"The story is made of twists, detours and many hesitations."

A Little Party Dress
By Christian Bobin
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
77 pages
Autumn Hill Books
December 1, 2009




. . . The story is like a piece of cloth folded in eight. As you read it you unfold it, it becomes bigger and bigger, ever more luminous to your eyes. A silk of pure sky. ("The Frailty of Angels")

Christian Bobin was born in Saône-et-Loire in 1951. In 1993 he was awarded the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel Le Très-Bas (The Secret Life of Francis of Assisi in English). His favorite form, however, is the fragment - a little picture representing a moment in time.

1994's Une petite robe de fête (A Little Party Dress, translated by Alison Anderson) is a collection of lyrical essays, a mode that combines the reflective essay with the prose poem. Each one is a brief rumination, like the snippet of a dream or pause in the midst of daily life, with a focus on childhood and the transcendental power of literature. Bobin's introduction establishes a link between the two with reading as the boundary between innocence and knowledge.

The three recurring tropes are the imaginative child, the transported reader, and the dull non-reading adult. The relationship between them is an uneasy, paradoxical one. Learning to read represents "a little piece of god departing, a first fracture in paradise," yet also keeps alive that spirit of boundless creativity. In the end, human growth is inevitable and accompanied by responsibility and conformity.

She leaves the white horse with regret. Each time it's the eternal question, the dark riddle: why can't I stay there? Since I'm happy there. Since when I'm close to the white horse I'm closest to myself. Why do I have to progress, to continue, when then are there all these hours that take me away from myself and from everything that matters. You don't know how to respond. You can't respond, because like her you've already met your own life in play - and nowhere else. ("Look at me, look at me")

The reading adult is the compromise between the two, standing apart from, say, a crowd of businessmen, the "same man, in dozens of copies. . . You look at them fearfully, the way as a child you used to look at dried-up old people with their somber voices" ("Promised Land"). Loss is another central motif, stemming from that original loss in the early days of school. To adults, this is often the loss of love, explored in the title piece as a redemptive but transient echo of childhood.

A Little Party Dress ultimately fulfills its own themes as the perfect book to come back to again. No essay is more than ten pages, wonderfully suited for those quiet moments in time when the philosophical mood sets in. Recommended.

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Review Copy

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Kafka on the Wall

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Various Authors
Various Translators
Open Letter Press
Words Without Borders
231 pages
November 30, 2009


Communist dictatorship . . . had its own rationality and motives, its own aims and purposes, except that these had nothing in common with normalcy, logic as we know it, or everyday life. (Judith Sollosy, "Reflections on Péter Esterházy's Revised Edition")

The Wall in My Head is an anthology of essays, poetry, short stories, images and historical documents from former citizens of the Soviet bloc, all relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. The release of both The Wall in My Head and Season of Ash, also from Open Letter Press, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of these historic events, and also, as Keith Gessen notes in his introduction, seeks to capture the tumultuous, upturned atmosphere of post-Communism, an era recently ended. "You can tell it's over because nobody wants to hear anymore about how terrible Communism was. Russians sure don't, and not just because Communism was all their fault." Like Season of Ash, The Wall in My Head depicts very recent history which nevertheless already feels distant, thanks to the radical changes that occurred in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s.

The writers featured in the anthology, though they come from different national, cultural, and ethnic perspectives, share many common experiences. But what I focused on the most as I read through book was the theme set up by the opening piece, a selection from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Kundera argues that life under Communism resembled a Kafka story, in which hapless humans are caught up in the mechanisms of a towering bureaucracy that operates under its own incomprehensible laws of unknown origin. Thus, a file buried in an office somewhere, Kundera explains, "takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast upon the screen of illusion." Land-Surveyor K. from Kafka's novel The Castle, for instance, exists only because of an obsolete, mistakenly-filed order; indeed, Kundera goes on, K. is actually the shadow of an error in the file, and therefore has no right to exist even as a shadow.

K.'s absurd situation is highly comparable to the protagonist of the allegedly true story of an engineer in Communist Prague, who is reported as having made a slanderous remark about Czechoslovakia while in London and having further stated a desire to remain in the West. No one seems willing or able to retract the false report and the poor engineer is continuously referred to one department after another. The engineer then starts to wonder if his phones are being tapped and starts to fear for his safety until he finally can't take it anymore and actually does flee the country.

But while the engineer's tale may or may not be an urban legend - a bit of sensationalized modern folklore whose seeming veracity arises from shared societal fears and anxieties - many of the collected works of The Wall in My Head deal, each in their own way, with the institutionalized irrationalities of life under Communism. Beginning with Communism's basic premise: that it represents an evolutionary endpoint, the Utopian culmination of centuries of the worker's struggle for a just society. And so, as Rousseau once put it, the oppressed proletariat must be "forced to be free." In "The Road to Bornholm," German poet Durs Grünbein describes East Berlin's atmosphere leading to the fall of the Wall:

The reason for the upsurge was a bundle of unsolvable contradictions, from the miserable future prospects for most citizens (despite their undiminished historical mission), to the stagnation of an entire society (which knew progress only as an ideology) due to the erosion of all their members' self-confidence (lauded as the development of a mature socialist personality), down to lifelong imprisonment (in order to protect the people from themselves and their misguided wants). . .

