Castrovalva

The Hermeneutic circle

2008-07-12T14:57:00.018Z

This piece from Morgan Meis in The Smart Set struck a chord with me:

"Criticism isn�t powerful anymore. It doesn�t drive anything, it doesn�t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There�s just more... The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think � it looks to itself...

Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There�s even a name for it: "critical distance." To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century... Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn't about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness....

Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here's the crucial paragraph:

If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules � or, at least, none save those that are obvious.

That last sentence is particularly crucial. Art, Nathan is perfectly willing to accept, has no rules. Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work. Nathan doesn't use the metaphor explicitly, but he is talking about closeness versus distance. He is talking about a kind of criticism that stands there right alongside the work of art, participating in it rather than holding it at arm�s length.

Going a little further into the metaphor of distance and closeness brings us inevitably to the grand master of critical distance, Immanuel Kant. It is simply impossible to talk about the modern critical attitude without addressing the sage of Königsberg. A central component of his aesthetics is the idea of disinterest and then of universality. For Kant, when we make genuine aesthetic judgments we do so with the implication that they are not made 'for ourselves' but with the implicit idea that they stand on their own, that anyone else would make the same judgment, that the judgment ought to be universally true even if that cannot be proven. This is how Kant puts it:

For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying his liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.

In contrast, here's a comment by William Hazlitt, an anti-Kantian in terms of aesthetics in every bone of his body: I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea�They are for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in: as much as to say that a bird's eye view of things contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

It's always seemed to me that the idea of universal standards of taste was an obvious absurdity; any such standard wide enough to encompass Perec, Dante, Orwell and Rabelais would be so generalised as to be meaningless. There's often something quite unpleasant about aesthetic demagoguery of critics; Ruskin's praise of gothic architecture and Pre-Raphaelite painting was predicated on a dismissal of Whistler's painting or architects like Cuthbert Broderick who disdained the gothic revival. Leavis praised Eliot, James, Lawrence and Conrad in The Great Tradition while dismissing the experimental on the one hand (Woolf, Joyce) and the gothic or sensational (Dickens, Bronte) on the other. Both essentially make the mistake of conflating their own predelictions with the universe and do so on grounds that are often moral or political. In either case, it's doubtful that many of us would agree with them now. In many respects, the idea of someone whose sole function is to tell us what to think about art or literature seems a form of impertinence.

When I was first introduced to the ideas of Barthes and Derrida, it seemed to me that much of the basis for criticism as a specialised function had been demolished. If literature was less the product of a single individual writing at a specific historical period and more the product of an endless play of differance in the mind of the reader, then meaning became a subjective affair. Sceptical even then, I'm less attached to either Barthes or Derrida now, but I do still think this view holds. Matters of interpretation or hermeneutics arose out of religious exegesis, the assumption that there were transcendent meanings encoded in texts that could be divined. I suspect I'd still agree with Derrida that such concepts have become untenable. Criticism as a professional activity might do well to be based on Moretti's sociological techniques or exploring reception theory through study groups, but the idea of interpretation as a valid function is one that probably should be discarded.

If there is a problem with the argument outlined above, it's less likely to be an aesthetic one and is rather more likely to be a political or social one. For example, Matthew Arnold's Kantian defence of criticism is partly due to his desire for a set of universal aesthetic standards to replace universal religious standards. Since criticism is derived from the study of religious texts and operates in a similar fashion, Arnold presumably saw the critic as an ideal replacement for the priest. A lot of this assumes that art is a form of individual expression and that the response to it is equally individual. Morgan's arguments are the perfect ones for an atomised, individualistic post-traditional society where consumption is as much a matter of individual preference as it is one of collective identification. But there is something rather ahistorical in this view and it does seem to me that there's a good case to be made that art if an expression of collective mores. That might be why particular genres tend to cluster in certain places at certain times. Labels like Greek tragedy, Restoration comedy or the nineteenth century novel are undoutedly generalisations but they do nonetheless exist for a reason; the works in question did not orginate in a vacuum.

Modernism and Conservatism

2008-06-08T19:36:00.006Z

While it goes without saying that it is the mark of a pride for any reasonable person to disagree with Roger Scuton on any conceivable subject, I did think this article was not entirely without interest:

"Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong�like communism�to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism�s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions... Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant�s Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, "build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure." Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum�in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster�between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities�live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville�s famous principle of "private vices, public benefits," it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice�the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation to their surroundings, that cannot easily change their use, that are extremely expensive to maintain, and that destroy the character of their neighborhoods.

Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression. Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture as a member of the city, standing among neighbors and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighboring structures, to the street, and to the sky, is lost. The form conveys nothing beyond the starkness of its geometry...

The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose."

