FUN Vol. 1

Fun

Volume 1, 2014 The University of Toronto journal in Literature and Critical Theory

Editors and Thanks

Editors Taylor Ableman Geordie Kenyon Sinclair Catherine Ribeiro Lena Suksi

Front Cover Illustrator Lena Suksi

Back Cover Illustrator & Layout Designer Lina Wu

Editors-in-Chief Alexa Winstanley-Smith Fan Wu

We would like to thank everyone who submitted to our inaugural volume, and the Arts & Science Student Union for funding this publication.

Š 2014 by the Literature and Critical Theory Student Union. Each work is property of its credited author. The authors retain copyright to their contributions to this journal.

Letters from the Editors A Salutation: Forbidding Groaning— Alexa Winstanley-Smith

Every time we write we put a theory into practice. The act is naïve. We

express a hope in the form of an emergent proof: Making one sentence follow another proves that when we jam all of our thoughts together in this way, something will probably emerge. We strive, more or less, for that something to present itself as having an order, or at least some rigour, or maybe a certain relevance, and—if we are bent on embarrassing ourselves completely—even truth.

But it’s nothing other than a bad habit that we call this hopeful exercise in jamming and emergence our work. It can be nothing but the result of rote conditioning to describe the activities of theoretical and critical thinking from a position guilt or shame, so that we casually define an essay more as a labour than a volley. But this really is our so-called ‘working vocabulary’: an uncomfortable and monotonous language of grinding endeavor. What we are working on makes of itself a tacit implication that there is something we would rather be doing. When we say we are working on an essay, when we claim that we’ve got work to do, we are validating what we care about with a stupid language of ambition indentured to the empty standard of task completion. Having an interesting idea is nothing like digging a ditch. The meaning, utility, or liberating thrust of a fine critical intervention will never cost its author much in callouses or herniation. And there is nothing humbling to a thought or its expression in describing it as a chore; that’s just subjecting both parts to a lousy mixed metaphor. In the ephemeral words of Auntie Mame, “Life’s a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.” We do ourselves a disservice if we mistake champing at the bit for joining the celebration. iii

Maybe this goes some way to justifying the title of the journal. “Fun,” after all, needs some justification. There is none. Instead, we can only offer an excuse in the bad old language: We’re not really sure that we’re having any yet, but we’re working on it. The papers included in this inaugural edition illustrate some push to overcome the divide between hoping for something to emerge from the writing process and its result that cannot be explained in obligations, deadlines, or the attitude of ditch-diggers absurdly displaced to the scholarly disposition.

We like to imagine that something else happened—that something else is, in fact, usually happening—when these essays came together: that somewhere in the stages of reading, thinking, and writing, some people actually enjoyed themselves. Readers of the journal can decide for themselves whether this makes a difference. We nonetheless celebrate the publication of our journal with the assertion that, come Hell or high water, if this is in your hands, Fun is being had.

In the spirit of gratitude no less than of celebration, we would like to thank the entire Literature and Critical Theory Department for their interest and enthusiasm in this project. Warm and specific thanks are due to Professor Rebecca Comay, for her support and attention; Professor Ann Komaromi, without whom this project could never have happened; and Professor Julian Patrick, whose presence in the lives of most members of our editorial board has served as a bonding force and a catalyst for the kind of friendship and collegiality necessary for an undertaking of this kind to come together.

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Notes on Fun Fan Wu The boy was tired of Fun being seen as mirth unbesmirched, as joy undiluted. He needed Fun, here, to act as a mediating term between two extremes; he wanted Fun to truly be unlivable. Beneath the imposed pleasure in the lyric “oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh” is the terror of Christmas as capitalist apparatus and, worse, the dullness of actually riding said horse in said sleigh. Beneath the popular tourist-magnet slogan “fun in the sun” is the threat of hepatitis, hideous tanlines and a flaccid happiness that only worsens the blues that come with winters which overstay themselves. Such as it goes. What, then, can Fun fit between?

‘Nuf and Unf: ‘Nuf is the placement of the limit-point, the drawing of boundaries from within, the “I’ve had enough!” of the soon-to-be divorcee as well as the “this is what’s good enough” of the academy’s dictate. Unf is linguistic sensuality: play of language as texture across skin, the pun as pleasure of the sonic and perversion of the sensible. In this journal the two factions are distinguishable, if you will a distinction: but Fun comes in the spaces in these pieces where you find that the will to distinguish dissipates in its productive dissolution.

Criticism and Experiment: Fun is that which oscillates between the recognizable and the unreckonable; every act of reading, which must be able to bend to the illusion of an identifiable critical structure, bears the mark of the unreadable, which is both the experience beyond language and beyond experience itself. Our hope is that these essays, at their best, offer themselves up to the reader with an initial readability, only to push the reader off the cliff of the known and the knowable. v

Work and Love: Fun is found both in the grueling hope toward love and love’s arrival. Readerly work and love and writerly love and work meet not knowing the position of the other in the phenomenological space of textual engagement. Our editors, with kris-edge eyes and crystalline minds, underwent a blind selections and editing process: working, reworking, loving, sighing along the way. It is the work of the Fun editors, contributors and designers that brings you our love, both as love’s work and love coming to itself in working through these rich and sensuous texts.

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Table of Contents Resounding History, Exhausting Time, and Recovering Space: An

1

Essay Concerning the Contradictory Positions of the Poetic Body

by Zachary Hope

Poetry of the Dance: a Prelude to the Dance Poetry Manifesto

17

by Michael Cavuto

A Metaphysical Mourning: Adorno on the Kantian Block

22

by Iris Liu

Clinging in Dreams to the Back of a Tiger: The Real in Nietzsche

37

and Žižek

by Amy Wang

The Novel of Contingency: On The Childhood of Jesus and Meillas-

48

soux

by Carter West

“Nothing but Chaotic Manuscripts”: An Analysis of Defamiliariza-

62

tion in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”

by Halyna Chumak

Identity, Agency and Artistry in Ulysses

by Daniel Glassman

vii

72

You row—I’ll steer:

85

Masculinity and domination in the rowboat scenes of Gor’kiy’s Chelkash and Zvyagintsev’s The Return

by Geordie Kenyon Sinclair

“Public Humiliation and the Anarchist State:”

101

A ‘Thank You’ (dis-)Card

by Corvus Coraximus

About the Authors

116

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Resounding History, Exhausting Time, and Recovering Space: An Essay Concerning the Contradictory Positions of the Poetic Body Zachary Hope I would like to consider the places we discover for ourselves amidst the desires and despondencies of reciprocating recognitions. These spaces are determined by poetic interaction. In corresponding with another, whether angel or monster, redeemer or betrayer, figures imaginary or living, we construct a space that places us in relation to this correspondent. The demand placed upon us situates us in the context of language and history. We give voice and take place in being related to the ear and body of another. This communication figures an indeterminate number of ethical positions, each of which varies according to the common ground (or “territory shared”) between correspondents in the context of their “immediate social situation” (86-7). This is the space they make for themselves and that remakes them through the reciprocity of recognition. It is a space within the social space, and yet its immediacy also makes it a potential exception to the coercions of language and history. It may even be the ground on which to remake these structures and restore the social body insofar as the immediacy of its reference – the poetic focus upon the message that constructs the bridge connecting ‘you and I’ – connects us body to body. In this fashion, I would like to consider Volosinov’s bridge-building, Benjamin’s angel, Pound’s seafarer and prophet, Eliot’s exhausted wells, and Auden’s dark night constellated by ironic points of light. Each figure provides a different measure for the subject’s position within history, language, and society. Some foreground the excess of desire in the body’s differential rhythms and others discover the minor yet intimate space of 1

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exception. What is everywhere certain is that what the age demands of us is not what we are able to provide. The ceaseless velocity and continual catastrophe of our ‘progress’ into the future is out of time with the needs of the sensual body.