. . . The sickness hidden behind it [the Wall], a deep identity crisis, was initially masked and later, denied. Since that time, a deceptively schizoid jargon, DDR language, had been escaping through the cracks in their rigid, inbred logic. The Soviet idea was so attractive that only prison architecture could preserve it. One day Rufus stumbed on two lines by Robert Frost, which to him summed up the whole paradox of the Wall in a nutshell: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out . . .

Most organized societies, of course, have their own incongruities and aspects that seem to deviate from common sense. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a brilliant exploration of this; Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night is another. But Vonnegut and Heller were obviously writing hyperbolic satire, whereas The Wall in My Head is equal parts realism (in the fictionalized pieces) and historical documentary. Absurdity stands out even more.

In a selection from his novel Imperium, we learn from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (with some exaggeration, naturally) that the Soviet Union was so obsessed with marking its borders that factories seemed to manufacture nothing but reams and reams of barbed wire, which deteriorated quickly under the elements and was in perpetual need of replacement. As such, it was virtually impossible to find in a Soviet shop any useful metal item such as a hoe, hammer, or eating utensil. And that's not even taking into account the logistics required in constructing and maintaining these barbed wire fences, from telephone calls and telegrams, to the orders constantly coming in, to the transportation of said wire, the bureaucracy involved, and the consequent neglect of other areas of Soviet infrastructure.

Though not everything that stood out to me was literally Kafkaesque, the very dissonance often felt closely related. East German activist Peter Schneider, in his novel The Wall Jumper, tells of the family of an influential Berlin Party member who were allowed to maintain their living conditions when the Wall was built. So the otherwise straight, monolithic Wall made a sudden zigzag around their house but abutted it so closely that the children were able to jump over and enter West Berlin whenever they pleased. In "My Grandmother the Censor" Marsha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and novelist, interviews her grandmother about her post-WWII job at the Soviet Department of Control over Foreign Media, in which she was basically responsible for reading all printed materials that came into the Soviet Union from abroad and determining whether or not a given book or magazine should be banned. Sometimes, the grandmother recalled, she found that she admired certain writers, such as Harrison Salisbury from the New York Times. But to make a simple error in translation (in documents being forwarded to Stalin's office) or allow in anything deemed even the slightest bit subversive could be deadly.

I found myself wondering how these Communist Era officials thought they could possibly maintain control over such a stack of cards: an unstable structure built upon an unstable foundation. But then, according to Croatian journalist and essayist Dubravka Urgesic in "The Souvenirs of Communism," the character of life under these regimes is essentially inaccessible to the West, and for that reason, truly authentic Soviet authors never gained a foothold abroad. "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." If that is indeed the case, then I think The Wall in My Head actually comes close to recreating, in elegant and intimate detail for the Western reader, a world that literally collapsed overnight and has wholly transformed itself since.

Obviously The Wall in My Head is a very valuable primary source (I didn't even talk about the photographs and government documents embedded throughout the text) but, despite my love of history, I saw it in more literary terms. But the beauty of a multi-author work is that multiple viewpoints are presented, and I think every reader is likely to see something very different. And really, that's how reality is: everyone's perspective is unique, even when viewing basically the same thing.

Also recommended: Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver

Click here for The Front Table's review.



This is Part I of the Vice Guide to North Korea. While certainly a far more extreme example of Communism than most of the Eastern Bloc ever was, this three-part video series is nevertheless a striking example of the Kafkaesque dictatorship. My favorite part was when the hotel staff tries to demonstrate to the host that there is indeed food in North Korea - by setting an entire empty dining room with sumptuous meals no one will ever eat. The host suspected that the same food was just brought out evening after evening. *Cue "Hotel California."*

Read-a-Thon: 12:30 p.m. (Update #1)

I began late (9:00 instead of 8:00) and have been reading sporadically ever since. Still, in these three and a half hours, I was able to get through 42 pages of Sylvia Plath's poetry and Thomas Nashe's "The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions."

Plath's poetry, despite its density, is remarkably easy to understand - at least, her poems from 1956 are, which is as far as I've gotten so far. The pretense of appearances stood out most to me as a theme: for example, "Street Song" and "Tale of a Tub." But, not surprisingly, most of the poems I read seemed concerned with some form of darkness or another. The very first one, "Conversation Among the Ruins," though quite well done, was interesting in its use of clichéd Gothic imagery to express a very real state of depression. Read on its own, it would probably look like the ramblings of some melodramatic Goth/emo kid who's read too much Poe and Rice, and yet it's real. Does that make any sense? She's using tropes already available in the cultural imagination to express very honest feelings. She's also rather obsessed with rooks. What is a rook?

Another observation: in "A Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest" the Ghost speaks in verse whereas the Priest speaks in prose. In English Renaissance plays, the dialogue of the noble, exalted main characters is in the former, while the words of the fools, clowns, and other comic relief are rendered in the latter. This particular poem ends with the Ghost getting the last word, but Plath is clearly implying more within the poem's very structure.

