On Bookishness

Continental philosophers['] rakish berets and lugubrious Black Forest climbs cannot mask a fundamental bookishness--one that makes little contact with the world itself.

... It would cheer the hearts of many to find some way to work back toward objects without implicating ourselves in the rubble of ontotheology. For along with the intrinsic value of such a program, it would also provide hope that we might someday be free of the endless spiral of increasing critique, irony, intertextuality, collage, deliberate fragments, scare quotes, questions of the question of the question, tracing(s) of the possibility of impossibility of impossibility of possibility, and other painfully reflexive contortions. The way to exit this dark and stagnant tunnel is not to turn around and resign ourselves to the regime of all the purported reactionaries. Instead, if merely navigated all the way to the end, the tunnel in which we stand issues directly into fertile valleys, volcanic landscapes, caravan routes, fields of pillars and windmills, and exotic ports.
- Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics (2005)

In the coarse environment of the business room stood a glass bookcase covered in a green taffeta. It is this storehouse of books that I would like to speak of. The bookcase of a man's early childhood remains his companion throughout his whole life. The arrangement of the shelves, the selection of books, the colors of the spines are experienced as the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. Indeed--those books that did not stand in one's first bookcase will never squeeze through into world literature, as if into existence. Inevitably, every book in one's first bookcase is a classic, and not a single spine can be done without.
- Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time

Man is but the imprint of his native landscape.
- Shaul Tchernichovsky

Pronouncements about the supposed bookishness or disconnectedness from reality of Continental philosophers appear at regular intervals in Graham Harman's text, though they become increasingly strident as the book approaches its messianic, nearly Nietzschean, conclusion. Harman loves to list the boring linguistic-turn preoccupations of his colleagues and then ambush the reader with lurid, exotic images, painted in Kinkade colors and hawked like trinkets at a bazaar. This approach is vital for Harman, because he seeks to demonstrate, as tangibly as possible, the advantages of his object-oriented realism over the subject-oriented philosophical status quo. Everywhere Harman reasserts the binary: object versus text, tiger versus book, living pulsing object-world versus dry imaginary subject-world.

This post is intended as a skirmish of sorts, though by no means as a totalizing critique (I hope to develop a deeper and more positive engagement with the book next month). For what lurks behind Harman's insistent hostility to textual approaches is a fundamental act of bad faith. It is the equivalent of the classic Internet suggestion that one's opponent never leaves his mother's basement. Like Rousseau, Harman writes books to accuse his opponents of being too bookish. "You need to get out more," he tells us, holding out a volume of philosophy that he presumably expects us to read with some care and diligence. This last point is key. What Harman is offering is an approach to philosophy, specifically metaphysics--no more and no less. His book is no more about tigers and bonfires than it is about Gilbert and Sullivan; at stake, ultimately, are objects and subjects and causality and epistemology, the dry wagers of any metaphysical debate. His hope is evidently that we will succumb to his (excellent, if rather purple) style and concede that his arguments and examples are more real or more embodied than those of his opponents. They aren't; they're just words.

After all, books are objects--they deserve to stand proudly alongside trees and planets. The words in books are also objects, produced by the very embodied stamp of the printing press; the experience of reading is always an experience of interacting with a physical object--whether fading, electronic, or recycled--not to mention any number of non-physical ones. I grew up, not in baseball diamonds or city parks, but amid imposing bookshelves, bookshelves on every wall, bookshelves above my reach. I am but the imprint of this printed landscape. I don't need tigers to remind me that books have a life of their own--they're placed by invisible hands, annotated by faraway people, they even interact there on the shelf. So why not leave me to my books? I might be a good realist, I might abandon the subject with the best of them, but I cannot escape my imprinting.

Harman's tactics make it seem as if there is no room in his metaphysics for collage, irony, intertextuality. But of course there's plenty of room. Though we haven't quite been able to picture to ourselves what intertextuality without a reader would look like, there is hardly anything more object-oriented than the discovery of the mysterious connections that unbeknownst to us link Moby-Dick to the Bible or the Origin of Species. That we have not phrased it this way is not the fault of bookishness; it's the fault of subject-centered philosophy, which may well (I hesitate to commit) be worth getting rid of. Whatever remains will be the world already being explored by the history of the book, in which watermarks and printer's inks and metaphors and marginalia all constantly compete for interpretive attention. The world of books is the real world; it is Harman's world, and mine.