Only in attending to the intimate place that we figure in our immediate or intuited contact with the world, whether with ourselves in time or with others in space, will we be able to restore the ballast of this body – an ethical orientation against disembodying abstractions – in both time and space.

As an instance of embodied encounter, it is useful to remember that Benjamin’s angel of history, now iconic, began (without history) as a painting on his wall. It remains most compelling when resituated in the radical materiality of its phenomenal encounter. The insight the angel figures is reciprocating: it only sees in being seen. Nor is this vision abstract. It locates each viewer in relation to the spatial flatness that achieves depth only in agitating time. Only in being flat is it capable of achieving motion in relation to the withdrawing spectator. The apparent crudity of its perspective - always unable to concede its own vanishing point opposes it to, yet makes it coterminous with, our position of progress. It belies all historicism. Its relentless movement puts us in the place of the perpetual and undifferentiated catastrophe. In meeting its gaze we are thereby overturned. We recognize our temporal guilt or debt in figuring it as history’s unredeeming angel.

It fixes us, moves away from us, and yet remains always before us: flatly immobile despite our sense of its recession. The angel is the negative of the dialectical image.

The spectator comes to a standstill - taking the place of the past that coheres as a catastrophic monad - and the image departs. It is the primitive flash of a revelation that impends but remains always without advent. In always withdrawing, it cannot arrive. It moves by way of our desire and despair. The former is the register of 2

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our concern for the future and the latter recognizes the impossibility of that same future. For Benjamin then, as again for us now, there is no possible future.

Benjamin’s figuration of the image embodies his private despair. His eyes are fixated upon the painting that hangs on his wall. If the angel’s “eyes are wide [and] his mouth is open,” then it is upon Benjamin that he looks and to Benjamin that he would like to speak (392). He would like to speak because Benjamin desires to hear him speak. Only then would the past - among the arcades of which Benjamin is perpetually lost - be restored to him. And only through his person, by way of the phenomenology particular to his position in time and space, can he give this restoration to others. In the economy of redemption, his body is either returned or sacrificed in light of the angel’s inevitable progress. It is simultaneously the chosen and fungible body. Benjamin’s recognition is singular but its returning gaze (a kind of alienated self-recognition) confounds him with the catastrophe of the past.

In figuring the angel, he also figures his body as among the dead that would like to be awakened. Benjamin thereby gives life to the future, however impotent it may be in its progress, by relegating his life to the past. He foresees (darkly) the coming catastrophe and recognizes (already) that he will be among its losses. If we are persuaded by Benjamin as to the inevitability of the angel’s unredemptive progress, then we are put in his place. In a world of velocity, or rather in a schema of salvation in which all hope must constantly withdraw, we are exhausted by looking. The question therefore becomes - as we will discover in Eliot, Berardi, and Auden - what we are to do with this exhaustion.

Before deciding this, however, we must consider history’s possible revitalization. Might our own energies restore the positivity of redemption?

In place of the angel, Pound gives us “The Seafarer” as his figure for survival in 3

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history. The force communicated by “May I, for my own self, song’s truth reckon” is the compounding of alliteration and assertion: the sound not only matches but actively produces the sense of self that grounds all reckoning (18). There is no dissonance in this voice. Seaboundedness is ontologically coextensive with both temporal and poetic circumferences, and it is “in the midst of a world full of suffering” that the seafarer, a subsistent centre, “calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis” (Schopenhauer 379). The poem bounds him but gives him voice. His impulse gives the verse its rhythm as “a FORM cut into TIME” (“A Treatise on Metre” 199). History is thereby constellated in rhythm.

Any constellation, of course, is observer-dependent, and time is accordingly structured by the purely individual cadence of the self-and-song-sustaining voice.

The Anglo-Saxon alliterative form structures contemporary language so as to translate this lost impulse into the enervated present. The poet takes strength in the persona of the seafarer, finding recourse in the past as a way of evading present trauma. The brutality that “the age demand[s]” - the reflected “image / Of its accelerated grimace” - is simultaneously evoked and counterpointed by Pound’s poetry (Mauberley 61). As the Futurists learn from the Vorticists, violence and velocity will produce things “as never before,” and yet Pound considers the gain to be little more than “disillusions as never told in the old days, / hysterias, trench confessions, / laughter out of dead bellies” (64). This is the demand that the future begins to place on the body, whether personal, social, or poetical. What the age demands – the bodies its war processes as fungible sacrifices – must not be conceded. Instead, the voice of the speaking subject, over and against future demand, must find recourse in the voices of the dead. The dead begin to speak to the poet that calls them in language. In using language, the poet cannot help but 4

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call them. The poet takes voice from them and they take the voice of the poet.

In this form of reciprocity, the poet’s voice inflects the authority of a tradition that is made responsive to contemporary demand. In Pound’s interplay of voices, the ear is given priority over the mouth: he advocates listening before speaking. The poet must be respondent to tradition: “He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward” (“A Retrospect” 6).

Or from that point backward. Onward and backward are simultaneous: energy is potential in history but only actualized in the instant of the presentation that is its resounding. As such, “a man’s rhythm must be interpretive, it will be therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable” (“A Retrospect” 9).

The poet is at once radically individual and wholly representative. It is his or her situation within the coercive structures of language and history that allows for the expression of a voice in tension with dominant discourses. In being disseminated, the voice becomes available to the differential rhythms of others. The position of the poem, although always at sea, includes both nostos and utopos as its orienting shores. Its “return to origins invigorates” as “a return to nature and reason,” and is undertaken more for the sake of the present than the past (“The Tradition” 92). The question is not what history is but rather what poetry makes of history: it makes its sense resound. Polyvocal and interanimating, Pound’s Cantos are history figured as fugue. The Odyssean theme (like an “organ-base” that “remains in the ear of the hearer”), arising from its most primitive source, is played upon, variously rhymed and counterpointed, by subsequent voices (“A Retrospect” 7). The auditory force of the “sea-surge” - translated from the AngloSaxon and revitalizing what is untranslatable in Homer’s dactylic hexameter, namely his “magnificent onomatopoeia, as of the rush of waves on the sea-beach,” 5

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as well as his “authentic cadence” - breaks through history, sounding epochs in the unstopped (and traumatized) ear (Pound, “Early Translators of Homer” 250).