Speaking of the English Renaissance and the various forms of "melancholy" (in the 17th-century sense of the word), it was quite the coincidence that Thomas Nashe's "The Terrors of the Night" seemed to go hand-in-hand at times with the poetry of Plath. Nashe, the Renaissance English version of Mark Twain (sarcastic, irreverent writer of essays and pamphlets), believed that night and day are spiritual opposites. While the Devil stalks his prey subtly under the sunlight, come nightfall, he does away with all disguises and all-out assaults the helpless dreamer. Awake, we focus our thoughts on particular goals and ideas; asleep, the noxious vapors of our spleens ascend to our brains, put our thoughts all into turmoil, dredge up secret fears and guilt, distort them, and conjure up all manner of horrors. But the fear of death or downfall is actually far worse than the very event itself, Nashe asserts, and it is one of humanity's great paradoxes that we invest so much time in charlatans purporting to tell the future so that we may live in perpetual apprehension of it. (Of course, many a royal "prophet" was involved with the conspiracies he prophesized about, just so he could prophesize about them and be lauded for his great powers.) We all too often believe that bad must follow good and vice versa. He who sees a comedy at the theater today decides he must see a tragedy tomorrow, as some sort of illogical sense of balance.

Nashe's 17th-century English was a delight to read, full of words like "cavaliering" and "knave" and phrases like "got a maid with child" (which has forced many a future "fortune-teller," all of whom are inherenlty corrupt, to flee to Ireland or the Low Countries, although he claims to have traveled to so many exotic places he's nearly forgotten the English language). But it was also highly convoluted in some places. A good 1/4 of the essay was subsequently gibberish to me, especially since he digressed so much. (Mark Twain, by contrast, abandoned "Conversations with Satan" after going too far off onto a tangent about cigars.) But Nashe's other works seem interesting, so hopefully I will get to another one during the Read-a-Thon. I'm not sure though - "The Terrors of the Night" took a long to time read.

Community and Contingency

For my thoughts on the first essay of Louis Menand's American Studies, "Henry James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient," click here.

"The Principles of Oliver Wendell Holmes"

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), Supreme Court Justice from 1902 to 1932, was a man of many sides on whom no label seems to stick. He has been called "a progressive, a liberal, a civil libertarian, a democrat, an aristocrat, a reactionary, a Social Darwinist, a fascist." But, according to Louis Menand, such labels assume that Holmes was concerned about the real-world consequences of his ideas. Actually, Holmes's 1881 book The Common Law posits, basically, that common law decides the outcome of a case first and then attempts to justify said outcome by resorting to abstract legal principles. Nineteenth century legal thought believed in formalism: that a general legal principle can be deduced by looking at a sequence of related cases. Holmes disagreed.

Holmes, in his approach to law, has been called "a formalist, a positivist, a utilitarian, a realist, a historicist, and a pragmatist (not to mention a nihilist)." Problem is, says Menand, supporters of each term tend to spend more time arguing why the others are wrong than trying to defend their own beliefs. Furthermore, such labels ultimately reduce the law to a bare essential, which was precisely what Holmes tried not to do. Once a case is introduced, it brings with it a whole matrix of "discursive imperatives." The final decision must be in sync with past decisions rendered upon similar cases. The decision must be beneficial to society as a whole. Preexisting legal doctrine must be bent to fit changing social norms. Bad must be punished and good rewarded. Costs must be redistributed to the party who can best afford them (Menand uses the example of car crash victims and insurance companies). Naturally, of course, judges want their decisions to be agreeable with their own politics, although they prefer not to admit this. And finally, binding the whole vortex together is what Menand calls "the meta-imperative": the desire to phrase everything so that it appears that no single one of these imperatives was decisive in determining the outcome at the obvious expense of the others.

So what decides cases? What apparently extralegal mechanism is the true force behind the scenes, which formal legal language merely supports after the fact? In Common Law, Holmes sought to articulate what exactly this force was.

In a nutshell: it's culture.

Holmes preferred the word "experience," which he saw as everything - values, prejudices, sentiments, and so forth - that evolves out of the individual human's lifelong reaction to their environment. Experience, he theorized, cannot be reduced to propositions; though the "pleasure of life is in general ideas," such general ideas cannot be utilized to solve specific problems. They must be deduced. First people decide, then they deduce. To train lawyers in "black letter law" - that is, to train them using only the abstract legal arguments upon which cases are ostensibly decided - is to train impotent, useless lawyers. The reality is, according to Holmes, that pretty much anything can go into a judge's decision. And if the general consensus is that the judge arrived at the right decision, then experience is therefore perfectly legitimate legal material to work with. In other words, the law is not based on some neo-Platonic, higher-level objective authority. As the instrument by which society regulates moral conduct and enforces social rules, the law is firmly rooted in the here-and-now.

Now since individuals rooted in the same culture must necessarily have sufficiently similar experiences (so Holmes thought), a second feature of common law is "the reasonable man," a "statistical fiction" who represents the average of all individual experiences. "The reasonable man" is what one expects a sound, prudent member of their society to look like. He is particularly well-known as the protagonist of modern liability theory. Society acts as an external regulator of each citizen's activities and seeks to prevent careless members from disrupting its smooth functioning. In a negligence case, the defendant's intentions or state of mind are irrelevant. (It's all rather Borg-like.) "A man may have as bad a heart as he chooses," Holmes explained in Common Law, "if his conduct is within the rules." What matters is that the defendant did somehow cause damage or injury, and this is where we return to experience, which is the basis for deciding whether a particular act or omission constitutes negligence. A reasonable man's experience tells him what the probability of injury is in any given situation (i.e. target practice in a populated area); added to this is the weight of the costs of avoiding injury against the social benefit of the hazardous practice in question (like working with explosives or toxic chemicals). Eventually, Holmes believed, formal legal doctrine in such cases will become archaic, as science and practicality take precedence over abstract concepts.

