Yasunari Kawabata

1972 in translation by Edward G Seidensticker

A thousand years ago the aristocrat and lady-in-waiting of the Empress in the Imperial Palace of Kyoto, Japan, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote The Tale of Genji, a candidate for the first story in novel form. In Chapter 3, Utsusemi, our hero Genji is trying to catch a glimpse of a woman he is infatuated with and gleans that ‘The lady from the west wing came this afternoon. They are playing Go.’

The game the two ladies played was already over a thousand years old, originating in China in some form, somewhere, before the first written reference remaining of 448 BC. Chinese, and later Japanese, gentlemen were expected to be accomplished in four arts: painting, calligraphy, music, playing Go.

Genji, eavesdropping on his paramour, is pleased that she ‘did not seem to be dull either, because near the end of the game, when the contest was on for the last unclaimed territory, she seemed quite clever and keen.’ The anthropologist Marc L. Moskowitz, in his study of Go and formulas of masculinity in contemporary China, traces the historical belief, continuing to the present day, that the game develops the intellect and teaches courtly politeness.

‘No art or learning is to be pursued half-heartedly,’ His Highness replied, “but each has its professional teachers, and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it. It is the art of the brush and the game of Go that most startlingly reveal natural talent, because there are otherwise quite tedious people who paint or play very well, almost without training.’

The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu

The implication of the Emperor (in the book that meant the most to Kawabata) is drawn out by Moskowitz, who explores connotations of Go that reach beyond a feather in the cap of cultivation. Not only talent, but the spiritual resources of the player can be revealed by their moves. For centuries Go has been associated with astrology and divination, as well as Zen Buddhist inner discipline. In Kawabata’s novel, the narrator wonders, watching the Meijin, the Master of Go, ‘was I watching a passage to enlightenment as the soul threw off all sense of identity and the fires of combat were quenched?’

Moskowitz, again:

‘the highest level of play was traditionally thought to be an aesthetic art form that connected to larger spiritual forces. Often called a “hand conversation” (shoutan) winning or losing was thought to be secondary to creating a harmonious balance on the board.’

In The Master of Go the players become ‘ghostlike’, their placement of pieces on the board striking an ‘unearthly’ tone, and when the tension of their play rises ‘Demonic forces seem […] lost in horrid battle.’ The game is fought over several months, with hours at a time taken to make a single move, bodies wracked by the intensity of concentration, death stalking the board.

Legend tells of a woodsman who, returning from a long day’s work, happened upon two venerable monks playing Go. When he stopped to watch for a moment, putting down his axe, the elegance of the moves was so marvellous that he stayed, entranced, until one of them looked up and wondered whether he shouldn’t be going home. Noticing the sun was setting, the woodsman reached for his axe, but found only the blade, the rotted remnants of the handle alongside. Rushing home, there were only empty rooms, scattered leaves, dust, and the desire to be back with the two immortal beings and the grace of their Go playing.

One day in the heavenly kingdom, a thousand years in the realm of mortals.
When a game of two opponents is yet unfinished, nothing else has meaning.
A woodsman returns on his path, an axe handle has been eroded by the wind.
Only a lone cinnabar bridge remains.

Lanke Shi – Meng Jiao (758 – 814 AD)

The impression given so far, though – that this novel might be a gothic melodrama – is at best partial. In fact, it is close to what is now called creative non-fiction. In 1938 Kawabata was employed to report on the match between Honinbo Shusai, holder of the title Meijin, and the challenger, Kitani Minoru, by the newspaper that sponsored the bout.

Shusai, the ‘invincible Meijin’, at the end of his long career, had never lost a title match. In deference to his age it was agreed to play sessions at intervals of five days, each player having a twenty hour time limit. It was always going to be a long game, and each player did indeed, here and there, deliberate for hours over a move. Shusai’s serious illness some way through meant that the conclusion wasn’t reached for six months.

Kawabata, on the other hand, jumps straight to the conclusion. In the first chapter, we learn that the Meijin is dead, in the second, that he lost the game. While the novel is substantially based on Kawabata’s serial reports, and has much of their journalistic quality – commentary on moves, character studies, and anecdotes about the players – this move totally undercuts the original context of the writing. Instead of waiting for updates on the week’s session, anticipating and discussing the plays to come, which player has the advantage, the reader knows already that loss and death are inevitable.

For the year 2023, the year that I write this, Lionel Messi was recognised as the best football player in the world, winning his eighth Ballon d’Or. This was largely in view of Argentina, with Messi in the side, winning the World Cup, his club achievements being poor by the standards of his younger days.

Despite this generating uncharitable comments below news articles, (‘Apparently he has won it next year too…’; ‘Ballon d’Or winner in the year 2040: Lionel Messi at the age of 70 for the 44th time.’) the award was widely anticipated and welcomed as fitting for the fairy tale curtain call of a wonderful career. Everyone knew that Messi, age eating away at him, was not playing at the sublime level of his peak. Few begrudged the bow to past glories allowed by his last hurrah in blue and white stripes.

‘In the world of competitive games, it seems to be the way of the spectator to build up heroes beyond their actual powers. Pitting equal adversaries against each other arouses interest of a sort, but is the hope not really for a nonpareil?’

These words of Kawabata have a place amongst the stats and analysis, the cold, hard logic of competition, and behind it the colder, harder logic of money: football still has room for romance.

The romance of the untouchable, the consummate, the all-conquering player is felt in Go too, and status has often been conferred on an honorary basis. The title Meijin was given for a lifetime and there were those who preferred to maintain its dignity by abstaining from the sort of competition that might make it appear ill-suited.

At least up until 2013, in China, a country of 1.3 billion, twenty players a year, mostly teenagers, were awarded the rank of professional, so gaining access to the most prestigious competitions. The rank is kept for life, leading to situations in which a professional who chooses a new career in some other field, Go becoming a hobby, will always be ranked higher than an amateur who makes their living through prize money, won at times against professionals in open tournaments.

Once their rank was assumed, some Meijin made arbitrary use of its privileges. Shusai, in the notorious ‘Game of the Century’ against the Chinese born prodigy Go Seigen, flexed his seniority to end every session after his opponent’s turn, thus allowing himself the luxury of the days until the next to consider his own move. But at least Shusai offered himself up – as indicated earlier, there were Meijin who had simply not taken on serious competitors. This high-handed wielding of the title reeks of, well, entitlement. But then, perhaps much of the position was a performance, an office – the master who does not play: that is, the master who represents playing.

In the novel, the outcome settled, much of the drama lies in the tussle of the players over the parameters of the game. Kawabata makes much of the way the length and frequency of the sessions, where they take place, how they are ended, has been carefully negotiated ‘to ensure complete equality’. A new, democratic rationalism is superseding a decorous, aristocratic order in Go, as in wider society.

In one of the few moments in which the narrator looks away from the closed, intense world of the game being played, he is shocked:

‘From the veranda outside the player’s room, which was ruled by a sort of diabolic tension, I glanced out into the garden, beaten down by the powerful summer sun, and saw a girl of the modern sort insouciantly feeding the carp. I felt as if I were looking at some freak. I could scarcely believe we belonged to the same world.’

This sounds hyerbolic, but the ‘girl of the modern sort’, the modan garu, was a movement emerging out of the 1920s and scandalising traditionalists in the way of teddy boys, rock and rollers, punks. The isolation of this reference to broader cultural developments makes it perhaps the more telling.

The narrator builds up the Invincible Meijin, the nonpareil of Go, attentive to his powers of concentration, the toll they take on his health – indulgent of the carelessness for the agreed terms that springs from these. Kawabata casts a wink at the earnestness of his novelised stand-in when he refers directly to the afore-mentioned Game of the Century, which the non-fictional Meijin, Shusai, appeared to be losing until move 160. This ingenious play turned the game and was strongly rumoured to have been devised by one of Shusai’s pupils in the Honinbo school during a recess. To the narrator, ‘such allegations were impossible to believe.’

The book’s blurb names it an elegy to the society that was usurped by the modern world. Is the elegy in part for the openness to the play of illusion that allowed there to be a Meijin at all? After Shusai, the title was never assumed by another person, rather it was attached to a major competitive tournament, up for the taking to all entrants.

No one, not even a Meijin, is really invincible – Kawabata’s loses his final game and then his life. Meritocracy has taken the place of the illusion that merely holding an office guarantees, or confers, special powers. And yet what replaces this illusion is not without its own illusions – the code of rules aiming to establish equality is slyly subverted through gamesmanship; the ruthless focus on standardised rules and competitive ranking obscures the grace and artistry that bring enjoyment to the play of the game.

In 1997, the computer program Deep Blue beat champion of world chess, Garry Kasparov, marking the first time a computer had beaten a human at the game under tournament rules. But there was no path from this program to one that could beat a professional Go player.

Deep Blue operates largely by calculating the next possible moves, then each possible move those moves might lead to, and so on, doggedly following branches of moves through to see which are more likely to lead to a win. Though the number of possible moves in chess is huge, the number of possible moves in Go is vastly huger. We do not know how to build computers that could compute those numbers within any remotely useful time-frame.

Nevertheless, in 2016 the program AlphaGo beat the top human Go player, Lee Sedol. It did so by examining thousands of records of human games, millions of moves, and by playing against itself over and over again, until it could recognise certain moves and board positions as both more or less likely to be played, and more or less likely to win. This greatly reduces the amount of calculation it needs to do in evaluating each move.

The developers of AlphaGo then developed AlphaGo Zero, which had no human input, and after playing itself for three days was able to defeat AlphaGo a hundred games to zero. Impersonal equality before the rules of the game has triumphed over the people that invented them. The nonpareil of Go gameplay is now internal to AlphaGo and it’s descendant programs, infinite self-playing solipsisms in which ever more perfect games are played out in the utter abstract. There is not even a passing woodsman to witness.

But an elegy is not an attempt at resurrection. Kawabata respected and admired the Meijin, and all that he represents in the novel, which marks the passing with sadness. None of this entails the rejection of the emerging era, not that of Japanese modernity, nor that of our algorithmic age. His Nobel prize acceptance speech quoted the Zen saying:

‘If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.’

The disciple can only attain Enlightenment by their own efforts, and to this end must eventually part from the path of any that came before, no matter how much they are to be respected. Kawabata met a Meijin, and killed him.

The post Kawabata Killed a Master appeared first on Views Re. Books.

Asle stands and looks at his picture, the one with the two lines that cross in the middle, brown and purple, the crossing colours blending beautifully, and he thinks; and Asle sits in his chair and looks out at the fixed point in the Sygne Sea, there where the tops of the pine trees meet the middle pane of the window, and daydreams; and Asle drives to Bjorgvin, and back, the route he knows so well he can fall into a sort of stupor and reminisce; and at all these times Asle rehearses in his mind his past life and love, his painting, his frugal plans, his faith, and never comes to a full stop even right at the end of the seventh book, the last book, just when you really think he might

Fosse has written a novel describing the practice of contemplation, in the Christian sense of the word analogous to Buddhist meditation and its aim to be rid of all attachment to the world. The first words of that classic work of mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, are: ‘Here begins a book of contemplation’ – though what is to be attained is named ‘a soul … made one with God’ rather than ‘Enlightenment’.

Given that the practice of contemplation is characterised by emptying the mind, by ‘unknowing’, describing it would seem a quixotic ambition, particularly for a novel. Had it been put to me prior to reading these books I would have struggled to believe it possible, yet there can be no doubt Fosse has some success.

