Freedom’s Failure (3)

A modern consumerist society dissolves the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, in the absolutist senses that used to apply to daily human conduct. For the most part rules for living are now informal. I think we would now be shocked by the sorts of social expectations, conformities, and restrictions that existed until quite recently in our society; that we were supposed to take them seriously once would seem monstrous. In this sense, consumerism dissolves narrative in certain very beneficial ways. It seems no longer possible to ‘tell the story of our behaviour’ in so far as it no longer seems to take place against the background of anything. (Which is one reason why we have a reversion to fundamentalisms I think: fundamentalisms of disbelief as in Hitchens, as much as fundamentalisms of belief.) … But now what of this; that since consumerism and consumerist politics have got rid of ‘the story of life’ so completely, what they have created is the simultaneous illusion that therefore nothing is actually happening … Nothing is really taking place.  So that Iraq is kind of a consumerist illusion.  I am not so much suggesting that typically people are oblivious of Iraq – although that might be true too – as suggesting that it seems impossible to imagine that any sort of consequences might come from it; that it might actually make a difference to things, to our life styles, wealth, aspirations and so on.  Really, in the end, we think, it is not going to make a blind bit of difference to real life.  So we just carry on as normal.

Freedom’s Failure (2)

After all, look at me.  Have I changed?  I wear my hat.  Grey as dust.  Can I?  No?  Yes?

Freedom’s Failure

To what degree can an act be pessimistic?  And is it something one should think about, how much of a failure that act is likely to be?  Should the idiom be: Fail again, fail better?  One sets out to change the world but in the end it is the trivial that commands one …

Reason’s Idiots (2)

A C Grayling on God is not Great.  [Independent on Sunday, 24 Jun 07.] He behaves in the usual way; cheers from the sidelines someone who has the rational steadiness to realise folly when he sees it.  But one has to question how this can be rational: “Hitchens … answers the weary canard that the secular tyrannies of fascism and communism have as bad a record as religion.”  - But he doesn’t seem to at all!  If what is at stake is rationality and fact, then – fact and rationality must be observed.  Fascism and communism produced the bloodiest times in human history; along with the First World War, and neither was that a religious war.  The problem that thinkers like Grayling, Hitchens and Dawkins have to deal with is that if they want to speak about human cruelty and violence originating with religion they need much stronger arguments.  They face the paradox that if – as they also want to say – the basic human impulses that brought about the arts and so forth would still exist, even if all religious sentiment had been removed from mainstream culture – well why not the same for cruelty and violence too?  Clearly if it doesn’t need religion to invoke these impulses then the entire argument is redundant.  So that the project of getting rid of religious belief wouldn’t make any difference!  Which brings us back to square one.  Religion is not evil!

Scraps (1)

Science fiction is full of longing.  But it longs for what doesn’t exist.  That is why it longs for it.  The content that it searches out is not factual but categorical. 

Happy Days

A few months ago I saw Beckett’s Happy Days.  It is a work of the poetic imagination.  For all meaningful purposes it renders the impossible real.  Unending daylight.  The apocalypse.  Fossilised narrative sense.  The ‘story’ has stopped.  Or almost stopped.  Nothing happens.  Or: almost nothing happens.  Only a toothbrush and a handbag occur as events along with Willie’s reading a ‘stopped’ newspaper, his body pinned to the rubble-scape. 

Reason’s Idiots

Milan Kundera’s The Curtain: “Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art.”  (But after all, what if it were weaker – if that is possible too?)  What ‘enters into’ what?  Kundera is like someone saying, “Why did I trip over the curb today?  There must be a reason!”  But why not just say “You did it because you were foolish” - ?  Foolishness can be rational too as well as reason’s failure.