Unless a rapprochement with this world is speedily arranged, in fact, Harman's realism will inevitably be trapped in a performative contradiction. It is difficult for the supposed outdoorsman to maintain that questioning the question is too nerdy if his primary duties as a philosopher require the same poring over Heidegger and Deleuze. Why dig around in books if you like tigers more? And if you happen to like both, why not leave both of them some space?

Hopscotch

To do. To do something, to do good, to make water, to make time, action in all of its possibilities. But behind all action there was a protest, because all doing meant leaving from in order to arrive at, or moving something so that it would be here and not there, or going into a house instead of not going in or instead of going into the one next door; in other words, every act entailed the admission of a lack, of something not yet done and which could have been done, the tacit protest in the face of continuous evidence of a lack, of a reduction, of the inadequacy of the present moment. To believe that action could crown something, or that the sum total of actions could really be a life worthy of the name, was the illusion of a moralist. It was better to withdraw, because withdrawal from action was the protest itself and not its mask. Oliveira lit another cigarette and this little action made him smile ironically and tease himself about the act itself. He was not too worried about superficial analyses, almost always perverted by distraction and linguistic traps. The only thing certain was the weight in the pit of his stomach, the physical suspicion that something was not going well and perhaps it had never gone well. It was not even a problem, but rather the early denial of both collective lies and that grumpy solitude of one who sets out to study radioactive isotopes or the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre.

... Perhaps. Why not? But it's also possible that your point of view is the same as that of the fox as he looks at the grapes. And it also might be that reason is on your side, but a lamentable and mean little reason, the reason the ant uses against the grasshopper. If lucidity ends up in inaction, wouldn't it become suspect? Wouldn't it be covering up a particularly diabolical type of blindness? The stupidity of a military hero who runs forward carrying a keg of powder, Cabral, the heroic soldier covering himself with glory, is hinted to be a revelation, the instantaneous melding with something absolute, beyond all consciousness (that's a lot to ask for in a sergeant), face to face with which ordinary vision, bedroom insight at three o'clock in the morning and with a half-smoked cigarette, is about as good as a mole's.
- Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963)

For a long time I've told myself, and occasionally other people, that Hopscotch was my favorite novel. I had read it as an eighteen-year-old and retained nothing except the sense that it was to be my favorite book. (That it was sufficiently obscure as to be flattering to my fatuous sense of intellectual independence was a bonus.) For years I've been wanting to reread it and make sure I was not simply fooling myself; this week, I finally did so. As it turns out, it is still very much my favorite novel, but I cannot for the life of me understand what attracted my teenage self to it. He could not possibly have appreciated what it was trying to do. Or perhaps he could; I am not a good judge of such things.

What I suspect attracted me was what I now find most repellent--the self-conscious bohemianism of the novel's first half. There is a certain subgenre of literary fiction in which the writer dreams up for himself a cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking coterie of poet-writer-artists who make learned puns and quote freely from the margins of the canon; the models are typically his own real-life friends, spiced up with appropriately exotic details and made into supporting-actor mouthpieces of his own shamelessly flaunted erudition. Obviously the Beats are the genre's foremost representatives, though other examples abound. The first half of Hopscotch is written almost entirely in this style, two hundred pages that would be nauseating if they were the work of a worse or less truly erudite writer. (Although I think my eighteen-year-old self was naive enough to fall for this kind of bullshit without complaint.)

And yet Hopscotch is not that kind of novel, despite what the back-cover blurb suggests. Its general subject is appropriately ambitious--it's a thoughtful reinvestigation of the old naive/sentimental dilemma--but Cortázar consistently refuses to take the easy way out, the old '60s alternatives of undigested Zen, psychedelics, or brutish sentimentality masquerading as principled irrationalism. And when it finally becomes clear that the bohemians must be left by the wayside, the prodigal-son protagonist does not exactly return to the forgiving embrace of his Argentinian home and hearth. The domesticity of the fatherland does not resolve the problem, it only makes it stand out in sharper relief. Even once the book reaches its peculiar ending, the reader is left holding enough metaphysical loose ends that the conclusion is more fertile than satisfying.

