The Allagash Rule of Perpetual Motion and Brouillard dans la tête: Madame Bovary Part II

Flaubert shows the reader early on that Madame Bovary’s flight from one place to another brings her no relief, for her complaint is with no particular place but the universe itself. She runs like a rat in a maze, finding each new place as damned and disappointingly real as the one before. She can’t stop looking to the next horizon, however, in a way I find touching despite her famously off-putting egoism and ruthless vanity. Again and again Flaubert writes stuff like this: “She was filled with temptations to run off with Léon, somewhere, far away, to try a new destiny” p. 119. Emma continues to dream of moving away to a foreign land or to Paris—as if there were no problems in Paris!

When she actually does leave home for other places and other men like Rodolphe and Léon, she never seems to arrive at her intended destination. Rather she looks to new fantasies, new lovers, or new romantic settings for her present affair. Her despair causes her to seek escape in a mirage of happiness that’s always a moving target. During one scene that dramatically equates romance with travel, she has sex on an interminable carriage ride through Paris, displaying a “rage for locomotion” (fureur de la locomotion p. 234). It calls to mind the opening pages of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, in which the narrator cites “the Allagash rule of perpetual motion.” His shallow friend Tad Allagash never has more than one drink per bar because “Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are.”

Place, as in the opening of Bright Lights, Big City—as in every case of despair, maybe—is in Madame Bovary a method of escaping reality and a crucial substrate of dreams. As such, Flaubert’s many beautiful landscape descriptions tend to involve naturalistic symbols of dream: fog (brouillard), haze (brume) and mist (vapeur). Flaubert’s landscapes are like old movie stars photographed with Vaseline on the lens in order to create a candle-like glow that obscures imperfections and welcomes the imagination to fill in the obscure blanks as it pleases.* The fog, like the Vaseline, clearly serves and represents the mind’s will to distort and obscure what it really sees. It’s there because Madame Bovary has unwittingly put it there. Her mind is a romantic fog.

Flaubert makes this link explicit when the housemaid Félicité observes that Madame Bovary suffers from a brouillard dans la tête—“a fog in the head” p. 119. But Madame Bovary doesn’t understand that her head is befogged with corrupt “unrealistic dreams” (rêves trop haut p. 118) that prevent her from accommodating herself to reality. She imagines that the mélancholies de la passion stem from her accursed inability to satisfy those passions and to realize her fantasies. She never guesses that it’s in fact the other way around—that melancholy attaching to the difficulties of civilized life in the real world could cause her to seek relief in a fog of childish fantasies. But that is exactly the nature of her brouillard dans la tête and the nature of all those dreamy, adulterous affairs Woody Allen writes about so incessantly.

Woody Allen generally writes about brouillard dans la tête as though it were inevitable, and Flaubert might agree, though Sigmund Freud’s oeuvre is based on the opposite idea—that human beings not only can see clearly if they dispel their defensive illusions but must dispel those illusions if they want to be free of the vicious cycle of despair. For that is what brouillard dans la tête really is: depression, and all the mind’s most inadequate and infantile romantic remedies for it.

With the possible exception of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Madame Bovary in fact lays bare the intricacies of depression better than any other novel. Because Madame Bovary’s melancholy arises from within and follows her wherever she goes, because it’s psychological in nature and not geographical, her efforts to erase it through fantasy escapes and affairs are all doomed to fail. Each one must be followed by another in endless pursuit of mirages of happiness that lie just there on the horizon. This leads to “her flighty airs” (ses airs évaporés p. 132) and “her continually youthful illusions” (ses illusions toujours jeunes p. 191). She cannot address her problems in the real world because she can’t look at the real world long enough to see herself naked of her vain dreams. Such is the “invasion of reverie” in her life (l’envahissement de leur rêveries, as is said of Emma and her lover Rodolphe, p. 194) that she remains always a child, dreaming, running, unconsciously fleeing and thinking all the while that she’s going to make the melancholy go away once and for all. Madame Bovary is cruel, yes, but she’s also suffering in earnest. She is overcome by guilt, self-hatred, and melancholy, “by an immense regret that stimulated passion, instead of suppressing it” p. 277. The roaring passion to escape leads to more damage and more self-loathing in a death spiral from which Flaubert won’t allow us to avert our eyes.

Emma Bovary is like many people, maybe, as she sits in the opera in a fog, dreaming of another more perfect, more romantic, more glamorous life. “She bemoaned love, and yearned to have wings. Emma, too, would have wanted to escape from life and fly off in an embrace” p. 215.

In the end Madame Bovary, who is often described as having her eyes only half-open, is like Flaubert’s blind beggar, who cannot see even with his eyes open wide. It’s a perfect novel and a perfect cautionary tragedy that draws inspiration from those tales of blindness by the ancient Greek dramatists. It whispers to us what the Delphic oracle did: know thyself….

*When master portrait photographer Philippe Halsman began his career in Paris in the 1930s, the prevailing style of portrait involved this sort of romantic distortion using filters and manipulation of the images. Halsman was one of a new generation who would make realistic photographs, only manipulating the images through lighting and exposure.

Freed Men

A number of the heavy-weights of Roman literature were freed slaves. Terence, for example, was an African slave, brought to Rome by a senator. His master became impressed with his literary talent and, insensitive to the demotion in quality of life and pay it would mean, freed him from slavery to become a playwright. (Terence wrote six plays and died young.) Horace, one of Rome’s most revered poets along with Virgil and Ovid, proudly admitted he was the son of a freed slave. The great Stoic philosopher Epictetus was himself a freed slave. And these writers overcame the disadvantages of slavery to influence the course of intellectual history—and even cast their shadows into the political sphere. The editors of the Dover edition of Epictetus say “Epictetus was considered the greatest of the Stoic philosophers by Herodes Atticus, a teacher of Marcus Aurelius,” who ruled Rome in the second century C.E. and wrote perhaps the most famous works of Stoic philosophy we have.