It may seem a rarefied subject matter, not to say frivolous, or even pernicious. Many in my social milieu would scorn a book that treats God as to be sincerely reckoned with. Well, as William Blake put it, ‘Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth’. Even those beliefs that seem to us most obviously false emanate from and are reflections of, however refracted, truth.

 

Each of the seven sections ends in a prayer, Asle repeating the Lord’s Prayer, or the Ave Maria, while focusing on his breathing, or thumbing the beads of his rosary. These ritual prayers are frequently given to the reader in full, and their repetitions tie together, make explicit, those that pervade the narrative. Characters themselves are repeated, doubled – we get two Asle’s, two Guro’s, and the strange overlaps in the relationship, or even identity, of the doubles are left unresolved. Asle and his neighbour speak in repetition, their long acquaintance, their rural and isolated lives, meaning that they already know each other’s news, opinions, likes and dislikes, so that they speak in ritual phrases. The language of the novel itself proceeds in measured phrases, unhurried.

In part Fosse means by repetition to take us out of time, or a certain sort of time – out of the momentum of our lives, out of the story of progress, of one thing leading to another. The busy, linear, secular, serial time of getting things done (or plot being developed) is not the time that his character Asle lives (at least, not all the time). Asle’s time circles back on itself, returns to special moments, rehearses familiar thoughts. It is the time of experience rather than that of the clock.

In addition, by this repetition of language, this chanting, this mantra, Fosse wants to get across that the contemplation of God is a practice rather than a system of beliefs. Rituals often use repetition to place their participants in a state conducive to contemplation, and Fosse wants to nudge us toward this place: ‘seeing oneself as Catholic isn’t just a belief, it’s a way of being alive and being in the world’.

This notion of the approach to God as something one does – an attitude or state of being one inculcates – rather than a dogma, is worth dwelling on. To quote the philosopher John Gray:

Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith – trust in an unknown power – for belief.

Seven Types of Atheism – John Gray

This mistake, one not made only by unbelievers, results in a weirdly confluent movement of both religious fundamentalists and atheists to persuade others that religion is a matter of unthinking literal belief in some immutable set of statements. Passing acquaintance with your common or garden religious person ought to be enough to dispel this, with most not being pedants of their book, nor even necessarily very familiar with it. Through most of the history of most religions, most religious people couldn’t even read. And speaking of the history of religion, what a farrago of argument and disputation, endless heresies and schisms.

Asle sometimes thinks about his religion, about what God is or isn’t, and ends up stuck with ‘but do I believe that? … is it even possible to believe something like this?’ or ‘I don’t understand what I’m thinking, and I don’t know what I believe or don’t believe’. He returns to his prayers, the words worn smooth as his rosary beads, polished of meaning by long use to the point that they fall silent in their speech, and that silence becomes a space waiting to be filled.

So if faith and contemplation are practices, what are their results? Among them, for Asle, are that when he paints a picture, he knows it’s good when he begins to make out an invisible light in it. What’s an invisible light? I wouldn’t know myself, if I hadn’t seen it. For me it was first in the faces of women I have loved, as Asle sees, when he looks at his wife Ales, ‘an incomprehensible light that streams invisibly from her face’. Occasionally I’ve seen it – I want to call it a radiance, though it changes not a single visual perception – in trees, in the halo of mist shrouded sodium street lamps, or pervading my surroundings entirely.

I mention this not to raise myself up into the company of saints, rather the contrary. My thoughts after experiences of this kind were that as they’d happened to me, and I’m a person, they must be among the sorts of thing that happen to people. This would appear to be somewhere in the vicinity of Fosse’s thoughts on the matter – Asle is not a monk, simply someone who does his work, goes about his day, who thinks about his place in the world, the people of his past. Fosse has called his writing ‘mystical realism’ to emphasise that whatever might seem esoteric in it is at home in the everyday.

The problem we have is that – as the phrase ‘invisible light’ shows – words aren’t adequate to such experiences, and so how are we ever to discuss them? Insofar as a vocabulary exists to describe such things, it is that of mysticism. This is a problem, particularly for those who spurn religion but experience the things it speaks of.

Certainly Barbara Ehrenreich, political journalist, doctor of cellular biology, and lifelong atheist, found it difficult to accommodate an experience that broke through her in her youth.

At some point in my predawn walk … the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? … Something poured into me and I poured out into it … a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.

Living With a Wild God – Barbara Ehrenreich

It was only much later in life that she felt capable of grappling with this that had happened to her that she had no words for. Especially given that when she discovered others had talked of such things it was in mystical terms, ‘a vocabulary and framework foreign to [her], if not actually repulsive.’

In her book on the subject she notes that close to 50% of people in the USA admit to having had a ‘mystical experience’ when surveyed. Even allowing that this might encompass a diverse range of phenomena, not all congruent with those under discussion, there’s something significant here. The classic work in this field remains William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which the author enumerates and analyses many examples, ancient and contemporary, from the lives of the saints, obscure autobiographies, psychological case histories, and more. We can leave aside the question of whether these experiences are of the Christian God, or any god at all (Ehrenreich vehemently rejects the idea): these are among the sorts of thing that happen to people.

They can be made out to be more or less than is necessary. Because what we can call mystical experience often comes with a sense of supreme significance, people who undergo it can sometimes think that their experience is of supreme significance for other people. Similarly, each person comes to such experience in some particular set of circumstances, or by following some particular practices, and it’s a pet theory of mine that this can be at the root of what leads the more enthusiastic to then mandate those particular practices – that is, religious practices – more coercively than is strictly polite: ‘I did this thing and something wonderful happened, so now I need to make everyone else do the thing. For their own good.’

Another danger here is the notion that to experience something like this is to have completed the game of life. Punk rock Zen priest Brad Warner questions the very idea of ‘Enlightenment’ for this reason, given that it leads some to think they have had what he calls the ‘Big Fat Download from on High That Fixes Everything Forever Amen’.

If the person who glimpses this is not very mature, this understanding can and does lead to all kinds of not-at-all-nice-things. To take one sadly far-too-common example, you can begin to believe that since all is one, and I am the same as everyone else, then I am the same as my best friend, and it is therefore perfectly all right for me to schtup his wife because, she’s, like, my wife too, right? And besides that even, she is ultimately the same as me ‘cuz, like, everything is the same as me. Therefore on the basis of Ultimate Reality – which, of course, I am privy to, having been enlightened and all – I’m not really doing any harm to anyone but myself. And, hey, I can handle it, so everything is cool.

Sit Down and Shut Up – Brad Warner

This is a pretty spot on précis of the doctrine of the mediaeval Brethren of the Free Spirit, who taught that the import of the sense of mystical union was that they had become God. For many of its adherents, the doctrine had relatively benign consequences. For others…

One can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages – Norman Cohn

Adepts of the Free Spirit, being one with God, could only do what God wanted, could only do right things. And so they freely, and in good conscience, lied and cheated, stole – with violence if necessary – and were promiscuous (this last is not in itself so much seen as sinful these days, but the schtupping-your-best-friend’s-wife variety is still generally frowned upon, and in bands of believers led by charismatic preachers was no doubt on the menu). Later iterations of this way of thinking saw bands of armed cultists marauding through the European countryside, and the infamous tyranny of the Anabaptist occupation of Munster.

Warner classes this as obsession, the desire ‘to hold onto that one shining moment of clarity’, a desire which clouds appreciation of all the other – less heralded but no less less true – moments of our lives. Obsessives may also become collectors of mystical experience.

They categorize them into levels of awakening. They compare their enlightenment experiences with each other the same way a group of seven-year-olds might compare Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They envy those with the cooler experiences and lord it over those who’ve attained lower levels of enlightenment.

Sit Down and Shut Up – Brad Warner

The author of the Cloud… similarly warns that though God may ‘set aflame the body of a devout servant’, this is not the goal of the contemplative life.

Some people are so weak and tender of spirit that, if they did not receive some encouragement by experiencing such sweetness, they could never bear or endure the variety of temptations and tribulations that they suffer … on the other hand there are people so strong in spirit … that they have no great need to be sustained with such sweet pleasure … Which of the two of these types is the holier or dearer to God, God knows and not I.

The Cloud of Unknowing

For both the Cloud… author and Warner, these are among the sorts of thing that happen to people. There is no final apotheosis, only the practice, whether that’s ‘beat[ing] on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love’, or, well, sitting down and shutting up.

And though I speak of spiritual practice, something that may sound arcane, the experience comes before the practice. Only when we’ve had the experience do we know that something is worth practising, only then do we think about how we got there and try to repeat what we can now call a technique. I have occasionally dabbled in meditation, and the first time I did so I realised that I had already been in something like the state of mind it accessed – when daydreaming, lost in music, angstily wondering what good I could do in the world.

To reach into a cloud of unknowing with a dart of longing love is not more than to accept that you understand nothing of the world, and still somehow want to be of benefit. Many the human who has found themselves under this shadow. The only caveat I put forward is that to accept that you understand nothing of the world is not to file away that piece of information, to intellectually note its likely truth – it is an active stance, an attitude of the whole being.

But some while back I mentioned that mystical experiences can also be made out to be less than is necessary. This is usually through some form of ‘explanation’ that aims rather to dismiss than explain, to say, ‘oh, it’s just so-and-so’, with a great deal hinging on that ostensibly neutral word ‘just’. Often these explanations relate to mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs. Indeed, it’s very likely that some mystics have had mental illness and/or have ingested drugs – these are among the sorts of thing that happen to people.

But to diagnose, usually without benefit of any clinical study and with minimal context, the recounting of a transcendent experience, often couched in the terms of long traditions, is reductive. Besides which, most of the times people undergo mental illness, or trip balls, they do not have mystical experiences, nor are all mystics high or insane. And then again, mystical experiences can resonate profoundly with people who have not had them, becoming part of the culture of religions, and so even if all such experiences were drug induced or caused by mental pathology, there would still be something in there distinguishing them from your common-or-garden hallucination.

We return to the question, then: what is this something in there? This wordlessness, this invisible light. When Asle thinks about it, he often thinks of Meister Eckhart.

was gott fur sich selbst ist, das jann niemand begreifen … gott ist nichts was man in worte fassen kann

Septology, Jon Fosse

It’s a little unhelpful that Fosse quotes the original German, but the internet says that the 13th century Dominican theologian intends: ‘what god is for himself that no one can understand … God is not something that can be put into words’. I don’t vouch for the precision of the English formulation, but it’s close enough to demonstrate that Eckhart was a proponent of the via negativa, the way of negation, also known as apophatic theology. If God is transcendent, then He is above all human understanding, and so we must approach Him by moving our attempts at understanding out of the way – a transcendent God is obviously not male, for a start. ‘He’ is not a father, is not good, even the term ‘God’ is insufficient. In this way we enter the cloud of unknowing.

The author of a recent article on Septology in the London Review of Books considers its ‘religiosity .. old-fashioned’ and is puzzled that Fosse would include prayers within a story that implicitly questions their effect, given its emphasis on life as ‘hard, lonely and bleak’.

But perhaps some confusion can be expected: as an approach to the divine, the via negativa is not mainstream. Indeed, Eckhart was tried for heresy, and though not declared a heretic, was subsequently subject to the censure of Pope John XXII. Which just goes to show that heresy is a feature of religion, an engine of its evolution. Pope John XXII, amid the turbulent politics of the time, was himself declared a heretic, later reinstated, and then again accused of heresy.