Sound as conceived by Pound is both radically primitive and utterly contemporary: the sound effects of language can be heard even where reference is no longer heard. Similarly, it is tribal and individual. The poet is not self-contained but must instead remain sonically fluid to history. The energies he or she focuses reproduce “singing matter, shouting matter, the tale of the tribe” (quoted in Cookson, xix).

The translation from ear to voice, proceeding through the poet’s unique psyche, is a modulation of sound through his or her individual cadence. In the act of poesis, the poet is simultaneously the maker and the made.

History is heard as poetry – Pound envisioned his Cantos to be “a poem containing history” – and the impulse around which this fugue coheres (like a vortex) is the poet’s own virtu or poetic potency. “All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live,” a primitive resonance which returns as “instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE” (“Vortex”). The poet is the machinic angel, a representative of “the lifeforce” that can “start [our] machinery going” (“Affirmations” 376). It is around him that history coheres. And yet, alongside this egoism, there remains the Orphic desire to be torn apart by the violence that poetry otherwise seeks to mediate or sublimate. Only through such ritual can the isolated and contingent body become the poetic body of common redemption. The poem requires the very potential for violence that also threatens it at every moment. In a poetics that fetishizes the poem as objectifying a subjective energy or potency that is always only equivocal in practice, the poet can never outplay the cycle of violence. As Pound’s own history attests, he or she may become the very mouthpiece that finally dictates the 6

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murderous demands of the age.

Of course, even the poetic impulse is not independent of the history it construes, nor can its presentation separate foretelling and retelling. The blind prophet, Tiresias, requires the blood of the living to have voice and the living require this primitive and generative organ-base to pattern their own history as coherent and vitalizing: we take life from the dead by giving them a portion of our life. Art’s sustenance, as Pound defines it, is life (“A Retrospect” 11). The bourgeois disfiguration of history’s angel (itself an image of the indigent future) is the neoliberal vampire of late capitalism. Whereas Tiresias takes blood in foretelling history at its outset, his double awaits at history’s end to consume the remainder and leave us in total entropy, devoid of both knowledge and future. Tiresias is more “full of knowing” than “the beefy men” who live but know neither where they are nor what must be done (“Canto XLVII” 137). And yet, if anything is to be done, it will require the blood-sacrifice of the living. To retell history as though it is being foretold is to speak of it as destined rather than past. It gives motive to history.

In poetry, this motive is inextricable from rhythm and this rhythm, in the end, is peculiar to each individual. Julia Kristeva, in her essay on “The Ethics of Linguistics,” cites Mayakovsky in stating that, “at the highest pitch of expressiveness,” the point to which Mayakovsky desired to bring his poetry, the linguistic “code becomes receptive to the rhythmic body and its forms, in opposition to present meaning, [imagine] another meaning, but a future, impossible meaning” (356). In giving voice to the abstract structure of language, the speaking subject embodies a code that his or her rhythms - in sensual interaction with the feel of words - may then inflect. For Pound, this position in respect to language also implied an historical standpoint. In speaking for the future, the voice of the past must be “modified in 7

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the guts of the living” (Auden 89). Pound’s invigorating return to origins is the difference between artists renovating histories as living traditions and histories enervating artists as impotent or dead bodies.

In this capacity, the poet speaks the social body. He or she takes blood only in addressing “a task which cannot possibly be tackled other than by a work of poetry” (Mayakovsky 184). Only in service to this “social demand” can the act, more than the mere affirmation of individual energies, remain ethical (184). Accordingly, in The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson makes Tiresias a figure for “the cultural past” to which Marxism alone can return the “life and warmth” that allow it “to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it” (19). Marxism restores the social body in opposition to the abstract ghosts (or transcendental Ideas) of the past. It “sets out from real, active men and their actual life-process and demonstrates the development of ideological reflexes and echoes of that process” (Marx 112). Periodization must not only make the past resound poetically; its poetics must also coordinate this resonance so as to recognize the vitality and obstructions of the past in their continuity with the demands placed upon the present body. To make the past speak, to return it to life and warmth, is to hear its voice now and to thereby take part in its warmth. What the angel of history fails to achieve in our future is perhaps better realized by the prophet who stands at the outset of all history. While the former reflects us as dead, the latter lives only by way of our life and warmth.

Poetry as such is a kind of resurrection. The body returns to the present, coming always from out of the past, but necessarily arriving in the character of the future. This futurity is the projection of the excess of our desires beyond what is available to us in the present. It comes to figure our own unaccommodated being 8

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and its reappearance is therefore often uncanny. In being placed in the future, its aspect is once more reciprocal in deciding our present position. The future arrives as in the character of either the angel or the monster and defines us accordingly as either unredeemed or endangered. We are either bearers of debt or under threat of loss. This self-alienation is akin to what Benjamin fears will allow us to “experience [our] own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (270). We no longer possess the intimacy, whether with ourselves in time or others in space, which might allow us to restore the life and warmth of self-care or hospitality. As Franco Berardi laments, “social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience” as it is now (59). Nor is our private guilt – internalizing the public debt that we did not accrue in our past but which we must pay for with our future - at all redeemable. And so we are stuck in the double bind of being distrustful of the monsters bred by our energies and dissatisfied with the angels we imagine for our redemption.

Yet, between the points of excess and deficit, there remains the possibility of an adequate or sufficient space. We may restore communication by denuding the social body of the coding that automatizes its exchanges. Opposing the dereferentialization of social exchange is the decoding of this body. The baring of its device restores the body to us as the material ballast necessary to focus all reference. Roman Jakobson defines the poetic function of language as concerning primarily the message of the speech event (144). This concern, however, is only ever properly activated insofar as the message becomes “a bridge thrown between myself and another” (Volosinov 86). ‘I and you’ are not exchangeable; although neither can absolutely determine the other, each responds only to the sign of the other. Although the poem (as the formal instance of poetic communication) 9

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may find many readers, each event of communication is determined by referring irreducibly to the bodies between which a “territory [comes to be] shared” (86). The social body is grounded in the body of the letter that has its source not in abstract systems of language exchange but in the living voice that desires to communicate itself to another. This dialogical model can also stand for our bridge to the future.

Even between various selves, both myself as ‘I’ am now and as ‘I’ hope to be, there may be discovered a minor space of perfect adequation that always refers to the life and warmth of the irreplaceable (yet empathetic) body.

The space we are describing is therefore the negative of the vortex. Rather than history cohering through the rhythms of an energetic centre, we seek the exhausted or decentered position that gives us refuge from all historical coercion.

We discover this intimate space within the ground of the commonplace. If “exhaustion needs to be understood and accepted as a new paradigm for social life,” how are we to conceive of a poetics that demotivates desire in attempting to give us space for communication (Berardi 68)? The poetry of T. S. Eliot, particularly The Waste Land, gives us an interesting (and contemporary) counterpoint to Pound’s self-energizing, self-destructing vortices. Resonance is an instructive concept for Eliot as well; however, his voices are reduced to “singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” (384). If Pound foretells in retelling, Eliot’s prophets (among which Tiresias is once again primary) instead foresuffer, outlive the aforesuffered, and are without the capacity to make this suffering resound as meaning. And yet there remains always a voice - its outrage filling “all the desert with inviolable voice” - however uncertain its significance (101). There is no discernible body in The Waste Land. Instead, the cry of the transformed Philomel laments the history of destruction that deprives her of her sensual body. Yet a voice is still heard. In 10

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Eliot’s poetry, the mind has lost its cohesion in being without the ballast of the social body. At the intersection of “the private mind” and “the mind of Europe,” there is a gap in which voices echo as disjunctive fragments of history and literature but do not therefore communicate (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 39). We cannot even be certain whether the poem is an agonized dialogue or schizoid monologue.