Our academy labels Horace and many other Roman writers ‘dead white males’ of the ruling class and so casts them aside. Most people won’t have even heard of Epictetus. The not ignoble idea is of course to give a voice instead to those who’ve been historically deprived of one. The irony is: who better meets this exact criterion than a poet like Horace or philosopher like Epictetus! A ruling class can impose no more thorough a silence on the powerless than through slavery, and Horace shares this heritage with the great African-American writers of today, only it was even closer to him—his father was a slave! Virgil was not a slave (though he did come from Gaul), but he was the sort of un-elitist man to give a chance to the son of a freed slave. Virgil gave Horace his shot by introducing him to the great Roman literary patron Maecenas. You see, the enlightened Roman Republic wasn’t just good for aqueducts. It was good for outsider literature too; its finest writers brought to their work a worldview from outside Rome’s ruling class.

Epictetus’s history as a slave has a special importance to his work. It not only marks him as an outsider but also, I would argue, forms the basis of his Stoic philosophies. His writings frequently criticize the institution of slavery—clearly, he didn’t forget about his early life as a slave—but more importantly the condition of helplessness of which slavery is the apogee colors all his thinking. He returns again and again to the theme of freedom of mind versus that of body; every line of his work speaks to all that we can’t control in life and seeks to define the correct terms of happiness and freedom given this limitation.

A collection of his teachings called the Enchiridion, or “Manual,” begins:

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinions, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. p. 1, Dover Thrift Edition

From this premise he draws the conclusion that one can only secure happiness “by withdrawing from the things which are not in our power, and by placing the good and the evil only in those things which are in our power.” (p. 13) The job is therefore to be master over one’s own thoughts, not one’s fortunes, over one’s deeds but not over their consequences. It is what might be called the art of assent, as it’s put in the 177th “fragment” attributed to Epictetus (p. 56). Paleo-Christian monks handed down these fragments across the centuries like Roman pottery, getting more and more broken with each transfer, and it’s just this sort of shabby treatment that’s out of Epictetus’s control and to which, I imagine, Epictetus therefore grants a certain assent. “Let it be,” “Let it go,” “It is what it is,” and like sayings seem to me to have this kind of assent in mind. It’s what I have in mind with my kids when I decide to pick my battles and give in. You want ice cream before dinner? OK, yes. The blessed freedom of it!

The Stoic philosophy is not idle speculation but rather a discipline. It’s meant for practical application to help you live a better life. The Stoics find happiness in the regulation of one’s feelings instead of in victory or salvation in realms outside the self. The idea belongs to a humanistic, rationalist movement of two millennia that begins with Socrates and ends, perhaps, with Freud. Could there be any talking therapy without a Stoic expectation of happiness attainable from within?

The pleasures of Stoic self-sovereignty allow the gladiator-slave Spartacus, at the end of the 1960 movie of that name, to conquer his enemy even as he is crucified by refusing to answer his interrogator’s question. As screenwriter Dalton Trumbo said, it was a movie about men “who in the end preferred to die as free men than live as slaves.” In this calculus, the freedom given to all human beings as a birthright trumps even death. But the pleasures of a free mind exceed Spartacus’s right to disobey—they include also a freedom of imagination. André Breton, the father of surrealism, makes a Stoical retreat from reality towards an inner freedom of thought that knows no bounds. He writes: “Among the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought.” (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 4)

Ovid Part IV: Metamorphose This

The speaker of Ovid's "Contrite Lover" elegy in Amores reflects on a quarrel in which he struck his lover. Full of remorse, he asks this of his own hands: "What have I to do with you, servants of murder and crime?" (Amores I, 7, 27). As Hermann Fränkel puts it, the speaker "feels estranged from his own self of a moment before. His identity is broken up...." (Fränkel, Ovid: A poet Between Two Worlds, pp. 20-21) The great classical scholar considers Ovid's representation of inner conflict a historic literary achievement:

[I]t was an unheard-of novelty for the ancients that a person should no longer feel securely identical with his own self.... There is no sign of a previous emergence of these possibilities; Ovid took them for granted and used them freely in his poetry.... [W]ith the self losing its solid unity and being able half to detach itself from its bearer, a fundamental shift had taken place in the history of the human mind. Frankel, p. 21

Before Ovid came along, Plato and other ancient philosophers had postulated a self divided by competing faculties of passion and reason. But who had ever represented the subjective experience of these internal divisions with Ovid's level of modern realism? Even among later poets, who but Shakespeare has represented our divided consciousness so well as Ovid?

Indeed, in Ovid's representations of mental life, schisms of identity and clashes between wishes and realities precipitate solutions where a troubling aspect of self or world is rejected from consciousness. "Time and again," Fränkel writes of the Amores, "we find Ovid bent on concealing from his own eyes a disagreeable fact; but he also sees to it that the cloak is transparent." (Fränkel, p. 31) In the Heroides, one of Ovid's heroines, Phyllis, attests to the same phenomenon: "one is slow to give credence to that which brings pain.... Often I lied to myself...." (quoted in Fränkel, p. 42)

True, there are antecedents to Ovid's notion of denial, too. Consider his telling of the famous story of Jupiter and Io, first in the Heroides and again in the Metamorphoses. Ovid seems deliberately to echo Sophocles. "What is the reason for your flight?" Ovid writes of the nymph Io in the Heroides. (To hide his affair from Juno, Jupiter has turned Io into a cow and Io goes mad trying to run from her new form when she cannot.) "You will never escape from your own face.... You are the same who both pursues and flees. It is you who lead yourself, and you go where you lead." (quoted in Fränkel p. 79) Whether or not Ovid intended it, the lines certainly call to mind Teiresias's stunning words to Oedipus in Oedipus Rex: "I say you are the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek."