Notwithstanding controversy, the via negativa is a thread woven throughout religious history, most often expressed as the notion, too often taken to fanatical extremes, that making a representation of God is idolatry. From the, at the time, shocking innovation of the empty altar in the temple of Jerusalem, to Iconoclasm, and more topically the taboo against visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad, there are many examples.

Pushed to its limit, voiding all positive statements about God, the via negativa encroaches on the territory of the atheist, allowing Fosse to have Asle think ‘God does not exist’, and even, ‘Meister Eckhart is right about how many of the people who don’t believe in God are people who really do, while the ones who are doing all kinds of things to show that they believe in God actually believe in something other than God’.

Fosse’s phrase ‘shining darkness’ – synonymic of his ‘invisible light’ – appears in an English translation of the Neoplatonic Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. That work is a touchstone for Eckhart (and for the author of the Cloud…) and so its use is surely not coincidental. For Pseudo-Dionysius, God’s ‘incomprehensible transcendence is incomprehensibly above all affirmation and denial.’

So when Asle thinks ‘God does not exist’, is it the same thought, in the same way, that an atheist might have? When you want to speak of what transcends words, or even knowledge at all, things get muddled up. We perhaps have to fall back on something like Maggie Nelson’s take on Wittgenstein:

…the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed.’

The Argonauts – Maggie Nelson

We cannot pin down the inexpressible, the transcendent. Not in our words, nor in our thoughts. But each time we aim at it with an expression that falls short, our gestures are nevertheless a furthering of the stuff of the universe out of which emanates, here and there, now and then, a shining darkness, an invisible light.

it’s not the painter who sees, it’s something else seeing through the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it’

Septology – Jon Fosse

The post Invisible Light appeared first on Views Re. Books.

Terminal Boredom

Izumi Suzuki
2021 in English translation

Suzuki’s sci-fi is not hard. It has little interest in the technical details of her future worlds, in speculating on the theories that might have made them. She explores softer sciences, her narratives moving dreamily through fragmented spaces, world-building abandoned, like the people she describes, barely enough infrastructure thrown up to support their uncertain interaction.

This vagueness with regard to detail is part of what allows the stories to still appear as of the future, and therefore to speak to the present. Suzuki’s explorations of the effect of a secular, consumer culture spread by mass media feel remarkably contemporary.

We live in a flood of images, every other structure merely the occasion for a facade that opens into another world – the bright future of the next purchase, a better you advertised incessantly. For many of us work consists in the sorting of symbolic images on a screen, a process broken off in order to engage in a leisure of images: cinema, TV, browser, app. Even when the world itself interests us we prefer to frame it in the phone’s camera, already imagining it as the past of a future memory.

I end up putting a frame around everything I see … It makes it seem fresh, helps me relax as a viewer … That really wasn’t staged, huh. Where are the TV cameras? I want my mum to see this.

This fantasia becomes exhausting. A fantasy is only an escape when it can be returned from, rarely at it’s root a desire to escape reality altogether – just this reality right now. When the possibility of return is lost then so are we, in an endless circle of images, or not even a circle, there being now no reference point from which to establish a pattern, only chaos. Pure fantasy is not a place of rest, but of restlessness.

There are no actively good feelings, just a passive, ambiguous contentment.

Depressive Hedonia

A term for this restlessness might be ‘depressive hedonia’, a coinage of the late cultural commentator Mark Fisher. He saw it as the condition of a society in the grip of ‘capitalist realism’, also known as TINA: There Is No Alternative. In much of the world, even once radical political parties have accepted that the rich rule and all that remains is to decide whether more or fewer crumbs should fall from the capitalist table.

The absence of any political project, any utopian ideal to aim for, might lead to classic depression, and its symptom ‘anhedonia’: the inability to feel pleasure. But if capitalism deadens any sense of active engagement in society, it provides in compensation the teasing promise that one day you might attain all that you dream of – just believe and work that bit harder – in its endless presentation of the good life that can be had by spending money. In Fisher’s own words:

Depression is usually characterised in terms of anhedonia, but the state I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

We live in a constant stream of inconsequential information, simultaneously soothing and anxiety-inducing, putting off any reckoning, turning a blind eye to challenge, to difficulty, and therefore letting life escape from us. A condition we cling to even while its futility gnaws us from within.

Nothing eases the boredom, of course … It’s not that I like the content of the programming itself. So much of it is total trash. I just enjoy the feeling of sitting there spacing out in front of the TV set. Because I don’t have to be active. Doing anything of my own volition is so painful that I can’t handle it. If I can just avoid that pain, that’s enough for me.

What was the effect of TV in the worlds of Suzuki is intensified by the smartphone in ours. But the world as spectacle is not a purely technological phenomenon: it is also, as Fisher points out, political. We are increasingly used to seeing the world as though the audience in an arena. It is not for us to act in the world, the world is acted upon by officials, high-viz vest wearers, state functionaries, corporate sponsors: it is the canvas that commerce paints on for our pleasure. We vote at the prescribed times for those we’d like to act for us.

‘Voter turnout’s gone up, though. Now that all you have to do is sit in front of your TV and press a button for your favourite celeb.’  ‘But they don’t even publicly announce which politicians the celebrity delegates choose with the votes they get.’

We are distanced from the world by its privatisation. It is owned, and the owners decide what it will be for us. At the endpoint of this there is no longer any commons, no public realm, merely individuals processing through a theatre. All the world’s a stage and all the people merely it’s audience.

They … had a total faith in society. Which is I guess why he committed suicide – he actually believed his death might have some kind of effect. Talk about optimistic.

When is a War not a War?

It was the burgeoning, relentless, ruthless, bewildering stream of information, obscuring reality to the point that on those occasions it emerges from the flood we no longer know how to tell it apart from its images, that Baudrillard invoked when he pointed out that the Gulf War did not take place.

By this he meant two things: one, that the first rolling news war was so set about by commentary on what might happen, what could be inferred as happening from the propagandistic newsreel of either party, and on the meaning of what then had happened, that the actual events were buried deep, so deep as to perhaps be inaccessible.

This may appear hyperbolic, but consider George Bush Jnr’s 2003 declaration to watching cameras that major combat operations in the second Gulf war were over. Followed by the 2010 official end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq. And then the 2021 end of the combat mission in Iraq. This is the projection of The War over war, resulting in the staged and stagy nonsense of declarations of the end of The War at times when war continues unabated. Only The War moved smoothly from Shock and Awe to the end of combat operations, whereas war never began with Shock and Awe, which prompted only massacre or retreat. Instead guerrilla war started to bite once the standing armies ceased their barking.

Baudrillard’s second meaning was that the First Gulf War was not a war in any traditional sense. The outcome was inevitable, and both parties knew it. On encountering the Iraqi army’s dug in positions, the U.S. fixed shovels to their tanks and simply drove over them, filling the defences with sand and burying many Iraqis alive.

For all I know, we could have killed thousands,” [said] Col. Anthony Moreno, commander of the brigade that led the assault … ‘What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with peoples’ arms and things sticking out of them.

The imbalance of military power was such that the U.S. could massacre its opponents without even noticing. As Baudrillard put it, ‘For the Americans, the enemy does not exist as such. Nothing personal.’ The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites ‘estimates of Iraqi military deaths … from 8,000 to 50,000. Allied casualties, by contrast, were remarkably light. Just 147 U.S. personnel and 47 British troops were killed in action’. These images, of Iraqi military deaths, somehow escaped us. Baudrillard again:

Never any acting out, or passage to action, but simply acting: roll cameras! But there is too much film, or none at all, or it was desensitised by remaining too long in the humidity of the cold war. In short, there is quite simply nothing to see. Later, there will be something to see for the viewers of archival cassettes and the generations of video-zombies who will never cease reconstituting the event, never having had the intuition of the non-event of this war.

Once the real event is over it is lost. There is no bringing it back, it cannot be reconstituted in its wholeness and immediacy. All that’s left is information and no possible permutation of that information will alchemise it into the reality of what occurred. This is the rabbit-hole of conspiracy theory – who really killed JFK? Is Elvis really dead?

When this casting of the information runes is confined to the past it can go on indefinitely, and perhaps harmlessly. The event itself is not going to return from the dead to confound speculation. When it is projected into the future we face two risks: that this projection forever overlays the reality of our lives, so that we fail to see anything beyond ourselves, living always at one remove; and that as the potentials of the future coalesce into the obstinately actual nut of the present we fail to see it coming until it smashes through the projection screen and strikes us dead between the eyes, the David to our phantasmagorical Goliath.

Pretend You’re an Actor

Suzuki’s stories speak of the post-modern self living among, as, spectacle. Her affectless, amoral, drifting teenagers sometimes suggest the recurring moral panic over disaffected youth turning to violence in their cosseted apathy. It is regularly shown that video games, video nasties, heavy metal, do not cause violence. It may be that the social relations they describe do.

The parallel between video game shoot-em-ups and remote operatives watching drone targets on a live video stream is obvious. But the connection is not that ‘shooting someone’ in a video game makes you a psychopath. Rather, that when life is presented to us as a video game, a spectacle, rather than an event viscerally participated in, it’s easier to deal death.

And this works two ways: the spectacle of violence can, to a degree, replace violence. The grim irony of the 6 January 2021 US Capitol building assault was that the reality TV president was capable only of a reality TV revolution. People were gathered to march on the Capitol Building by baseless social media chatter and turned out to have few other connections. There were no roots to it, no serious organisation or planning, an assumption that to be seen to enter the building would be enough and the rest would fall into place.

Reality feels like a TV show, and TV shows feel like reality. It’s like the boundary between them breaks down, like you’re living in a dream.

The attackers gave interviews to news reporters and filmed their own trespass, one woman live-streaming complete with an advert for her business, because their actions were an extension of the stories they told online, the spectacle become more real than reality, the importance of the event not what it materially changed in power relations and governance, but how its appearance affected the online culture wars.

Pretend you’re an actor.

Or, to return to Baudrillard:

We have neither need of nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, which, as in the case of drugs, is also the pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. Here is the supreme form of democracy. Through it our definitive retreat from the world takes shape … But, ultimately, what have you got against drugs?

A Lone Eye Somewhere

Our retreat, though, is not definitive, and I have so far, for rhetorical effect, overplayed the power of spectacle, which, though itself real, can never wholly prevent us from reaching out and touching reality. Suzuki’s worlds, however, speak of just this solipsistic retreat into the warm and consuming flicker of screens.

She doesn’t evoke the hallucinatory riot of mass media images – many of her stories are remarkably placeless, vague and dreamy. Rather, she evokes the effect of their profusion and interchangeability, an effect of deadening homogeneity. The many images are so disconnected as to be only superficially distinguishable, their affect equal and so equally tepid.

Our organism calibrates to the constant yet unchallenging stimulation: just as can we tune out the difficult real world of work or family with a foreground of media images, we become able to tune out of the image stream, let it too fade into the background, to find ourselves… where?

In one of Suzuki’s stories.

No, I don’t want to be in anybody’s dreams. I want to go someplace where there’s nothing. … I want to keep on living. Forever. And that’s how it’s going to be. I’ll become a lone eye somewhere, floating, without consciousness.