Unfortunately, what Holmes failed to factor in is how widely experience varies once you consider age, gender, location, sub-culture, culture of origin, and other such variables. One of Holmes's most famous screw-ups was the case of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad v. Goodman (1927). A motorist had died at a railroad crossing because his view of the track was obstructed. Holmes at the time was an 86-year-old man who had never driven and had been born decades before the invention of the car. In his mind, the motorist should have stopped the car, gotten out, and looked up and down the track before crossing it. Of course, such actions are not customary when driving and would likely disrupt traffic. But Holmes's experience didn't teach him this.

Still, the "imprecision factor" was an important third element of Holmes's theory of common law, which simply says that experience is amorphous and we should never treat a prediction as a certainty. You can start out with a seemingly concrete principle which appears to be of great help in deciding a large number of cases. As you expand outwards, however, you find that this principle actually rests on a shifting foundation of politics, sentiments, beliefs, intuitions, and so forth, and is therefore emptied of predictive force once you step back far enough. Menand uses the example sic utere tuo ut alienum nom laedas, which is generally interpreted to mean that a citizen can use their property any way they want to, as long as said use does not injure another citizen's property. But, said Holmes in Common Law, this also means that an arsonist who uses his matches to burn down a mom-and-pop candy store will be held liable for damage, whereas a competitor who opens a candy store across the street and forces Mom and Pop out of business and homeless into the night will face no legal consequences. The moral is that we cannot universalize our principles.

Menand goes on to explore how Oliver Wendell Holmes applied his theories to several famous free speech cases during World War I. However, I was more interested in the common law theory itself. I work a legal secretary in a general practice law firm that handles motor vehicle accidents, personal injury, and negligence cases, so this was all quite eye-opening to me. I have no intention of becoming a lawyer myself (I have neither the personality or the diehard work ethic), but I do find the law to be an interesting profession: abstract and research-based, yet grounded in practical concerns and real action. I wonder if how much influence Holmes ended up having on the practice of tort law. I'll have to ask someone when I get back to work on Wednesday. (Today is Columbus Day and I got tomorrow off for my birthday, so I have a four-day weekend. My birthday is actually Wednesday, however, and we will be having cake at the office.)

On History, Narrative, and Epilepsy

According to Louis Menand, the past is something that retreats further and further behind but to which we desperately cling. We wonder what became of the "golden age" yet fail to realize that we are looking at history from the anachronistic vantage point. People often do not realize the significance of the era they occupy. Events build on one another, quietly and unnoticed, until one day we realize a whole movement has occurred, and things have profoundly and uncomfortably shifted. We then try to twist old concepts to fit present circumstances, or we try to take new concepts and use them to understand the past. This is where "historical criticism" comes in. It is the practice of trying to understand the past on its own terms, with things, people, and events in their proper context. It sounds like common sense, but nostalgia, sentimentality, and blind conservatism tend to blur our view. American Studies is a series of essays in which Menand sets out to demonstrate how great ideas, rooted in their time and place, eventually insinuate themselves into the culture at large.

"William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient"

History isn't a narrative. We just like to think it is because that's how humans conceptualize of an inherently disordered world. Marxist historiography, for example, attempts to explain all of history by whittling everything down to class struggle, an apparently overwhelming meta-force that conveniently puts everything else on the back burner. Similarly, biography, as a form of individualized history, is often structured as a "crisis-resolution" narrative: the "protagonist" experiences a period of difficulty which they eventually overcome and upon which they build their famous life. It's not unlike Gustav Freytag's analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama:

Exposition → Rising Action → Climax → Falling Action → Resolution

Of course, that is not the only way to organize a fictional story or play; therefore, it is highly questionable if such a model is appropriate for understanding a real, living human being.

Though he never says it outright, Menand critiques this paradigm in the first essay of his book American Studies: "William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient." Biographies of James (a philosopher and psychologist, not to be confused with his brother, Henry James the novelist) have often pivoted his life around two seemingly defining moments, as detailed in an excerpt from a series of published lectures James had done at the University of Edinburgh from 1901-1903, and in an 1870 diary entry made when James was studying in Germany as a young man. The former comes from a chapter called "The Sick Soul," consisting of the talks James had done on pessimism, disenchantment, and other dark states of the mind. James had initially claimed it was the translated testimony of a Frenchman who one day, out of nowhere, was struck by an intense horror personified by the image of an epileptic patient the Frenchman had once seen in an asylum. Much to his despair, the Frenchman realized that everyone was potentially a helpless, degraded wreck of humanity. Health and sanitary are frighteningly fragile gifts. My only consolation, the Frenchman concludes, was to turn to Biblical scriptures promising hope and redemption.

William James later confessed to his French translator, who had asked to see the original document, that this was a true story and that it had actually happened to him.

The second momentous document, the diary entry, is more subdued but profound in its nascent expression of what later became James's "will to believe" doctrine. James has just read an essay by French philosopher Charles Renouvier and found himself at odds with Renouvier's definition of free will as an illusion: "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts." To Renouvier, this type of control is a fantasy, but to James it made perfect sense. Contemplation seems to only bring melancholy, he mused, so therefore, instead of wallowing in Grüblei [the "grubbing among subtleties"], I resolve to focus on action and self-assertion. Though this may be difficult at first, over time the forced habit will become a true habit. If I wish to do something daring, then I shall do it without the need for what ifs? and self-doubt. Overall, this is a very bold, positive, and pro-active personal philosophy, and one that is innately self-fulfilling. It is an entire mode of being brought into existence by individual will alone. I act, therefore I shall be.