Ovid, however, accomplishes with his fantastic tales what Sophocles did not attempt: he converts the ancient wisdom written on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi--gnothi sauton in the original Greek (nosce te ipsum in Latin, "know thyself" in English)--into psychological realism that not only depicts inner conflict and denial in personal terms, but actually examines what Freud later called defense mechanisms.

That is to say, not all transformation in Metamorphoses is supernatural. In many cases Ovid in fact dispenses with the fantastical metamorphoses and depicts in straight realist terms an emotion being actively revised or altered by another. For example in Book II Phaethon asks his father Apollo whether Clymene (Phaethon's mother) lied when she said Apollo was his father. His exact words are nec falsa Clymene culpam sub imagine celat (Metamorphoses, II, 37), "if Clymene is not hiding her shame beneath an unreal pretence." Here Ovid makes the pattern of pain and emotional flight more intricate, more subtle: the particular pain in this case is shame; the particular means of evasion is hiding.

At times Ovid upstages Freud to the degree that he uses Freudian terms like "repression" and "transference" in connection with pretty much the same phenomena Freud sought to describe.

erebuit Phaethon iramque pudore repressit, "Phaethon blushed and repressed his anger in shame." (I, 755)

Iovis coniunx ... a Tyria collectum paelice transfert in generis socios odium, "the wife of Jove had now transferred her anger from her Tyrian rival to those who shared her blood." (II, 256-259)

The Phaethon episode in Book II, one of the best in the Metamorphoses, tracks Apollo's changing emotions in sequence like a psychoanalyst would. After his son Phaethon's death, Ovid tells us, lucemque odit seque ipse diemque datque animum in luctus et luctibus adicit iram officiumque negat mundo, or "He hates himself and the light of day, gives over his soul to grief, to grief adds rage, and refuses to do service to the world." (Metamorphoses, II, 383-385)

After Jupiter goads Apollo into climbing back into the chariot to light the world, Ovid writes: Phoebus equos stimuloque dolens et verbere saevit (saevit enim) natumque obiectat et inputat illis, "in his grief Phoebus savagely plies the horses with lash and goad (so savagely), reproaching and taxing them with the death of his son." (II, 399-400) It's true that the horses were an instrument in Phaethon's demise, but Apollo knows that they are innocent beasts, that the fault lies most of all with Phaethon himself and with Jupiter, who threw the thunderbolt that killed him--and who, after making a brief apology, had the audacity to threaten Apollo if he didn't resume his duties. Ovid implies quite unambiguously that Apollo whips the horses in Jupiter's place, in Phaethon's place, in his own place.

When Jupiter rapes Callisto, one of Diana's maidens, Ovid writes, huic odio nemus est et conscia silva "She loathed the forest and the woods that knew her secret." (II, 338) She seems to hate the woods in place of Jupiter (again), because Jupiter is too terrible to attack directly. Perhaps Callisto also hates the woods in place of her own guilt. Ovid continues, quam difficile est crimen non prodere vultu! "How hard it is not to betray guilt in the face!" (II, 447) Freud teaches us that guilt is a major, if not the major, stimulus to repression. Guilt causes people to hide emotions from themselves and from others. More often than not, transformation of ideas and affects does the hiding. Shakespeare knew this before Freud. And Ovid evidently knew it before either one of his great intellectual heirs, as transformative defense mechanisms of displacement and identification abound in his Metamorphoses. I found it most interesting that Ovid describes Nyctimene, a woman who slept with her father and was punished by turning into a bird, as being conscia culpae--literally "conscious of her guilt." (II, 593) It implies she might also have been unconscious of it. Ovid would have had little trouble understanding Shak and Freud, and it's obvious that "Ovid's amazing candor" (Fränkel, p. 58) imparted much psychological wisdom to later ages.

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.

More on the Imperfect Science of the Heart

New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every modern, educated person should read this book's predecessor, the (old) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. For those interested in learning still more about psychoanalysis, the New Introductory Lectures are also vital. The latter work reflects clarifications in Freud's thinking since the original lectures given from 1915 to 1917 at the University of Vienna.

His daughter Anna Freud's book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense is also a very clear, very helpful and common sensical treatment of the subject of psychological defenses--i.e., the varieties of ways the mind lies to itself to protect itself from painful feelings and ideas.

There is at least one chapter in the New Introductory Lectures that is completely bizarre--Freud at his most cavalier and speculative, bordering on ridiculous--and it will do little to dispel the common canard that psychoanalysis is a "pseudo-science." It suffices to say that Freud wasn't perfect. But many great scientists make mistakes or fall prey to ideology; Einstein did (see this article, "The Master's Mistakes" from Discover Magazine); Linus Pauling, one of two people ever to win a Nobel prize in two different areas (Chemistry and Peace), had fairly lunatic ideas about vitamin C; and Isaac Newton wasted a lot of time in foolish speculations about alchemy. But we don't throw out what Einstein and Newton had right and we shouldn't throw out what Freud had right, which is about as revolutionary and beautiful as either of those physicists. Freud's works ought to be read like any other thinker's, not like orthodox readings of a Bible--that is, readers have no reason to try to retrofit reality to correspond with his scriptural errors--and just the same readers have no reason to dump the baby with the bathwater.

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Adventure Time in the Rabbit Holes

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Post-Freudian expressionism has now had a century to percolate throughout the arts. I think in particular of painters and writers, Spaniards and Jews. Picasso, Miró, and Dalí. Sensuous dreamers like Modigliani, Chagall, and Soutine. Kafka and Singer and Marquez. But lately it's disseminated as far as white-bread Montana Eagle Scouts like filmmaker David Lynch and to men with names like Methodist generals in the Civil War: a man named Nicholson Baker has written three literary works of sex fantasy, and a man named Pendleton Ward created the very funny and super-creative expressionistic cartoon Adventure Time (in which Jake the Dog and Finn the Human roam the wastes of the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, where the stuff of our own world has been made substrate to fanciful recombinations in the person of characters like Peppermint Butler and Donny the Grass Ogre). Via Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, psychologically sophisticated expressionism even animates my Cheerios box, which asks me impertinently, "What makes your heart beat a little faster?" over the two sensuous humps of a heart-shaped bowl.

