Author: Sineokov

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A World Split Apart :: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[Text of Address by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978]

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said. [. . . .]

A WORLD SPLIT APART
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.

Contemporary Worlds Continue reading →

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149. Self-Importance :: from Stuff White People Like, the book

Implied but not stated in virtually every entry here is the notion of self-importance. Magically, over the past half century white people have been able to mask much of this self-importance through the arts, charities, nonprofit organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and childbirth.

The life of every white person is worthy of a memoir. Being born into a middle-class existence, having some difficult experiences in college, and taking a year off to teach in Asia/work in the Peace Corps/volunteer with Teach for America are all life stories realized by a select few. Unfortunately, the publishing industry can only put out so many books each year and white people have had to turn to an alternative means: blogging.

Due to an undying need to share their life story with everyone who will listen, white people have taken to blogging in massive numbers, though it is no surprise that many have simply turned their journals/diaries into blogs where they talk about the latest episode of American Idol, Darfur, their experience at a coffee shop, and their concerns about the future. These were to be expected.

What has been less expected is the need for white people to document in blog format any experience that takes more than a week. Pregnancy, vacations to Asia and South America, renovations, child rearing, and car restoration have all become blogs that encourage the rest of the world to take notice of the astute observations and talent of the undiscovered writer.

When a white person shares their URL with you, do not say, “Do I have to read this now?” Instead, you should say, “I’d love to check it out,” quickly read one post near the middle of the blog, and return to the white person, saying, “Oh man, I saw that post on [insert topic]. It was great. I forwarded it to all my friends.” Doing this shows that you believe their life to be important and their presentation of that life to be worth your time. Sadly, the temporary boost in self-esteem for the white person is the only benefit to be gained from the blog and your interaction with it.

*

[Lander, Christian. Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. 2008.]

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White Annotated Biography :: from Stuff White People Like, the book

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius “Honestly, I’m not afraid to call this the book of our generation. He captures all that we are and aspire to be.”

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated “The book is incredible. The accented English literally jumps off the page and demands to be read out loud.”

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay “His first book was good, but I think he really comes into his own as an author with this novel. It does this amazing job of combining all that I remember loving about comic books with all that I love about prose fiction.”

Henry James, all books “If you send me to a desert island, just make sure I have a page of James’s delicate prose in my back pocket. I promise you it can keep me entertained and thinking for months.”

All Victorian novels “So your favorite books are Pride and Predjudice [sic], Wuthering Heights, and Vanity Fair? Convenient that they’ve all been turned into movies, don’t you think?”

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma “The politics of food are fascinating, and this book will change the way you eat and the way you think forever.”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake “I love Joyce, although I feel as though Dubliners captures the spirit of the Irish more than this book.” (Note: It is an old white-person trick to steer conversation away from books that you have not read.)

William S. Burroughs, Junky “Did you like Trainspotting? Yeah, well, Burroughs was doing that in 1960 with this book.” (Note: Do not bring up Naked Lunch; white people don’t even pretend to understand it.)

Jack Kerouac, On the Road “I read this book when I was sixteen years old. I would say that by the time I reached page 2, I wanted to be a writer.” (Note: Advanced white people are disgusted by people who like this book.)

Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby “You know, I’ve never read Fight Club. I find his other works to be far more engaging.”

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good “I fell in love with Hornby when I read High Fidelity in 1995, and I think he gets better with each book. This one is my absolute favorite though.”

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City Note: This novel is written in second person (“You step outside,” etc.). This makes it very easy to test if a white person has actually read it or just watched the movie starring Michael J. Fox.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho “Reading Ellis is like watching an amazingly melodramatic soap opera and then realizing that it actually taught you something at the end. I can’t tell you how much time I really spent thinking, just thinking, after reading this book.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest “Did you know that this book is more than 1,000 pages long? I read it in high school, on spring break. A thousand pages.”

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past “I hope to read this one day.” (Note: Any person who has actually read all fifteen volumes has a graduate degree in English.)

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Source: [Lander, Christian. Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. 2008.]

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138. Books :: from Stuff White People Like, the book

The role of books in white culture is perhaps as important as organic food — essential for survival. However, understand that this is not about literacy or reading, but about the physical object of a book

Try this out as an experiment. Show a white person a photo of a living room that features an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They are guaranteed to respond by saying how much they would love that for their own home and that they are planning on having a living room just like that in the future.

This is because white people need to show off the books that they have read. Just as hunters will mount the heads of their kills, white people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books. After all, what’s the point of reading a book if people don’t know you’ve read it? It’s like a tree falling in the forest.

