Doublethink, Consciencethink

1984 by George Orwell

George Orwell's famous dystopian novel 1984 could be the best prose ever written in the science fiction genre. Its anti-fascist themes remain relevant too. This description of an overzealous patriot beset by "war hysteria" may sound familiar to anyone who's watched Bill O'Reilly on Fox News: "a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph." (1984, p. 192) Yet the novel's purview is bigger than just politics, and its outlook might be summed up like this: what is righteous is not necessarily right. Or, as the emancipated Roman slave-turned-playwright Terence wrote two millennia ago, "The strictest justice is sometimes the greatest injustice."

An immoderate conscience is like a totalitarian conspiracy against the self, and Orwell's totalitarians are conspicuously interested in their subjects' inner lives after the manner of conscience. When Big Brother, the face of 1984's totalitarian regime, stares at protagonist Winston Smith from the cover of a doctored history text, Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. p. 80

What is that if not a description of conscience--of that bullying spokesperson for society within our heads? Orwell takes great pains, in fact, to show Big Brother's means of getting inside citizens' heads in the manner of conscience, of controlling not just speech or actions, but thoughts. "[I]n the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed." (p. 242) Orwell calls the governmental agency that gets inside people's heads the "Thought Police"--an immortally apt descriptor of bully conscience.

If that were not enough to convince you of the connections between the political and the psychological in Orwell's writing, Orwell also assigns the Thought Police a rather unexpected preoccupation with sexuality.

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. p. 66

The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. p. 68

A member of the Thought Police even makes this startling prediction late in the novel: "We shall abolish orgasm." (p. 267)

By contrast, Winston describes the chief virtue of "the Proles," who have largely escaped the Party's suffocating influence, in the following way:

They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. p. 165

The Thought Police are so aggressive in their puritanism that they demand a good number of thoughts be extirpated from consciousness entirely. To satisfy the Thought Police, "Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness." (p. 55) Party members are even equipped at their desks with "memory holes" for the incineration of intolerable information, usually data that might reflect the Party's practices of destroying facts--a practice that has all but "abolished" the entire temporal category of "the past." (p. 143)

This is exactly the theory of conscience according to psychoanalysis: the conscience polices one's mental contents and rejects and suppresses those that offend conscience, such as, I hate my (big) brother, leaving behind a cleansed mental landscape of inoffensive contents like: I love my brother. Orwell all but tips us off that his political parable recapitulates an intrapsychic relation: "Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system." (p. 64) And again: "one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body." (p. 103)

1984 is a fantasy more thoroughly paranoid than Invasion of the Body-Snatchers and more unrelievedly chilling than any of Kafka's, to which Orwell is directly or indirectly indebted. Both master Kafka and disciple Orwell concern themselves with the life of the individual inside the group--what might be called social psychology, which ought to be the psychology of conscience, since that's the internal institution that brokers relations between the individual self and society. While abuse by political or religious authorities is probably sufficient to corrupt a child's conscience, it's by no means necessary. I'd guess that's why Orwell's nightmare speaks to so many people who live more or less free of the sort of propaganda he describes. We all know what it is to feel guilt, suppress thoughts, and to run from the merciless Thought Police.

Ovid Part I: A Delicious Fränkelburger

The middle of summer -- July -- if you walk west on Montague Street toward the harbor at around 6:30 in the evening, carrying your bag of black plums, the water is a gigantic cauldron of fire that sets upon every head a backlighting halo. It's like something out of On Golden Pond except that it smells like garbage and there's dogshit all over the sidewalk. You see more fire dripping from a top floor air conditioner and exploding on the awning of an Italian restaurant like ore dripping from a smelter. You see girls with bare arms and bare legs. Up, down, and sideways, you see boobs boobs boobs.

Ah, summer! "For there is no hardier time than this," Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses, "none more abounding in rich, warm life." Bk XV, ll. 207-208.

In August you drive to the beach with the windows down and the "where do we go now" part of "Sweet Child o' Mine" breaking down on the car stereo at an almost painful volume, and you have a vanilla ice cream cone in each hand and are driving with your knee (not really, I can't digest milk, but you get the idea), and you're watching the girls with their bikinis and their cover-ups, and you're thinking to yourself, "If Norman Mailer was here, I would karate chop him in the neck" and you don't even pity Slash for being less of a bad-ass than you are. And your boys are in the back seat in their bare feet, without their seatbelts on and you don't even care.