To many James biographers, the epileptic story represents a crisis in James's life. The Renouvier piece represents its resolution.

However, says Menand, some information is often worse than none, because this is when people start speculating and trying to fill the gaps. In doing so, they inevitably track in their present-day cultural baggage like a child leaving a trail of mud through a house. As an excellent example of this tendency, Menand introduces Kim Townsend's book Manhood at Harvard, which purports, among other things relating to masculinity and the university, that the epileptic story reveals that William James had a chronic masturbation problem. In this interpretation, the epileptic patient is a man driven insane by "self-abuse." (Townsend isn't the first to consider this theory but she seems to take it the furthest.) Townsend offers supporting evidence, which Menand promptly refutes, but the most intriguing aspect, for the purposes of my analysis, is Townsend's anachronistic interpretation of "self-abuse," as well as "moral" and "habit" in the same context. Linking these words to masturbation is actually a very twentieth-century thing to do. In the Victorian notion of "moral hygiene," these can refer to sexual activity, but also to anything else imaginable. Menand points to a celebrated 1859 psychology textbook, Alexander Bain's The Emotions and the Will (this same Bain, by the way, is mentioned in James's Renouvier diary entry), which asserts that "one of the strongest of our fleshy indulgences" is oversleeping.

Maybe James is having a rather strong reaction to a trivial matter like oversleeping? Actually, says Menand, the rhetoric of Victorian moral hygiene was usually quite hyperbolic. Bain's hypothetical account of a man overcoming his habit of sleeping late is downright heroic in tone. Furthermore, epilepsy is a physical disorder, not psychological. If anything, Menand argues, biographers may be getting the whole thing backward. Perhaps the epileptic patient is a renunciation of the thoughts expressed in the Renouvier piece. To put it simply: bad things happen to good people, regardless of their powers of positive thinking and self-assertion. It's the classic problem of religious faith: innocent suffering.

And for that reason, there are doubts that the story of the epileptic patient is even a factual account of something James experienced. It's too literary-conscious, with obvious overtones of Pilgrim's Progress. Furthermore, its lesson about drawing strength and sanity from the Bible doesn't sound very much like the modern, pragmatic William James (or, for that matter, like a Frenchman). Perhaps it was written by someone else?

For all his exhortations to act when faced with uncertainty, and to take risks sound in the assurance that fate will meet you halfway - thoughts expressed most famously in The Will to Believe and Pragmatism - William James was depressed all his life. No one falls apart over an ancient religious conundrum, Menand argues. Depression is a "weather-pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear, or become 'opportunities' or 'challenges' – until the dark skies return." The Renouvier piece is simply a different form of "therapy," or self-help, for a very different problem: intellectual stagnation.

In a nutshell: biographers have failed to take a "holistic" view of William James. They have not taken the whole man into account, focusing largely on two small samples from a whole body of work done on various aspects of philosophy and psychology. When looking at the bigger picture – James's life, writings, career – Menand finds a rather melancholy edge to James's can-do promotion of self-assertion, self-confidence, self-help, bravado, and the power of belief. Many of James's critics have argued that this response simply isn't enough when faced with life's biggest challenges. But no one, says Menand, knew this better than James. And that is why the Renouvier piece is not an expression of philosophical triumph.

James believed in the legitimacy of religious response but not religion itself. He may have spent his whole life searching for some kind of transcendence but could only study its psychological aftereffects on true believers. That is where the epileptic piece comes into play as a hypothetical case study (if it wasn't written by someone else), and where the Renouvier piece comes in as merely one expression of a larger issue James wrestled with. James may have tried to believe, but finally had to accept that "[p]hilosophy is a moralism: it is for people strong enough to face the universe on its own terms, knowing that there is, in the end, nothing to back them up, nothing to guarantee that their vote will be counted." Later on, this became one of the central tenets of Modernism: the void that comes from knowing yet doubting in the old truths espoused by religion and tradition (see Joseph Wood Krutch's The Modern Temper for a contemporary discussion of this). "There was, in spite of his playfulness, a deep sadness about James" John Jay Chapman would later say. "You felt that he had just steeped out of this sadness in order to meet you, and was to go back in the moment you left him." The philosophy of William James, Menand concludes, was, for its creator, a personal failure.

The two pieces in question - the story of the epileptic patient and the Renouvier entry - cannot possibly reveal all this on their own, being taken simply as self-evident truths from which all understanding of the person of William James must arise. You cannot take two snippets from a person's life and construct a narrative around them. That's how you end up with "chronic masturbation" and other sensationalist, improbable, politically correct (for your time period, not the subject's), and ultimately subjective theories. Our lives are not fiction. They are reality.