As much as white people do not want you rifling through their medicine cabinet, they are desperate for you to examine their bookshelves. When scanning through the rows of books, the best things you can say are “You made it through Infinite Jest? Wow” or “I didn’t know you loved Joyce so much.” If your intentions are to grow your friendship either romantically or platonically, there is no better technique than to ask to borrow one of the books.

This is because lending out books is the only practical reason for white people to hold on to their entire collection. So by asking to borrow a copy, you are justifying their decision to save the book, allowing them both to introduce you to a new author and assert their status as a well-read individual. It is the perfect move.

But there are times when your visit to a white person’s house is not long enough for a full inspection of their bookshelves. How then can one gauge their taste? Simple, just look at the coffee table. You see, white people like to purchase very expensive, very large books that they can put on their coffee tables for other people to see and then use to make value judgments. If the coffee table book is about art, then the white person wants you to ask them about their trip to the Tate Modern. If it’s about photography, they want you to ask them about their new camera. If it’s about football or bikinis, you should politely ask to leave.

So now that you know white people like books, you might assume that a book is the perfect gift. Not so fast. There are a few possible outcomes from giving books, and few of them end well. If you get a white person a book that they already have, the situation will be uncomfortable. If you get them a book that they do not want, you will be forever viewed as someone with poor taste in literature. In the event that you got them a book that they want and do not have, they are forced to recognize that they have not read it, which instantly paints you as a threat. There is no way to win when you give a book to a white person.

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Source: [Lander, Christian. Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. 2008.]

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Original analyses, discoveries, and interpretations

“Why would you have to discover something? Your genius ought to be to fulfill yourself in the life you live, not in original analyses, discoveries, and interpretations. Your model ought to be Socrates or Goethe; but imagine a Goethe without a written opus!”

–Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth

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Notes on a poem / Can you guess?

Notes on a poem are like anatomical lectures on a piece of roast beef.
–August Wilhelm Schlegel, Aethenium Fragment 40

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Believing in tradition and always straining at new insanities; frenetically imitative and proudly independent; awkward in what is superficial and accomplished to the point of dexterity in what is profoundly or gloomily ponderous; congenitally vapid but striving to be transcendental in feeling and outlook; comfortably and seriously entrenched against wit and frivolity, and inflamed by a sacred abhorrence of these qualities. Can you guess to what great body of literature these traits correspond?
–August Wilhelm Schlegel, Aethenium Fragment 58

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[from Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow]

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Language is Language

Language itself is — language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical twice — language is language — how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we already are.

–Martin Heidegger, “Language”
[Translated by Albert Hofstadter]

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Epigraphica

What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
–Vladimir Nabokov, “On Translating ‘Eugene Onegin'”
[D]

Another school of thought declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous details of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid . . .
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
[D]

In regard to Nature, it is agreed that philosophy ought to know her as she is, that if the philosophers’ stone (der Stein der Weisen) is hidden anywhere, it must at any rate be within nature herself, that she contains her own reason within her. . . . the ethical world (die sittliche Welt), on the other hand, the State. . .

Innocence, therefore, is merely nonaction, like the mere being of a stone (das Sein eines Steines), not even that of a child.
–Hegel
[D]

. . . Gullibility whipped up with blasphemy, this worldly black magic spreads, indeed, to literature, an object of study and criticism.

A certain deference, better, toward the extinct laboratory of the philosophers’ elixer, would consist of taking up again, without the furnace, the manipulations, poisons, cooled down into something other than precious stones, so as to continue simply through intelligence. Since there are only, in all, two pathways open to mental research, into which our need bifurcates — namely, esthetics on the one hand and political economy on the other — it is principally of the latter that alchemy was the glorious, hasty, and troubling precursor. Everything that once stood out, pure, for lack of meaning, prior to the current apparition of the crowd, should be restored to the social realm. The null stone, dreaming of gold, once called philosophal: but it foreshadows, in financial terms, the future credit, preceding capital or reducing it to the humility of small change! With what disorder are such things pursued around us, and how little understood! It is almost embarrassing to profer this truths, which imply neat, prodigious dream transfers, thus, cursively and at a loss.
–Mallarmé
[D]

“It isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one’s energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don’t you see?” he confessed with a queer face, “one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life,” he puzzled it out, “call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralyzing, or at any rate engrossing — all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one can see.”
–Henry James, The Ambassadors
[LN]