Yet among the barest remnants of mind, in sounds divested of all significance, there is perhaps a hint of solace within the exhausted space. Sound is the imperative throughout Eliot’s poem. How it should be heard - how we must come to receive it - is the question. The nightingale’s song is transcribed in the poem as “Jug Jug to dirty ears” (103). This can be read (and heard) in many ways: as the sound of a “human engine” turning, “a conventional way of representing birdsong,” or perhaps “a crude joking reference to sexual intercourse” (Southam 79). It is certainly (in dirtied ears) not the sound of a nightingale. It is only the remnant of this sound. And yet its repetition, as though it were trying to get the engine going, signifies in each instance, and for each hearer, a desire for the pure voice that the poem may corrupt but also remembers. Only in being referred to us, only in being received by us, by resounding in our ears, is the voice (perhaps) revitalized. We restore the sign to the body, and thereby return our bodies to ourselves, by first referring to one another. By way of our differential yet corresponding rhythms, signs again refer to bodies. Accordingly, Eliot’s speaker states that “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (413-4). ‘We’ here become the ‘each’ that the self-same sound imprisons. The prison is individual but the sound is general. Eliot’s glossing of the passage cites both Dante’s Ugolino and F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. The latter defines us (each) as a “circle closed on the outside” that (each to each) “is opaque to the others which surround 11

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it;” and hence “the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul” (Bradley as quoted by Eliot, 411n). Ugolino, however, also once heard the key and, although he is now imprisoned, his imprisonment was caused by his thought of a prison when he heard the key’s turning. He cannot hear the redemptive potential (now squandered) of his own speech. He fundamentally misheard the key and so confirmed his perpetual prison (Dante 33.4-75). The simple sound of its single turning can either be a locking or unlocking. It can confine us to the sphere of our perpetual egoism or become the sign that enters into the body, unlocking us in our concern for the social body that is activated by the address of the living voice.

Whereas the sign of the key had taken the place of Ugolino’s body, automatizing his voice in a speech without insight that perpetuates the self-enclosure of his private despair, the sign of the key that enters into the body, that instead refers to the body, might restore us to life.

The precoded and recombinatory sign system that reproduces dominant (and often barbaric) forms of culture reaches its limit in Eliot. The culture remains thereafter only as bodiless simulation. Despite the theological overtones of angels and resurrections, we do not require anything but a corresponding body. There is no singular redeemer; but any poetic interaction, the mutual commitment of ‘you and I’, of each to each in ongoing dialogue, will suffice. Geoffrey Hartman defines this interpretability (our continual responsibility to one another) as an instance of “passionate divination,” wherein “a private language,” founded on trust but always with the possibility of betrayal, is intuited within the context of “a public and highly stylized word-system” (286). Beyond (or rather within) the self-alienating knowledge of abstract and abstracting signs, we seek to discover (together) the “palace of wisdom” that is “the space of singularity, bodily signification, the 12

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creation of sensuous meaning” (Berardi 22). The exhausted well that encloses us therefore has the potential of becoming the intimate space that gives us room (if only a stanza) for our communication with others.

The space we are claiming is therefore deceptively small. It is not utopia but here and now; nor is it “Collective Man” but only ‘you and I’, whoever we may be (Auden 96). Our passionate interaction foregrounds “the immediate social situation and its immediate social participants” (Volosinov 87). Language finds root in an ethical concern that resolves the self-alienating mediacy of its structural condition. It is not that we step outside of either history or language. We do not seek to evade the demand of the social body. Instead, we give ourselves space to respond.

We discover what (for us) is most immediate and make this form of committed interaction, the minor space of Volosinov’s shared territory, our common concern.

This is the revolution of the living voice in the mausoleum of language: in speaking, and in being reciprocated, it overturns its own catastrophe. It turns to face the future, finding neither angel nor monster, but instead discovering only the bare sufficiency of the receptive body. It is this mere capacity that Auden exclaims in the poem, “September 1, 1939,” that announces the advent of absolute catastrophe: “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain […]

And the lie of Authority” (97). Egoism and collectivism are the contradictory causes of the same disaster. The romantic lie obscures politics in valorizing aesthetics and, like Pound’s poetry of personal energy, often degenerates into fascism (see Benjamin’s “Art in the Age,” 269-70). Similarly, however, as Auden had discovered through his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, “Collective Man” (disfigured as Stalinism) is often the machine through which fungible humans are processed as sacrificial bodies. We need not decide whether politics should be aestheticized 13

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or aesthetics politicized. Poetry should have no direct connection with politics.

Instead, it should realize discrete and nonexchangeable ethical positions that can ground (but should never be subsumed by) a political position. It is for this reason that Auden seeks to strip poetry of its coercive power: “For poetry makes nothing happen.” Instead, “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth” (89). This limited capacity perfectly figures our exhausted space. The poetic mode foregoes the recombinatory processes of pure productivity in favor of the marginal means of surviving beyond such process. Its exchange requires no more than a mouth and an ear (the ‘you and I’ that may be anyone), yet between both a bridge is built in mutual desire for the social body. And so, although “defenceless under the night,” “ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages” (97). These acts of love are constituted by the committed engagement of each to each. The discrete spaces of exception they figure, positions against the violent totality of night’s negation, may yet constellate in providing a shape for (or at least a way toward) our communal redemption.

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Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1980.

Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson.

New York: Vintage, 2007. 88-91.

——. “September 1, 1939.” Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage,

2007. 95-97.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings. Trans. Edmund

Jephcott. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 4. Cambridge:

Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003. 389-400.

——. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Selected Writings.

Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 4.

Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003. 251-283.

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Croom Helm, 1985.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose. Harcourt Brace, 1975. 37- 44.

——. The Waste Land. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. 61-86.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Words and Wounds.” The Geoffrey Hartman Reader. Ed. Geoffrey

Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 273-290.

Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed.

David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow: Pearson, 2008. 140-164.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Kristeva, Julia. “The Ethics of Linguistics.” Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow: Pearson, 2008. 348-357.

Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. Trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. Selected Writings. Ed. Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. 102-156.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “How Are Verses to Be Made?” Plays, Articles, Essays. Ed.

Alexander Ushakov. USSR: Raduga Publishers, 1987. 179-211.

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Pound, Ezra. “Affirmations.” Selected Prose 1909-1965. New Directions, 1981. 374-377.

——. “Canto I.” Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. 96-98.

——. “Canto XLVII.” Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. 137- 140.

——. “Early Translators of Homer.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New

Directions, 1981. 249-275.

——. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. 61-77.

——. “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1981. 3-14.

——. “The Seafarer.” Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1957. 18-21.

——. “The Tradition.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1981. 91- 93.