Hopscotch is organized literally like a hopscotch; the reader is forced to jump from chapter to chapter if she is to really grasp the author's design. Normally this kind of gimmick would leave a sour taste in my mouth, but, as it turns out, it is integral to the book in a very interesting way. Cortázar's characters are not token placeholders in the exploration of an abstract idea, as are many of Borges's. Nor does the formal element serve to expiate the literary sins of the narrative, as often happens in Pavic. Cortázar is more like Unamuno in that sense: in his work, the troubled relationship between form and content--between the characters and the broad narrative structure--is inseparable from whatever claims he is attempting to make about the human condition. The tortuous form is the most direct way of getting the reader to understand the predicament of the characters, as well, hopefully, as her own.

A similar device is used, in a different and more radical (if superficially more conventional) way, in the more ambitious 62: A Model Kit, which takes its point of departure from a chapter in Hopscotch. But Oliveira is much more successfully realized as a character than anyone in 62. What makes him appealing is that he is not merely the self-deceiving puppet of systems and forces from which all agency has been emptied; rather, he struggles against the current, he tests his boundaries, he asks questions and seems to find answers. Whether he succeeds is immaterial: it is his intellectual delusions that bring him so vividly to life. His struggle, and Cortázar's own participation in it, makes Hopscotch not only a great but also a fun novel--something that can be said for few other books.

The Translator's Burden

...IV.

To get away from all the talk of translation, I went camping by myself in southern Utah, and was about to light the campfire when a bare-chested man crawled out from the tent next to mine, stood, and started to file his nails. “You don’t know who I am,” he said, “but I know who you are.” “Who are you?” I asked. “I’m Bob,” he said. “I spent the first twenty years of my life in Pôrto Velho, and feel that Manuel Bandeira is the great undiscovered twentieth-century poet— undiscovered, that is, by the English-speaking world. I want to translate him.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “I teach Portuguese at Southern Utah State where the need for Portuguese is great since so few people there seem to know it exists. You’re not going to like this, but I don’t go in for contemporary American poetry and don’t see why that should disqualify me from translating. I can always get one of the local poets to look over what I’ve done. For me, meaning is the important thing.” Stunned by his penciled-in eyebrows and tiny mustache, I said, a bit unfairly, “You language teachers are all alike. You possess a knowledge of the original language and, perhaps, some knowledge of English, but that’s it. The chances are your translations will be word-for-word rendering without the character or feel of poetry. You are the first to declare the impossibility of translating, but you think nothing of minimizing its difficulty.” And with that I packed my things, struck the tent, and drove back to Salt Lake City.

V.

I was in the bathtub when Jorge Luis Borges stumbled in the door. “Borges, be careful!” I yelled. “The floor is slippery and you are blind.” Then, soaping my chest, I said, “Borges, have you ever considered what is implicit in a phrase like ‘I translate Apollinaire into English’ or ‘I translate de la Mare into French’: that we take the highly idiosyncratic work of an individual and render it into a language that belongs to everyone and to no one, a system of meanings sufficiently general to permit not only misunderstandings but to throw into doubt the possibility of permitting anything else?” “Yes,” he said, with an air of resignation. “Then don’t you think,” I said, “that the translation of poetry is best left to poets who are in possession of an English they have each made their own, and that language teachers, who feel responsibility to a language not in its modifications but in its monolithic entirety, make the worst translators? Wouldn’t it be best to think of translation as a transaction between individual idioms, between, say, the Italian of D’Annunzio and the English of Auden? If we did, we could end irrelevant discussions of who has and who hasn’t done a correct translation.” “Yes,” he said, seeming to get excited.
“Say,” I said. “If translation is a kind of reading, the assumption or transformation of one personal idiom into another, then shouldn’t it be possible to translate work done in one’s own language? Shouldn’t it be possible to translate Wordsworth or Shelley into Strand?” ...