Or maybe you ride a bike and you have no urge to karate chop Norman Mailer. Anyway, I am more bad-ass than Slash because, in addition to sometimes not forcing my shoeless kids into their seatbelts, I read Ovid's Metamorphoses this summer, as well as Hermann Fränkel's magnificent Sather Lectures on Ovid, given at Berkeley 65 or 70 years ago.

Frankel calls Ovid "a poet between two worlds," because in many ways he is the first truly modern writer--a writer with an enlightened, scientific, expressly psychological worldview--even more so than his great predecessor Virgil:

[H]e was leaving behind him Antiquity as we know it and traveling on the path to a new age of mankind.... [H]e candidly voiced his experiences in the same modern spirit in which he lived through them, ignoring established traditions and the code of wary discretion. Fränkel, p. 23.

Ovid's reputation has suffered under the general hailstorm of postmodernism raining down on the classics, but he's suffered much more undervaluation than Homer and Virgil ever have, in part because he's been misconstrued as a mere anthologist of old myths and been outshone by the many artists whose careers he shaped and in the first place made possible. However, he is no Joseph Campbell. On the contrary, Ovid reinvented old myths in a great tapestry of modern art, and his particular artistry and modernity probably have much to do with later artists' fascination with his work. As Fränkel says, "the poet has turned a primitive fiction into a symbol for a substantial truth." (p. 78)

For having done so, the greatest of later poets took Ovid as their master. John Frederick Nims tells us, "Goethe probably knew Ovid better than he knew any other poet. So, we suspect, did Dante.... So too did Shakespeare. One wonders if any other poet can claim so many devoted followers among the great?" (Introduction to the Arthur Golding translation, p. xix) Ovid's "metamorphoses"--transformations that sometimes punish and reflect crimes--provided to Dante the contrapasso method that's the chassis for the Inferno. Ovid not only influenced Shakespeare but invented the inward-looking soliloquy for him. Though he doesn't appear in Henri Ellenberger's comprehensive history of the unconscious and though Freud barely refers to him, Ovid is probably the first and most influential commentator on unconscious ideation. In its psychologically sophisticated fantasy, his work draws closer to modern magical realism than anything else in the ancient world, a fact which may be reflected in Kafka's conspicuously Ovidean title, The Metamorphosis. John Donne's famous poem "The Sun Rising," which Carol Rumens calls "one of the most joyous love poems ever written" is very clearly influenced by Ovid's elegy "The Dawn." Renaissance painters used the Metamorphoses like they did the Bible, and in fact, knowing Ovid through his autobiographical works (like Ex Ponto and Tristia, almost unique in the ancient world) is equivalent to knowing the human authors of the Bible.

My edition of Fränkel's Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds is literally stained with summer delight; it has a faint discoloration on its green cloth binding from where a delicious Prime Meats hamburger exploded on it. (I have since sterilized the spot so you can't get E. coli from reading about Ovid.) The book has a stamp on the bottom that says "Niagara University Library" and the card catalog stamps say it was taken out 4 times between 1970 and 1981. Now this particular copy has been taken out for the last time, by me. It is a grand gateway into Ovid, who was arguably the father of modern literature. This is the first of several blogs celebrating Ovid, this life-affirming poet, in this livingest of seasons--summer.

A Dog's Dog

Ribsy by Beverly Cleary


No one but Jack London, perhaps, has ever written so convincingly from a dog’s point of view as has Beverly Cleary in Ribsy. Like most dogs, Ribsy seems charmingly brain damaged. His loyalties are permanent but also have a happy-go-lucky fluidity that embraces many; he forgets to be ashamed for very long; and forgets discouragement. He’s in a word dogged.

When he’s ashamed, he rarely knows what he did wrong, and moves on with admirable alacrity. He solves problems with the tools he has at hand, for example, waiting. This is how he deals with young Ramona Quimby, who constantly irritates him. There’s waiting and there’s also trying, again and again. There’s subterfuge. At one point he feigns sleep, waits for a ticket-taker to walk away, and then sneaks into a stadium—I think in pursuit of hot dogs. Wittgenstein said that a dog is incapable of hypocrisy, but he never met Ribsy. I assume he had met a hot dog somewhere along the line since Wittgenstein was from Vienna, hometown of the original wiener.