Affect in Suzuki’s art resides in the dim sense that another reality might exist – if only in a dream – one where actions matter, where change is possible, where the unexpected occurs. And what is at stake for her characters, as for us, is whether this sense tips them toward hope or despair.

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The Last of the Wine

Mary Renault

1956

A very heaven, or perhaps Olympus, for Classics nerds, this story is set in late fifth century BC Athens and comes well stocked with its truly legendary citizens: Xenophon, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Plato, Socrates.

At its heart is the love of Alexias and Lysis, two of the circle of young men fired by the wisdom of Socrates (Renault spells his name ‘Sokrates’. I don’t know why, but it lends a pleasing air of academic nicety). Many members of this circle are recognisable from the dialogues of Plato, as is the homoerotic relationship our lovers form. It is a real and deep love, though at times one could mistake it for Platonic in the modern sense.

In all this time, Lysis never asked anything from me besides a kiss. I understood him, that he wanted me to know he was in love from the soul, and not, as they say, with the love of the Agora.

Even when the passion picks up, it’s never less than tasteful, as in this lyrical, if a little mannered, passage:

I lay between sea and sky, stricken by the hunter; the fiery immortal hounds of Eros, slipped from the leash, dragged at my throat and at my vitals, to bring the quarry in.

To cap it all, Lysis is the name of a boy in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, with whom Socrates teasingly explores… the nature of friendship.

Whether to Speak the Names of Love

Mary Renault wrote frequently of love between men (and on occasion women) at a time when to engage in a male homosexual act was to commit a criminal offence under UK law. Perhaps as a result, her novels present a restrained and idealised homosexual love and might be criticised for pandering to the ‘as long as they don’t throw it in my face’ brigade.

Her approach is to look for what is universal in love, whether between man and woman, man and man, or whomsoever, and her characters take pride in their love, not their homosexuality. She apparently did not look favourably on the gay pride movement. Gay pride, of course, foregrounds particular forms and expressions of love, in answer to their superstitious repression.

To see the contrast as an antagonism, as some will, including it seems Renault herself, is a shame. There’s no reason why these approaches can’t be complementary. To emphasise now similarity, now difference, is to move toward a comprehensive view. The championing of what is particular to homosexual love (not to mention the full panoply of loves that exist beside the heterosexual) can quite easily sit alongside the recognition of what is common to all loves. What is this but the play of the eternal Platonic Forms with their infinitely varied instantiations?

And the way Renault presents gay love so straightforwardly, eschewing any direct political commentary, her political act being the simple fact of presentation, is in its own way bold. What, anyway, is so remarkable about homosexuality? It’s been going on these thousands of years. While there may be problematic elements in her work, she is still remembered fondly by many gay men who came of age in the mid-twentieth century English speaking world.

Character Flaws: Ancient vs. Modern

Still, the touch of reticence in her treatment of this theme is of a piece with a niggling sense that, while this book is very engaging, there is also something about it that I find strangely arms length. Brutality and degradation are depicted, particularly when the Spartans lay siege to Athens and hunger lays waste to its inhabitants, physically and morally. Her characters do suffer, do make mistakes, do battle to overcome themselves.

But we see that their intentions are always noble, though the flesh is sometimes weak. It is, from beginning to end, clear who is good and who is evil. Good and evil is by no means restricted to one or other faction, but all characters fall into one or other category.

In this it is reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that utopian vision of the USA. The programme was cast so far in the future that I could suspend disbelief and accept its idealism in a way that I could not with, for instance, The West Wing.

The result is that there is little moral jeopardy. The characters that we care about are incorruptible, after their model Socrates, and can at worst suffer and die nobly in defence of the good. When Alexias faces a crisis, it is over a desire still more chaste than that he shares with Lysis.

One might argue, albeit ironically, that they could be considered authentically ancient characters. Theories of the modern individual chart a shift from a human experience of good and evil forces that swirl around in the ether – so that the moral choice is whether to latch onto the spiritual or social good or evil – to an awareness of the good and evil impulses within our selves.

Certainly Renault’s character’s lag behind, in their stoic simplicity, the complex fragility of, for instance, the protagonist of Hamsun’s Hunger. They can be buffeted by Fortune, but the evil of the world does not reach up, at least, not convincingly, from inside their own skin.

A Milieu Meticulously Portrayed

But if the characters, though enjoyable, are not utterly convincing, their milieu is meticulously portrayed. Our hero, Alexias, is selected to run at the Isthmian Games for Athens. His lover Lysis is to compete in the Pankration. Alexias is aghast to discover that Lysis’ opponent in this combat sport is to be ‘a mountain of gross flesh, great muscles like twisted oakwood gnarling his body and arms.’

Alexias is disgusted:

…at the sight of a man too heavy to leap or run, who would fall dead if he had to make a forced march in armour, and whom no horse could carry … This man had sold grace and swiftness, and the honour of a soldier in the field, not caring at all to be beautiful in the eyes of the gods, but only caring to be crowned.

Often Renault is able to open up historic perspectives that feel authentic, as here, where practical, aesthetic and religious values coalesce in the physique of young men. She is careful, too, to cast Alexias’ distaste as that of an older generation, fashions changing for the ancients as they do for us. And there is something else in it, the refined aristocrat deploring the incursion of the uncultivated rabble.

There is a parallel with the fading glory of the disinterested amateur athlete through the twentieth century, leading to the triumph of what could be called the grubby commercialism of the professional. We should not forget that Athenian democracy was the preserve of an elite.

Elsewhere Renault again seems to strike an authentic note when Alexias interrogates Socrates: ‘“Why?” I asked; for with him it came naturally to ask a reason.’ But this time the reason is that ‘something had made a sign to him’. This ‘something’ is usually called Socrates’ Daimon, a ‘prophetic voice’ that warned him against certain actions and also helped him guide his friends.

This is a side of Socrates, or at least of the character ‘Socrates’ bequeathed to us in Plato’s writing, sometimes glossed over. Fans of the Enlightenment like to speak of Ancient Greek culture as the first great flourishing of rational critique, of reason over faith. They have reason to. But there was more going on than that (and isn’t there always more going on than we can fit into our speech?).

In The Last Days of Socrates Plato reports the inventor of Socratic dialogue, the model of rational discourse, as saying of it:

This duty I have accepted … in obedience to God’s commands given in oracles and dreams.

Besides seeing his own philosophising as a divine duty, divinely given, he speaks in that book of religion more generally:

When any man dies, his own guardian spirit, which was given charge over him in his life, tries to bring him to a certain place where all must assemble, and from which, after submitting their several cases for judgement, they must set out for the next world.

The daimonic aspect of Socrates may well be more influential than that of rational discrimination, crucial as it was in the development of Neoplatonism and, via that, of the Christian theology that has so dominated much of the world’s thought up until our own time.

Renault nods heavily to this with an uncharacteristic anachronism. In the aftermath of the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, the Athenians are celebrating the reinstatement of Democracy. Plato, ever the aristocrat, warns against too great an admiration for the Demos, a concept something like what we would now call ‘the People’ (or, at times, ‘the Mob’):

Even if Zeus the All-Knowing were to put on earth this perfect man we have postulated, would he love the Demos? I think not. He would love knight and commoner, slave and free, Hellene and barbarian, even perhaps the wicked, for they too are the prisons of God-born souls. And the Demos would join with the tyrants to demand that he be crucified.

Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

If I have criticised the realism of Renault’s characters, I should also acknowledge that her approach to them is not wholly realist. The inevitable anachronism of the historical novel itself, always already outside of the time it tells of, lends itself to the legendary – as the future does for Star Trek. Characters who are a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away*, or once upon a time, are a step away from reality, a step into our dreams.

This book names real people, but those names are now somewhat foreign to their persons, coalescing around the written works produced by or speaking of them, and around what many generations and nations have made of those works since. Furthermore, Renault wrote other books that could be called historical in their efforts of fidelity to records written and archaeological, but featuring characters from the myths of Theseus: the man himself, Ariadne, Minos, Hippolyta… It isn’t a huge leap from historicising mythical figures to mythologising historical ones.

In this context I was very willing to indulge Renault’s idealised heroes and, in fact, enjoyed spending time with characters so fine and upstanding. Sometimes we all feel Bonnie Tyler’s need. The Last of the Wine accomplishes what historical novels should with flair, convincingly evoking a culture foreign in time and place, and in the same gesture holding a mirror to Renault’s contemporary society.

* yes, yes, that’s Star Wars, not Star Trek

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Roberto Bolaño
2004
2008 in translation by Natasha Wimmer

This one book might have been published as five. One would have been about the incestuous sexual entanglements of a clique of European academics obsessed with a reclusive (and fictional) author with the nom de plume ‘Archimboldi’. Another about a man who may, or may not, be going mad. Another about a journalist sent over the border to cover a boxing match he knows nothing about. Another about Archimboldi’s pre-literary life as a Wehrmacht soldier.

One of the books would have been about murder. Murder upon murder.

‘..the partially charred body of Silvana Pérez Arjona was found in a vacant lot. She was fifteen…’

‘Maria de la Luz Romero died … She had been raped and hit multiple times in the face … The cause of death was stab wounds to the torso and neck, which had pierced both lungs and multiple arteries.’

‘According to the medical examiner, she had been beaten and whipped: the marks of a wide belt were still visible on her back.’

‘Her vulva and thighs showed clear signs of bites and tears, as if a street dog had gnawed at her.’

There are characters in this book. There is narrative of sorts. Above all there are murders of women, dozens and dozens of bodies, many unknown, many sexually violated, tortured, the scant details of their identities and deaths submitted with forensic professionalism.

Though Bolaño did toy with the idea of allowing each part of this book to be its own book, it, or they, were constructed as an organic unit. How are they bound together?

Coincidence is a Luxury

Guiseppe Arcimboldo painted canvases teeming with objects, riddled with double meaning and allusion. He delighted the royal courts of sixteenth century Europe with teasing creations that often seem a simple collection of stuff, only to reveal, from the right angle, a hidden unity. Take The Gardener:

Oh, ok, I’ll give you a clue: turn it upside down.

The narrative non-sequiturs of Bolaño’s 2666 don’t initially appear to add up to a whole story, but it is impossible not to infer a relationship between each section, and this leads uneasily to thought of the section, The Part About The Crimes. And to the thought that it is of a part with the rest.

The horror of the crimes seems incomprehensible, alien, but perhaps this is only because we look too closely, failing to pull back and take it all in, to see that they are all too easily linked to our own lives. On the other hand, pulling back shows us the deaths not in their unique horror, but as just another part – something that can be ignored in itself – of the overall picture. Once you see the gardener, his component parts lose their individuality, and matter not for themselves, but only as they were chosen to illustrate the man.

The book contains a fictional painter, Edwin Johns, famous for ‘an ellipsis of self-portraits … seven feet by three and a half feet, in the centre of which hung the painter’s mummified right hand.’ Johns says that: ‘Coincidence … is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.’ The fragmentary nature of the book might seem to endorse this nihilism, the nod to Arcimboldo’s painting a suggestion that any pattern made out is an illusion indulged in by the viewer.

If this was the case, the book would be a senseless parody of a senseless universe. But this is belied by Bolaño’s long effort to produce the thing – he had written thousands of pages by 1995, and the book was not quite finished when he died in 2003. It is belied most of all by the memorial litany of murdered women, the implacable horror of which cannot be conceived as parodic. No doubt, though, the senseless is explored here. Bolaño exhibits a dark night of the soul, the unquenchable search for meaning that remains, apparently senselessly, even in the face of despair.