Who is Mark Twain? (A Review)

Who is Mark Twain?
By Mark Twain
Edited by Robert H. Hirst
HarperStudio
206 pages
April 21, 2009





[The grave's] occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech. The living man is not really without this privilege - strictly speaking - but as he possesses it merely as an empty formality, and knows better than to make use of it, it cannot be seriously regarded as an actual possession. As an active privilege, it ranks with the act of committing murder: we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences. Murder is forbidden both in form and fact; free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact. By the common estimate both are crimes, and are held in deep odium by all civilized peoples. Murder is sometimes punished, free speech always - when committed. Which is to say seldom. - from "The Privilege of the Grave"

In 1900, Mark Twain wrote an editorial entitled "The Missionary in World Politics," originally intended for publication in the London Times. Palpable anger smolders beneath the polished veneer of a journalistic conviction intended to persuade the reader over the breakfast table. Now you, complacent Westerner, Twain charges, now you imagine what it would feel like to watch foreigners traverse, uninvited, throughout your homeland, telling your children that your native religion is the sure ticket to eternal damnation, which has doubtlessly been the fate of all your heathen ancestors. And we wonder at the murderous rage this inspires, he continues, and then fail to see that the insult is only compounded when colonial punishment is meted out and a new, overbearing church is built in memorial to the fallen Christian martyr. "[The missionary] has loaded vast China onto the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey; and they were glad, smelling carrion; but they have lit and are astonished, finding the carcase alive. And it may remain alive - Europe cannot tell, yet," Twain concludes, ominously foretelling a dark future should European exploitation of China continue unabated. The editorial is signed with an anonymous X, but it was never published anyway - it turned out that the "massacre of the Ministers" had been a mere rumor. The topic of the piece nevertheless remains pertinent today, while the tone and the imagery further emphasize the anti-imperialist sentiments of an author all too often derided as a racist.

"The Missionary in World Politics" also brings together two main themes - free speech and issues with the American publishing industry - that run throughout HarperStudio's new book Who is Mark Twain?, a collection of twenty-four previously unpublished essays, sketches, thoughts, and short stories by the famed writer whose real name was Samuel Clemens. Although he never left explicit instructions for dealing with his vast collection of written remains - roughly half a million pages of everything from personal correspondence to bills to manuscripts to miscellaneous notebooks - Twain certainly implied that he would greatly prefer that most of it be published only after his death. "He seems to have been wholly willing to let posterity read them," says editor Robert H. Hirst, "unafraid of the light they might cast on his talent, or the way he wrote. That unusual willingness to let the world see how he worked, including how he failed or simply misfired, had only one precondition - he must not be alive at the time." As indicated by the title, the purpose of this newly-released compendium is to contribute to a greater understanding of an American literary giant: to clarify and illuminate him as both an artist and an individual. But, as an occupant of the grave, Twain is also protected from whatever public outcry and vilification he felt would accompany the publication of his more controversial works. Pure, unadulterated free speech, he felt, is a risky endeavor for the living, but the dead are more easily forgiven.

Each item in the book was handpicked by Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California in Berkeley. While some are complete short works, others remain unfinished or unedited ("Conversations with Satan," for example, starts out very promisingly but soon veers off onto a tangent about taste in cigars and then abruptly cuts off). Opening the collection is, appropriately, a farcical essay entitled "Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book." Although Twain never knows exactly what kind of book he is writing until the literary critics tell him, he still wants to know what the general public will think of it, so he lists fourteen distinct "focus groups" (i.e. "Men and women with no sense of humor, "Men and women with a prodigious sense of humor," "A sentimental person") to whom he likes to gives private readings. "I seem to be making a distinction here," he observes, "I seem to be separating the professional reviewer from the human family; I seem to be intimating that he is not a part of the public, but a class by himself." That is not entirely the case, he goes on to explain: the professional reviewer simply represents a tiny sliver of the reading public, the crème de la crème who has the God-given authority to determine if you should be enjoying your new book or not. But whether or not he actually decides to publish the book in the first place depends largely on the opinion of the "Man who always goes to sleep," who must remain awake for at least three-quarters of an hour during the Twain's test run.

"Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book" also establishes Twain's tenuous relationship to the press, particularly the American press. The context of "The Missionary in World Politics," as well as the disparity Twain has noted between the freedom of speech accorded to the living and the dead, both indicate an ongoing resentment of the de facto social restrictions on what can and cannot be published. Two other pieces entitled "The Force of 'Suggestion'" and "Interviewing the Interviewer" also reveal a frustration with the often sensationalist and salacious nature of the "yellow journalism" that prevailed at the time. In the latter work, Twain takes aim at Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun and envisions a meeting between the two of them wherein Twain (ironically) plays the role of humble advice-seeker. "My son, unto none but you would I reveal the secret," he imagines Dana telling him,

". . . The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation. Never let your paper go to press without a sensation. If you have none, make one. Seize upon the prominent events of the day, and clamor about them with a maniacal fury that demands attention. Vilify everything that is unpopular - harry it, haunt it, abuse it, without rhyme or reason, so that you get a sensation out of it. Laud that which is popular - unless you feel sure that you can make it unpopular by attacking it. Hit every man that is down - never fail in this, for it is safe. . . If an uncalled-for onslaught upon a neighboring editor who has made you play second fiddle in journalism can take the bread out of his mouth and send him in disgrace from his post, let him have it! Do not mind a little lying, a liberal garbling of his telegrams, a mean prying into his private affairs and a pitiful and treacherous exposure of his private letters. It takes a very small nature to get down to this, but I managed it and you can - and it makes a princely sensation."