Wittgenstein, Cleary, and Jack London aren’t alone in imagining what it is to be man’s best friend. Franz Kafka’s short story, “Investigations of a Dog,” predictably imagines a dog in rebellion against his own nature, a dog apart from other dogs, a dog who’s uncomfortable being a dog. Ribsy is by contrast one of those unquestioning dogs that Kafka’s tormented narrator would have envied. Kafka was famously not at home in his body and with his instincts. He is the greatest of artists devoted to that problem Freud named Civilization and Its Discontents, and it makes sense that Kafka chose the dog as a representative creature who (except for his unusual narrator) is content, in direct proportion to his incivility. My grandfather called all dogs “he,” and I always felt this had something to do with their incivility. There’s something unfussy about drinking out of a toilet.

Jack London’s White Fang, however, who’s three parts wolf and one part domestic dog, shares in the Kafkaesque dog’s alienation from his own species and in his struggles with the yoke of civilization. A harsh Indian master called Grey Beaver gives White Fang his first taste of civilization, and White Fang learns to revere human beings as gods. But he doesn’t feel at home with the civilization forced upon him in the company of men until he discovers the hidden instinctual pleasures that civilization alone makes possible: love and even violence on behalf of those he loves.

In a non-fiction book that tries to imagine the psychological experience of a dog, Jeffrey Masson quotes the 19th century pediatrician Louis Robinson on the presumed centrality of human beings in the canine weltanschauung. I wonder if Robinson got this from London or the other way around:

It has been said that a man stands to his dog in the position of god; but when we consider that our conceptions of deity lead us to the general idea of an enormously powerful and omniscient man, who loves, hates, desires, rewards, and punishes in human-like fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to conceive that from the dog’s point of view his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog—of different shape and manners certain from the common run of dogs, yet canine in his essential nature.

Dogs have much that’s human in them, and we have much that’s canine. If dogs have something to teach us, perhaps it’s not to be too discouraged by civilization and its discontents. Like Ribsy, or like a child, we can still love and can still find outlets for a natural aggression that is, after all, part of the life-force. We, too, can run after hot dogs and forget what to be ashamed of.

A Postcard from Nietzsche's Haus

My blog this week, on Nietzsche, savagery, self-destruction, Lake Sils, Anne Frank, and stones in umbrellas, appears here, at writershouses.com.  This is one of my best essays, on one of the best essayists of all time.

In the Penal Colony

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

A Goodreads friend makes the point that Kafka is funny.  He's probably the funniest writer I've ever read.  Partly the world of paranoid fantasy he depicts is just so familiar to me.  (What?  Is there something wrong with that?  Why are you judging me?)  I have laughed till I was in tears reading Kafka, and supposedly Kafka himself, his friend Max Brod, and others of his tiny Prague literary circle would often laugh quite a bit when he read aloud from his work.  That said, it's true that Kafka's subject matter never strays far from paranoia, self-loathing, loneliness, and self-destruction; so how can it be funny?

Kafka is the great innovator of psychologically sophisticated expressionism.  Many writers before him depicted their dreams and imaginings, but Kafka does so with a certain groundbreaking insight into the psychological motives and irrational methods of dream-life.   And I believe it's that sophisticated faculty of psychological observation that makes him so funny.  More than any other writer, Kafka is alert to the conscience as a potentially overactive and irrational psychical force, a wily, tormenting inner adversary which uses the imagination as its weapon in its internecine wars against the human self.  It's that insight that allows him to parody (and describe) the conscience and its irrational methods, rather than be duped by them and take them at face value.  Borges, who was so influenced by Kafka (he invokes the name "Qaphqa" in his Kafkaesque story "The Lottery in Babylon") is rarely very funny precisely because he chooses to take seriously the perversities perpetrated on him by his conscience.  The Borgesian conscience bricks Borges up in a labyrinth, but unlike Kafka he mistakes the bricks and walls of the labyrinth for reality.  He isn't onto the mischief of his own conscience and cannot laugh at it as Kafka can.  This makes Borges rather lugubrious reading, even though his conscience destroys him and his claim on reality with grace and elegant persuasion.

Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" is the finest parodic description of overzealous conscience ever written.  It's about a torture device for prisoners (that is faintly reminiscent of Pilates equipment) and the penal colony where prisoners are senselessly tortured.  Try reading the story as an allegory on the structure and function of the human conscience.  Where it says "penal colony" read "conscience."  Where it says "our former Commandant" read "childhood."  Certainly, where it describes the torture device, read "conscience."  "It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," says the officer in the very first line.

"In the Penal Colony," like "Metamorphosis" and the novel The Trial, is of course tragic as well as witty.  Every Kafka story is wise, profound, darkly humorous in some way, and so dense with knowledge, joy, and pain that I have to read a little bit and walk away (it's hard for me to read many Kafka stories in a row).  Some stories are more subdued (like "In the Penal Colony" or "The Hunger Artist"), some more flagrantly ridiculous.  "The Judgment" is flat-out hilarious.  So is "Report to an Academy."  But every Kafka story is brilliant, crafted with a blend of artistic control, imaginative freedom, and fearlessly scientific self-observation unique to Kafka, and realized with a nuance and specificity found only in the greatest of all works of literature.

On Trial for a Kiss

The Trial by Franz Kafka

On September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka stayed up all night writing a highly autobiographical, somewhat fantastical, short story called “The Judgment.”  Twelve years later he was dead.  He had published little, but what he’d written in that decade—including “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and The Trial—was a thunderbolt staked in the heart of literature unlike any since Boccaccio’s Decameron.

From Boccaccio (and Dante and Petrarch) emanates that realist, psychological humanism which passed through Chaucer into its apogee in the plays of Shakespeare, and resounded across the next centuries in the work of the great modernists, like James Joyce.  Kafka belongs to this tradition, clearly, but he also inaugurates a new way forward.

John Updike wrote that Kafka “felt abashed before the fact of his own existence….  So singular, he spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.”  William Hubben said that Kafka “expressed the terror of life in such unforgettable images that comparisons with classical writers suggest themselves.”  And George Steiner notes that kafkaesque is now a coinage in a hundred languages.  “The letter K is his,” Steiner said, “as S is not Shakespeare’s or D Dante’s (it is in analogy with Dante and Shakespeare that W.H. Auden placed Franz Kafka as the shaping mirror of our new dark ages).”

Updike, Hubben, and Steiner are right about Kafka’s importance, but unenlightening about the reason for it.  Furthermore, they seem to think of modernity as a time of darkness, and wish to anoint Kafka as its bard—a common, and a mistaken, view.  John Gardner is perhaps more helpful.  In Kafka’s work, Gardner writes, “particular details of psychological reality are directly translated into physical reality….  [T]he reality imitated is, not in one or two details but in many, that of our dreams….  The presentation tends to be that of conventional realistic fiction; only the subject matter has changed.”

This sounds like “magical realism,” and in fact Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is perhaps more closely associated with that movement than anybody else, was directly inspired by Kafka.  In a 1981 interview for The Paris Review, Peter H. Stone asked Marquez, “How did you start writing?”  Marquez answered, “...One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka: I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read ‘The Metamorphosis.’  The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect....’ When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”

Expressionism existed before; artists have always depicted the contents of their imaginations, often in a realist style.  Look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or at the ancient Greek plays.  But what separates Kafka and much of the magical realism he inspired from previous examples of expressionism is that he wrote with psychological insight and intent.  “Despite his power of fantasy,” Harold Bloom says, “Kafka is as empirical as Freud or Beckett.”  And Kafka was influenced by Freud.  In a diary entry from September 23, 1912, Kafka noted that throughout the writing of his famous story, “The Judgment,” in which he first worked out his general psychological-expressionist method, he had “thoughts of Freud, of course.”

