Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Month: September 2009 (page 2 of 3)

The Part of Kafka People Forget

It seemed to K. as if at last those people had broken off all relations with him, and as if now in reality he were freer than he had ever been, and at liberty to wait here in this place, usually forbidden to him, as long as he desired, and had won a freedom such as hardly anybody else had ever succeeded in winning, and as if nobody could dare to touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him; but –this conviction was at least equally strong—as if at the same time there was nothing more senseless, nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability.

The Castle

It’s not all “Before the Law” and “The Judgment.” Especially in The Castle, K. has his moments of self-determination and freedom beyond anything typically associated with Kafka. It’s still problematic–and then some!–but it’s not the man waiting for the law, and it’s not the country doctor in bed with the patient. It’s as if Josef K. had not been killed at the end of The Trial but was allowed to stay in the open air (I believe the only time in the whole novel in which he is definitively outdoors).

[A scene from the odd but effective Japanese animation of “A Country Doctor.”]

Krasznahorkai

Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska’s notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of ‘the collapse into anarchy,’ a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable. Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of the full weight of those frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life, the way his joints and bones were knit, had loosened and he carelessly transgressed the ancestral laws of his soul–if he simply lost control of his undemeaningly ordered world..It bothered him greatly that however he tried to persuade his friends of this they refused to listen to him, but it saddened him most when in tones of unrelieved gloom they proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’, for such awful thoughts reminded him of the sentiments and unremittingly painful monologues he was used to hearing on a daily basis in the house on Bela Wenckheim Avenue, which was where he had just arrived.

The Melancholy of Resistance

That traditionalism, that reference to the “ancestral laws of the soul” which supposedly keep us all in line and prevent the fall into chaos–that is the voice of fear for me. I used to think that this was indicative of a somewhat conservative tendency in Krasznahorkai, a willingness to accept the strictures of fate out of the worry that challenging them would bring down the weight and fury of the heavens. Now it seems more like a description of some lurking death-instinct, an atavistic tendency that represents something like Moosbrugger did in The Man Without Qualities, except generated in the angst and neurosis of people’s minds, a product of the flaws of order that are built into the systems that emerge: more of a biological process than a political one, the inevitable appearance of the imp of the perverse, the worm in the apple. Valuska is the world-dazzled character who does not fall prey to such autodestruction (at least not internally), but I don’t think Krasznahorkai holds him up as any sort of practical solution for the world.

[Attention Krasznahorkai fans: I have it on good authority that the English translation of Satantango is still a good 2-3 years out. Sorry.]

William Empson: Let it go

Let it go

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
 The more things happen to you the more you can’t
  Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
 The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
  You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

Empson said it’s “about stopping writing.” Then later, he said about it:

Reading that poem feels like baby-watching an imbecile child, oozing at every hole and playing with itself incessantly, and trying to attract attention by untruthful cries of pain.

It might be if it weren’t so…ambiguous.

Addendum: As mentioned by nnyhav, here is Empson’s (amazing) Villanelle:

Villanelle

It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

What later purge from this deep toxin cures?
What kindness now could the old salve renew?
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

The infection slept (custom or changes inures)
And when pain’s secondary phase was due
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

How safe I felt, whom memory assures,
Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.

My stare drank deep beauty that still allures.
My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

You are still kind whom the same shape immures.
Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue.
It is the pain, it is the pain endures.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

Atherton on Finnegans Wake and Giordano Bruno

One of the best books on Finnegans Wake, William Atherton’s The Books at the Wake, has just been republished, and I’d recommend it to anyone trying to get a basic grip on the text. But I quote him here for the Brunian synopsis he gives early on, which follows nicely from Blumenberg:

There was a medieval theory that God composed two scriptures: the first was the universe which he created after having conceived the idea of it complete and flawless in his mind; the second was the Holy Bible. What Joyce is attempting in Finnegans Wake is nothing less than to create a third scripture, the sacred book of the night, revealing the microcosm which he had already conceived in his mind. And as the phenomenal universe is build upon certain fundamental laws which it is the task of science and philosophy to discover, so the microcosm of Finnegans Wake is constructed according to certain fundamental axioms for which Joyce is careful to provide clues, but which it is the task of his readers to discover for themselves.