Nicholson Baker's House of Holes is like a sexual Adventure Time. It possesses that same modern combination of self-awareness with expressionistic free-for-all. Baker goes farther with his erotica than any other literary writer I've ever heard of, including D.H. Lawrence, of whom Lenny Bruce said, “This guy can really tear up a piece of ass.” (The Essential Lenny Bruce, p. 216) Yet Baker inspires a sense of expressive freedom that transcends sexuality, much like Lenny Bruce himself does; if he can say that, I think, then surely I can say this. I found the book activated my whole sense of possibility even in non-sexual terms. I could go out to a fancy dinner two nights in a row! What's to stop me? I could put music on right now! Damn straight: I am stone cold crazy insane.

A favorite quote of mine—from Andre Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism—is apropos: “Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought.” But a freedom of the imagination that excludes sexual desire would be a chicken-shit sort, wouldn’t it? "[T]he reason we left England was just for that right," Lenny Bruce said: "to be disgusting." (p. 216 again) But of course he meant "disgusting" ironically because he held "dirty" words in high esteem. They’re a (relatively) peaceful conduit for vital human aggression, and Bruce saw no dirt on the body parts and functions to which such words referred. The censorious people with their obscenity laws, Bruce observed, don’t hate the words as much as they hate the parts and the deeds and wishes; in the final prudish analysis, "the word isn't dirty—the titties are dirty.” Having gone to jail on charges of obscenity, Bruce called out the hypocrisy in the comparative public lenience toward violence: “Here’s how the titties work. If the titty is bloody and maimed, it’s clean. But if the titty is pretty, it’s filthy.” (Bruce, p. 180)

House of Holes is Baker’s third erotic novel, and also his most imaginative and funniest. Commentators have called all three books funny, but I sometimes get the feeling they have nervous laughter before something that was meant seriously—like kids in a sex ed class or on a trip to see the nude Greek statues at the art museum. Baker always writes elegantly, persuasively, and the people in his novel are real enough for the job, but he’s gone out of his way to fashion a plane of experience purified of anything but the unadulterated physical appetite for sex. His success in fashioning such a plane, and with a certain Eden-like innocence no less, reflects a sustained, sincere act of concentration from its creator. This third novel in particular can be hilarious in its reflections of the absurd contradictions, magic symbols, and gluttony of the id, in its characters’ preposterous lack of public shame, and in their equally preposterous castration anxiety, relieved in preposterous fantastical ways; but still the book’s ethos is in general more fun than funny. It isn’t principally satiric. It doesn’t side with shame by any means. It’s obscene. It’s filled with pretty breasts, penises, vaginas, buttocks, legs, bras, pubic hair, and underwear, and with people making shamelessly “filthy” use of them in body and mind. Don’t read it.

Or if you do read it—and apparently some other people besides me have, because I found it on a shelf of bestsellers in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport—just tell everyone it was really, really “funny.”




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Non Serviam

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest.  The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft in violation of the Selective Service Act passed earlier that year.  She brought with her to the jailhouse, according to Vivian Gornick, only two things: "a small toilet case" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.


Joyce's novel was a rare object at that time (though, admittedly, not so rare as Emma Goldman's toilet case).  At the time Goldman was arrested, Portrait had been in print for little more than six months in an edition of less than a thousand.  Yet it’s fitting, even if surprising, that she had a copy and attached such importance to it, since Joyce wrote the quintessential book against "the spirit of unquestioning obedience" that Goldman deplored.


While Goldman rebelled publicly against governments, armies, corporations, and churches in order to even the scales of justice, Joyce ignored a political bagatelle such as World War I.  He wrote not of the struggle to liberate a people but of the individual’s struggle to liberate himself—if need be, from his people.  In his book on the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus—the best book ever written on male adolescence, I think—Stephen liberates himself above all from his own twisted conscience.  And that is hard enough.  To overthrow a government of the people is not so hard, perhaps, as to overthrow the government of the heart.


Plato confused conscience with reason, but Freud, the ultimate analyst of corrupt conscience (a.k.a. neurosis), did not.  He knew that for some it could be a catalogue of hysteric, childish dangers with sometimes pitiless, bullying, and sophistical methods for enforcing its prohibitions.


Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus rebels against such irrational conscience, conscience that rules not by reason but by incantations and scare tactics, a sovereign conscience that “force hath made supreme / Above his equals” as Satan says of God in Paradise Lost Book I, ll 248-249.  At times Stephen shares the apostate angel’s “unconquerable will” and “courage never to submit or yield,” as Milton puts it.  When the priest names the cardinal Satanic sin—“non serviam: I will not serve” (Portrait p 117)—and says you burn in Hell for it, Stephen cowers and chastens himself.  But reason, courage, and self-sympathy prevails; in the novel’s last pages Stephen twice echoes Satan’s famous line, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (PL I, l 263); he tells his friend Cranly “I will not serve” on p 239 and “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church” on p 247.  Dedalus soars over Hell with self-made wings, over the Irish Sea to Europe, hoping “to fly by those nets” of church and homeland (p 203) which are the aliases by which demonic conscience makes itself known.


This inner conflict, which shapes Portrait, in turn takes its shape from the family conflict in which its template was cast.  Just like in Paradise Lost, where the many crises of conscience turn on relations between God the Father and his curious, jealous children, Portrait is all about fathers and sons.  Patrick Parrinder, author of a great essay on the novel called “A Portrait of the Artist,” says of Stephen Dedalus: “his father’s voice plays a crucial part in the novel.  Portrait begins (as we have seen) with his father’s words and ends with a cry addressed to an imaginary father.”  It’s battle and rapprochement between father and son, rebellion and submission, resentment and idolization, and a vacillation between these two positions, conducted wholly in the realm of language.  While writing my college thesis on Portrait I counted instances of the word ‘father’ and came up with 193 (including ‘governor’ three times and ‘Papa’ once) in 253 pages.  (Since this was before the internet and e-books, I counted by circling ‘father’ whenever I came across it and then I went back and tallied them up on notebook paper with hash marks in sets of five!)