- from Mark Strand, "Translation," in The Weather of Words (2000)

Having been duly exposed as a fraud by a commenter in my previous post, and having just spent sixty hours in a car with four poets and a gradually disintegrating pile of Russian verse, I'll return briefly to familiar ground: translation as theory and practice. Mark Strand's witty essay (?) tackles some of the translator's characteristic dilemmas--in an overly perfunctory way, perhaps, but nonetheless with incisiveness and clarity. Every translator, especially of poetry, must answer for herself the questions Strand poses: will you keep the focus on the translator or the poet? Will you be free or literal? (Nabokov's answer is not always the best one.) Will you domesticate the author's idiom or emphasize its particularity?

For this last, Strand's answer is, again, not always the best one. He has famously "translated" Wordsworth's Prelude into his own idiom (I have not read this, or, indeed, more than a few books of the overlong original), and what is at stake for him in this essay is the vindication of that project. The particularity of the poet, for Strand, inevitably overshadows the differences between languages; people like Bob, who start from the language, deserve nothing more than contempt. I think this position rather self-serving. More importantly, I do not think that a baldfaced statement making the poet (or the Great Poet, or the True Scotsman) into a hermetically individual snowflake really does justice to the translator's difficulties. Yes, langue, parole, blah blah blah; but it is obvious that the practice of poetry-writing is a historically-grounded one that exists in an intimate and inevitable relationship with the history of the language.

I am thinking here of Russian poetry in particular. Due to a variety of factors--intellectual culture, social elitism, snobbish traditionalism--Russian poetry never turned into free verse, as Western poetry largely did in the twentieth century. Individual free-verse poets existed and exist, but the word "verlibr" itself continues to have a derisive connotation for Russians. So a central problem for translators of Russian poems is that even poetry rooted in European modernism (like the work of Blok, Akhmatova, or Mandelstam) retains many of the formal features of traditional verse. This is not just a question of the author's individual particularity--the decision to write in this way was as much a social as an individual one.

What is to be done? Should fidelity to the very modernist (self-reflexive, imagist) concerns of these poets be sacrificed to permit an elegant rhyme-and-meter translation? Or should the original form be jettisoned entirely, as Ilya Kaminsky has done (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion) for Polina Barskova's recent work? As you probably expected, I don't think either extreme is preferable to the middle course. What that middle course is is a matter of debate. I prefer to retain only meter (or, at any rate, the textual features that permit the reader to recognize that the original poem was written in meter) and be maximally accurate within those boundaries. Other translators retain the rhyme but abandon the meter--which often makes the work sound like it was written by a preteen, but might nonetheless occasionally be useful.

If we put aside thorny problems of interpretation for the moment, there is also another problem with the idea of a unique individual idiom. A poet's idiom in English is quite a different beast from that poet's idiom in Russian (say). My translations of Pasternak (would ideally) sound different from my translations of Mandelstam, though they may be substantially similar--and of course each translated poet is different from his own original. It is thus an oversimplification to suggest that the translator should try to be maximally faithful to the poet's individuality. What is really needed is an ability to negotiate between the demands of the languages at large, the uniqueness of the poet, the specific purposes of the translation, and the more nebulous claims of euphony and rhythm.

It is all well and good to say, as I have done before, that this skill is largely an instinctive one, that translation is at its best when such calculations become seamlessly integrated into one's thought process. But this blurs the boundaries between translation as a kind of unconscious, Romantic poetry-writing and translation as a deliberate, craftsmanlike process. Could one--could I--relearn how to translate? I suspect I could not. I have been translating professionally (if not regularly) for half my life, and I do not think my style has changed in any substantial respect. Yes, the phrases I use sound more natural and my translation is less of a mere calque than it used to be--but I recognize the same familiar patterns, the same run-on sentences, in a translation from 1999.

And yet of course I know more about translation theory now than I did when I was twelve. Does that mean that Strand is right after all--that what I am really always doing is clumsily making Pasternak into Afinogenov, no matter what I say? I don't think so. What I think it means is that the negotiating skill I mentioned actually operates on a deeper level than that of translation. One develops an approach to translation as an outgrowth of a more fundamental relationship to languages and literary traditions; if I have conscious objectives and stylistic commitments as a translator, it is because my view of Russian and English is such that I cannot do otherwise. Hence translation is both instinctive and intellectual. But perhaps this is yet another version of an idiom...

Schelling: History and Ontogeny

I've been on hiatus for the past couple of weeks, because I've been on a book tour, promoting the second issue of Correspondence. It's great! In the meantime, I'll be posting more often this week to compensate for my absence. Here is the first, somewhat technical [update: and, apparently, completely wrongheaded], installment.