Tin China

Kafka’s story: the innocent seeming phrases always yielding to contradiction; endlessly, dismayingly; the effect that this has is clear: it puts his material beyond the scope of reason. For example, the beginning of the Great Wall of China; something like: “The Great Wall of China was completed …” (ah so, it was finished!) “…in its North Eastern Section.” (Ah, so it wasn’t finished.) One could call this technique ’erasing the beginning/ending’.  The origin of an event or object is put beyond the reader’s reach, like a rabbit out of a hat.  Thus, for example, K.s trial; it begins “one morning”. But immediately this “one morning” loses its origin. No, no - it never began.  K. was always on trial. His trial is without beginning.  Just as our present is too. 

Puerility as a Voice

A surprising number of contemporary British novelists have no ‘voice’. Not to name any names. But compare the Americans. McCarthy; DeLillo; Ford; Salter, who write prose with a distinctive human stamp: books suited to being read aloud. I am about halfway through a sequel to The Graduateby a writer whose best instincts take him toward pure dialogue. If life is becoming increasingly ‘contextless’ -– then it is in the human voice that something of a counterbalance to that loss can be found, a resource finely exploited by all these writers. In the recognition that one is hearing someone speak, there is also the recognition that here at least is someone who exists! The ‘loss of story’ or the so-called ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ that is said to characterise much of modern cultural life illustrates the theme that this engages with generally.  For this process excludes the very possibility of culture - so to speak. Caulfield demonstrates this rather abstract idea very well: he hates everything: religion, culture, tv, life, society, school, mum, dad, etc. The kind of Catcher in the Rye style novel of disaffection that shows the hero cut off from life, cut out from it, ‘contextless’, needs the counterbalance of Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice to make it live; he has to be real - knowable. The irredeemably disaffected Caulfield, expelled from Pency, has gone on a wilful self-destructive binge, wandering from place to place, talking, drinking, whoring, running away, and generally living in a world in which the key is homelessness, in which nothing is likeable, without amenity: even though, or because, he is moneyed and privileged.  The problem is context and the lack of real meaning, that there is no real story for him (that David Copperfield crap); being phoney, it makes him feel nauseated — and yet the counterbalance, as it were, is the very ’sound’ of this - this vocal noise, this image of what it is for the individual to be alive now. We need to be able to hear him because thus he exists; since he exists in spite of himself; against everything. I find certain similarities in Charles Webb’s Home School. ‘Nature’s register’ is the human voice. In other words, for there is nothing real besides - nothing that means anything beyond this, the voice’s mere material fact. Voicelessness here means mannerlessness, puerility.  The inability to conceive of a believable social reality.  Caulfield lives for us, as Benjamin also lives for us, because a form of mannerliness seduces him: if in nothing else then in the sound of this voice complaining at its voicelessness; crying for the scruple of human taste.  Unable to evolve any sort of conduct beyond that which demonstrates a new kind of now world chic the only thing left to him in these is its rejection and the evolution of a voice that works through this rejection. He complains, volubly and at length, and so finally is successful: yes, yes, he exists.  So, voice and place. Haunted by the Spectre of Vulgarity, doomed to fade into the gigantism of an Advert, complaint in mourning its absence of manners establishes a new order of one. 

Cake not Water

In The Passages of Joy the poet Thom Gunn writes about self-expression in a paradoxical way; in what amounts to a rare moment of self-revelation, he writes against it, seeing it as a form of disease.  The class he is taking have been writing poems about their lives. These concern such fraught subjects as Mum’s suicide, the Dad being a notable alcoholic, filial troubles, an endless catalogue of disasters, black moods, depressions and whatnot.  Their main life experiences stem from such stuff seemingly.  Afterwards left to his own devices he finds himself compelled to visit an art museum (I am vague on details); and realises that he is searching for something, something specific, the counterbalance - a madonna and child in a medieval painting.  Formalised, stylised, blank of expression.  Impersonal.  Impersonal.  That is the key.   It is like a drink of water after too much cake.  A draught of something normal, real after self-indulgence. (Much of my own writing falls into that category: cake not water.)