There’s a beautiful triangle form inside of Portrait, with sin at one end of its base and piety at the other, and a conciliation between the two at its glorious flying vertex.  Only Joyce could inscribe this abstract form onto a novel of such incomparable specificity and naturalism.  He does it with three motivic lines on Stephen’s approach to reality.


First:


"It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin." p 103


Then:


"In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality." p 159


And then:


"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." p 253


There at the windy vertex Stephen throws off the yoke of oppressive conscience by replacing it with a conscience he made himself en route to maturity.  That is self-governance, no?  That is autonomy, and it enables "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old," as Freud says in “The Transformations of Puberty,” the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.


I’ll soon be forty years old.  I’ve been done with puberty for months.  Now, if I could just move past this nasty, moody adolescence.  Well, here I go with my wax wings on, to set sail over the abyss, muttering to myself, “ ‘Indigestibly byronic’?  I find that incontestably mo-ronic, Mr. Kenner….”  Shit, it’s a long way down there.



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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.

Philosopher King

Republic by Plato

The Republic is amazing in that it contains inchoate within it many of the major arguments later put forward by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, Mill, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, and many others.  Because of the style--elenchus, or Socratic dialogue--Plato's many profound insights are embedded in a rambling river of desultory, all-night sort of conversation between Socrates and Plato's brothers (or their fictive analogues, anyway) and several other interlocutors who are probably sorry they ever showed up.  The style is, however, fairly easy reading, at least in G.M.A. Grube's translation.

Among the major useful ideas: that our morals, laws, and values may in some cases only reflect the self-interest of the creators of those laws and values (both Nietzsche and Marx's thinking pivots on this fulcrum) and that people may not be aware of this, may take their values for granted without cynicism, and that the ruling class would have it that way; that people's minds contain conflicting attitudes to the same objects and that among these attitudes are--in everyone--"lawless desires," including even an unconscious desire of incest with one's mother and of parricide, and that such desires ought to be subject to rational consideration, modification, and control (Freud would in general agree); that knowledge can be more or less certain and that the philosopher seeks the daylight of certain truth when confronted with the uncertainty of incomplete perception, such as in the case of shadows and darkness; that the pursuit of truth is the highest pursuit.  You will also find such famous passages in here as "The Parable of the Cave"--a useful contribution to epistemology and at the same time the basis for a good deal of other-worldly fabulism--and such famous concepts as the "philosopher-king," the latter half of which George Bush so well exemplified.

The Republic is also, however, pervaded by a corruptive anxiety about the aforementioned "lawless desires" and the threat they represent to the security and well-being of a civic population.  This anxiety drives Plato to some extraordinarily irrational conclusions.  For example, "[H]ymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city.  If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law...."  Hmm.  Here is another whopper: "[in a spirit of approval] Nor, I believe, does Homer mention sweet desserts anywhere."  Well, that is, after all, what we so much admire about Homer--he never tempted his readers to binge on chocolate, or even Nilla wafers.  Plato's views on art and education, which make up probably a third or a half of the text--are in general off the reservation.  Plato well understands the deep-seated irrationality of so much instinctual human motivation and the importance of reason, but he overlooks the equal human propensity for irrationality of conscience--the sort that could be said to drive fascism and other forms of political and religious extremism.  But perhaps this irrational censoriousness belonged to Socrates, truly.  Perhaps Plato was blinded by love of his dead mentor, to whom he devoted so much of his life and thought.

The Explanation of Explanations

Aspects of Scientific Explanation by Carl G. Hempel

In 1965 Carl Hempel sought to describe the process of scientific explanation.  While it may not sound like an original or important thing to do, it was.  For now you'll just have to trust me because I'm the sort of person that electively reads books entitled Aspects of Scientific Explanation.

As you might guess, Hempel's account isn't exactly entertaining, nor is it intended to be, but it is the clearest and most organized account of the subject I know.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that "recent discussion [of scientific explanation] really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. This model has had many advocates (including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel."

Why is it important to describe or define scientific explanation?  Consider a recent article in The New York Times about the Catholic Church's revival of exorcism.  Here is a passage from the article:

"Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.  A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614."  Progress?  ("Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages." --Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Devil possession is a way of explaining the symptoms listed above.  A particular mental illness would be another way.  The explanation that you credit has serious implications for what you do about the problem.

Everybody attempts to explain stuff to themselves and others every single day, and arguments about the validity of various explanations are plentiful in a society with the right to freedom of expression.  The senators from Oklahoma don't believe that global warming is explained by the greenhouse effect--whether they're right or they're wrong, their opinion means something significant in the computation of our national response and therefore means something for the fate of human beings on earth.

If everybody better understood how scientific explanation works, it might help to settle these arguments rationally over the validity or type of various explanations and theories (explanations and theories are much the same thing).  Hempel provides criteria by which one might assess an explanation; one could ask whether an explanation had a scientific character or not or whether it was really an explanation at all versus a different ideational product of the mind.

I was introduced to Hempel and also Hans Reichenbach while researching the scientific validity of psychoanalysis, about which endless debates rage and roar over whether it's science or "pseudo-science."  Like Reichenbach, Hempel suggests that knowledge is generalization from repeated instances (Francis Bacon's "induction by enumeration") and that explanation seeks to define specific observed relationships as instances of general relationships established in principle.  Hempel says of psychology, "[W]hile frequently the regularities invoked cannot be stated with the same generality and precision as in physics or chemistry, it is clear at least that the general character of those explanations conforms to our earlier characterization."   He makes a similar argument regarding the study of history, asserting that good historians explain historical events on the scientific deductive-nomological model, but of necessity with less than mathematical precision.  To denote the somewhat lesser degree of precision, he calls historical explanation an "explanation sketch," which is "scientifically acceptable" since further research can confirm or disconfirm it.  Says Hempel, "Explanation sketches are common also outside of history; many explanations in psychoanalysis, for instance, illustrate this point."  So ... stick that in your Popper and Karl it.  With Carl Hempel on your side, you too can win arguments staged in Goodreads reviews of books that are out of print and unrated.  But at least you yourself will know.