—

That an immediate influencing among intelligences is impossible, according to the principles of transcendental idealism, stands in no need of proof, nor has any other philosophy rendered such an influence intelligible. Hence nothing remains but to suppose an indirect influence between different intelligences, and here we are concerned merely with the conditions for the possibility of this.

Among intelligences which are to act upon each other through freedom, there must, then, in the first place, be a preestablished harmony in regard to the common world which they present. For since all determinacy in the intelligence comes about only through the determinacy of its presentations, intelligences who intuited utterly different worlds would have absolutely nothing in common, and no point of contact at which they could come together ... But now if the intelligence brings forth everything objective out of itself, and there is no common archetype for presentations that we intuit outside us, the consilience among the presentations of different intelligences--as regards both the whole of the objective world and also individual things and events within the same space and time (which consilience alone compels us to ascribe objective truth to our presentations)--is explicable no otherwise than from our common nature...

Through the influence of a rational being, it is not unconscious, but conscious and free activity (which merely glimmers through via the medium of the objective world), that is reflected and becomes an object to us as free. This progressive influence is what we call education, in the widest sense of the word, wherein education is never completed, but persists as a condition of the continuance of consciousness...
- Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800)

Something very interesting happens between pages 160 and 164 (in my edition) of Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism. Up to that point, the book had put forth a rather straightforwardly Fichtean ontology, awash in pseudo-rigor, wherein the individual self had differentiated itself out of an underlying absolute self through dialectical processes of reflection and (object-)production. But in Part IV, on page 161, Schelling slips in a statement that in effect annihilates subjective idealism as traditionally conceived: "The act of self-determination, or the free action of the intelligence upon itself, can be explained only by the determinate action of an intelligence external to it." A reader who (like me) was lulled into a false complacency by Schelling's painstakingly methodical exposition of Fichteanism would be likely to interpret this claim as yet another indirect restatement of the basic claim that absolute self and individual self (ego in-itself and for-itself) are not the same. (In retrospect, however, this reading ignores the preparatory work Schelling carries out on the previous page.)

In fact, it is a much simpler and contextually more radical proposition: other minds exist, and the individuum is not the only child of the Absolute. Fichte's teaching is basically a conglomeration of metaphysical subtleties grafted onto a Kantian vocabulary and designed to obscure the fact that it is essentially a solipsism. Fichte, in other words, can't really defend the existence of other minds of equal dignity. Yes, he never tires of repeating that our sense of individuality is only a derivative of its underlying Self, just as the "Not-Self" is—but there's always a sense in which the ego that serves to ground and produce all beings is my ego and mine alone. Schelling's proposition represents a dramatic break with this view. External intelligences originate from the same underlying subjective principle that produces my own intelligence; therefore, they have as much claim upon it as I do.

This sleight-of-hand strips subjective idealism of all its motivating impulses. Fichte had looked at Kant's Ding-an-sich and decided it was unnecessary, that he could ground all of his experience in his own subjectivity. But if we follow Schelling in creating other, equally dignified minds, then there's nothing all that subjective (and hence reliable) about this underlying principle. Its existence is as uncertain as that of external trees and houses. Thus Schelling is faced with the need to refill the absolute with compelling philosophical content in order to salvage it at all. In doing so, he effectively prefigures Hegel's model of subjectivity through recognition: in order for the free self to act freely, the free-ness of its activity must be acknowledged by other equally free selves--a solitary individual, far from being the Fichtean ideal, cannot ever be authentically free. The possibility of this acknowledgement is guaranteed by the fact that the intelligences exist within a preexisting harmony that emerges from the absolute.

In this way, we slip imperceptibly from the realm of ontology to the realm of history. In his practical philosophy, Fichte had appropriated Kant's faculties and categories and plugged them into a chronological-ontogenetic model of development. Schelling takes this chronology, which deals with the abstract evolution of the individual self, and merges it into the flow of a broader history. No longer is each individual merely following his own developmental course: individual evolutions become mere tributaries to a mighty historical river that embodies the groping of the absolute toward something. (Toward what? Hegel hasn't shown up yet, so all we have is unconvincing Kantian meliorism to point the way.)