The Kafkaesque expressionist is a psychologically-educated spelunker in the caves of his own mind; by contrast, Aeschylus’s expressionism, while loaded with psychological meaning to an almost shocking degree, feels less psychologically self-aware, less attuned to the mechanisms of psychic change, more intuitive.  “The dilemma of Orestes,” A.D. Nuttall writes, “is essentially public: one god says ‘Do this,’ another god says, ‘Do that.’  There is no question of attributing hesitation or procrastination to Orestes as a feature of his character (indeed, he can hardly be said to have character).”  That could be called naïve expressionism, whereas Kafka represents a psychologically sophisticated expressionism—the sort, for example, that some critics have observed in the work of filmmaker David Lynch.  Chris Rodley commented on Lynch’s film Blue Velvet: “The movie does seem to display or illustrate, almost perfectly, certain Freudian concerns and theories—and in an extreme, undiluted way.”  He then asked Lynch, “Was that intentional?”  Lynch said, “[F]ilm has a great way of giving shape to the subconscious.  It’s just a great language for that.”  Not so great, however, as fiction—at least since Kafka got to it.

Kafka adds to the biblical-Shakespearean tradition of inquiry into character a research into the dream-life, into the imagination as a psychodynamic force, into the manner in which emotions distort perceptions of reality.  Existentialists like to point out that despite the pervasive sense of guilt and accusation in The Trial, K. never knows what he’s accused of.  Updike was right in this much: it’s K.’s whole life that’s on trial—in the courtroom of his own over-zealous conscience.  And we could say that were there one specific cause, repression obscures such painful memories and ideas.  But all that being said, there are certainly hints as to what he’s accused of (or has accused himself of).  At the end of chapter six, K. kisses Leni, his lawyer’s mistress.  “Joseph!” his uncle cries, “how could you do it! … the poor sick lawyer … In all probability you have helped to bring about his complete collapse and so hastened the death of the man on whose good offices you are dependent.  And you leave me, your uncle, to wait here in the rain for hours and worry myself sick, just feel, I’m wet through and through!”

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Leviathan

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes reminds me, in a good way, of the ape who learned to act like a human being in Kafka's hilarious short story, "A Report to an Academy."  The Kafka story begins:

Honored members of the Academy!  You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.  I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire.  It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to your calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause, orchestral music, and yet essentially alone....

Hobbes trains his attention on our primate nature, a nature prone to quarreling from three principal causes, as he sees it (p. 185, Penguin Classics ed.): Competition, Diffidence (i.e., fear), and Glory.  And we are motivated in our quarrels accordingly, says Hobbes, by the objectives of Gain, Safety, and Reputation.  I hear ya, brother, give me some of all that.  He sure is preaching to the ape.

Many people think of Hobbes as a cynic with a low opinion of human beings.  But that's wrong.  On the contrary, Hobbes is very sympathetic with us hungry beings in need of food, safety, and respect.  He is far more sympathetic to innate Desire than St. Augustine, for example:

"But neither of us [Hobbes himself and the average man who locks his doors at night] accuse mans nature in it.  The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin.  No more are the Actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them...." (p. 187)

Another reviewer expresses hatred for Hobbes because of his supposed endorsement of the reign of Christendom.  There is a late section in Leviathan on "Christian Common-Wealth," and I confess I haven't read very much of that part, but what I did read was nothing other than an attempt to compel people with Christian morals to see that the Bible does not invalidate or supercede his rationalist political and moral philosophy.  In Part II, "Of Common-Wealth," which I have read thoroughly, he makes it pretty clear what he thinks of religious claims to political authority (p. 230):

"And whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there is no Covenant with God....  But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition."

All righty then.  His revolution was the systematic application of reason to the planning of society; he derived his conclusions from first principles of human passions that he didn't intuit but observed, in others and also in himself--he exhorts us (p. 82), Nosce teipsum: Read thy self.  Supposedly he knew Descartes and Galileo and was influenced by them; like them, he is one of those Leviathans of rationalist, humanist Renaissance thought who laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment.  He was less imaginative than John Locke, it's true, when it came to the possible forms of political representation, but it was he, before Locke, who described government as a social contract between men by which those men defend themselves from each other and from their own passions; it was Hobbes who described government as a representative of its citizens and not of God.

It's impossible not to love the engraving on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition, which comes from the frontispiece of the original from 1651.  Across the top it reads, "Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei," meaning "There is no power on earth which can be compared to him."  That's a quote from Job about a "big, ugly monster" as my three-year-old would say.  But Hobbes means something different: he means the monarch who embodies the interests and security not of God but of human beings.



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