——. “Vortex.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2013. Web. 5 April 2013.

<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238700>

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Ed. Christopher Janaway.

Trans. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2010.

Southam, B.C. A Student’s Guide to The Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1968.

Volosinov, V. N. “Verbal Interaction.” Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans.

Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. 83-98.

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Poetry of the Dance: A Prelude to the Dance Poetry Manifesto Michael Cavuto

The problem is compounded by the universal and everpresent problem of formalism. …

When this happens, both the neo-precisionist avant-garde and the Dionysian ecstatics combine to overthrow it. …

Post-Victorianism was a formalism of practice.

New Criticism was a formalism of method.

William Everson * So, then, the duende is a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

Federico García Lorca * …A dance? An involuntary gesture to others not there?

Robert Creeley

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We are, once again, now confronted with the resurgence of formalism in

all its dubious guises. It has swept in with its aspirations of an authoritarian hold on the future as well as a retrospective attempt to codify or canonize those poetic endeavors of the recent past that so profoundly combated previous incarnations of formalism. The neo-precisionists (the Black Mountain poets and their wake) and the spontaneous imprecisionists (the Beat Generation and its wake)—the later Twentieth Century descendents of the American modernist bloodline—have been stripped of their Dionysian vitality and true prophesy of an untamable multiplicity of poetic possibility by the present arbiters of formalism: a new “progressive” criticism and the liberally embracing reach of the academy. Thus, formalism, the foundation on which the academy exists, the cornerstone of the Ivory Tower, has absorbed the language of the neo-precisionists in order to sterilize the once rapidly expanding genealogy of American postmodernist poets. The verse of Pound and the writings of Stein have been canonized in the same fashion as the literary classics that the Cantos sought to displace through a new poetic vision of modernity while the implications of both writers are constrained into the narrow understanding of repeated, banal exegesis.

The energy of the dance, of the spontaneous ritual, which comes up

through our dirt and stone to overwhelm the body, a poetry of the spirit that shakes the physical being as Whitman called for, a fervor of our most natural and chaotic origin that the poet seeks to embody, must be revitalized from the pitfalls of a blind intellect that supposes its own infallibility. There is, in the dance, both the Dionysian and that which Lorca knows as the duende, through which the poet achieves the spiritual intimacy of infancy within and the unrefined state of the pure natural origin of creation: as Robert Duncan wrote, 18

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… I know no other continent of Africa more dark than this dark continent of my breast.

Duncan’s Africa is the external secret hidden within the shrouded birth of man— the same secret of his breast—scattered throughout the mystic forces. They are of the same force as Lorca’s, “secret and shuddering… descended from that blithe daemon” which will descend upon America—as he himself did—in the form of the Dionysian bard.

Formalism as an opposition to this intrinsic poetic experience of the dance’s spirit reframes the true poem as singular and restrained in its means.

There is nothing of the original mystery that is by nature untrammeled and radical.

It was this very circumstance of formalist authoritarianism that the first modernist precisionists—the Imagists—assailed against, which was then taken up again by the Objectivists. But the poem would not be emancipated from the formalist imposition until the Black Mountain neo-precisionist vision was joined with the reemergence of the American Dionysian spirit in the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation. It is this vital force rekindled in the poet that will bring the arrival of a new era of 21

st

century poetry, a poetics intertwined

with the dance of creation, just as for Lorca “the arrival of the duende presupposed a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm.”

If the poetics and the theories of the Black Mountain poets have since been recast in terms of objective theorization through the formalist establishment of a new, albeit veiled, academic stasis, this was never those poets’ prophesy.

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The success of the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, and Beat poets in overthrowing the formalist hold of the 1950s came about due to their shared embodiment of the Dionysian spirit, with the former group achieving the restrained and critical perspective of the sage and the latter two the orgiastic, celebratory power of the Bacchante. There never existed a neo-precisionist urge toward objective poetic theory, but rather a fully subjective quest for—as Duncan wrote— “a poetics” of the self, with all the mystical and imaginary implications of the term.

It is the collective experience of the self in which the poetry lives, as in the dance the individual role is transcended to invigorate the collective, always grounded in an abstracted communication and subjection of itself. As Duncan wrote: There is a sense in which the “poet” of a poem forces us as writer or reader to obey a compelling form, the necessities of the poem, so that the poet has a likeness to the dreamer of the dream and to the creator of our living reality: dream, reality, and the poem, seem to be one.

It is that which is imbibed with the dance, succumbed to it, that of the purely gestural wherein the earthly and other-worldly coalesce, that those unknowable terms of the real become manifested and the plurality of self is unveiled as intrinsic to an immeasurable, mystic whole.

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Works Cited Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Duncan, Robert. The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Ed. Peter Quartermain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

The H.D. Book. Ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Everson, William. “Dionysus & The Beat: Four Letters on the Archetype.” Sparrow 63 (1977).

Lorca, Federico García. “Play and Theory of the Duende.” Lorca, Federico García. In Search of Duende. Trans. Christopher Mauer. New York: New Directions, 1998. 56-72.

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A Metaphysical Mourning: Adorno on the Kantian Block Iris Liu

In this paper I question the legitimacy of Adorno’s depiction of the

Kantian block in his Negative Dialectics and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Adorno formulates the Kantian block in several ways; notably, he claims that the Kant’s critical philosophy is subject to a performative contradiction—it is unable to reconcile its ambition to create a ‘self-consistent’ system with its knowledge of its own inadequacy (KCPR, 174). Elsewhere, Adorno heavily thematiz es the damning image of the imprisonment of reason in immanence—i.e. that the Kantian subject simultaneously fetishiz es and denies its fetish for that which is ‘outside’ its bounds of knowledge. In §1 I give a narrative of Adorno’s many formulations of the Kantian block as a “metaphysical mourning” in light of pure reason’s self-alienation from any ontological or phenomenal truth. In §2 I investigate the legitimacy of the cause of mournfulness in the Kantian subject in light of Adorno’s formulations of the block. In defense of Kant, I argue against the coherence of speaking about the unknowable positively as a possible mode of knowledge or experience.

§1

Adorno’s formulation of the Kantian block reconstructs from Kant’s

critical philosophy a tormenting disjunction from which he thinks Kant’s philosophy cannot escape—the disjunction between “truth in the ontological sense, and our ability to comprehend” (KCPR, 174), i.e. the disjunction between what reason can and cannot validate for itself as a legitimate form of knowledge.

This is a disjunction that Adorno thinks plagues the entirety of Kant’s Critique of 22

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Pure Reason.1 In the section ‘On the Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena, ’ Kant specifically addresses the misuses of reason: in short, for Kant, the extended application of the categories beyond appearances always reflects a misuse of reason. Here, despite Adorno’s reluctance to commit himself in discussion to any Kantian language, his disjunction ostensibly demonstrates the gulf between Kant’s thing-in-itself and appearance—the gulf between noumena and phenomena.