There's a great deal I have sympathy with here. I've long felt that modern architecture is a form of engineering rather than a branch of aesthetics, leading to the situation whereby one can wonder around the City of London at a weekend and find a deserted ghost town filled with modern skyscrapers whose weekday workers would never dream of living in anything that even remotely resembled them. Whereas early modernism led to the construction of private villas as well as public buildings, I'm not aware there is any private analogue for the Lloyds or Swiss Re buildings. On the other hand, this is all far from persuading me to endorse the tepid pastiche of Krier's Poundbury, Barratt Homes with a royal warrant, which is surely as unpleasant a form of utopianism as anything Corbusier dreamt up. Poundbury does have the rather unpleasant air of being a middle class commune.

Brechtian Dialectics

2008-05-26T14:17:00.004Z

On the one hand:

"Brecht... was a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism. The normal injunction to never judge an artist by his or her politics is an insult to his ghost because politics dominated his work. The Good Soul of Szechuan ends with the narrator asking if it is possible to lead a good life in a rotten world. The expected, indeed demanded, answer is "no". Individual morality will only be possible when the collective morality of communism comes.

Nothing, not the mountains of corpses or the cults of the personality, could shake Brecht's confidence. He preferred silence about the vast crimes of the Bolsheviks, including the murders of his friends and translators, to admitting that his god had failed... The American socialist Sidney Hook put the case for indifference best after Brecht came to dinner in Manhattan in the mid-Thirties. Stalin was forcing thousands of Soviet communists to confess to fantastic crimes, and Hook asked Brecht what he thought of the show trials. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him."

And on the other:

"It's strange how forgiving we are of artists who were involved with Hitler's Third Reich. In 1933, Goebbels appointed the composer Richard Strauss - whose dreamily decadent operas Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier remain central to any contemporary opera house's repertoire - president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state music bureau. In 1936, Strauss composed the Olympic Hymn for the infamous summer games and befriended some high-ranking Nazis.

He was probably politically naive. He may have been acting to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law; and he refused to have the name of his friend, the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, removed from the playbill of his opera Die Schweigsame Frau. This, it seems, is now enough to redeem Strauss the man... The early Brecht was a wild, anarchic poet. Productions of his 1928 Threepenny Opera often struggle to find in it a consistent political line... For a short time in the 1930s, as German society became more divided, Brecht's plays took a decidedly Leninist turn. His play The Mother shows a working-class woman struggling to reconcile individual needs with the demands of a political cause. It's a beautiful, moving piece, painfully ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism that were to follow. How strange that this play is considered beyond the pale in Britain and no longer performed - yet the Economist can declare, in 2003, that Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, marks her out as "the greatest female film-maker of the 20th century".

Brecht was very clear about one thing: his resistance to fascism. Before the Nazis came to power, Hitler's brownshirts were disrupting performances of Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Mahagonny, claiming that it brought the contamination of black and Jewish musical influences into the German opera house. Brecht dedicated the next 15 years of his writing - plays, film scripts, poetry - to the anti-fascist cause."

I'm not really sure why the second excerpt believes an analogy between Strauss and Brecht to be especially helpful. His complicity with Nazism is rather better documented and more frequently discussed than the above article might suggest, but it is nonetheless rather improbable to imply that Strauss was a fascist composer in the same way that Brecht was a communist writer. A better analogy might have been Hamsun, Celine or Pound, but then the issue of their engagement with Nazism is equally well known and all three faced legal reprisals for their views during their lifetime. The point about Riefenstahl also seems misplaced (although there is a good case to be made that her treatment after the second world war probably was too lenient), particularly given that an especially harsh biography of her involvement with the Nazis was only published a few years ago. Worst of all is the insinuation that Brecht's opposition to Nazism exculpates his support for the other great totalitarianism of the twentieth century. While there's certainly no reason to single Brecht out for more criticism of his art or politics than Pound or Hamsun, there is a good case to be made that communist writers have only comparatively had their political commitments subjected to the same scrutiny that writers associated with fascism did long ago.

The Written Image

2008-05-23T20:01:00.017Z

An article questions the resurgence of graphics in modern fiction:

"The Lazarus Project features a twin narrative, telling the story of a murder in 1908 and a present-day writer investigating the death. In both cases, the images are intended to add depth and resonance to both stories. The effect, however, is the opposite: their inclusion only suggests that Hemon lacks confidence in his present-day narrator, and the verisimilitude of his historical reconstruction. Last week, I asked a friend, and fellow Hemon admirer, what he thought about it all. "Sebald has a lot to answer for," he said.

WG Sebald subtly altered the literary landscape with his fiction/travel/history books. Melancholic, digressive and erudite, his unsettling narratives are punctuated with photos, landscapes, diary entries and other images. It's the tension between these two elements - between what is real and fake, what words can describe and what they can't - that gives his books their dream-like power. It also allows Sebald to give a direct line into the mental landscape of his narrator, one that is visual as well as linguistic.

Sebald was a master of this device, but it's a technique that can scupper otherwise good novels... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's image heavy second novel, also suffers under the weight of its artistic leanings. I'm still undecided as to whether the last pages which depict a man falling from the Twin Towers, are an ambitious attempt to prove that sometimes words are not enough, or whether it's a final tricksy passage to a book over-stuffed with visual stimuli."