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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Polished Bones and Hobnailed Boots

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

The style of narration in The Emigrants is akin to a pathologist murmuring into his dictaphone at the end of a long day of autopsies. It confronts ugliness, despair, and destruction with a mask of neutral reserve and tireless scientific dedication to detail. It's unique and beautiful, breathes real life, and artfully expresses a melancholy feeling of obligation to history:

"And so they are ever returning to us, the dead," Sebald writes of the discovery of the body of mountain-climber Johannes Naegli 72 years after his disappearance. "At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots." (p. 23)

For much of the first half or three-quarters of the book, I considered it marred by an orthodox devotion to elusiveness, ambiguity, misery, uncertainty and a Baudrillardian insistence on the link between commerce and destruction: "Deauville ... the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction." (p. 116)

I advise you to pause midway through and marvel at Sebald's necromantic power to conjure melancholy. Then read five poems by Walt Whitman and the following quote from astronaut Alan Bean and call me in the morning.

Bean, who went to the moon with Apollo 12, said this about his homecoming from the desolation of the moon:

"I've not complained about traffic. I'm glad there are people around. One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers and I'd just go around there, get an ice cream cone or something and just watch the people go by and think, 'Boy, we're lucky to be here.' Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden."

And then, having shored yourself up, you must push on through to the end of this book, where Sebald proves himself so much more human and courageous a writer than those who satisfy themselves with a specious finality of melancholy and bleakness alone, those who regard ignorance and obscurity as an inevitability of epistemology rather than a byproduct of psychology--repression--as Sophocles and Freud would have it. The narrator confesses a feeling of guilt about omitting to ask his friend Max Ferber about his parents, who were killed by Nazis when he was a boy, and on p. 183 Ferber says, echoing Wittgenstein's famous last sentence of the Tractatus, "of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing." The narrator and Ferber are united in repression and silence, the German in repression of crime, the Jew in repression of suffering: "When I asked if he remembered saying goodbye to his parents at the airport, Ferber replied, ... he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them, or whether he and his parents had embraced or not." (p. 187)

At last we are squarely back in the realm of Freud and Sophocles: "Naturally, I took steps," Ferber says, "consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents' sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years." (p. 191)

This dehiscence of memory and guilt late in the novel serves to explain and also redeem the forsakenness that preceded.  And the motivic butterfly which has haunted the narrative throughout like a recurrent dream or uncatchable memory turns out to be a messenger of liberation after all, albeit a messenger with a somewhat unstable, fluttery flight path.

A difficult but magnificent book.


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James Joyce's "Grace": Temperance of Conscience

The psychoanalyst Eugene Mahon in 2006 published a wonderful paper in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child entitled “The Invention of Purgatory: A Note on the Historical Pedigree of the Superego.”  He writes of Purgatory as a kind of “third way” in the history of imaginings of the afterlife:

“If Heaven and Hell sound absolute in their depiction of total damnation or total eternal salvation, Purgatory seems to represent a yearning for continued communication with the afterlife in an attempt to modify the imagined sufferings of departed ‘souls.’ ”

Mahon then poses the fascinating question: “Is the psychology that led to the concept of Purgatory a possible forerunner of the later Freudian concept of the superego, which, at its most mature, rejects splitting and magical absolutism in favor of a more reasoned assessment of guilt and pleasure?”

The question caused me to turn back to “Grace,” the penultimate short story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, in which Tom Kernan drunkenly falls down some pub stairs on the way to the bathroom and bites off the end of his tongue.  The memory or idea of this incident seems to have had some importance for Joyce, as it reappears in Ulysses in the interior monologue of Molly Bloom: “Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk in some place or other…”  Joyce’s brother Stanislaus informs us that “Grace” treats the Kernan fall as an allegory: “Mr Kernan’s fall down the steps of the lavatory,” Stanislaus writes in My Brother’s Keeper, “is his descent into hell, the sickroom is purgatory, and the Church in which he and his friends listen to the sermon is paradise at last.”

Most of “Grace” takes place in that Purgatorial “sickroom,” where Kernan’s friends sit and talk with him while he recuperates; eventually, they make plans to atone, as inhabitants of Purgatory are meant to do.  The word “grace” is in fact one intimately connected with Purgatory in the Christian faith.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that Christian Purgatory is “the state in which those who have died in grace expiate their sins….”

Whether Joyce would agree with Mahon’s interpretation of Purgatory I don’t know, but Joyce clearly had Purgatory on his mind in the writing of “Grace,” a story I never much liked because it seemed to ridicule its own graceless characters in a simplistic and unsympathetic way.  But rereading the story with Mahon’s insights in mind, I think Joyce may have been using the idea of Purgatory in a more sympathetic way than I first understood.  While the characters certainly look foolish in their slapstick discussion of theology (Mr. Cunningham tells a ludicrous story about an Irish priest they all know who supposedly argued with the Pope over papal infallibility only to be overruled on the question by infallible papal verdict)—but while they’re foolish, they’re also wiser than I first guessed—especially the hero, Tom Kernan, with the bitten-off tongue.

Of the fourteen stories in Dubliners based on a Christian vice or virtue (that is, all the stories except “The Dead”), “Grace” occupies the anchoring fourteenth position.  The virtue Joyce assigned to this story is clearly temperance, as Kernan and friends seek to temper their drinking.  But more importantly, they exhibit a healthy temperance when it comes to the conscience that damns sinners to eternal Hell.  As such, “Grace” is not only deep, but a sort of antidote to the damning syndrome of psychological paralysis introduced in the collection’s first story, “The Sisters.”