Dana's imaginary "advice" also graphically reflects Twain's wariness of attracting public animosity as a living man writing controversial material. And yet, the last piece in the book, "The American Press," appears almost as a note of redemption for the hitherto darkly satirical portrayals of the state of American publishing. Twain is responding to English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold's disparagement of American newspapers as lacking in reverence and respect. "Goethe says somewhere that 'the thrill of awe' - that is to say, REVERENCE - 'is the best thing humanity has,'" Arnold is quoted as saying. On the contrary, Twain contends, the European newspapers remain stupidly and thoughtlessly committed to propping up their nations' archaic governments and, to that end, maintain a sonorously serious aspect utterly lacking in any sense of humor. "Professor Mahaffy on Equality" also counters another European mischaracterization of American culture, as Twain responds to Mahaffy's apparent confusion of "physical equality" with the Constitution's proclamation of political equality. For all his difficulties with his country and its institutions, Twain was also more than willing to defend America from its misinformed detrators and proclaim it as the greatest, most free nation on earth.

At the same time, however, Twain's travel memoir Roughing It certainly leaves the reader with a profound sense of disillusionment as, one by one, American dreams and myths are acerbically torn down. The overall tone of the works in Who is Mark Twain? is likewise one of hard realism and a playfully pessimistic view of human nature, with a witty edge reminiscent (to modern readers) of TV's Dr. Gregory House ("Everybody lies!"). In "The Undertaker's Tale," a family in the graveyard business lists their sick neighbors as business assets and despairs of ever having a "good season," especially after the cholera epidemic misses their town. "Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman" ironically makes use of the parable (in this case, the noble Christian Van Dyke luring an innocent fish to his hook of death) to illustrate the impossibility of man's ever living up to his own lofty ideals. But not that Twain is blind to his own faults:

Satan would not allow me to take his hat, but put it on the table himself, and begged me not to put myself to any trouble about him, but treat him just as I would an old friend; and added that that was what he was - an old friend of mine, and also one of my most ardent and grateful admirers. It seemed such a double compliment; still, it was said in such a winning and gracious way that I could not help feeling gratified and proud.

"Conversations with Satan" is emblematic of the entire collection: a small fragment of Twain, raw and unfinished, but still recognizably Twain in its biting satire (of courtly manners and the author himself) and brazen honesty. Despite having been previously unpublished, the selections in Who is Mark Twain? are definitely not second-rate when compared to his famous works. Twain's unique voice is heard in multiple genres, from travel accounts to indignant editorials to a wide range of short stories (one of my favorites, the sad and adorable "Telegraph Dog," surprised me with its striking tenderness and the pathos surrounding loyal, tragic little Billy). Who is Mark Twain? comes strongly recommended for anyone seeking a greater understanding of an American literary great whose candor makes him a contentious figure even today. It is both a quick, comprehensive introduction to readers unfamiliar with Twain and a great supplement to a full literary diet of Twain. Considering the 500,000+ pages he left behind, I am sure we can expect another book like this one in the future.


I would like to give a special thanks to Kathryn and everyone at HarperStudios for inviting me to review this excellent book.

What is Enlightenment?

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

The concept of "enlightenment" is like a grand and gorgeous mansion with a plain yet sturdy concrete foundation. Flowering at the top are the splendid, earth-shattering words and ideas of thinkers such as Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Jefferson, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Locke, and so many others. Although their genius, innovation, and eloquence were rare, their fame rests on a simple potential found in each of us: courage.

Without courage, the inner spirit cries silently and perishes unnoticed with the body, never to impart its wisdom on another. Courage propels the individual to finally run free from tutelage. That is, the obligation to go through life guided not by one's own thought and sense, but by the dogma or doctrine laid out by self-appointed "guardians." Above all, you need courage in order to confront the opposition that independence inevitably draws. Example persuades: others will notice when one has the strength to rise back up when struck down by despotic convention, leaving the harness behind on the ground. The ditch is only wide for that first leap, as the initial break always commands the greatest strength. For control is comfort and thought is a wandering frontier trek. It is difficult to find solid ground there on which to stand firm.

Yet even enlightenment among the guardians themselves is no remedy for tutelage. Prejudice is ultimately unmanageable, spiraling out of the hands of its fathers and taking such stubborn root in the people that any thinking guardians may prefer to keep mum so as not to offend sacred tradition. Therefore, the enlightenment of the general public is a slow process, not the violent burst of a revolution. For any progress to even begin to occur, freedom is needed to marry reason to life. Only then can true debate begin, provided, of course, that society remains stable against external disruption. That is the duty of the civil government: to encourage and protect discussion.

One crucial element of an organized society is the proper functioning of its institutions. To maintain the neat flow of life in an advanced and complex civilization, its individual inhabitants must perform their duties with minimal disturbance. Therefore, in order to accommodate both order and the dynamism inherent to free thought, the individual must divide himself into two parts: the public and the private. The private self operates within the confines of the individual's role or vocation. Thus, it is restricted to the fulfillment of societal obligations. The public self, on the other hand, is a member of a community made up of all the intelligent, thinking citizens. It is an unguarded forum for new ideas where everyone is a scholar: here, the soldier may question the orders of the officer and the tax collector may criticize tax policy.