On Adorno’s reading, the root of this disjunction (and of the Kantian block itself) rests on Kant’s claim that ideas of things-in-themselves are “not valid objects of knowledge” (KCPR, 174), but are instead ‘regulative’ ideas, assigned the bitter task of enforcing the limits of knowledge. The Kantian block can be briefly introduced here as follows: r eason is ‘blocked’ from truth, for it alone can affect neither knowledge nor the conditions of knowing—and it is actually twice blocked: r eason is blocked from any ontological truth, as well as any phenomenal truth (KCPR, 174-9).

It is the illusory nature of mere phenomenal appearance that blocks reason from any ontological truth, and this idea is implicit in the ambiguous meaning of ‘appearance’ itself. For Adorno, ‘appearance’ (‘Erscheinung’), as that which appears (neutrally), carries with it the ‘common’ sense of that which is selfevident and obvious, but also comes with a demonic sense of false sheens and false appearances. By this ominous logic, not all that glitters is gold, the sinister clown of nightmares always wears a big grin, and the poisoned apple always presents 1 “I believe that it is important in this context for you to realise that this idea of a block, of unbridgeable chasms between different realms, is in fact ubiquitous in the Critique of Pure Reason; it does not refer simply to the single point where it first makes its appearance, namely the question of the unknowability of the so-called things-in-themselves” (KCPR, 174).

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itself as full and ripe for the eating. Reason alone cannot validate any knowledge beyond appearance (ontological or metaphysical truth), for it cannot account for the ontological validity of any knowledge about appearances (phenomenal truth) in the first place. Pure reason, fed through the mouth of sensibility, takes comfort in the effortless intelligibility of its appearances and, in so doing, entangles itself in an ambiguous relationship with the illusory and the untrue. Nonetheless, despite its awareness of the fact that phenomenal truth cannot be validated as a form of knowledge given its deceptively immanent character, the Kantian subject struggles continuously to comprehend and appropriate this contamination of untruth that it receives in sensible intuition.

It is in light of this that Adorno maintains: “the object of nature that we define with our categories is not actually nature itself” (KCPR, 175). To return to our initial disjunction, this ‘object of nature’ that we define with the categories is similar to neither nature itself nor any ‘truth in the ontological sense’ and as such reveals the little of which the Kantian subject can actually comprehend. This claim can be understood in conjunction with Adorno’s reading of the Solution of the Cosmological Dialectic: the “actual thing-in-itself is ‘completely unknown to us’” (KCPR, 108). To attack Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, Adorno uses this language of deception and disillusionment together with this disjunction to reveal a schism, a duality or ‘doubling’, of nature—for now nature can be said to have an undefined “true existence” i.e. as thing-in-itself, as well as an illusory “positive existence”, i.e. as appearance (KCPR, 109). I will examine this ‘two-worlds’ reading of Kant later, but now, it is helpful to quickly note how this initial disjunction can be reformulated with equal bluntness in many ways—as Adorno himself does—for example, as the disjunction (or dualism) between form 24

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and content in Kant (ND, 386), as the disjunction between concept and object in ‘identitarian thinking’ (ND, 161), as the disjunction between the “two spheres of the understanding”: between knowledge of experience and knowledge of ideas in Kant (KCPR, 174), or even as the disjunction between the inner and the outer, as per a Cartesian dualism (KCPR, 174). (Quite humorously, Adorno goes so far as to characteriz e this disjunctive movement with a lyric: “The soul soars high into the air / The body rests upon the chair.”) However, in all seriousness, to keep with the true shape of a disjunction—the image of a splitting—Adorno claims that the two branches of the disjunction, i.e. the aforementioned two spheres of understanding, necessarily point in opposite directions (KCPR, 174), thus displaying an irreconcilable movement between two distinct alternatives.

To Adorno, Kant’s critical philosophy is not to be read naively as a doctrine of knowledge, for it instead defines the bounds of human knowledge. However, the burden of the Kantian block is not just the impoverished image of pure reason standing alone on a phenomenal island—that pure reason is denied access to knowledge it cannot autonomously account for is neither truly problematic nor unbearable for Adorno (and to characterize the block simply as such would be onesided and missing the point)—rather, the tragedy of Kant’s entire metaphysical endeavor lies in one horrible paradox: The dialectical or antinomical structure of Kantian philosophy means that it aspires to create a system, to provide a central point, which is that of the idea that it can construct reality – but at the same time, it refuses to regard the world as identical with that idea. This implies a vast effort to square a circle… On the one hand, [Kant] holds fast to the intention of philosophy to understand reality as a whole, to decode the totality. At the same time, he declares that philosophy is incapable of this, and that the only form in which the totality can be grasped is the expression of the fact that it cannot be comprehended… It is the attempt to give an account of the totality, while

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simultaneously conceding that this totality is no such thing, that subject and object do not seamlessly fit together (KCPR, 177-8) (Passage 1)

This passage best illustrates the contradiction in Kant’s critical project: first, that Kant knows no other way to make good on his dream of creating a totality of knowledge other than by subjectiviz ing it; second, that Kant knows that any subjective totality can only be a false one, for it has been subdued under the formal constraints of our reason, under ‘regulative’ ideas. The logic of this paradox should by no means feel foreign, as it is quite commonplace: f or all the wildness of the blooming rose is lost the moment I pick it from the garden; I want what I cannot have, and immediately, then, I have been resigned to choosing between two undesirables—either the discomfort of suppressing my desire, or the violence of taking it by force, in so doing emptying it of all its character just so I can ‘have’ it as such, in the emptiest sense of the word.

Adorno’s narrative of the block suggests that this paradox can be thought analogously alongside the proverbial ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too.’ Here, the function of the adage is not to announce some stupid norm about the virtues or harms of abstinence and consumption, nor is it a poetic testament to its own tautological truth—instead, it is that the adage, with all its brevity and banality, reveals an undeniable listlessness in its very expression. One sighs before eating the cake, and sighs again after having eaten it, and this is the sorry image. The feeling that both options appear to be equally flavorless captures the very essence of their irreconcilability: We have a situation in which knowledge is illusory because the closer it comes to its object, the more it shapes it in its own image and thus drives it further and further away, much as civilization has riven the wildest and most exotic animals into the most inaccessible jungles. This is what is reflected in

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the doctrine of the block: it is a kind of metaphysical mourning, a kind of memory of what is best, of something that we must not forget, but that we are nevertheless compelled to forget. (KCPR, 176) (Passage 2)

Adorno dwells heavily on this feeling of listlessness, of resignation, in his narrative of the block, and he approaches this ‘feeling’ from many directions. To properly understand it, it is important to emphasiz e again that these two moments in Kant’s critical endeavor are simultaneous, not successive. Only from this simultaneity does Kant’s philosophy begin, and does the ‘feeling’ arise. Adorno ascribes the force of this feeling to a lurking premonition (KCPR, 176); more arrestingly, the debilitating effect of this feeling is rooted in the knowledge of the impending failure of the act. Because the two moments are not successive, it is not as if the sadness comes only after the deed is done, as if the deed had caused a nasty surprise, and one then feels disappointed and blindsided… (After gluttonously consuming the cake, it is now gone, and this cannot possibly come as a shock to me.) Depressingly, Kant embarks on his critical project knowing full well that what he is doing will never satisfy him; as such, he has already anticipated the failure of the act—but nonetheless, he acts. To Adorno, this is the ‘feeling’ that saturates the Kantian block: this belabored performative contradiction in Kant’s metaphysics. In light of his ambition to create a ‘self-consistent’ system’ (KCPR, 174), Kant’s continued renouncement of absolute identity between subjective and objective totality just looks like pure masochism. As Adorno suggests, the struggle to accommodate this damning knowledge reveals itself to be a struggle to forget this knowledge.