And one of the sources of these axioms is Bruno:

Probably Joyce was first attracted to him as a self-confessed ‘Restless spirit that overturns the structure of sound discipline’ and as a heretic who was burned to death. But he is not likely to have read his work very thoroughly for Bruno is one of the most verbose of all writers and on one occasion takes a page to say that he himself, Il Nolano, calls things by their right names: Chiama il pane pane, il vino vino, il capo capo, il piede piede… and so on to say that ‘He calls bread bread, wine wine, a head a head, a foot a foot’ until he has given nearly a hundred examples of his own virtue in calling things by their right names…[Joyce] seems to have found his style irritating on a second reading, and appears to be parodying the passage I have just quoted in ‘did not say to the old old, did not say to the scorbutic, scorbutic’ (136.10).

I like Bruno’s proof of proper use of language. Talk about self-assertion! But isn’t this part of the problem with setting up the duality of law and reality?

Hans Blumenberg Cheat Sheet

This is a quick attempt to summarize Blumenberg’s positions on some of the main pre-modern thinkers he treats. Corrections welcome.

  • Platonism: Knowledge = happiness = justice. Elitist guardians possess greatest amounts of all three. Knowledge to be pursued. A lawful, knowable connection between this reality and the reality of the forms.
  • Epicureanism: Happiness attained by ignoring that which does not directly concern you. Knowledge-as-exploration is distracting and leads to misery. Abandonment of any claim to universal knowledge. Anti-elitist.
  • Stoicism: Happiness attained by the cessation of desire, including desire for knowledge. Anti-elitist.
  • Skepticism: Pursuit of knowledge undermined through rhetoric, ultimately ending in a negation of humanity’s ability to know or master the world.
  • Gnosticism: As conceived by Marcion and others, Christian salvation is attained through knowledge of the irrelevance of this evil world and focus on private knowledge of the real and good God. Knowledge is good but resolutely non-secular, not to be pursued in this world–and therefore there is no public standard of knowledge, no method of verification. Elitist, as only those who pursue otherworldly wisdom get saved.
  • Augustine: Abandons Gnosticism to focus on salvation attained through virtuous acts and repentance in this world. Beginning of classic anti-elitist Catholic/Scholastic tradition. Condemns curiosity as an arrogant and dangerous distraction from the real matter of salvation.
  • Scholasticism: As epitomized by Aquinas, the attempt to locate salvation and relevance in this world while placing God in a realm beyond comprehension. The height of establishing a coherent and meaningful connection between this world and God. Curiosity beyond the restricted realm of humanity is fiercely condemned.
  • Voluntarism: The particular offshoot doctrine of God being constrained by no law or rule whatsoever in what He can bring about. Consequently, curiosity loses some of its forbidden character as there is no greater law or theory that could be discovered.
  • Nominalism: In the context of theology, a doctrine of Ockham and others that proposes that every object in this world does not have any linkage to a real, greater Platonic sort of form in the amorphous Godly realm. Undermines Scholasticism by making the “greater” reality (whether of forms or God) more remote from this reality and diminishing God’s derivable influence on this reality; thereby it is now safer for conceptualism and theory to exist in this reality, as it does not intrude on God’s turf.
  • Nicholas of Cusa: Specifically proposes that humanity may discover the truths of this world through a proto-scientific process of trial and error by which we may eventually achieve a perfect, though limited, knowledge of our own world. Endorsement of curiosity as an integral part of the theological whole.
  • Giordano Bruno: Expands and reverses Nicholas’s conceptions by putting no limits on the expansion of humanity’s knowledge, now encompassing the (Copernican) heavens and the earth’s place in the now non-geocentric universe. Beginning of genuine self-assertion over the (now-expanded) world.
  • Descartes: Represents an odd regression to the problems of Scholasticism, by attempting to reconcile a posited voluntarist God with one who guarantees a quasi-scientific, perfectible methodology in this world. The attempt fails, and so Descartes represents the last gasp of a not-yet-secularized scientific curiosity, for which Leibniz will take him to task.
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