It's not particularly new; prior to the advent of the printing press, image and text were inextricably entwined. With the Victorian period, the love of medievalism led to a revival of sorts; editions of works by Chaucer issued by the Kelmscott Press were illustrated by Burne Jones. In parallel, Paget's illustrations for Conan Doyle were sufficiently powerful to create an image of Sherlock Holmes that failed to resemble that described in the text. The same followed for Phiz and Cruikshank's illustrations for Dickens and in the case of Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland; although modern readers might find themselves reading an edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake. George Eliot had her novels illustrated by no less a figure than Lord Leighton. Much of Dore's work was done as book illustrations, while Rossetti served as both writer and illustrator. Photographs occurred in fiction as early as Rodenbach�s Bruges-la-Morte, followed by the work of Andre Breton. In a sense, modern fiction has been aberrant for relying solely on text. Nonetheless, the above comments immediately brought an essay by Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line to mind:

"Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds."

The Political Turn

2008-05-12T19:48:00.006Z

Stanley Fish reinterprets Derrida:

"What was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the "I" facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the "I" and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many... both the "I" or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The "I" or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted � given a transitory, ever-shifting shape � by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can�t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which "it" (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us. It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn�t exist "out there"; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift � after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another � scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." Three centuries later, Richard Rorty made exactly the same point when he declared, "where there are no sentences, there is no truth � the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose � were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense (but not perfect sense) to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the "I" and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida�s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. (More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.)

This is not the conclusion that would be reached either by French theory's detractors or by those American academics who embraced it. For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset's main contentions � and here I completely agree with him � is that it doesn�t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity � a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda � and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

If "presences" � perspicuous and freestanding entities � are made by discursive forms that are inevitably angled and partial, the announcement that any one of them rests on exclusions it (necessarily) occludes cannot be the announcement of lack or error. No normative conclusion � this is bad, this must be overthrown � can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn�t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one. Deconstruction's technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction. "Deconstruction thus contains within itself�an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement. In order to use it as a basis for subversion�the American solution was..to divert it�to split it off from itself." American academics "forced deconstruction against itself to produce a political 'supplement' and in so doing substituted for "Derrida's patient philological deconstruction" a "bellicose drama.""

While Fish's account of Derrida's 'negative theology' is quite coherent I'm less than convinced that it's an especially accurate summary of what Derrida had intended. In some senses it would be more valid to argue that Derrida intended a revaluation of all values, overturning logocentric western hierarchies, rather than simply a pragmatist redescription of the linguistic turn (particularly since an alteration of our understanding of how the world is described does change the world perhaps rather more than Fish is suggesting - his pragmatist account of the philosophy of science being a rather telling case in point). The extension of this to the feminist concept of phallogocentrism, with its influence on Cixous, Irrigaray and, indeed, Butler, introduces an explicitly political element into his work. Derrida certainly felt deconstruction to have political implications in his later stress on a form of Kantian idealism that stated justice to be the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible. In that sense, Fish is introducing a criticism of Derrida more than his American interpreters. I seem to recall Rorty wondering why should we think that the abandonment of Platonic ideas and strivings would have important ramifications for the rest of culture and questioning why Derrida insisted that science has been constrained by 'metaphysical bonds that have borne on its definition and movement from its beginning.' Instead Rorty preferred to cite the likes of Popper and Dewey to argue that the natural sciences have done a lot to loosen those bonds, and to make possible a post-metaphysical culture.

Update: a piece arguing that Derrida's ideas of differance can be empirically tested and found wanting:

"Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."

I've always regarded Derrida as a Hume in need of a Kant to refute him; while Derrida's logic is robust there remains the gnawing sense that we empirically already know that language functions in far more straightforward and unambiguous terms than he suggests (as with Tarski's meta-analyses of language and their use to map the hermeneutic possibilities of even texts like Ulysses). Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the above approach is necessarily the best way to determine the 'valency quotient' of any given text; response to characterisation is a fairly narrow aspect of the response to the text as a whole. Assuming the above study relates to Jane Austen it also seems important to note that texts like The Outsider, Querelle of Brest or Correction would prove a father more difficult proposition.

Balzac and Flaubert

2008-04-10T20:16:00.012Z

An interesting summary of Beckett's lectures on literature:

"Beckett first defined his literary criteria by way of the contrast he set up between the 19th-century French authors Balzac and Flaubert. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, Beckett saw Balzac as the counter-example of the modern novel, and Flaubert as the great innovator. For Beckett (as he has the protagonist of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, put it): "To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world." He resented both the lack of confusion and the lack of self-criticism in Balzac. What fascinated him was the clair-obscure (the painterly distribution of light and shade) he found in the writers he admired, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Balzac, by contrast, only transcribed the surface, creating a fictional world that resembled a pool table on which balls are perfectly arranged and sent in one direction or another according to a very precise strategy of control. In Beckett's eyes, Balzac divested his fictional universe of the unexpected and the unknowable, properties which, for Beckett, lay at the heart of human experience and whose expression must find its way into fiction.