Edwin Johns also speaks of a friend who believes ‘in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with.’ This friend believes that there is no ‘coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning , exhausted, to go to work: for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he’s already accumulated’. For this friend, coincidence is a luxury.

In a whispered revelation Johns tells that the meaning behind the finishing touch to his last work – the cutting off of his painting hand – was the money it would make. Beyond the obvious symbolism of avarice as the death of creativity, integrity, self-restraint, there is in this ugly self-mutilation at the heart of an acclaimed and astronomically expensive artwork a resonance with the book’s broader themes.

In The Part About the Critics, European academics – art lovers, humanists – travel from conference to conference, country to country, debating the meaning of books, the meaning of life. One day, drunk and gnawing on jealousy, two of them beat a man almost to death, an experience that imparts a sexual charge and profound guilt. They talk of the event as ‘the thing that can’t be explained’ and worry over what it says about who they truly are. With time the guilt passes, life goes on.

In The Part About the Crimes, the women of Santa Teresa die, women working in and around slums rapidly propped up against the factories of the de-regulated border zones of Mexico. These are a consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to a collapse in Mexican farming, subsequent large movements of people, and the upheaval of their economic and social status. For these people, too often, violence means that life does not go on.

Bolaño points to the parts of our globalised world and invites us to join the dots. Because the Crimes are real, more or less. Bolaño has fictionalised the Ciudad Juárez femicides. Rubi Marisol Frayre, whose fate is illustrated towards the beginning of this article, really was murdered.

I would be fascinated to know what those unaware of this make of the book – the experience of reading 2666 without knowing that things very much like those it describes have happened, and continue to happen, is closed to me. ‘Who,’ I imagine the hypothetically unaware reader thinking, ‘is murdering all these women? Why does the author so monotonously describe their deaths? What does it have to do with the story?’

Perhaps the question invited by Bolaño is: ‘What does it have to do with me?’ When we see the whole of something – say, the modern world – we can, in starry-eyed admiration, ignore any ugly parts. When we see the parts, we can feel bad about the ugly while ignoring the connection to the beautiful.

Unless you’re a woman in Ciudad Juárez, looking over your shoulder in the dark on the long walk home from the late shift at the factory, knowing that the flow of money and drugs over the border means that the criminals can pay off the police, that the police are often criminal, that your life is cheap. Coincidence is a luxury.

Bought by Blood

Bolaño is in the place of Ivan Karamazov, unwilling to allow violence to be accommodated and explained, to be the spice of life, to allow evil as the yeast that raises the bread of life. Dostoevsky’s character says, in relation to the suffering required for the attainment of Christian salvation:

I decline the offer of eternal harmony altogether. It is not worth one single small tear of even one tortured little child that beat its breast with its little fist and prayed in its foul smelling dog-hole with its unredeemed tears … by what means will you redeem them? … Will you really do it by avenging them? But what use is vengeance to me, what use to me is hell for torturers, what can hell put right again, when those children have been tortured to death?

Ivan goes on to ask, if we were given the task of building a world that would culminate in happiness for all, would we agree to build it on a foundation of suffering, of the suffering of even one child:

…are you able to allow the idea that the people … would themselves agree to accept their happiness being bought by the unwarranted blood of a small, tortured child and, having accepted it, remain happy for ever?

Bolaño shows us that much of at least our earthly happiness is bought at this very price, over and over again. The Crimes, the murders of women, are to the aspirational citizens of a globalised world what Edwin Johns’ mummified hand is to his self-portrait, what the torture of a child is to the glory of heaven.

The number 2666 is not explained, or even alluded to, anywhere in the book it titles. But in another novel entirely, Amulet, Bolaño writes of:

a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

Presumably it is this forgetting that Bolaño wishes to fight by presenting so nakedly the many murders. To do so by bringing to mind something very close to, but in the end not, the truth, is a strangeness. We are admonished to remember via a misremembering.

This invites an interrogation of memory. After all, our memories of someone who is gone are an abstraction of them, a representation of them. They are not a photographic record, their elements burned into a fixed pattern at the moment they occur. They are reconstructed by drawing together the disparate fragments we have as evidence of them in our minds, including our memory of previous rememberings.

As a result, each time we remember someone, we blur their image at the edges, mixing them gradually in with our other memories, and with ourselves. In this way, each act of memory distances us from the person remembered in the same moment it connects us to them.

In the long term – think generationally – memories can of course only be vague, and will eventually become legendary. Yet even when the details have become partly fictional, when dates, or even names, are forgotten, these traces are still testament, however obscurely, to a human life.

No one can expect their name to be remembered in a thousand years’ time, but if we image a life as a pebble dropped into the pond of the universe, we know that the ripples created will wash right through it. An act of memory is an amplification of the ripple. The wave of deaths in Ciudad Juárez has washed through Bolaño in the form of this book.

All things considered, there can be no doubt that he intended his fictional crimes to remind us of the real. He was rigorous in his research on femicide in Ciudad Juárez, working closely over many years with Sergio González Rodríguez, the brave journalist who did the most to bring those crimes to the attention of the wider world – and who appears, lightly disguised, in 2666. There is some suggestion too, that Archimboldi’s first published novel is plagiarised from the journals of a Russian Jew murdered by the Nazis. Perhaps, and this may be a stretch, this is a hint of the discomfort attendant on Bolaño’s own appropriation of real life tragedy.

A Terrible Heroism

Despite the size of this book there are some things Bolaño did not include, perhaps so as not to compromise the picture of human evil, to not let us off the hook. In Ciudad Juárez there is also a terrible heroism. Despite the impunity of the drug cartels, the corruption of the police, and the lawlessness that grows in their shadow, there are those among the most vulnerable, among the women themselves, who are unbowed.

Their work is chronicled in La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico, a documentary graphic novel drawn and written by Jon Sack. Lucha successfully ran, and minded, her own business. But something called her to remember:

…every day the belief grew stronger in me that I could not be part of inhumane structures that offered me a more-or-less comfortable living, as long as I forgot about those who were suffering.

In response, Lucha founded, and until recently ran, the Centre for Human Rights for Women, which provides emotional, practical and legal support to women, and families of women, who have been victims of gender-related crime. She sees that work as a memorialisation, something she describes by remembering the words of her murdered friend, Bety Cariño:

We denounce human rights violations so that we do not forget, to preserve historical memory in the heads and hearts of the torturers who burn down our houses, threaten us, rape, disappear and murder our children.

Saúl Reyes Salazar’s family campaigned for environmental and human rights in the Juárez valley. Six members of the family have been murdered, and Saúl sought asylum in the USA. He has said:

I believe that for all these dead there will never be justice … No one will be detained … No one jailed … No one condemned … But some day I’ll go back and erect a great monument that says in waging war, Calderon supported the deaths of all these people. And all the names will be there … So the memory of those who died stays with us forever because these were human lives.

2666 could be considered a great monument erected to the memory of those who have died in Ciudad Juárez – but how could this be so if it names them by fictional names? Through the character of Archimboldi, Bolaño ties the crimes of the disguised city to the great crime of the Holocaust, and in doing so suggests that his book takes aim at all crimes. By only alluding to real injustices, perhaps he prompts the reader to the work of uncovering them. Rather than a monument, 2666 may be an invitation to make our own contribution to the continuous, monumental work of bearing witness to evil.

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The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

1558
1956 in translation by George Bull

‘…I noticed someone riding along the edge of trench on a mule … I was well prepared before he came opposite my line of fire, took accurate aim, and hit him … right in the face … The man I hit was the Prince of Orange.’

So this Benvenuto was a famous soldier then, I hear you ask. No, but he was one of those people who, if they do anything, are very good, the best; tremendous – everyone says so (we’re not talking about that Prince of Orange, keep up). He intended to tell his story ‘with a certain amount of pride.’

In 1527, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was Emperor of many things, but not, for some reason, Rome. His army, happening to be in the neighbourhood, decided to change that, and as the city had no significant standing army at the time, the residents, including Cellini, took up arms to defend their homes. Hardly had his arms been taken up, than on a brief expedition to the walls, intending to observe the progress of the fighting, he had a potshot at a figure who stood out from the rest of the attackers. And, so he relates, killed the commander of the enemy army, the Constable of Bourbon.

Then, inspired by:

‘an accompaniment of blessings and cheers from a number of cardinals and noblemen … I forced myself to try and do the impossible. Anyhow, all I need say is that it was through me that the castle was saved that morning’.

Which was nice.

Despite having nothing to do with his career, these snippets give an excellent picture of the general tone of Cellini’s autobiography, which is despite – or because of – his overweening self-regard, the sort of read that gets paired with the otherwise redundant word ‘rollicking’. It’s a real-life picaresque, abounding in colourful events. Cellini whisks us through a gallery of historically momentous people, places: Popes, Medicis, Titian, Michelangelo, the court of Francis of Angouleme. The exploits above were during the Sack of Rome:

‘Night came on, and the enemy were in Rome. Those of us in the castle, especially I myself with my constant delight in seeing unfamiliar things, stayed where we were, contemplating the conflagration and the unbelievable spectacle before our eyes.’

All of this, though, is merely the backdrop to the improbable life of the author, who immediately goes on to say of this unbelievable spectacle:

‘But I shall not begin describing it; I shall just carry on with the story of my own life and the events that really belong to it.’

And he does ‘just carry on’, without chapters or transitions, in relentlessly conversational fashion. Indeed, the book was dictated, after an abortive attempt by Cellini to write it himself – an attempt he dismisses in the unpromising first sentence as too time-consuming and ‘having seemed utterly pointless.’ Chattering away to a servant as he worked, you can think of this as a prototype podcast, only with all episodes delivered en bloc.

Instead of the whimsical anecdotes of middle-class comedy-nerds though, the story of this life is driven by Cellini’s hair-trigger temper and Viking warrior levels of pique. He frequently complains that his misfortunes are due to the hate of his venal enemies. But the frequency with which he falls out with people becomes somewhat suspicious.

As a young Florentine Cellini got into a row with rival goldsmiths and was fined for assault by the magistrates. Boiling with anger at what he saw as the injustice of the sentence, he went after the man he had struck and attempted to stab him. Fleeing the consequences was what took him to Rome, where his skill as a craftsman brought him to the attention of a bishop, and then the Pope.

This really ought to be the meat of the book: the work of a great artist, courted by Dukes and Kings; the innovative technical solutions; the inner search for inspiration. And there is some of this. Cellini writes at length about the gestation of the Saliera, which graces the cover of this edition of his book and has been valued at £35 million. More bling than Mr T, this is a salt and pepper cellar. A minor part of a dinner service. Executed with great skill, it is nevertheless testament to the timeless truth that some people have more money than taste. It was scandalously stolen in 2003, when by happy coincidence scaffolding was erected against a Vienna museum shortly before a man who ran a security alarm firm took a tour of the exhibits. He put two and two together. Thankfully, the Saliera was recovered three years later.

It’s been said that Cellini is better known for his book than his art. And even tyrants have limits. Eleanor of Toledo, Duchess of Florence, had him design a jewellery piece for a valuable diamond of hers. She later had it reset because it was thought it ‘would make a better show if it were set less elaborately.’ It may be that this is why Cellini doesn’t appear in Giorgio Vasari’s famous chronicle of Renaissance notables, The Lives of the Artists, though it features many of his contemporaries. Another reason might be the bitter enmity of the two – Cellini’s autobiography contains a passage in which he humiliates Vasari in the belief that the painter had spread a malicious rumour about him.