Is this, then, the root of the nineteenth-century obsession with history? Perhaps not. But is Hegel that root? Or the revolutions? Did history creep in accidentally, as part of a solution to a problem that would soon itself become meaningless? Or was Schelling merely a convenient vehicle for the philosophical irruption of a historical longing that was already being born? Did the absolute stumble upon history in its blind forward rush--or did history dig up from its own depths the evanescent specter of an absolute? Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Matter Prefatory in Praise of Biography

Notwithstanding the Preference which may be vulgarly given to the Authority of those Romance-Writers, who intitle their Books, the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, &c. it is most certain, that Truth is only to be found in their Works who celebrate the Lives of Great Men, and are commonly called Biographers, as the others should indeed be termed Topographers or Chorographers: Words which might well mark the Distinction between them; it being the Business of the latter chiefly to describe Countries and Cities, which, with the Assistance of Maps, they do pretty justly, and may be depended upon: But as to the Actions and Characters of Men, their Writings are not quite so authentic, of which there needs no other Proof than those eternal Contradictions, occurring between two Topographers who undertake the History of the same Country: For instance, between my Lord Clarendon and Mr. Whitlock, between Mr. Echard and Rapin, and many others; where Facts being set forth in a different Light, every Reader believes as he pleases, but all agree in the Scene, where it is supposed to have happen'd. Now with us Biographers the Case is different, the Facts we deliver may be relied on, tho' we often mistake the Age and Country wherein they happened: For tho' it may be worth the Examination of Critics, whether the Shepherd Chrysostom, who, as Cervantes informs us, died for Love of the fair Marcella, who hated him; was ever in Spain, will any one doubt but that such a silly Fellow hath really existed. Is there in the World such a Sceptic as to disbelieve the Madness of Cardenio, the Perfidy of Ferdinand, the impertinent Curiosity of Anselmo, the Weakness of Camilla, the irresolute Friendship of Lothario; tho' perhaps as to the Time and Place where those several Persons lived, that good Historian may be deplorably deficient ... The same Mistakes may likewise be observed in Scarron, the Arabian Nights, the History of Marianne and Le Paisan Parvenu, and perhaps some few other Writers of this Class, whom I have not read, or do not at present recollect; for I would by no means be thought to comprehend those great Genius's the Authors of immense Romances, or the modern Novel and Atalantis Writers; who without any Assistance from Nature or History, record Persons who never were, or will be, and Facts which never did nor possibly can happen: Whose Heroes are of their own Creation, and their Brains the Chaos whence all their Materials are collected. Not that such Writers deserve no Honour; so far otherwise, that perhaps they merit the highest: for what can be nobler than to be as an Example of the wonderful Extent of human Genius. One may apply to them what Balzac says of Aristotle, that they are a second Nature; for they have no Communication with the first; by which Authors of an inferiour Class, who can not stand alone, are obliged to support themselves as with Crutches; but these of whom I am now speaking, seem to be possessed of those Stilts, which the excellent Voltaire tells us in his Letters carry the Genius far off, but with an irregular Pace . Indeed far out of the sight of the Reader,

Beyond the Realm of Chaos and old Night.

But, to return to the former Class, who are contented to copy Nature, instead of forming Originals from their confused heap of Matter in their own Brains; is not such a Book as that which records the Atchievements of the renowned Don Quixotte, more worthy the Name of a History than even Mariana's; for whereas the latter is confined to a particular Period of Time, and to a particular Nation; the former is the History of the World in general, at least that Part which is polished by Laws, Arts and Sciences; and of that from the time it was first polished to this day; nay and forwards, as long as it shall so remain.

- Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews

When Ezra Pound said that an epic was a poem that included history, he meant it quite literally: an epic should contain within it a universal history. His own Cantos, with their interminable digressions on Jefferson and Chinese dynasties, gave it a pretty good go. But of course they could never comprehend all of history. A kind of tension is thus established: on the one hand, there is the drive towards a truly total history, complete with an encyclopedic assembly of dates and facts. On the other, there is the pressure to create something simply representative, where individual features and tendencies of the historical landscape are described with precision and then tesselated to fill out the rest of the space. If the former had been achieved, the Cantos would have lacked any conceptual coherence at all; if the latter, the work would have been much shorter, but, naturally, much less inclusive.