Kernan’s friends’ discussion of sin and atonement is warm-hearted, jovial, and hilariously funny, nothing like the grave treatment of sin in that opening story.  There are no bottled-up, paralyzed, tortured figures here.  Kernan amiably goes along with the plan to confess in church, but he knows the limits of his conscience.  When Mr. Cunningham tells him he has to stand up with a lighted candle and renew his baptismal vows, he balks.  Joyce writes:

“No, damn it all,” said Mr. Kernan sensibly, “I draw the line there. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the retreat business and confession, and... all that business. But... no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!”

Shortly thereafter Kernan rephrases his objection to the candle ceremony in a wonderful and telling way: “I bar the magic-lantern business!” he cries.  It’s as though Mr. Kernan, in waving off “the magic-lantern business,” is renouncing precisely that “magical absolutism” of conscience that Mahon describes as the animating force in the Manichean system of Heaven and Hell.  Kernan’s conscience “sensibly” makes a Purgatorial compromise wherein he’ll renounce Satan but not himself, who he stands up for with his sense of humor intact: “I’ll just tell him my little tale of woe.  I’m not such a bad fellow—” he tells his wife.

This jolly, kindly, self-tolerant, all-together-now group of friends may drink too much, but it appears they’ve achieved a higher form of grace in Joyce’s eyes: temperance of conscience.  This hilarious story of self-forgiveness has now become a favorite of mine.  Another indication of its importance to Joyce is its prefiguration of Leopold Bloom, the amiable, self-tolerant protagonist of Ulysses; one of Kernan’s friends, Mr. M’Coy, is an advertising canvasser married to a soprano (like Bloom—and when Molly thinks of Tom Kernan in Ulysses she also has some unflattering words for Mrs. M’Coy’s singing).  “Grace” also contains very funny mention of a banker named Mr. Harford, an Irish Jew like Bloom.  Joyce writes that “his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate, and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of his idiot son.  At other times they remembered his good points.”

Mr. Harford the Jew is not only saved, comically, from damnation but, in Joyce’s created conscience, granted an apotheosis—into the stardom of Leopold Bloom.

The Naturalist of Good and Evil

Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Essay on Bentham: Together With Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin by John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill is the rock star of moral philosophy.  And I don't say that because he trashed his hotel rooms.  He didn't trash them, or even stay in them, to my knowledge.

But he's got the sort of brilliance that sings, that fears no tradition and no opprobrium.  Jeremy Bentham's idea of utilitarianism (a good action is one that has happiness of self and others as its consequence) was genius to begin with and Mill applies his own genius to it to give it another level of subtlety and versatility.  Mill's utilitarianism is for me the most honest and helpful of moral philosophies.

Some people complain that utilitarian ethics neglect 'Kantian' notions of good: fairness and justice.  Mill was aware of this complaint and he addresses those questions about the connection between justice and utility in Chapter V of Utilitarianism, titled "On the Connection Between Justice and Utility."  See how to-the-point he is?  And he addresses the question to my satisfaction, thoroughly.  Mill is a naturalist who observes and describes moral sentiments more than he attempts to interpret the will of a moral God; he observes morals in action like David Attenborough hiding in the bushes and training his binoculars on a troop of baboons.  I suspect he offends people who believe religiously that we are not animals and that morality is an emanation of the divine.  Mill says, "[O]bjectively the dictates of Justice coincide with a part of the field of General Expediency."  That is, you can explain the moral value of justice in the secular terms of utility.  His analysis of moral instincts points ahead to Nietzsche's brilliant On the Genealogy of Morals and on to Freud.

Warning: Mill does often write in those endlessly lapping nineteenth century waves of dependent clauses upon dependent clauses.  They seem to sway to and fro across the page and actually make my chin swing back and forth.

Spoiler: Mill dies.  The chronological table says (p. 346) that he became godfather to a baby named Bertrand Russell in 1872 and died in 1873.  I knew there was something foreboding about the fact that he was born in 1806, but still I was rooting for him.

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The Relevance of Psychoanalysis

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 for his research on the neurochemistry of the Aplysia sea slug, wrote in 1999 that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind.”

That may come as a surprise to people who think of Freud as a relic or a quack, and there are many who feel that way, and with a passion; I've learned that Sigmund Freud, like politics and religion, is a dangerous topic of conversation.  But Eric Kandel’s 1999 paper, “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited,” ought to give some pause at least to anyone who despises Freud without having carefully read and considered his ideas.  Kandel’s paper opens like this:

“During the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis revolutionized our understanding of mental life.  It provided a remarkable set of new insights about unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism, infantile sexuality, and, perhaps most important of all, about the irrationality of human motivation.”  Kandel, American Journal of Psychiatry 1999; 156:505.  Or, to put it more simply, it provided insights into the relation between what you feel now and what happened in your childhood, even if you can't remember it clearly, and insights into dynamic relationships in the mind between desire, love, anger, loss, guilt, fear, and the lies we tell to ourselves to make it all feel better.  Finally it made the point that talking about it (aka psychotherapy), and in so doing coming to look at yourself truthfully, is a real help.  These ideas are so deeply subsumed into our culture that they're almost clichés at this point.

Yet canards, misconceptions, and prejudices against Freud abound, and many could be cured if Freud-haters actually read the brilliant and brilliantly written Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from beginning to end, carefully, and with an open mind.