Art for Beckett at this period was the progressive discovery of the "real", as Burrows remembered in an interview in 1982: "The artist himself was changing all the time and his material was constantly in a state of flux, hence you had to do something to organize this mess, but not to make puppets and set them in motion." Beckett favoured the absence of a controlling authorial personality and any sense of finality in a text, and was opposed to the control, embellishment or glorification of reality. In these respects, Flaubert was an exemplary modern author for him. Citing Madame Bovary and Salammbo he explained that Flaubert was neither photographer nor image monger, but a writer who displayed an honest apprehension of reality.

Beckett denied any modernity in Balzac, whose flawed duality he denounced - on the one hand he was a realist, and on the other a romantic psychologist. But, for Beckett, these two aspects did not fit together, resulting in a profound lack of cohesion in Balzac's work. According to Beckett a modern writer must seek "homogeneity". Thus, Flaubert was at once coherent and complex, in the manner in which the extreme precision of his texts revealed the contradiction of so-called 19th-century realism: exactitude was inevitably bound to be frustrated because confusion cannot be reduced to a neat narrative � la Balzac.

Beckett also appreciated that Flaubert, rather than fabricating heroes, created circumstances that reduced his characters to their just level of banality, thus revealing their paradoxical nature and sometimes their stupidity, an approach which shocked Henry James, who said: "Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and ... such abject human specimens?" Madame Bovary's creator had anticipated such a charge by once writing that there were neither good nor bad subjects, and that, from an artistic point of view, the subject was irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. He refused to dissociate form and content. "Here form is content, content is form. [...] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" was Flaubert's motto, which Beckett used to champion Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible."

As noted on my previous post on this subject, there's a lot about this that reminds me of the distinction Keats drew between Milton (the egotistical sublime) and Shakespeare (negative capability) or that outlined by Berlin in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with Balzac firmly characterised as a writer who celebrates diversity and the contradictory and Doestoevsky described as the type of writer who sees the world through the lens of a single lens (itself an opposed description to Bakhtin's characterisation of Dostoevksy's work as polyphonic). It's certainly true that in Flaubert, we have the sense of consciousness as something submerged and independent from the normal categories of the social novel, as with Emma Bovary's romantic longings or Frederic's admission at the end of Sentimental Education that the zenith of his life was a hitherto unmentioned visit to a brothel. It's also not difficult to see how Flaubert's stated aim to "derouter le lecteur" would appeal to Beckett. Sentimental Education in particular goes a long way to confirming Beckett's contention; in a Balzac novel the different paths taken by the characters would often lead to different moral outcomes, whereas in Flaubert all paths lead to the same destination. The usual teleological structure of the nineteenth century novel, with its remorseless progress towards tragedy or marriage, is abandoned. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also not that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.

Nonetheless, I'm still not quite convinced I find Beckett's argument wholly meaningful. It's certainly true that, like Dickens, Balzac seems to see his characters as caricatures, driven by social and moral concepts rather than an idea of human consciousness (his idea of each individual having only a certain amount of life force that can be frittered away by dissolute or hubristic behaviour has a rather medieval quality to it). On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Balzac, like Thackeray is not an especially good moralist, and the moral fables that lie at the centre of his work either lack conviction or simply go awry altogether, leading to something rather more interesting. In short, I think that the disconnection of the romantic and realist in Balzac is a strength rather than a defect - not the first time, I find myself preferring the dissonant and inconsistent to the consistent and harmonious. Homogeneity is probably the very last thing the novel should aim for. To take the example of The Black Sheep, I was struck by what an anti-novel it is. The form of the novel should be similar to that of Nicholas Nickleby but instead of simply dwelling on the notion of the good and neglected Joseph eventually receiving his dues, Balzac pays as much attention to Philippe, the prodigal son, and instead of solely focussing on the dissolute aspect of his life, depicts the raw will to power as someone could have been a great general but is left out of place in the world he finds himself in. Instead of a simple moral fable, Balzac instead describes "a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest level, where the brutality of self interest reaches the point of cynicism." Philippe's rapacity is as vital and necessary here as Eugenie Grandet's self sacrifice or Cousin Pons's good nature is as pointless or helpless in the novels of those name. In Balzac, we always feel that we are reading a novel where the characters are evaluated primarily in moral terms, only to discover that such considerations are never of any importance.

To take another example, Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement that is worthy of Brecht's What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Update: an interesting comment on the same theme from a review of a history of modernism:

"Each of Gay�s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits � that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound�s 'make it new') and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the 'monologue interieur' of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann... Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity�s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.

This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs explained, between these two generations of French writers 'lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time'. In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.

This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Luk�cs argues, on the artist having a 'living relationship to the real life of the people'. Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism�s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that 'a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other'.