Still, he did also produce, for Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, a statue of Perseus that is a remarkable work of art by any standards. Bronzes of such size had only been cast in sections before but Cellini wanted to do it more or less in one go (‘…what you want done is beyond the powers of art. It’s simply impossible’, said one of his staff. Allegedly.). Its creation provides one of the few pieces of drama in his story solely to do with the artistic process.

The specially built furnace was brought to such a pitch of heat that the roof of the workshop caught fire. As time came to pour the metal, Cellini was taken so fiercely with a fever that he thought, never a man to under-employ hyperbole, he ‘would certainly be dead by the next day.’ Despite his instructions, the men let the alloy curdle – so he leapt from his deathbed to pile wood on the fire until ‘there was a sudden explosion and a tremendous flash of fire, as if a thunderbolt had been hurled in our midst.’ The cover of the furnace itself had cracked open, but rushing to plug it, he was able to complete the cast.

The Perseus was an immediate success, holding out the head of the gorgon to the three existing statues on the Piazza della Signoria, which, carved out of stone, were made to seem appropriately petrified. The sinister undertone is that the earlier works, made to celebrate Florence as a republic, have been silenced by commission of a tyrant. Some years earlier, censured by fellow Florentines for supporting the Medicis, Cellini responded: 

‘You idiotic fools, I’m a poor goldsmith, and I work for anyone who pays me, and there you are jeering at me as if I were a political leader.’

To repeat, paying attention to anything beyond his own affairs wasn’t his style. Instead of the republican uprisings, wars and intrigues of the time, what astounds and interests are the incidents that develop from his dangerously flamboyant, emotionally incontinent, utterly self-obsessed approach to life.

There was that time he was imprisoned for various murders and the theft of precious stones (self-defence and trumped up charges, says he), then escaped from the tower – having removed the nails from his cell door one by one and camouflaging his progress with wax replicas – by shinning down tied-together bed-sheets; was then recaptured and slung in a dungeon in which his nails grew ‘so long that I could not touch myself without their wounding me’, but where he received visions of Christ and was ‘full of great rejoicing’, so that ever after ‘a light – a brilliant splendour – has rested above my head, and has been clearly seen by those very few men I have wanted to show it to.’

On the other hand, there was the court case in Paris, which seemed to be going against him, so to defend himself from ‘the leading spirit in that unjust lawsuit’ he had no other option than his ‘large dagger.’

‘One night I stabbed him so many times in the legs and arms (taking care, however, not to kill him) that I deprived him of the use of both his legs. Then I went after the fellow who had brought the suit, and notched him so effectively that he abandoned it.’

It’s possible that the heavenly light shining above Cellini’s head was not apparent to these men.

Or how about the time he made friends with a necromancer and they staged a ritual in the Coliseum to persuade the powers of hell to reunite him with his lover. The virgin boy brought as medium saw legions of demons, and fire rushing at them, and ‘then he clapped his hands over his eyes, and started crying that he was dead and didn’t want to see any more.’ The lot of them shaking in fear, Cellini called on a companion to burn some stinking herbs to drive away the devils:

‘The instant he made a move, Agnolo blew off and shat himself so hard that it was more effective than the asafoetida.’

This last escapade invites the thought that the whole book could be a lark, the self-mythologising of a teller of tall tales in the vein of Woody Guthrie’s riotous autobiography Bound For Glory. But where Woody wrote for the sake of the story, and with a gleefully ironic eye on his own legend, Cellini is too obviously keen to self-justify, settle scores, and establish status.

‘Lark’ doesn’t fit the callous maiming of his legal opponents. He could be a viciously violent man, and his sexual involvement with models and servants, male and female and some very young, would provoke #metoo in our time, if not prosecution. But one can read with an ironic eye on Cellini’s attempts to puff himself up, and so, while he doesn’t come across as likeable in any more than short doses, it’s easy to be marvelously entertained by the story of his life.

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The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
2015

Humanity as a virus is a popular metaphor of secular apocalypse. We are parasites stealing life from Mother Earth and selfishly ruining her capacity to nurture the finely balanced and mutually supportive dance of the innocent plants and animals. Gaia may be about to annihilate us with her immune system: climate change the rising temperature of a world-wide fever that will consume us and allow the patient to recover.

But what’s wrong with viruses? The metaphor only works because a virus is something that we dislike. From the point of view of a virus, what viruses do may seem perfectly reasonable, perhaps even virtuous. If we were to finally wipe them out with our hygiene and inoculations would that not be another example of our evil, virus-like, eco-cidal behaviour? Does Gaia hate viruses, or are we their only enemies?

The ease with which we see ourselves as viruses comes from our idea of ourselves as apart from, rather than a part of, nature. We think of the natural world as something over there, outside our homes and cities. There are ‘natural’ ecosystems and habitats which our presence destroys and to allow them to flourish we need to leave them alone. Taking our own prejudices out of the picture leaves us one more organism among others, naturally doing the things we do given our nature.

The Matsutake Mushroom

In Japan, as in many parts of our twenty-first century world, volunteers are working to conserve and restore the woodlands they remember from their youth and that have vanished as the country became urbanised. Paradoxically, they are doing so by clearing and managing the apparent wilderness that has grown up since the people left their peasant lifestyles behind. In the abandoned forests, an invasive Chinese strain of bamboo shades young pine trees, which struggle to survive. Are the pine trees being naturally out-competed? Or are they being artificially killed because humans brought non-native Moso bamboo to the Japanese islands?

The community groups restoring Satoyama, or traditional peasant woodland, draw no such distinctions. Peasant farmers once irrigated the land to create rice paddies: frogs and dragonflies flourished. They coppiced oak trees for firewood, the stumps growing new limbs again and again: Japanese Emperors fluttered the air, gluttons of the young oak sap. They scoured the forest floor and used the organic matter collected to fertilise their crops: in the thinned soil, hardy pine trees gained a foothold. And in the roots of the pine trees, mushrooms grew.

Human cultivation is yet to produce a matsutake mushroom: they will only grow entangled with ‘the plants, slopes, soils, light, bacteria, and other fungi’ that make up their homes. Satoyama is neither nature in the raw (whatever that might be), nor intensive agriculture. It is a landscape that forms out of the entwined lives of many organisms, where people are one element in a developing ecosystem. In her book, Tsing makes the matsutake mushroom an emblem of such mutual life-worlds.

The Japanese festivals of cherry blossom viewing are well known, but the autumnal equivalent of gifting matsutake has largely passed the rest of the world by. The mushroom has been a poetic symbol of the melancholy Fall season for hundreds of years and to a Japanese nose ‘smells like village life and a childhood visiting grandparents and chasing dragonflies.’ As the Satoyama woodland disappeared, so did the mushroom, and Japanese demand drove a globalised matsutake market. Prices fluctuate according to harvests, but at the time of writing a kilo could easily set you back £500.

Like many fungi, matsutake grows in symbiosis with plants. The main body of a fungus is a potentially vast network of filaments lying below the soil, from time to time fruiting the mushrooms that poke their way toward the surface. These filaments can thread themselves into the roots of trees, connecting forests together in a wood wide web. Recent science has shown how, by means of these prosthetic roots, healthy adult trees can nurture shaded saplings by sharing nutrients, or if attacked by pests can warn their neighbours to prepare to repel boarders. Matsutake likes to live with pine trees.

Pines are pioneers. In partnership with their fungi they can live in exposed and impoverished locations. Hence they often live on the fringes, such as high up where soil is scarce, and thrive in disturbed landscapes. ‘When a volcano erupts, or a glacier moves back, or the wind and sea pile sand, pines may be among the first’ trees to spring up. Forests first logged indiscriminately, then managed as monocultures, then abandoned as the local timber trade is undercut by exploitation elsewhere, are an example of the Capitalist Ruins of the book’s title. In them, pines take over.

But this is an ecology in motion: pine trees and their fungal symbiotes, such as matsutake, always arrive together on, say, the barren rock a glacier has retreated from. The matsutake eats the rock, passing the valuable minerals, in now digestible form, to the pines. As the rock is broken down it becomes soil. The soil banks up and becomes fertile for broadleaf trees that as they mature shade out the pines. The next generation of pines plant their roots beyond, chasing the diminishing glacier, the whole forest advancing along the stony ground. Or they may not survive, and new pine growth will have to wait until the woods are disturbed again, by fire perhaps. Or logging.

Tsing points out the dynamic nature of these habitats to show us that our fellow creatures have histories too. Sustainable forests are human creations and require human action – as in Satoyama – to be arrested at one point in their development and kept static. This point, of course, is the one at which humans can extract something valuable.

De-historied Lives

Humans often isolate one product of an environment and exploit it over and over again. But this, in reality, means isolating it from its history as part of an evolving ecology. To make sure that we can log a consistent quality and amount of timber we manage the landscape so that competitor species are suppressed and carriers of diseases and parasites are wiped out. The trees themselves are not allowed to fully mature but are chopped down while still young. In this way pine plantations are maintained and their relationship with the broadleaf trees they prepare the way for is refused.

Tsing argues that capitalism proceeds by tearing objects out of their networks of relationships and pretending that, instead of these, they are constituted by some ahistorical essence. So, for instance, the regiments of trees managed for harvest that deny the vaster cycles of forest movement across the landscape in favour of the isolated life-cycle of the timber producing pine.

This approach goes back to the birth of capitalism and two of its exemplary commodities. First, sugarcane:

‘All the plants were clones, and Europeans had no knowledge of how to breed this New Guinea cultigen. The interchangeability of planting stock, undisturbed by reproduction, was a characteristic of European cane … which had no history of either companion species or disease relations in the New World. As plants go, it was comparatively self-contained, oblivious to encounter.’

Second, slaves:

‘As cane workers in the New World, enslaved Africans had great advantages from growers’ perspectives: they had no local social relations and thus no established routes for escape … They were on their way to becoming self-contained, and thus standardisable as abstract labour.

How far it’s possible to abstract a human being from their environment has been examined via a thought experiment by the philosopher Donald Davidson:

‘Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, Swampman, moves exactly as I did according to its nature, it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognise my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.’

Davidson purposed to show that Swampman would not be an identical replica of his – because lacking the historical basis of the unfortunately vapourised philosopher, the creature’s words and thoughts could not refer to what they appeared to be about. When it greeted a ‘friend’ it would in fact be mechanically responding to a stranger. It’s words would have no meaning. Perhaps it couldn’t be said to have thoughts at all.

Philosophers have long argued whether it’s possible that there could be creatures physically identical to humans but lacking a sense of self (Swampman’s a favourite, but they also love zombies). They argue because we often imagine ourselves as a mind and a body, potentially separate items, much as we used to imagine ourselves as a soul and a body. This is also what gives us notions like brains in vats, and minds abstracted from bodies and ‘uploaded’ into the internet.

These ideas can have pernicious consequences. The anthropologist David Graeber discusses slavery in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, arguing that we consider ourselves ‘as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings.’