The British empiricist Karl Popper (who Ludwig Wittgenstein famously threatened with a fire poker) believed that psychoanalytic ideas were not only unproven but unprovable; he thought there was no way to evaluate the truth or falsity of a psychoanalytic proposition because psychoanalysts interpreted data in such a way that any and every possible finding would be consistent with their theories.  (Some physicists have said as much about "string theory," by the way.)  Popper's view is a common one, partly because Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed have sometimes treated doubters as patients and doubt of Freudian theory as a symptom (called "resistance").  While emotional "denial" and "resistance" are real phenomena, worthy of study and recognition, it seems like a bad strategy to forestall healthy intellectual skepticism in this way.  Kandel argues that despite the tricky nature of the emotional and cognitive phenomena that psychoanalysts study, they have to do a better job demonstrating the validity of their findings in the methodological terms with which most scientists are familiar.  He's right.  If not, psychoanalysis insulates itself, prevents others from reaping its benefits, and prevents itself from reaping the benefits of advances in other fields of study, like psychopharmacology.

Psychoanalysts do, of course, base their theories on close observation, and their interpretations are no different in syllogistic form from other scientific interpretations.  For example, we know the core of the earth is made of iron and nickel even though no one has ever seen the core of the earth directly; scientists have interpreted seismic wave patterns as signs of the presence of iron and nickel, just as psychoanalysts identify conscious and unconscious ideations by signs--mainly, words.  You might say to a psychoanalyst, "I feel worried but I don't know why."  You are conscious of part of the contents of your own psyche, but perhaps not all of them.  You talk more and in the raw material generated by your talking you discover clues--signs--of the full nature of your worries.  You find yourself talking about your health a lot.  You are worried about your health, you've been having chest pains...  It occurs to you that you are turning 52 years old this month...  50 was the bigger milestone, but you had no worries at the time of your birthday two years ago...  You read an obituary about a famous lawyer.  Your father was a lawyer who died, it occurs to you, of a heart attack at age 52...

Maybe you could care less about your own inner life.  If you can get away without examining yourself, then you're lucky.  For the rest of us, there's Sigmund Freud.

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The Bible as Literature

The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned half of his psychology from the Romans and the other half from the Hebrew Bible?

Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, "[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of ... lifelike characters and actions, and so they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers." The Bible is generally more realist in style and more concerned with the minute details and subtle intricacies of mental life than say, Homeric epic, or the plays of Aeschylus, where emotions certainly occupy a central position but are seen at a longer psychic distance and are represented in more abstract ways.

When Cain is snubbed by God, who heeds Abel’s offering but not the older brother's, I can put myself in Cain’s shoes (sandals) more readily than I can in those of say, Menelaus, after Paris absconds with his wife. I understand Menelaus on a more intellectual level. When Cain is snubbed, the Bible says “his face fell” and that God asked him, “Why is your face fallen?” The narration and the figures in the stories themselves are remarkably attendant to the inner life, to discrepancies between the outward manifestations of thought and feeling and the inner facts, to discrepancies between intention and action, even between inner ideas and deeper levels of consciousness (i.e., the Bible depicts lies told to oneself; i.e., denial ain’t just the river where Moses turned up in an ark of bulrushes). Noah’s ostracism of his son and grandson and Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar are entirely modern-feeling accounts of guilt and jealousy and the way such emotions are handled in the psyche.

R. Crumb’s recently published illustrations of the Book of Genesis amplify this psychological pathos in a wonderful way without diminishing the Bible's subtlety. Crumb shows Cain sweating under the weight of his offering to God juxtaposed with the tiny lightweight lamb that Abel brings. You see how unfair and hurtful it was for Cain and understand what came next.

Some of the Crumb illustrations are funny and implicitly ask subversive questions about God, particularly in the earlier chapters, where God enters the story as a kind of lunatic artisan who likes to make things for reasons unknown to anyone, including, apparently, himself and who gets furiously dissatisfied with his creations and takes out all his frustrations on his children like the put-upon alcoholic Farrington in James Joyce’s story “Counterparts.” The things God yells about seem not to make any sense as in a real human temper tantrum. The opening passages of Genesis may lose some of their gravitas in this version, but the familial dysfunction at the heart of so many of the Bible stories is thrown into bold relief. Furthermore, the satire in these early parts lends a certain existential irony to the stories, which I appreciate, and which it might be argued is not even foreign to the biblical writers. Alter sees the Bible’s main agenda as the depiction of human character in all its variety and consistency, and that character's interrelation with forces beyond human control—fate, destiny, chance (or God, if you prefer)—to create what we call history. Sometimes the biblical heroes themselves don’t understand God’s designs, and sometimes laughter is the result, as when Sarah laughs at God’s annunciation of her pregnancy in old age and this laughter is commemorated in Isaac’s name, which means “he who laughs.” Sometimes the heroes object to God's designs, as when Abraham bargains for Lot’s life. Sometimes God seems like a personification of the sort of natural disaster that just befell Haiti as when God wantonly destroys Babel. It might be argued that the biblical writers purposely made God at times cruel and outrageous because fate is cruel and outrageous. And inasmuch as the Bible writers rationalized natural disasters as punishments for bad behavior (as Pat Robertson does even today) or otherwise rationalized them as in any way useful or necessary or morally ordained—well, then this benighted and primitive element of their worldview deserves satire.

On the whole, however, what’s so remarkable about the ancient writers of the Bible is not what's primitive about them, but what is modern. They have honored the complexity and majesty of the real world with the most meticulous artistry and have not only bequeathed their wise and beautiful stories to later readers but their techniques to later writers and artists.

I reread Genesis in Crumb’s illustrated edition (which uses Robert Alter’s translation, a major upgrade from any I’ve read, sensitive as it is the artistic aims of the original Hebrew) and afterward I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, a masterpiece of literary criticism and a highly accessible one at that. If you want a pair of excellent guides to one of the great artistic creations in the history of humankind, I commend to you the Roberts Alter and Crumb.

Addendum: On Bloom’s notion that Freud got everything from Shakespeare; this is surely “the anxiety of influence” in action—a wonderful concept Bloom invented with a little help from Freud. (As that immortal rock band The Bettelheims said, “I get by with a little help from my Freud....”)


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