The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows � the market � as before an antagonistic mass: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'"

Modernism and Form

2008-04-10T20:15:00.006Z

George Szirtes writes of the connections between artistic form and political content:

"The normally unquestioned assumption is that Modernism is a left wing movement. One assumes that, rightly, of the Constructivists and to some extent of the Bauhaus. We know that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos wanted to do away with all ornament, primarily because ornament was bourgeois. We know that pitched roofs were regarded as emblems of crowns and therefore as ideologically unsound. The bourgeois were the enemy. They were conservative and stodgy and repressive. Any opposition to them might be thought to be left wing. To manufacture mass-produced objects for the masses was forward-thinking, egalitarian and honest.

In the previous century, William Morris, a socialist, was certainly not against ornament, nor was he bourgeois. Unlike the Modernists-to-come he was in revolt against mass production, chiefly because it tried to replicate craftsmanship. He thought the work of human hands working with natural forms was the right expression of the socialist ideal. Natural form, however, was anathema to most Modernist architects. For them geometry and logic were better. What they desired was clarity, light and a certain moral astringency... The proper question I want to raise - or rather begin to raise - is whether specific forms embody specific ideologies. Was the architecture of Italian Fascism, or the movement-through-planes of Futurism formally so different from works by left wing contemporaries?

The problem with formal pattern was that it was associated with the wrong things. The Imagists talked of not composing according to the metronome. It was the metronome and all it entailed - the forms of rhetoric it conjured - that was, briefly, the enemy. It is interesting that while some poets, some of the time, seemed to be freeing themselves of mathematical patterns, the modernist architects were developing new, ever stricter formal equations. Nor is there any lack of strictness in twelve-tone serial music. It is only fairly recently that people have suggested that formal verse was an expression of repressive, authoritarian, right-wing, imperialist, proto-fascist politics.

There is no serious poet in the world who has not learned from Modernism. I have learned almost everything I know from it. But what he or she has learned is less to do with rhyme or metre or stanza than with narrative. That, in turn, has been informed as much by cinema as by literature. Cinematic narrative is now often more complex than literary fiction. Its language of hint, enigma, fracture, return, inconclusiveness, doubt and complex register are part of the mainstream audience's field of expectation. They are so in poetry too. Nevertheless movies are not formless, not without rhythm, stanza and rhyme, or rather, their cinematic equivalents."

There's something about this that rather reminds me of Thomas Mann's decision to base the Nietzchean protagonist of Doctor Faustus on Schoenberg, Mann�s friend and fellow artist in exile instead of a Nazi fellow traveller like Richard Strauss. The cult of the kulturnation Nazi aestheticisation of politics seemed to demand a figure like Schoenberg, whose declaration that his system would "ensure the hegemony of German music for the next hundred years" seems an inevitable corollary of the thousand year Reich and Speer's theory of ruin value. In practice though, such distinctions are nearly impossible to draw; Mann's choice of favourite composer was the same as that made by Hitler: Richard Wagner. In terms of literature, similar problems apply. The Marxist critic Georg Lukacs argued that the novel was a form of bourgeois epic wherein a form of 'problematic individual' must emerge as self and society were forced apart by capitalism. It's a description that works well for much of the history of the novel from Defoe to Eliot. With that said, I found it a little too easy to read this as a valedictory narrative and to decenter the endorsement of Scott and Balzac's aristocratic critiques of the bourgeoisie. At that point, Lukacs becomes much more congenial to an alternative account of the novel, that of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin sees the novel as inherently contesting totalitarian ideologies, such as communism. Bakhtin characterises the novelistic form, exemplified for him by Dostoevksy, as polyphonic, its language as heteroglossic and dialogic, incapable of rendering a single meaning. The most interesting aspect of Bakhtin's work is that it essentially rests on aspects of the history of the novel rather than on imputed metaphysical or formal characteristics (occasionally in contradiction to some of Bakthin's rather Derridean statements); novels are not inevitably polyphonic but it does represent a significant strand of the novel's lineage. I think this is why I always found it one of the most convincing analyses of the political aspects of genre.

State of the Nation

2008-04-06T11:08:00.005Z

Philip Hensher writes on the history of the state of the nation novel:

"Several things define this genre: a range of social settings; the coverage of an extended period of time; a sense that the lives described reflect major social shifts or matters of public importance; and, often, open debate on political concerns and the nature of the nation itself. Commentators on the English novel have often claimed to find works of this type in 19th-century fiction. In fact, few of Dickens's or Eliot's works really analyse the whole of a society. However, some 19th-century authors certainly did set out to write state-of-the-nation fiction. The title of Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a clear indication of intent, and the book conscientiously covers a range of social settings and roles, from the agricultural to the new capital markets of the City. Disraeli's splendid "Young England" trilogy of the 1840s, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, with its broad social spectrum and tendency to political solutions, is virtually the founding example of the state-of-the-nation novel. The celebrated passage from Sybil about the two nations, rich and poor, is one of the very few examples of a piece of state-of-the-nation rhetoric making its way permanently into the political debate. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Middlemarch and, probably, Little Dorrit all have a state-of-the-nation flavour: they have an acute sense of the larger implications of the individual situation; their ambitions are both literary and, in a general sense, policy-directed in ways which go beyond the aspirations of, say, Great Expectations or Daniel Deronda.