Style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us. . . . And it is perhaps as much by the quality of his language as by the species of . . . theory which he advances that one may judge of the level to which a writer has attained in the moral and intellectual part of his work. Quality of language, however is something that theorists think they can do without, and those who admire them are easily persuaded that it is no proof of intellectual merit.
–Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
[LN]

You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.
–Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man
[LN]

He shook his head sadly.
“i glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
“But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”
“Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.”
–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
[LN]

I said to him: “I am one who, when Love breathes
in me, takes note. And in whatever way
he dictates within, that way I signify.”
–Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXIV
[LN]

He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
–Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
[LN]

It is no chance matter we are discussing, but how one should live.
–Plato, Republic
[LN]

Here, as in all other cases, we must set down the appearances and, first working through the puzzles, in this way go on to show, if possible, the truth of all the deeply held beliefs about these experiences; and, if this is not possible, the truth of the greatest number and the most authoritative.
–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
[LN]

The exposition of the letter is nothing other than the development of the form.
–Dante, Letter to Can Grande
[LN]

Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
[LN]

. . . I spoke of the novel as an especially useful agent of the moral imagination, as the literary form which most directly reveals to us the complexity, the difficulty, and the interest of life in society, and best instructs us in our human variety and contradiction.
–Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
[LN]

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
–Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
[LN]

What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules.
What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II.xi
[LN]

Of these States the poet is the equable man . . .
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more
nor less . . .
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a
helpless thing . . .
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and
women as dreams or dots.
–Walt Whitman, from By Blue Ontario’s Shore
[LN]

At the centre, the bed of crystalline Love was dedicated to her name most fittingly. The man who had cut the crystal for her couch and her observance had divined her nature unerringly: Love should be crystal — transparent and translucent. . . . Its roundness inside betokens Love’s Simplicity: Simplicity is most fitting for love, which must have no corners, that is, no cunning or Treachery.
–Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan
[LN]

No dogs, bicycles, or tricycles allowed in this garden at any time by order. The gardeners are required to conduct from the garden anyone infringing these rules.
–Sign in the garden of Cadogan Square, London, 1980
[LN]

We’ll let Teisias and Gorgias continue sleeping. For they noticed that plausible stories win more public honor than the truth. And so they make trivial things seem important and important things trivial through the power of their discourse, and they dress up new views in old language and old views in new language, and they have discovered how to speak about any subject both concisely and at interminable length.
–Plato, Phaedrus 267a6
[LN]

And if a cataleptic impression does not exist, neither will there be any assent to it, and thus there will not be any certainty either. And if there is no certainty, neither will there be a system of certainties, that is to say a science. From which it follows that there will be no science of life either.
–Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos vii, 182
[LN]

As we examine this view closely, it looks to us more like a prayer than like a truth.
–Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos xi, 401
[LN]

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“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say–
What manner of man art thou?”

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
The heart within me burns.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
[NE]

And as he spoke, I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
–Philip Roth, The Counterlife
[NE]

Someone said, “Our right hand is in the book. But the left has the privilege of opening and closing. Thus both hands preside over the morrow of the book.”
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Dialogue
[NE]

You read. You tie yourself to what comes untied — to what unties you within your ties. You are a knot of correspondence . . . a knot of innocence, craftiness, of things likely and unlikely, of infinite faithfulness.
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
[NE]

A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forwards. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said.
–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
[NE]

Evasions of the existence of others may take the form of smothering a person, or a text, with seemingly scrupulous questions.
–Michael Fischer, “Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein”
[NE]

Kafka wanted to know at which moments and how often, with eight people sitting within the horizon of a conversation, you have to speak up in order not to pass for taciturn.
–Maurice Blanchot, “Interruptions”
[NE]

[A dream:] This is my sister here, with some identifiable friends and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, the neighbor whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake because he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent; they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word. . . . My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that I dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?
–Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
[NE]

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.
–Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
[NE]

We die in a last word.
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
[NE]

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THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; the summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned over the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
–Wallace Stevens
[CWK]

God made man because he loves stories.
–Elie Wiesel
[CWK]

How shall we know all the friends whom we meet on
strange roadways.
–Ezra Pound, “Cathay”
[CWK]

Poetry is capable of saving us.
–I. A. Richards
[CWK]

To the aesthetic temperament nothing seems ugly. There are degrees of beauty — that is all.
–Max Beerbohm
[CWK]

It is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the supersubstantial nourishment of men.
–Jacques Maritain
[CWK]

A book [of prose fiction] at the time [it is written] is a good or bad action.
–Jean-Paul Sartre
[CWK]

One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. . . . The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is seperable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.
–George Orwell
[CWK]

“What takes place” in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; “what happens” is in language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.
–Roland Barthes
[CWK]

Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. . . . The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
–T. S. Eliot
[CWK]

A work of art is . . . a bridge, however tenuous, between one mind and another.
–Andrew Harrison
[CWK]

[Art] is civilization’s single most significant device for learning what must be affirmed and what must be denied.
–John Gardner
[CWK]

Reading is the easiest thing in the world, it is freedom without work, a pure Yes blossoming in the immediate.
–Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus
[PR]

. . . . . . . . . .