By paying attention to the unpredictable mutuality of human-matsutake assemblages, Tsing means to help us escape our isolation. By mingling with the things of the world, by noticing how we act and react to them, we may avoid what Graeber calls the ‘essential horror of slavery: the fact that it’s a kind of living death.’ The organic products of capitalism are in this sense undead, zombified – existing as commodities, cut off from the social worlds in which they had a history and instead reproduced identically, eternally.

The separation of mind and body is a dream of the halting of history, of immortality: the body may decay and die, but the mind can leave it behind. The price of the dream is that the mind must control the body as its slave. We discipline our physical lives in order to optimise our dream lives and end up disciplining our dreams too. We struggle for the same off-the-shelf successes once symbolised as house-car-picket-fence, now offered by the economy of (ersatz) experience: Machu Picchu, self-curated streaming services, street food.

Politics from the Fungal Perspective

Tsing wants us to look out for the serendipitous emergence of mutual benefit – such as matsutake foraging – in places that we are, rather than that we own. Instead of trying to master our environment we ought to be within it, alive to its rhythms, one more thread of the universe’s weave, no more, no less. In this there’s the taste of Taoism, Zen practice – but also of the networked world of the internet. Like the pervasive threads of fungal mycelium, the cloud of our virtual interactions dissolves the boundaries between things and precipitates spontaneous uprisings as people discover their good in each other, the Arab Spring perhaps the paradigm example.

Not, however, necessarily an example Tsing would cite. For her, Progress, the desire to master the world, is the totalitarian ethos that has left the world in ruins and needs to be abandoned:

‘…the world will not be “saved”. … If we don’t believe in a global revolutionary future, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present’.

Hold on, though, because metaphors of entangled networks and encouragements to live on our wits, entrepreneurs of our selves, are the stock in trade of today’s capitalism too. The captains of industry would be quite happy for the rest of us to make do and mend among the ruins they have left. To do so seems a form of quietism. The risk is that by opening ourselves to the lessons of the non-human environment, we close ourselves off to the social groupings that have traditionally resisted capitalism: political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, and so on.

Eschewing Progress seems to effectively give up on countering the destructive status quo, even to ignore its imminent threat to our own lives. As a critic of this book has it:

‘We acquire the exquisite privilege of cultivating vulnerability only when we have first seen to one another’s security.’

Tsing takes that critique on the chin in her article Is There a Progressive Politics After Progress?, well aware that what she has put forward ‘is hardly a robust political program.’ She is, though, a seasoned activist who has by no means given up the struggle. What she has given up is a mode of struggle: the ‘clash of swords’ that pits ultimate visions of the future against each other, where either capitalism is The End of History, or it must be opposed from ‘within a universal politics of resistance’.

Seeing these ideological wars as, like the real thing, so far producing only ruins, she prefers to stand aside from the battle, to look around her. Away from the noise of human squabbling she hopes to learn, from the creative adaptations of our myriad neighbours, ways of being that allow progress on immediate practical matters and leave the universe as a whole to itself.

Abandoning the desire to master – and therefore enslave – might lead us away from the sound and fury of political and economic utopias that threaten to bring the End of the World (with added mushrooms). Living in the present might lead us back to ourselves, reconciling our minds with their immediate natural environment – our bodies.

Living in the future, though, may be the natural thing for humans to do. When we say that humanity is a virus, we imagine a virus only as something that viciously attacks humans, and the metaphor damns us. If, with Tsing, we cease to see humans as the apex of ecosystems, we can recognise that humans and viruses flourish together, their numbers in dynamic balance – and that, maybe, there is room for humans too, and their visions of worlds to come.

What’s advocated in this book is to let go the need to save the world all at once by clearing the intellectual undergrowth to allow this or that grand theory to grow unchecked; and instead to forage among whatever humble dreams of near-futures sprout out of the run-down, unregulated hinterlands of thought. The hope is that these cross-pollinated mongrels are the survivors that will thrive amid the ruins of Progress.

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Hrafnkel’s Saga and Other Stories

Unknown authors
Circa 13th Century
1971 in translation by Hermann Pálsson

Iceland was minding its own business until around 870 AD, when, finally, humans decided to try living on it permanently. These Nordic pioneers had travelled west to an island wild with volcanic activity and afflicted by punishing cold. Unruled and unruly, they were accustomed to claim summary justice, by the sword if necessary, according to a Germanic moral code characterised by the fierce guarding of honour.

Having more than one dimension, they nevertheless realised the value of civil infrastructure, and in 930 established perhaps the earliest example of a national parliament: the Althing. In Old English, and related languages, a ‘thing’ was a meeting or assembly – a council gathered to discuss some important matter – before it took on the connotation of any matter at all. That use survives in our word ‘hustings‘, or ‘house thing’; originally a gathering at the leader’s homestead to hear speeches. In mediaeval Iceland, Patriarchs vied for followers across 39 districts. Those with the most influence spoke for their district at the annual Althing, where laws were made and claims were judged.

In that auspicious year 1000 AD, the Althing declared Christianity the official religion of Iceland. Under the auspices of the new clerical administration, a more literary and humanistic culture developed, and out of this the Icelandic Sagas were produced. Much of their drama is born out of a clash between ethics: on the one hand, the honour-based imperative of personal prestige, according to which not an iota of dignity may be ceded; on the other, the understanding that a stable society requires give and take between neighbours and that turning the other cheek to a rigid code might sometimes yield preferable results. 

And it’s true that the message of these stories is something less savage than we might imagine for the period. Take Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a 2009 short story by Wells Tower. By describing a perfunctory but brutal Viking raid in contemporary US vernacular he creates a thinly veiled allegory (though I didn’t notice it on my first read…) for the stupid destruction wreaked by our present puffed-up superpower. 

Like Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, the Sagas are historical fiction, written in the thirteenth century but set in the tenth, well within the Viking heyday. The Christian authors are rather more generous to their pagan forebears than is Tower. The title character of Ivar’s Story was an Icelander who did actually become Court Poet to the Norwegian King. The saga, though, is an invention. It recounts the poet’s grief when his brother marries the woman he loves. King Eystein offers wives, lands, money to soothe his friend, but Ivar has no heart for any of these. At a loss, the King offers the only remaining thing he can think of:

‘Come to me every day before the tables are cleared, when I’m not engaged in matters of state, and I shall talk with you. We’ll talk about this woman to your heart’s content for as long as you wish, and I’ll devote my time to it. Sometimes a man’s grief is soothed when he can talk about his problems.’

A contemporary writer putting these words in the mouth of a tenth, or even thirteenth, century character might well be accused of the anachronistic insertion of present preoccupations with talking therapies and men in touch with their feminine side.

The title story of the collection throws us back on our Viking stereotypes though. Hrafnkel (this guy seems to know how to say it) loves his horse. So much so that he dedicates her to his god, Frey, and swears a sacred oath to kill anyone else who rides her. Then he hires Einar to herd his sheep, and explains at length how many other horses Einar is welcome to ride. I won’t draw the diagram.

After Hrafnkel tugs his axe out of Einar’s face he’s sued for damages by the lad’s family. Mediaeval Icelanders lived by the motto: ‘Where there’s blame there’s a claim’. He loses his lands and goods in the case, not to mention being tortured, and decides that sacred oaths have a lot to answer for. Accordingly, he gives up religion and works hard until he makes his fortune over again. Years later Eyvind Bjarnason, a powerful relative of Einar’s family returns from long travels abroad. Hrafnkel has known all along that this chieftain could protect his enemies and seizes the chance to kill him, then takes back by force everything he had forfeited.

Modern commentators have found it difficult to identify with the ethical framework of this saga, leading some to suggest that ‘Hrafnkell turns out to be a total asshole.’ With his killing of innocents at the beginning and end of the tale, can Hrafnkel be considered its hero? R.D. Fulk’s persuasive analysis argues that he is, because he changes from an ideologue to a pragmatist.

Hrafnkel doesn’t actually want to kill Einar, but he feels bound by his oath: ‘I’d have forgiven this single offence … but my faith tells me that nothing good can happen to people who break their solemn vows.’ When nothing good happens to him anyway, he thinks better of holding his honour in such high regard. After being shamefully tortured he chooses, over a heroic death, to live with his humiliation for the sake of his sons.

Hrafnkel isn’t particularly keen to kill Eyvind either, but one of his feudal servants harangues him for his disgraceful cowardice in ignoring the chance for revenge. He deplores her motives, but agrees to the act because, according to Fulk, he reasons that otherwise his household will lose respect for him and will fall into disarray. At the close, though he has them in his power, Hrafnkel is more lenient to his enemies than they were to him, passing  up the chance to torture, kill or impoverish them in return.

While this might acquit Hrafnkel of the charge of being a total asshole, it doesn’t seem quite enough to make him utterly un-asshole-ish. It would have been possible for Hrafnkel, like a jaded film cop nearing retirement, to have uttered the immortal lines ‘I’m too old for this shit‘, and to have gone off to his allotment leaving his kinfolk to their bloodthirsty honour-killings – and Eyvind alive.

But it’s also true that in rejecting the heroic ideals of earlier writing, in which honour, purity and victory, were lauded, the authors of the sagas were contributing to the long emergence of a realist literature out of epic, mythic roots. To get from paragons like Achilles, Roland or Galahad to the flawed, or even anti-heroes of Dostoevsky, Hamsun or Camus, we needed plenty of Hrafnkels in between.

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The Invisible Child and The Fir Tree:

Tove Jansson
2017

As everyone knows, the Moomin is a hibernatory creature. This accounts for the fact that the Moomin family are neither aficionados, connoisseurs, nor even passing acquaintances, of Christmas.

Hence, when they are prematurely woken from their wintry slumbers by the Hemulen, they are most disconcerted by the foreboding news that Christmas is coming. Sleepy-headed and amid the rush of their neighbours’ festive preparations it seems as though ‘something awful is happening.’

The Hemulen’s Aunt tells them: ‘Better get yourself a fir tree before dark.’ But to the innocent Moomins this only means that: ‘The danger comes by dark’. Aghast at how much food must be prepared for the Christmas that is coming, they ask each other: ‘Do you think Christmas is very hungry?’ Fortunately, the other woodland creatures between them give the Moomins the help they need and the whole thing works out well for everyone.

This book collects two Moomin stories to raise money for Oxfam’s Invisible Child campaign to help women and girls. So far sales have helped to support women survivors of sexual violence in Iraq, women farmers in Rwanda, and women’s rights activists in Bolivia, Lebanon and South Africa. It’s an appropriate cause for a writer who wanted everyone to feel safe in an extended Moomin, or even human, family.

Delinquency as a Sign of Hope

One day, Too-Ticky asks the Moomin family to look after a little girl. ‘You all know, don’t you, that if people are frightened very often, they sometimes become invisible.’ Little My knows that if it’s fright that’s made you invisible, it isn’t other people being kind to you that will make you be seen again. She asks the invisible girl (who is terribly mousy) ‘Haven’t you any life in you? D’you want a biff on the nose?’ And she asks because ‘You’ll never have a face of your own until you’ve learnt to fight.’

Recommending MMA training may not seem the obvious central message for a campaign to raise the profile of the struggle for gender equality (although, I suppose, why not?). But Jansson recognises that fights, like the much misunderstood Jihad, need not only be about biffs on the nose.

When the invisible girl finally releases her anger and stands up for something that’s important to her: there she is! ‘…the silliest, nastiest, badly brought-uppest child I’ve ever seen, with or without a head’, as Moominpapa, the poor object of her wrath, puts it.