This thought all but explicitly portrays Kant as a burn victim smashing all his mirrors, while harboring a secret desire for seeing his ugly face reflected in shop windows and nearby ponds. With all the ungrounded terror of a premonition, this 27

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knowledge can never be reconciled with our existing modes of knowing, and as such, can only appear as a threat.

It is for this reason that Adorno portrays Kant’s epistemology as being

a mournful one: reason hems itself into a false subjective totality of what it can know; however, in the very act of doing so, it also yearns to know what lies outside its self-given bounds—what it has defined for itself as unknowable and as having no way of knowing. In its yearning, reason reflects a transient, disingenuous forgetting of its own self-legislated totality. Because Kant sees no other way to validate knowledge than to subjectiviz e it, Kant’s critical project is in its structure necessarily ‘subjectively directed’, and the subject cannot escape his own imprisonment. Insatiably, in its appetite for absolute dominance and control, Kant’s idealism becomes indistinguishable from any other ideology—it can only gain reverence and legitimacy by forcing its subjects under a spell (Bann), a spell Adorno likens to industrializ ed capitalism and unthinking mass-consumerism: [I]n Kantian philosophy, the world, reality as a whole, is turned into a product… the product of labor, of effort. Thinking as a spontaneous activity – that is what we do; but it is actually nothing other than labor… Because analysis shifts the entire weight of the dynamic, the dynamic character of reality, onto the side of the subject, our world becomes increasingly the product of labor… and the livelier the subject becomes, the deader the world becomes. (KCPR, 115) (Passage 3)

This ‘spell’ that Kant’s idealism casts upon its subjects is precisely the spell of thought; the spell of subjectiviz ation, the illusion of complete correspondence and rigid identity between objective and subjective totality in experience. “There is a reifying quality in the very attempt to relate all phenomena to a unified reference point and to subsume it under a self-identical, rigid unity” (KCPR, 114). What is remarkable about the spell is that Kant’s idealism seems more and 28

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more reasonable the longer the Kantian subject dwells in its repose of ‘legitimate knowledge’. The more it comes to “constitute knowledge as such,” the more the “determining factors are withdrawn from the object” (KCPR, 115), and the greater the divergence between the two poles of knowledge. This confines the Kantian subject in an “imprisonment in immanance” (ND, 389), under the ‘terrorism’ of Kant’s subjective totality (ND, 388). Adorno goes on to argue that with this comes a metaphysical alienation—for any cognition not held in strict “scientific sanction” (that reason cannot validate) is “second-rate” (ND, 387), all traces of meaning left in the world incommensurable with Kant’s knowable realm are flushed down the toilet—“expurgated” (ND, 388). This leads Adorno to his conclusion that “exclusion is central to [Kant’s] epistemology” (ND, 388): What seems to me to be unique about philosophical concepts is that, in the face of the despair which philosophy can sometimes induce, they provide, if not the ‘consolation of philosophy’, then at least a consolation for philosophy.

Philosophy has the curious characteristic that, although itself entrapped, locked inside the glasshouse of our constitution and our language, it is nevertheless able constantly to think beyond itself and its limits, to think itself through the walls of its glasshouse. And this thinking beyond itself, into openness – that, precisely, is metaphysics. (MCP, 68) (Passage 4)

Adorno thematizes the damning image of reason’s imprisonment in its false subjective totality of immanence —I cannot leave my house so I look out my window instead—a double imprisonment: I cannot even speak of what I see outside. Adorno, in this account of the Kantian block, draws on our initial Cartesian disjunction of the inner and the outer (KCPR, 174). The disjunction between what reason can and cannot validate for itself as knowledge splits knowledge into two incompatible poles (KCPR, 115). Kant’s subjective totality, when accused of demarcation and limitation, lends itself all too well to the Adornian critique. The unknowable, the

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unspeakable (now having been defined as such, as prohibited) presses with even greater insistence upon the defined barriers. Just as “what tolerates nothing that is not like itself thwarts the reconcilement for which it mistakes itself” (ND, 142), the harder the totality attempts to look away from what it cannot understand, the harder it becomes for it to convince itself of its own legitimacy.

An echo of our initial paradox: the coping mechanism singlehandedly brings about its own insufficiency. Of trauma, the more I try to forget, the more I am reminded. The totality responds to the thought of its own inadequacy with renewed self-assertion, the only way it knows how, and, in so doing, irresistibly magnifies the weight of its own failure. The Kantian subject simultaneously affirms and denies its attachment to that which is ‘outside’ its phenomenal field of knowledge. In staying true to the conception of a totality, it must deny the possibility of a coherent experience of anything ‘outside’ it, but to really stay true to this conception of totality, it too must deny its having denied it in the first place, for to admit to having denied it at all would be to admit the possibility of something ‘outside’ the totality, a coherent noumenal experience of which to deny. The unknowable, once innocuous, has now become the object of our greatest curiosity.

In short, Adorno formulates the Kantian block in two different ways: first, by way of the paradox and the performative contradiction, and second, by way of the image. The paradox delivers the mood or the ‘feeling’ that permeates the Kantian block, the feeling of listlessness and resignation from the irreconcilability of the two moments. The image conveys the mournfulness of the block: reason, retaining a memory of what lies beyond its self-legislated totality, mourns the absence of the ontological truth that it has denied for itself. Neither formulation is without its problems, and in this next section I address both.

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§2 Under the first formulation, the paradox correctly holds that the two moments in Kant are not to be taken successively. For the paradox to work, neither moment is reducible to the other. Despite his awareness of this in theory, Adorno still commits himself to speaking of these two moments in temporal succession by way of a language of effort and activity: The totality that the mind is just able to encompass is no more than the fact that as mind it is unable to comprehend the totality; but that it somehow contrives after all to comprehend what it does not comprehend and the fact that it cannot comprehend it. (KCPR, 178) (Passage 5)

Adorno continually describes Kant’s critical project as if it were a task or an act that demands a performance, (or perhaps even an audience), and both his descriptions of the paradox and the labor of thinking (Passages 1, 3, respectively) are illustrative of this mistake. However, Adorno must commit himself to this language of effort and activity in order to charge Kant with a performative contradiction. Given that the paradox is founded on a premonition, one must act despite it in order for it to be paradoxical—the performative act is what sets the paradox in motion. For this reason, to think two contradictory thoughts in silence is neither paradoxical nor worthy of examination, for the two thoughts (that the phenomenal world is apparent, but the ontological truth of the world is never apparent) are just that: temporally distinct thoughts. If not instantiated simultaneously in a performative act, the thoughts, considered separately, reveal no unlivable movement that tends in two directions, and cannot constitute a performative contradiction. By that same logic, the activity of thinking would first need to be demonstrative before it can be laborious—it is not that all thinking is laborious and commodified for Adorno; rather, at stake here is only a certain kind of thinking, a thinking that is 31

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carried out in accordance with the terms of Kant’s idealism.