Initials of titles from which the above epigraphs are taken:

CWK . . . . . . . . . . Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988)

D . . . . . . . . . . Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (translated by Barbara Johnson) (1981)

LN . . . . . . . . . . Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990)

NE . . . . . . . . . . Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (1995)

PR . . . . . . . . . . Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading (1998)

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Existential Kangaroo

Upon your conception of the single individual all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. There can never be an exact science dealing with individual life. L’anatomia presuppone il cadavere; anatomy presupposes its corpse, says D’Annunzio. You can establish an exact science on a corpse, supposing you start with the corpse and don’t and don’t try to derive it from a living creature. But upon life itself, or any instance of life, you cannot establish a science.

–D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo

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Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives

To collect is to create a meaningful set of objects. The meaning resides in the way the pieces in the collection call attention to one another. By understanding the dialogue between members of a collection, we discover what the collector wants to show us about the objects and the world. Perhaps for this reason, it is often said that a collection is the reflection of the taste of its creator. Indeed, a collection is the collector’s convictions rendered concrete in inter-related acts of acquisition. When the collection is displayed, these convictions are intersubjectively accessible, hence, open to appreciation and criticism.

. . . . [C]ollecting is essentially a compensation for prior disappointment and an illusory comfort in the face of an uncertain future. Collecting serves this role particularly well, it seems, because its repetitive structure allows the individual to repeat the tension-reducing act of acquisition when the satisfaction induced by the previous act fades. The meaning of the process of collecting resides in the “momentary undoing of frustrating neediness but is felt as an experience of omnipotence. Like hunger, which must be sated, the obtainment of one more object does not bring an end to the longing. Instead, it is the recurrence of the experience that explains the collector’s mental attitude. The compelling concern to go in search, to discover, to add to one’s store, or holding, or harem, is not generated by conscious planning. Rather, every new addition, whether found, given, bought, discovered, or even stolen, bears the stamp of promise and magical compensation” (p. 13). In a similar vein, Muensterberger locates the origins of the urge to collect in the child’s reliance upon objects as “symbolic substitutes” for the parent. The acquisitive bent of the collector is derivative of the “grasping and clinging” of the infant.

Werner Muensterberger – Book Review: Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives – Philosophy and Literature 20:2.

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Listen to James Joyce read from FINNEGANS WAKE!

joyce1.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object).

Recording of Joyce reading from “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in Finnegans Wake. Soak up the weirdness.

You are listening to: Book I, Chapter 8, pages 213.11-215.11. [I’ll try to find the slightly longer version of this recording that goes up to 216.5, the end of both Chapter 8 and Book I — “Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stern or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!” — The end of the chapter is my favorite part, especially how he reads it!]

[N.B. – “213.11” denotes page 213, line 11 in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition (with an Introduction by John Bishop).]

“The text is that of the first edition of Finnegans Wake published by Faber and Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 4 May 1939″ (FW xxix).

Surrender the need to be master of everything! I find Bishop’s Introduction incredibly reassuring:

“. . . any reader can enter Finnegans Wake and find something to absorb him – as long as he or she doesn’t expect to find it all in one place or, complementarily, understand everything else that appears around it. It is even possible to argue, with this same logic, that Finnegans Wake may be more accessible to the common reader than Ulysses – or, for that matter, War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past – since one doesn’t need to comprehend it as a totality to profit from it or enjoy it. Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything – or even most things – in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards.”
(FW ix)

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The Informer :: A Lover’s Discourse

The Informer

informateur / informer

A friendly figure whose constant role, however, seems to be to wound the amorous subject by “innocently” furnishing commonplace information about the loved being, though the effect of this information
information is to disturb the subject’s image of that being. (Barthes 138-139)