Fielding traces each path to its ultimately absurd destination. The efforts of the "topographers" can be understood to represent nothing more than the fragmented remains of an original project of universal history: not finding it in their power to give a total accounting of the history of the world, they have settled for the history of some nation or other. But the real problem is not that they thus restricted. It is that the assumption of possible completeness, in a sense, traps them. Two topographers can give contrary accounts of the same country because each operates within his own monological domain of facts. Though there may be several ways to understand this or that historical figure, the topographer must commit to choosing one interpretation. This move both enables the writing of the history (by creating a firm "fact" that can be fitted into it) and fatally undermines it (because its completeness is belied by the one-sided presentation topographical history demands). Thus the necessary consequence of the possibility of one, even limited, universal history is the possibility of an infinite number of other mutually exclusive histories.

Biography, though preferable, is equally absurd. In contrast to the encyclopedism of topography, biography understands the world as a realm of purely structural relationships devoid of any significant content. A Spanish shepherd is in love with a girl who spurns him--but he may in fact be French instead of Spanish, or a blacksmith instead of a shepherd. All of which recalls the old Russian joke--

A listener calls in to Radio Armenia and asks:
"Is it true that the chess-player Petrosian has won a thousand rubles in the lottery?"
"Yes, it is true. But, first, it wasn't the chess-player Petrosian, it was the soccer player Akopian; second, it wasn't a thousand, it was ten thousand; third, they weren't rubles, they were dollars; fourth, it wasn't in the lottery, it was in a card game; and fifth, he didn't win, he lost."

What is especially dangerous for biography is the possibility of creating new human types that have never existed in reality and thus lack any connection to their supposed historical subject matter; like Aristotelianism, biography has the potential to become completely speculative. And of course, this danger forces us to ask whether any firm grounding for biography can ever be found, since the thoroughgoing instability of names, dates, and places gives even the most ahistorical speculation the chance to refer to something.

Fielding (sarcastically) sniffs at this danger as being merely a defect in craftsmanship. That is because biography offers him something that topography cannot: a sort of epistemic subversion. It is not by accident that he refers to historians as "Romance-Writers": his aim is to show, like a Hayden White avant la lettre, that history and novel-writing are coterminous. The manifest deficiencies of topography leave it with no foundation from which to attack biography as less rigorous. The two simply offer two different kinds of truth--the one, a superficially-plausible construction that always falsely pretends to objectivity, and the other, a pile of generalities that must (like Lewis Carroll's clock) unquestionably be right somewhere, sometime. So it's far from outlandish to believe that The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews should be shelved next to Gibbon and Bede!

Back in the USSR

They hired so many French girls to tutor me that all their features have gotten mixed up, merged into one common blur of a portrait. To my mind, all the little songs, dictations, chrestomathies, and conjugations made these French and Swiss girls regress into childhood themselves. At the center of a worldview dislocated by chrestomathies stood the figure of the great emperor Napoleon and the war of 1812, followed by Joan of Arc (though one Swiss girl turned out to be a Calvinist), and no matter how hard I tried, being a curious boy, to get them to tell me something about France, I could get nothing more than that it was beautiful. The French girls prized the art of speaking quickly and loquaciously, while the Swiss valued the knowledge of children's songs--the "Malborough song" taking pride of place. These poor young women were deeply taken by the cult of great men: Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon, and Molière... On Sundays, they were given leave to attend Mass; they were not supposed to have any acquaintances.

Somewhere in Île-de-France: grape casks, white roads, poplars, the vintner with his daughters goes to Grandma's house in Rouen. He comes back--everything is "scellé," all the presses and vats are sealed, sealing-wax on the doors and cellars. The foreman tried to hide a few buckets of new wine from the excise. He was caught. The family is ruined. An enormous fine--and, thus, the harsh French laws have given me a tutor.

Well, what business did I have with the guardsmen's festivals, the monotonous prettiness of the infantry regiments and horses, with the stone-faced battalions that flowed with resounding step down the Millionnaya, graying with granite and marble?