All religions are based upon inner spirituality, so within his private realm, the minister or priest may continue to conduct services whether he agrees with each ceremonial component or not; these are the responsibilities given by the church to its clergy. He has his public self to express his doubts. One consequence of an open intellectual marketplace, however, is the honest expression of dissent and dissatisfaction, even with regards to religion. An ecclesiastical government may attempt to combat this by adopting permanent, inflexible codes of doctrine. This is impossible: either unhindered progress in other areas of society will render them archaic and subject to future override, or they will be a brick wall against which any new ideas will crash. In the end, all that will be achieved is a violation of the natural right to progress. The best course of action for the religious body is to allow its restless members to peacefully defect and form their own church, as the justification for any law is that the people should wish it.

The basic foundations of a free society are vitality, progress, inquiry, and finally, change. These can neither be avoided nor suppressed; no oath, no treaty, however solemn or dignified, can justifiably stifle them. Again, for a body of guardians to do so would be to trample on the rights of their children by denying them full application of their intellect.

The role of the civil government in all this is merely to continue to maintain order and stability, including the prevention of any severe religious discord from erupting into violence. Adherents to the various and sundry sects in a single nation should all hold at least one common principle: loyalty to the state and its secular leader. For the government to entangle itself in spiritual strife would be an undignified neglect of its duties to its loyal citizens. Furthermore, it has been proven that the melding of the two forms a most destructive tutelage. For that reason, any lay ruler who discards the ancient tradition of interference in theological quarrels is worthy of widest praise.

Indeed, the government should not regulate any facet of intellectual and cultural life: art, music, science, and so on. Still, it has been religion that has been at the root of most unrest down through the centuries as secular leaders have tried to appoint themselves as the spiritual guardians of their subjects.

We are not yet so enlightened that every nation is blessed with such a government. Still, we are fortunate to at least live in an era actively engaged in the struggle to become enlightened, so that our descendants may know true freedom. Still, freedom is a paradoxical thing: the less practical decisions one has to make, the more time one has to exercise thought simply because of lack of other concerns. Just as the inquiring intellect cannot afford to be interrupted by worldly matters, so the free society cannot afford to be threatened by its enemies; public peace must be secure in order for ideas to flow unimpeded. Free thinking and its offspring, enlightenment, are the pearls formed by the hard protective shell that is the state and its military.

Immanuel Kant's essay, "Was ist Äufklarung?" ("What is Enlightenment?") first appeared in the 1784 edition of Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly) in response to a question posted a year earlier by a Prussian government official. No, this is not the essay itself (click the first link). It's just my rewording of it.

John Crowe Ranson: A Sad, Strange Little Man

Bierce Ambrose once said that, "A conservative is one who is enamored with existing evils. A liberal wishes to replace them with new ones."

One conservative "enamored with existing [or formerly existing] evils" was undoubtedly John Crowe Ransom. Before I trash him, I should point out that I did agree with him on one issue: that if a liberal, or "progressive," were to actually find Utopia, they would then have to protect it from all programs of change. That would make them conservative. It's an interesting paradox, one that demonstrates the fluidity of labels.

Yet Ransom is also, I feel, guilty of grotesquely misrepresenting an archaic and repressive culture. The man was a literary critic, and his essay "Reconstructed but Unregenerate" (originally part of the 1930 manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition) makes the mistake of trying to see the world through the lens of such literary and artistic modes as sentimentalization, elegaic reminiscing, and the Gothic romance of ancient and ruined grandeur, which he seemed to think was somehow attractive in real life. I get the feeling that, instead of actual historical and political research, Ransom simply read a few antebellum Southern plantation romances, was utterly entranced by the language and the evocation of mood and setting, and decided that these were accurate portrayals of Southern life before the Civil War. When Ransom asserted that slavery was "human in practice" I wanted to shove Frederick Douglass' autobiography The Life of an American Slave under his nose. That book affected me even more than Elie Wiesel's Night. (No, I didn't like Night. Yes, I do have a soul.) Not for nothing did one of my English professors advise us against obtaining our political views from poets by pointing out that Ezra Pound once mistakenly and misguidedly believed he could do for Benito Mussolini what Walt Whitman did for Abraham Lincoln.

(Hey Ransom! What about that whole lynching thing?)

Furthermore, Ransom looks to Europe, specifically England, as an example. But we do not live in Europe, genius! You see, young John, different peoples have different cultures and values. This diversity is a virtue. To try to make everyone the same is a very bad idea. Not only would resistance be fierce, but even if by some miracle you did achieve it, the world would be extremely boring. Honestly, Ransom's romantic notion of an "establishment" culture is really quite sad. As Immanuel Kant puts it better than I ever could in his essay "What is Enlightenment?":

But would not a society of clergymen . . . be justified in obliging itself by oath to a certain unchangeable symbol in order to enjoy an unceasing guardianship over each of its memebrs and thereby over the people as a whole, and even to make itself eternal? I answer that this is altogether impossible. Such a contract, made to shut of all further enlightenment of the human race, is absolutely null and void even if confirmed by the supreme power . . . An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at very best occasional) knowledge, purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress; and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees has having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner.

First off, Kant and all his fellow Enlightenment thinkers came from such cultures as Ransom wholeheartedly desired: ancient, established, fixed, resistant to change. If such a culture is to be preferred, then why this outburst of discontent in the eighteenth century? Come to think of it, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau are even older than Southern culture. Doesn't that make them even more established than antebellum aristocracy?

Luckily, Ransom eventually saw the light at least somewhat and ditched the whole agrarian movement thing. He admitted at the beginning of "Reconstructed but Unregenerate" that the "unreconstructed Southerner" is a political and social outsider, and all I can say is, thank God!