend dances and make courteous overtures to one another. Everyone is simply trying to survive. Gradually, however, it emerges that the lines of class are insufficient to differentiate protagonist from antagonist. Some Loyalists are noble, true, and their inevitable failure is supposed to be pitied but not sympathized with. Others are craven and deserve only contempt. The shrunken society that takes refuge at this Westchester manor becomes one where the duty to nation can no longer be ignored. And the ultimate protagonist, the titular spy, ceases to be simply a greedy and contemptible small trader: in his cleverness and self-sacrifice, he becomes American par excellence.

It's a relief that Cooper depicts both the bitterness and the sweetness of this process. Still, the dying world of eighteenth-century New York expires on his pages, and it's hard for me not to feel a pang of nostalgia. For the elites that inhabited Westchester's hermitages during the war, the emergence of nationalism in its full statist regalia often ruptured every personal bond and rule of conduct. The new world that encroached on theirs was still very much unknown; the feeling of dislocation always trumped the feeling of newness. There was promise as well as danger here, of course. But in lamenting that "America will never see such happy days as in the past" (as one exiled upstate lawyer wrote at the end of the war), they weren't wrong. Nationalism was different, yes--but hardly worth the pain.

Historicizing Absurdity

I was wrong, Peterson thought, the world is absurd. The absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it. I affirm the absurdity. On the other hand, absurdity is itself absurd. Before the emcee could ask the first question, Peterson began to talk. "Yesterday," Peterson said to the television audience, "in the typewriter in front of the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue, I found a recipe for Ten Ingredient Soup that included a stone from a toad's head. And while I stood there marveling a nice old lady pasted on the elbow of my best Haspel suit a little blue sticker reading THIS INDIVIDUAL IS A PART OF THE COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY FOR GLOBAL DOMINATION OF THE ENTIRE GLOBE. Coming home I passed a sign that said in ten-foot letters COWARD SHOES and heard a man singing "Golden earrings" in a horrible voice, and last night i dreamed there was a shootout at our house on Meat Street and my mother shoved me in a closet to get me out of the line of fire." The emcee waved at the floor manager to turn Peterson off, but Peterson kept talking. "In this kind of world," Peterson said, "absurd if you will, possibilities nevertheless proliferate and escalate all around us and there are opportunities for beginning again. I am a minor artist and my dealer won't even display my work if he can help it but minor is as minor does and lightning may strike even yet. Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets," Peterson said, "cash in your life insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play the guitar. How can you be alienated without first having been connected? Think back and remember how it was." A man on the floor in front of Peterson was waving a piece of cardboard on which something threatening was written but Peterson ignored him and concentrated on the camera with the little red light. The little red light jumped from camera to camera in an attempt to throw him off balance but Peterson was too smart for it and followed wherever it went. "My mother was a royal virgin," Peterson said, "and my father a shower of gold. My childhood was pastoral and energetic and rich in experiences which developed my character. As a young man I was noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form express and admirable, and in apprehension …" Peterson went on and on and although he was, in a sense, lying, in a sense he was not.
- Donald Barthelme, "A Shower of Gold," 1962

I can't decide if I really like this story. It is funny and clever, there are several fantastic lines, and the whole piece is delivered, as Barthelme's work often is, as if he were playing some kind of joke on the reader. On the other hand--and this may be deliberate--its cutesy self-conscious randomness comes off as rather sophomoric. The temptation of writing a story about absurdity is to write it in an openly absurd fashion. Does this really work? I'm not quite sure. Perhaps a somber and serious delivery would have been better at making the point.

At any rate, what I think is most interesting about this piece is that it is intimately grounded in a historical context which is only hinted at in the story itself. I first read this in a great 1960s anthology of short writing entitled How We Live, a huge book assembled around the thesis that fiction writing can provide a better picture of contemporary society than, say, sociological texts. Thus it is unsurprising that it introduces this story as a smirking commentary on the then-chic intellectual preoccupation with the Absurd. Its characters are the epigones of a dying fashion for existentialism.

But this raises an interesting question. To what extent is philosophical and other intellectual work discredited by its rootedness in history? For instance, we can link many of Nietzsche's middle-period formulations to his enthusiastic embrace of positivism. We don't really believe in positivism anymore, certainly not in the kind that was all the rage in 1885. So how do we take his work seriously? It is tempting to say that we should partition off the superficial, fashionable aspects of his text from a supposed inner core of philosophical insight. That is not only a betrayal of Nietzsche himself but also a fundamental mistake in another sense--it commits us to the claim that there is a universal and non-historicized knowledge that later generations are somehow better at accessing. This sounds rather silly. Anything we could identify as "universal" is really just something that responds better to our contemporary concerns. So we might rephrase the claim and say that the value we glean from Nietzsche is something like the value the raccoon gleans from the garbage can: we're not concerned with the past use-value of the work (the fact that the orange peel once contained an orange) but rather with the current use-value of the debris. I favor this approach myself, and in the context of the other proposals this one looks quite attractive.

There is, however, an interesting liability here. If we disclaim both the position that reduces work to chicness and that which posits a universal essence, the critical point of a story like Barthelme's ends up being rather dramatically blunted. To put it another way, reading '50s-'60s existentialism sympathetically must reduce the distance between "Shower of Gold" and the trendiness it criticizes--after all, aren't they both just competing and potentially valuable interventions in a particular philosophical conjuncture? When both critic and criticized have ended up in the dustbin of history, the critic is at a distinct disadvantage.

I don't know how to solve this problem--or even if, in the scheme of things, it is really a problem. The ephemeral nature of much critical discourse may be more of a selling point than a drawback. This way of looking at things does, however, offer a potent answer to charges that (say) Derrida was "fashionable" (in the sense that his concerns were ephemeral). Sure. But he was no more fashionable than was George Steiner or T. S. Eliot. Neither the historical context of intellectual work nor the critique of that context can be disengaged from fashion, at least not in a way that preserves any of their value. A catch-22 for the Bloom/Sokal set.