The novelist's concern with the state of the nation has never gone away, but it only occasionally emerges in the form of a state-of-the-nation novel. Nothing could be more telling about Britain's unhoused exhaustion at the end of the second world war than the rush of enthusiasm for novels about country houses and fantastical, often demonic palaces�Brideshead Revisited, Love in a Cold Climate, Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings. None of them, however, was exactly state-of-the-nation, and the taste for the national diagnosis was satisfied by the factual discussions of the Beveridge report, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, at two shillings each.

Since then, the state-of-the-nation tendency in fiction has surfaced from time to time. The mid to late 1970s saw a small run of such books concerned with what seemed the collapse of the Attlee consensus. AS Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in the early 1950s, was the first volume of a tetralogy that traced the developing state of the nation in the following decades. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) seems to give in to despair in a tale of motiveless violence. In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), commerce and property become evil, empty values in ways that foreshadow the "Thatcher's Britain" novelists... Why are we seeing such a range of state-of-the-nation novels at this moment? Perhaps the last occasion when such novels seemed urgent and vital was not the "Thatcher's Britain" years but the years which produced Drabble, Byatt and Golding, the fag-end of the Callaghan Labour government. The public consensus then was clearly breaking down under a prime minister who had no mandate from an election. The trust between people and elected representatives was evaporating, and acts of individual violence were common."

This is something I've been thinking about recently and something I have my doubts about. London Fields by Martin Amis is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. By contrast, the London of Trollope and Dickens was an economic experiment, a place wholly unlike anywhere else on Earth and which represented the shape of things to come. There's also the sense of Victorian society as having been considerably more cohesive; even with two nations there is the sense of inequality as a source of collective shame that needs to be addressed collectively. This isn't something that is obviously a part of modern England, where the return of Victorian social conditions does not seem to have led to any similar set of social concerns. Modern England seems to be comparatively atomised, it's individualism and multiculturalism making state of the nation fiction difficult at best and often confined to minority groups, as with Smith or Hollinghurst.

Perhaps this is why much modern social fiction seems a rather poor substitute for its Victorian counterpart; Arnott's He Kills Coppers spans a social history of decades but its characters remains as they are, unaffected by social upheaval, whereas the Victorian assumption was that the individual and society were inextricably intertwined. Similarly, McEwan's On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age.

Update: an interesting, and to my mind quite persuasive, article from Alan Massie takes an approach that rather recalls Lukacs. In this context we might compare the 'closed' Madame Bovary to the 'open' Lost Illusions:

"One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference � or almost no reference � to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world. In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures. In, for instance, that fine novel by Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, the second world war is a character as the Napoleonic Wars are not in Jane Austen�s beautifully self-enclosed novels. The treason of which the heroine�s lover is guilty would seem less significant if we didn�t bring to our reading of the novel our knowledge of the enemy he has chosen to serve � the enemy whom his lover, Stella, rightly calls �horrible � specious, unthinkable, grotesque�.

The open novel was invented more or less by Walter Scott, though it had ancestors in Defoe and Fielding. Especially in the series of great novels set in the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, Scott demonstrates that, for a man of a certain stamp at a certain time, there is no escaping history. It is history, the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men�s lives. Henry Morton�s dilemma in Old Mortality is certainly occasioned by his character, but it is specifically provoked by the temper of the times in which he lives and the bitter animosities with which he is confronted are historical facts...

Some frown on this. A work of art, they say, should be self-sufficient, needing to make no reference to anything beyond itself. This argument is advanced more often in discussion of painting than in literary criticism � Roger Fry�s doctrine of �significant form�, for instance � and would have puzzled the Old Masters who expected people to bring their knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to the contemplation of their work. It would likewise have puzzled the poets who expected their readers to catch their classical allusions.... The self-enclosed novel will always be written, but Scott�s example was soon followed by Stendhal, Hugo and Tolstoy. Most novels are perhaps hybrids. Sometimes you get an open novel, like Thomas Mann�s masterpiece Doctor Faustus, which, for much of the time, pretends to be self-enclosed. Nowadays the problem for the writer of the contemporary open novel is that news and the sense of immediacy press so hard and insistently upon him. This is perhaps why so many of the best open novels are set in the past, even if that past is quite recent, as in Evelyn Waugh�s Sword of Honour trilogy."

The Coast of Utopia

2008-03-15T12:34:00.006Z

From a recent interview with Tom Stoppard:

"The citation mentions Travesties, Stoppard's play based on the fact that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin all lived in Zurich during the First World War; Arcadia, featuring a Cambridge contemporary of Lord Byron; The Invention of Love, which took for its subject the poet AE Housman; The Coast of Utopia, about the roots of political radicalism in 19th-century Russia; and his latest stage hit, Rock'n'Roll, which travels between Prague in the spring of 1968 and the present. "I'm attracted to the past," Stoppard says. "It doesn't necessarily have to be the distant past, and I certainly didn't think about it, but looking back on it, the truth of the matter is that for about 15 years everything I've written has got at least one foot in the past."