The whole graceful mirage of St. Petersburg was only a dream, a glittering shroud spread over the abyss, and around it was the chaos of Judaism, not a motherland, a home, or a hearth, but precisely a chaos, an unknown womb-world from which I had been born, which I feared, of which I had a vague inkling, and from which I was fleeing, always fleeing.

The chaos of Judaism seeped through all the cracks of the stone St. Petersburg apartment--with the threat of ruin, with a hat left in the room of a houseguest from the provinces, with the hooklike type of the unreadable books of Genesis discarded on the dusty bookshelf under Goethe and Schiller, and with the tatters of yellow-black ritual.

The strong, ruddy Russian year rolled through the calendar with painted eggs, Christmas trees, steel-bladed Finnish iceskates, December, Shrovetide sleighs, and summer-houses. But there was also a specter that was always in the way--a New Year in September and strange somber feasts that tore the ears with their wild names: Rosh-Hashanah and Yom-Kippur.
- Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time (Шум Времени)

When Americans hear that Stalin was recently voted one of the greatest Russian heroes, or some such thing, they often take it the wrong way--as if the love of Stalin were evidence of some underlying allegiance to communism, or, indeed, Stalinism. In other words, they take Stalin's ideological position to be identical with Stalin's ideological significance. This is, of course, a mistake. If it were really the ideological position that mattered, Lenin would have won out--after all, Stalin made his career as Lenin's vicar on Earth. The reason Stalin can be ranked today in the same poll as Stolypin and Peter the Great is that his "greatness" is profoundly non-Leninist: to the extent that he had genius, it was in the grafting of a barefaced Great Russianism onto an ideology that by 1928 had largely outlived its usefulness. (Perhaps it was only because Stalin was Georgian, as well as an expert on the problem of the nationalities, that he managed to pull it off so cleanly.)

The poll may be regarded as only the most recent development in an ideological project of enormous significance for post-communist Russia. This is the sifting of the communist experience into two bins: "Marxism-Leninism" and "national greatness." The former is embarrassing, obsolete, and profoundly unsexy. The latter is the only conceivable moral framework and policy objective for any self-respecting Russian. The former's existence could be justified because it served as a womb for the latter, with Stalin acting as midwife; the emergence of democratic/Putinist Russia is thus less of a break with the past and more of a qualitative Aufhebung of the World Spirit of Great Russian nationalism.

A feature of this duality that is acknowledged rather less often is that it possesses a clearly defined ethnic-cultural dimension. National greatness is the work of Russians (and a couple Georgians). Marxism-Leninism is the work of--you guessed it--Jews. The most firmly established self-vindicating contemporary narrative of the communist era is that dirty, ratfaced Trotsky and dirty Lenin (who not only had a Jewish grandfather or something but is also generally described as dropping his Rs in speech, a trait normally associated with Jews) fucked over "our" country and "us" with "their" communism. Thus Putinism has only to pick the pure Russianness out of the adulterated twentieth century and write a revisionist history where it marches triumphantly forward.

But, as Mandelstam's experience demonstrates, things were never quite so simple. He escapes the encroaching chaos of Jewishness only to discover that, circa 1900, there is nothing on the other side. There is the "glittering shroud," to be sure; but there is no Russian culture to join. His upwardly (and outwardly) mobile family hires French people to tutor him, not because they want to broaden his horizons, but to enable him to participate in a culture where everyone has been tutored in French. It is a culture that exists as a hybrid, a collection of accumulated influences--pseudo-French aristocratism, Jewishness, "raznochinstvo," science and commerce. Even the seasonal traditions he cites are far from being rooted in Russian soil, as the Finnish iceskates and sleighs (actually "вейки," defined as "Finnish [or Estonian] coachmen in old St. Petersburg who would give rides every year on Shrovetide in sleighs bedecked with bells and ribbons") testify.

Mandelstam, who would soon convert to Lutheranism, was hardly a less hostile critic of Jewish culture than the contemporary revisionists from Solzhenitsyn on down. Yet today's benighted Kulturmachers prefer to invent a mock-Russian culture to champion, complete with onion domes, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and sanctified Romanovs (all of which paraphernalia are as if ready-made for sale to tourists). Mandelstam, for his part, tried to create a culture from the ground up--and I would say he was much the nobler man, despite, or because of, his failure.