The development of the story reminds me – as if proof of Jansson’s psychological acuity were needed – of a lecture by Donald Winnicott: Delinquency as a Sign of Hope.

Speaking to the Borstal Assistant Governors’ Conference, the psychoanalyst told of:

‘A child who has … suffered unthinkable anxiety and then has gradually reorganised into someone who is in a fairly neutral state, complying because there is nothing else that the child is strong enough to do. This state may be fairly satisfactory from the point of view of those who are in charge.’

This child is obedient but passive, nothing of their real self is there, nothing of their own motives, thoughts, agency. Our desires inevitably have a destructive aspect – think of all the poor plants and animals you’ve gnashed into paste in order to further your sorry life (though sometimes what’s destroyed may only be ‘the rules’). The child who didn’t find their destruction accepted, or contained, and was therefore deprived of a desire, becomes afraid of it.

‘Then, for some reason or other, hope begins to appear, and this means that the child, without being conscious of what is going on, begins to have the urge to get back behind the moment of deprivation and so to undo the fear of the unthinkable anxiety or confusion that resulted before the neutral state became organised. … Whenever conditions give a child a certain degree of new hope, then the antisocial tendency becomes a clinical feature and the child becomes difficult.’

Tracing rule-breaking back to its origins, Winnicott points to occasions when: ‘Your own child claims the right to go into the larder and take a bun, or your child of two years explores your wife’s handbag and takes out a penny.’ If these natural explorations and assertions of autonomy are crushed, the grown child may only be able to express their desires compulsively.

‘Naturally, the fountain pen stolen from Woolworths [you’ve dated yourself there Donald] is not satisfactory: it is not the object that was being sought, and in any case the child is looking for the capacity to find [for themselves], not for an object.’

Of course, the Moomin family would never abandon anyone they’d taken in (even if Moominpapa is quite annoyed), so they would agree with Too-Ticky’s assessment when she comes back to see how the invisible girl has got on:

‘You seem to have changed her; she’s even worse than Little My. But the main thing is that one can see her’.

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Surviving the Holocaust

Bruno Bettelheim
1986

Bruno Bettelheim survived Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. After escaping Nazi Germany he directed a home providing for the care and rehabilitation of disturbed children, becoming a world-renowned psychoanalyst and expert on autism. He was a brilliant writer and had many books published besides this influential collection of essays. His The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (referenced on this very blog), won, in the USA, both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. 

After he died, another narrative emerged. On emigrating to the USA, Bettelheim had taken advantage of the chaos that World War II introduced among official records to invent an academic background in psychology. He was then able to take up the post of professor in that subject at the University of Chicago, and subsequently to be appointed Director of the institution’s Orthogenic School. A former student of the school took exception to a posthumous description of Bettelheim as ‘a great Chicagoan’, and their letter to the Chicago Reader provoked more correspondence from students and staff alike, describing systematic physical and emotional abuse at his hands. Eagle eyes spotted that chunks of The Uses of Enchantment were plagiarised. His theories on autism are now largely discredited.

What, then, to make of Surviving the Holocaust? These essays analyse the concentration camp experience and the totalitarian nature of Nazi rule. They carry the moral authority of eyewitness testimony and persuasive, scholarly expression. They are written by someone whose academic qualifications and professional integrity have been found lacking.

What Survives the SS

Even within his lifetime Bettelheim met controversy. His essay ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’ was first published in 1943 in an attempt to publicise the fact of concentration camps. He wrote that when he tried to speak of them:

‘I was accused of being carried away by my hatred of the Nazis, of engaging in paranoid distortions. I was warned not to spread such lies.’

In later years, the essay would be criticised from a different angle, focusing on his assertion that the long term prisoner reached the point of ‘chang[ing] his personality so as to accept various values of the SS as his own.’ Bettelheim is balanced, acknowledging that this interpretation is partial and that these very same prisoners ‘who identified with the SS defied it at other moments, demonstrating extraordinary courage in doing so.’

But elsewhere there is less balance. ‘The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank’ discusses the famous diarist, and the play and film based on her writing, as unhelpful models for survival. Bettelheim contends that the Franks’ choice to go quietly on living as a family, hiding away in the wainscoting like mice, expressed in microcosm the majority reaction of European Jewry: ‘passively waiting to be rounded up for their own extermination.’ To make the point as clear as can be, he is reported to have asked a mainly Jewish audience: ‘Anti-semitism, whose fault is it?’ And then to have answered himself, ‘Yours! Because you don’t assimilate, it is your fault.’ 

Bettelheim’s denunciation of ‘Jewish’ passivity stands in contrast to his account in ‘Surviving’. In this essay, he emphasises the arbitrary nature of survival in the Nazi camps, and particularly in the death camps (though he was fortunate enough to be released before these were established). While he writes that ‘To stay alive, prisoners had to try at all times to be active in their own behalf,’ he at the same time scorns ‘the pretence that what the prisoners did made their survival possible.’ Only the liberation of the camps by the Allied armies prevented the eventual death of them all.

‘Surviving’ is in part a response to the ideas of Terence Des Pres. In Bettelheim’s reading, this scholar of the Holocaust thought that survivors, having been forced to ‘live beyond the compulsions of culture’, were then able ‘to embrace life without reserve’. By contrast, Bettelheim asserts that prisoners reduced to what he characterises as amoral, animalistic survival behaviours didn’t last long, whereas those acting in solidarity improved their chances.

Taken together, that survivors were active even in captivity, that they were not the final arbiters of their own fate, and that even minimal remnants of culture held them together: these beliefs appear an implicit endorsement of the Franks’ approach to persecution. Feeling, perhaps, otherwise powerless, they took steps to preserve their social unit for as long as possible. This is not necessarily to say that Bettelheim was inconsistent – the circumstances were different, and no prescription is universal. But that he proposed in such strong terms two views in such tension with each other might suggest some internal conflict.

His lauding, at least in this essay, of the importance of culture is compelling. Why, after all, did the Nazis separate families from each other in the camps? In order to more effectively dehumanise them. It is disconcerting, then, to consider that the children Bettelheim cared for at the Orthogenic School boarded there, separated from their families, and that he appears to have despised those families. He believed children’s problems largely stemmed from mothers and fathers it would be best for them to escape.

Richard Pollack’s brother had been at the school and when he died in tragic circumstances Pollack visited Bettelheim. As reported via Molly Finn, he:

‘heard his father dismissed as a crude schlemiel, his mother vilified “with astonishing anger,” described as the cause of all his brother’s problems and scorned as a “Jewish mother”.

This wasn’t Bettelheim’s view of one family only:

‘All my life I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them.’

Pollack later devoted a book to, as he saw it, exposing Bettelheim as a charlatan. Ex-staff characterised the psychoanalyst’s work with the children as ‘instruction through terror’ and the ‘Nazi-Socratic method.’ The frightening possiblity raised here is that Bettelheim’s diagnosis that prisoners came to accept SS values may be anecdotally confirmed in at least one case: his.

Feet of Clay

And yet, Ronald Angres, who suffered under the Orthogenic School’s regime, does ‘not believe that Bettelheim first learned either his manner or his methods from the SS in the camps.’ He was already the man he was in the USA before his interment. Bettelheim seems monstrous either way: the survivor who learnt to control others as he had been controlled, or a man already base who posed as a martyr to con his way to wealth and status.

But if we judge that in these essays he has judged too harshly the response of the Jews of Europe, must we, therefore, also not judge his own response too harshly? Timothy Pytell argues that the critique, offered by Des Pres and others, that ‘Bettelheim … somehow accurately or inaccurately captured Holocaust experience is an unfair burden to place on [him] … The real question is why would we expect [him] to get it right?’

Bettelheim does take on the role of academic observer in these essays, but why do we take him at face value? He acknowledges that this approach was in large part driven by his personal demons: ‘Trying to be objective became my intellectual defence against becoming overwhelmed by these perturbed feelings.’ ‘Trying’ is the operative word and to read this book again, considering it as a form of self-therapy for Bettelheim, would be an interesting exercise.

Then again, even Pollack acknowledges that some students of the Orthogenic School believe they benefited from their treatment. Bettelheim’s successor as Director of the school, Jacquleyn Sanders, has defended his legacy. Bettelheim’s extensive self-mythologising has generated a prodigious number of articles, some excoriating him as an irredeemable villain, others ambivalent, keen to salvage his talents as well as recognise his sins. 

And, though this in no way excuses the abuse that Bettelheim did perpetrate, we ought not to be complacent about our own treatment of autistic children. Right now, in the twenty-first century UK, people with autism and severe learning disabilities are being imprisoned and abused, receiving still worse ‘care’ than the Orthogenic School provided. 

Confounded Codas

Bruno Bettelheim killed himself in 1990, at the age of 86. On first learning this, ignorant of his dark side, I was reminded of my feeling when I read that Primo Levi, another writer of the Holocaust, perhaps the greatest, died by suicide. I thought it a desperate tragedy that after having the fortitude, the sheer will, to survive the death camps, and then to bear witness to that trauma in superbly humane books, that, as Elie Wiesel put it: ‘Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.’ It seemed as though the Nazis had ultimately defeated him.

Then I picked up from some article or other the notion that Levi had other things to concern him besides the Holocaust. Indeed, he was undergoing a period of poor health and was also oppressed by the decline of his mother and mother-in-law, both living in his home under the constant care of a nurse as they fell ever further into senility. Muddying the waters still more, serious questions have been raised as to whether Levi’s death was due to suicide at all. He may simply have fallen: an old man recovering from surgery, a low banister.

Bettelheim certainly did kill himself. He took some pills and put a plastic bag over his head. Previously, he discussed suicide at length both with his daughters and in interviews with the Los Angeles Times. But his morbid preoccupations were to do with the physical and mental debility caused by a succession of strokes, not his experiences in the camps:

‘if I could be sure that I would not be in pain or be a vegetable, then, like most everyone, I believe I would prefer to live.’

His daughter Naomi traced the causes of his suicide, at least partially, even to before Nazi persecution began:

‘There are many, many factors why my father did choose this route, going as far back as his upbringing in Vienna. There was quite a preoccupation with suicide in Austria when he was young.’

Reverence Vs. Empathy

These Holocaust survivors fill me with a sense of awe involving deep sadness and horrified fascination. They are people who have seen a hell on earth. But perhaps this reverence is a problem. After all, to say ‘Holocaust survivor’ is to name just one aspect of whole persons, such as, for example, Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim. The Holocaust hangs over our thoughts and feelings about them. We are liable to assume it was some sort of lesson, that it gave them courage, wisdom, compassion, that it defines the rest of their lives.

But we may be doing not much more than reading tea leaves. And those who lived through it may not have been much more able to comprehend their experience. Many of those who were murdered in the Nazi death camps, and who survived them, will have been stupid, mean, greedy, deceitful – even murderers themselves – as well as whatever else they were or are. To see those people only in the light of that aspect of their lives is to ignore their full humanity, a fault that is the shadow, if a pale one, of that which led to their ordeal.

Bettelheim’s story remains fascinating despite, or still more because of, the kinks that appeared in it after his passing. The lessons the world thought he had left it turn out to be slipperier, suppler than had been imagined. I still struggle with what to make of the man and his work, perhaps only that we should doubt even the authority of suffering. Nevertheless, by extending alongside that doubt our empathy, a quality that, if he bestowed it unevenly, Bettelheim always celebrated, there is much to learn from him.

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