What he fears most about this new world is the drive towards homogeneity. "The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority."

Individual freedom was central to Rock'n'Roll, in which Jan, a young Czech V C lecturer at Cambridge University in 1968, returns home as members of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, invade Czechoslovakia. In contrast to Jan's increasing politicisation against the forces of Communism, back in England, his mentor Max Morrow refuses to abandon his communist principles. Stoppard sees Morrow as "a rather moving, strangely sympathetic figure. To me he was an idealist with a strong sense of natural justice and social justice and all these things are admirable." But the attitude of many on the left who persisted in their support of communist ideals irked him. "

Like Stoppard, I do seem to see myself becoming a comparatively young fogey, and can easily understand the allure of the historical to the present day. It doesn't seem especially difficult to understand how writers from Eliot to Woolf and Tolstoy to Pasternak could see the individual in relation to a wider narrative in a way that is considerably more fraught at this time. One of the paradoxes of modern society is that in one instance it is highly individualistic, with a general loss of social cohesion leading to a prevalent state of alienation and anomie. As Robert Putnam put it, social capital is in decline. In another instance, the prevailing political ethos has been a frequently coercive communitarian one, which has been essentially disinterested in the individual and at best dismissive of individual rights. Restrictions of civil liberties that would have been fiercely resisted by previous generations are acquiesced to with barely a murmur now. Governments have gone from treating migrant communities as monolithic blocks of racial categories to regarding them as monolithic blocks of religious categories, with scant regard given to the possibility of individuals having multiple forms of affiliation. On a commercial level, large sections of the population are employed within large corporate organisations that tend to regard consumers as demographic segments rather than individuals. Modern society is in many respects a highly homogeneous one, whereby there may be more brands of shop and television channel than ever before but what they all tend to offer seems at best a case of variations on a theme. As Hal Niedzviecki puts it:

"Individuality becomes a goal to be framed by rules and regulations and measured in predetermined plans and models. The paradox of �natural� is the paradox of having to follow a communal and well-travelled path in order to arrive at individuality. States Ulrich Beck: In modern life, the individual is confronted on many levels with the following challenge: You may and you must lead your own independent life, outside the old bonds of family, tribe, religion, origin and class; and you must do this within the new guidelines and rules which the state, the job market, the bureaucracy, lay down.

The Princeton professor of psychology Hadley Cantril noted as early as 1941 that almost every individual was born into a highly organized society. "Almost all the experience which constitutes his life are likely to be prescribed roughly for him by the particular culture within which his life happens to be lived." Cantril softened the blow, and ceded that some small changes to the way society operates were still possible: To be sure, the individual will develop the capacity to select alternate courses of action. He may also set about changing some characteristics of his culture which are by no means to his liking. But still this selection and this desire to alter certain practices are themselves bounded and determined by the original conditions imposed by a certain way of life.

What are the conditions imposed on us, what is the "certain way of life" that constitutes our particular existence in postmodern capitalist society? De Tocqueville�s 1835 travelogue/social study Democracy in America points us in the right direction. The author�s primary observation concerned the way the political and economic system of the United States was creating a new kind of individuality. As he saw it, freedom American-style was forcing everyone into their shell, their social framework reduced to immediate family and friends, their only interest personal success. De Tocqueville wrote of an "innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest." If we depend on anything, it is the largely bureaucratic structure that shapes our increasingly atomized, solitary lives. So it is that the appearance of independence is underscored by a vast world of regulation and restriction. "

Against Venice

2008-02-17T16:03:00.013Z

In Against Venice, Regis Debray decries the city of Venice as a hyperreal sanctuary for the artificial and picturesque, where the tourist can bathe in the festive unreality of the city's "ongoing fancy dress ball." Venice only plays the city and we play at discovering it, through a repertoire of poses, temptations and daydreams. I was reminded of this when I came across this article:

"Venice is a corpse. It died in 1797 with the last, preposterous old Doge eased out by the French. Napoleon then insulted the Venetians by calling the Piazza San Marco Europe�s finest drawing-room... As Henry James observed, "Of all the cities in the world it is the easiest to visit without going there." That does not seem to stop them. Preserving the fiction has become destructive of the very spirit that made Venice a miracle.

It was Ruskin who indexed Venice for almost all subsequent visitors. Applying a nihilistic and absurd rejection of wealth-producing modernity to the Pearl of the Adriatic, Ruskin fiercely opposed the creation of the vaporetto service to the Lido. When he was in Venice to finish Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James was also cross about democratic water transit systems, raging about the "accursed whistling of the dirty steam engine of the omnibus."