1.         Gustave, Leon, and Richard form a group; Urbain, Claudius, Etienne, and Ursule, another; Abel, Gontran, Angele, and Hubert, still another (I borrow these names from Paludes <Gide>, which is the book of First Names). However, Leon happens to meet Urbain, who gets to know Angele, who knew Leon slightly anyway, etc. Thus is formed a constellation; each subject is called upon to enter into relations, one day or another, with the star remotest from him and to become involved with that particular star out of all the rest: everything ends by coinciding (this is the precise impulse of A la recherché du temps perdu <Proust>, which is, among other things, a tremendous intrigue, a farce network). Worldly friendship is epidemic: everyone catches it, like a disease. Now suppose that I release into this network a suffering subject eager to maintain with his other a pure, sealed space (consecrated, untouched); the network’s activities, its exchange of information, its interests and initiatives will be received as so many dangers. And in the center of this little society, at once an ethnological village and a boulevard comedy, parental structure and comic imbroglio, stands the informer, who busies himself and tells everyone everything.

Ingenuous or perverse, the Informer has a negative role. However anodyne the message he gives me (like a disease), he reduces my other to being merely another. I am of course obliged to listen to him (I cannot in worldly terms allow my vexation to be seen), but I strive to make my listening flat, indifferent, impervious.

2.         What I want is a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only by “the two of us.” Everything from outside is a threat; either in the form of boredom (if I must live in a world from which the other is absent), or in the form of injury (if that world supplies me with an indiscreet discourse concerning the other). By furnishing me insignificant information about the one I love, the Informer discovers a secret for me. This secret is not a deep one, but comes from outside <Bunuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie>: it is the other’s “outside” which was hidden from me. The curtain rises the wrong way round-not on an intimate stage, but on the crowded theater. Whatever it tells me, the information is painful: a dull, ungrateful fragment of reality lands on me. For the lover’s delicacy, every fact has something aggressive about it: a bit of “science,” however commonplace, invades the Image-repertoire.

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]

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“Show me whom to desire” :: A Lover’s Discourse

induction / induction

The loved being is desired because another or others have shown the subject that such a being is desirable: however particular, amorous desire is discovered by induction. (Barthes 136-137)

1.         Shortly before falling in love, Werther meets a young footman who tells him of his passion for a widow <Werther> : “The image of that fidelity, that tenderness, pursues me everywhere, and as though scorched myself by that fire, I faint, I fail, consuming myself.” After which there is nothing left for Werther to do but to fall in love in his turn, with Charlotte. And Charlotte herself will be pointed out to him, before he sees her; in the carriage taking them to the ball, an obliging friend tells him how lovely she is. The body which will be loved is in advance selected and manipulated by the lens, subject to a kind of zoom effect which magnifies it, brings it closer, and leads the subject to press his nose to the glass: is it not the scintillating object which a skillful hand causes to shimmer before me and which will hypnotize me, capture me <Freud>? This “affective contagion,” this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original. <La Rochefoucauld> (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves. <Stendhal>)

The difficulty of the amorous project is in this: “Just show me whom to desire, but then get out of the way!”: Countless episodes in which I fall in love with someone loved by my best friend: every rival has first been a master, a guide, a barker, a mediator.

2.         In order to show you where your desire is, it is enough to forbid it to you a little (if it is true that there is no desire without prohibition). X wants me to be there, beside him, while leaving him free a little: flexible, going away occasionally, but not far: on the one hand, I must be present as a prohibition (without which there would not be the right desire), but also I must go away the moment when, this desire having formed, I might be in its way: I must be the mother who loves enough (protective and generous) <Winnicott> , around whom the child plays, while she peacefully knits or sews. This would be the structure of the “successful” couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.

STENDHAL: “Before love is born, beauty is necessary as a sign, it predisposes to this passion by the praises we hear bestowed upon whom we will love” (On Love).

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]

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The Unknowable :: A Lover’s Discourse

The Unknowable

inconnaissable  /  unknowable

Efforts of the amorous subject to understand and define the loved being “in itself,” by some standard of character type, psychological or neurotic personality, independent of the particular data of the amorous relation. (Barthes 134-135)

1.         I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you-I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

(Of everyone I had known, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never knew anything about his desire: isn’t knowing someone precisely that-knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y’s desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terror but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.)

Reversal: “I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

2.         To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth. <Gide> It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.

3.         Or again, instead of trying to define the other (“What is he?”), I turn to myself: “What do I want, wanting to know the other?” What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And If I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.

GIDE: Speaking of his wife: “And since it always requires love in order to understand what differs from you . . .” (Et nunc manet in te).

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]