James also found poverty useful for his art and conducive to his pleasure, a disagreeable example of the retardataire snobbismo that has frozen Venice in the past. In 1872 James was complaining that the Lido was being "improved" and the deserted beaches and dunes were turned into a mere "site of delights" for visitors less worthy than The Master. These improvements, of course, eventually comprised the splendid Hotel Des Bains and the Hotel Excelsior.

Ruskin and James wanted Venice kept in a state of picturesque poverty. James resented modern plumbing because it would deny him the sight of washerwomen struggling with huge ewers and pitchers. He resisted the industrialisation of glass-making because it would reduce the number of bead-stringers whose back-breaking labour he enjoyed contemplating. Never mind that vaporetti and factories might help Venetians prosper � filthy old conditions were better for art. "The misery of Venice," James said, "is part of the spectacle ...it was part of the pleasure." To James, Venetian beggar girls were at their very best when starved and wearing thin, exhausted, limp clothing: "it would certainly make an immense difference if they were better fed."

The slightly potty futurist F.T. Marinetti thought Venice a "jewelled hip bath for cosmopolitan courtesans ...a great sewer of traditionalism." On the evening of 8 July 1910 Marinetti ambushed travellers arriving home from the Lido, shouting "We want electric lamps brutally to cut and strip away ...your mysterious, sickening, alluring shadows! Your Grand Canal, widened and dredged, must become a great commercial port. Trains and trams, launched on wide roads built over canals that have finally been filled-in will bring you mountains of goods and a shrewd, wealthy, busy crown of industrialists and businessmen... Le Corbusier had an unrealised design for a new hospital at San Giobbe. The Biennale brought some decent architecture: Josef Hoffmann in 1934, Gerrit Rietveld in 1954 and Alvar Aalto in 1956, lately Zaha Hadid et al., but it is a passing show."

I'm less than impressed with the implied elevation of Marinetti and his fascist dogma above Ruskin and his naive brand of medievalist socialism (reading Marinett's advocacy of brutal electric light simply makes me think of Tanizaki and his anti-modern polemic, In Praise of Shadows), but there is nonetheless a valid argument to be had here, which I've written about before on my other weblog. Modern Venice is trapped like a fly in amber, forever preserved more or less as it was at the fall of the Republic, when its history ended. In its present form it is less of a subject in its own right than an object for the gaze of others. The Lido is indeed the only part of Venice to include modern architecture, such as rather drab fascist era casinos and cinemas. Its main street also features an art deco hotel, albeit not the one Von Aschenbach stayed at, its exterior covered in beautifully painted stucco sculptures of the muses. Beneath the bustle of tourism, Venice is inert, etiolated and lifeless, a ruin caught in an endlessly deferred process of decay; and this is, course, precisely the source of its captivation. By contrast, London is unremittingly modern, its structure a pullulating mass of destruction and construction; to my mind it is also unremittingly ugly, noisy and dirty, a place that has come into being without any consideration for aesthetics or quality of life. By contrast, the lack of cars in Venice makes it quiet and serene. Were a firestorm to destroy all of the new buildings constructed in London since the second world war, I find it difficult to believe that I would miss a single one of them.

In terms of aesthetics, there is really no choice for me between Venice and modern cities. But in terms of politics, I'm less certain. It's true that most economic activity in Venice has either adapted itself to tourism or migrated to Mestre. It's true that the city is becoming increasingly depopulated. Nonetheless, there's something in the idealised role of craftmanship that Ruskin saw in Venice that reminds me contemporary plans for another medieval italian city, Orvieto:

"Slow City" advocates argue that small cities should preserve their traditional structures by observing strict rules: cars should be banned from city centers; people should eat only local products and use sustainable energy. In these cities, there's not much point in looking for a supermarket chain or McDonald's. "Our goal is to create liveable cities," says Cimicchi, a cheerful 51-year-old with a white moustache and laugh lines around his eyes. "We are working, if you will, on the concept of the utopian city, in the same way as the writer Italo Calvino and the architect Renzo Piano have done."

To a certain extent, a "slow city" tries to preserve the civic structures from medieval or Renaissance times, while at the same time incorporating the most recent scientific findings of ecology and sustainability. Even modern technology is allowed if it helps to meet the city's goals. For example, Cimicchi is hoping to install electronically controlled access gates in Orvieto, which would grant entrance exclusively to city residents. Pisa already has a similar system: If the camera catches you letting the parking meter run out -- whether it's for a single minute or an entire day -- you can expect to receive a parking ticket.

There's still work to be done in Orvieto. Even with its medieval charm, the hillside town still has a good way to go before reaching Cimicchi's ideal of a utopian city. Retailers' fears of decreased profits have led to continued opposition to a total ban on automobiles in the city center. And Coca-Cola is still served in street caf�s, on request."

As some of this hints at, I suspect that much of the ideas behind the Slow City movement are somewhat impractical and no more likely to come to pass than anything envisaged by Ruskin or Morris. In practice, I'm less than convinced whether I would want or be able to live in a city like this (and without moving to Shropshire or Norfolk, I couldn't anyway). But it's still an idea I find myself drawn to.