Given the demonstrative nature of an act—that it can either be performed or withheld—the ascription of a language of effort and activity to Kant’s critical project (i.e. the characterization of Kant’s critical endeavor as a futile act, and of thinking as effortful labor) naturally assumes that we are able to abstain from this futile act, hence raising the question: how do we act differently? It is especially strange to say that “the livelier the (Kantian) subject becomes, the deader the world becomes,”2 almost as if one need only think differently, under different conditions, in order for the world to not be completely deadened as a result. To use Adorno’s analogy of squaring a circle in Passage 1 as an example, we see that the analogy implies two things: first, this ‘effort’ implies that if one puts the pen down the paradox will go away (i.e. the futility of squaring a circle will be no more if I just get rid of all my pens and stop being masochistic); second, if it is possible to put down the pen, I have a choice between two coherent experiences, as if on Sunday morning I will either go to church or stay in and focus on squaring my circle like an idiot. The analogy culminates in a sense of reconciliation: that the performative contradiction can be resolved if the Kantian subject simply abandons his quest for a totality of knowledge.

This sense of reconciliation directly contradicts Adorno’s formulation of the paradox. As discussed in §1, the irreconcilability of the two moments in Kant’s critical philosophy is essential to the Kantian block. The Kantian subject can never be situated on one moment of the disjunction (on Sunday, a choice between either subjective totality or nothing), as if either moment can be taken alone to provide a coherent model of experience. If this ridiculous fiction were to be the case, one 2 Text in brackets mine.

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saves much grief by just asking Kant whether his metaphysics prefers ‘to be or not to be,’ and await metaphysical world- change according to the response. The problem with the paradox is its propensity to attach itself to living, contingent performativity like a parasite, and as such cannot be trusted. Similarly, the adage of the cake- loss mourns beautifully but contains all the wickedness of the paradox.

Without the language of effort and activity, Adorno cannot charge Kant with a performative contradiction, for it demands an act; but with it, he cannot charge Kant with the paradox, for it demands a simultaneity. The thrust of Adorno’s paradox lies in its very ‘feeling’ of mournfulness and irreconcilability, a feeling that his own language disavows.

Under the second formulation of the block, Adorno’s uses the image of reason’s imprisonment in immanence to draw attention to the possibility otherwise, the possibility of non-valid forms of knowledge that he claims reason to secretly lament. However, the Kantian block, when described with this image of reason’s eternal house arrest, obtains only insofar as it makes continued reference to a Cartesian inner/outer distinction—in a way, it is but a theatricalization of reason’s anguish at its own subjective solitary confinement, a gross glorification of an archaic Cartesian dualism. Engrossed in the act of its self-absorbed lamenting, the image has reason pining away, unable to tear itself away from the window. Like a starving film director, the image, in order to achieve any poignancy or coherence, desperately needs a convincing performance of this flamboyant mourning. Forced into exhibitionism, reason, as a result, fears getting sacked; it stares out the window with such an absurd degree of concentration, it probably sees nothing at all. It probably even throws in a sigh every few minutes for good measure. The image is as powerful as a soap opera is cathartic, and both are equally comical. The 33

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sheer theatrics of the image sabotages its intention of conveying any mournfulness

—it’s just too funny.

In addition, the more pressing problem with the image is that it masks its assumption that such a Cartesian distinction is anywhere to be found in Kant’s philosophy at all. By imposing such a distinction upon Kant’s philosophy, the image suggests that looking out the window would actually provide a coherent model of experience, albeit one very different than the experience of the furniture and household objects. In more Kantian terms, it implies coherent experience of both an object of sensible intuition as well as an object of intellectual intuition (an unknowable object for Kant), i.e. it implies that both the phenomenal and noumenal can be experienced, in a positive sense, as possible objects of knowledge.

The image is a confused formulation of the Kantian block because it reveals a error of scope in Adorno’s reading of Kant: it fails to acknowledge the elementary difference between a positive and a negative concept of the noumenon in Kant. To confuse this negative notion of the noumenon with the positive one would be to commit the error of mistaking Kant’s negative, legitimate notion of the noumenon as “not an object of our sensible intuition” for the positive notion of “an object of non-sensible intuition,”3 i.e. an intellectual intuition, which we can have no access to. Kant claims that although we cannot know or cognize things in themselves, “we at least must be able to think them, for otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears” (Bxxvii).

With this said, Kant’s concept of a noumenon is only legitimate for knowing in the negative sense: as a limiting or “boundary concept” (A255/B311), and in itself gives 3 Here I loosely follow Jill Vance Buroker’s formulation of the scope error in her Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 203-4.

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A Metaphysical Mourning

no content. For this reason, Kant’s two terms, phenomenon and noumenon, do not refer to two distinct realms; the former is constituted positively as a possible object of knowledge, whereas the latter functions negatively as a prohibitive, limiting concept.

Adorno commits this very error of scope, dividing objects into two worlds: objects of the senses (phenomena) and objects of the understanding (noumenon), a division that Kant explicitly condemns (A255/B311). By rewarding it with a name (‘the object of non-sensible intuition’, ‘the world outside the window’), this piece of cheap fiction feels terribly comforting to both image and block, for it finally knows what it is mourning—at last, it has identified and localised the lost object.

Striking as the image is, it doesn’t pertain to Kant. If this error of scope is truly the cause of mournfulness in the Kantian subject, by now it should be apparent that it has no ground whatsoever in Kant, for this mourning admits of no discerni ble object in Kant’s philosophy. After a banal process of subtraction, it amounts to no more than a self-punishing performativity. Spellbound by its own performance, it cannot help but continue its act. Yet, mirthlessly, for this empty mourning, its believability increases with its sustained performative ordeal.

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Works Cited Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.

——. Adorno, T. W. (2000). Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Cambridge, UK: Polity

Press.

——. Adorno, T. W. (2001). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959). Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press.

Buroker, J. V. (2006). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: an Introduction. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Adorno Abbreviation Key Negative Dialectics [ND] Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems [MCP] Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [KCPR]

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Clinging in Dreams to the Back of a Tiger: The Real in Nietzsche and Žižek Amy Wang

Human beings, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, desire truth only in

its most constricted sense, bounded on every side by guardrails which prevent them from falling off the precipice of their willful ignorance. Though indifferent to acquiring knowledge for its own sake, Nietzsche contends that humans blind themselves to potentially harmful truths, seeking artificial shelter in a contrived state of happiness. Ultimately, this delusion is the only form of salvation from the ugly impotence of human existence, and is itself characterized by a certain nihilist state from which one perpetually attempts to escape. Nothing is more meaningless, in Nietzsche’s view, than the human intellect as it is ensconced within the placidity of nature. “Insubstantial and arbitrary,” the invention of cognition serves only to “cast a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings,” after which “nothing will have happened” (764-5)1. The cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, too, is cognizant of the “artificial” insularity of our universe (33), where we, as the “Nietzschean Last Men,”2 deaden ourselves to meaning by being solely “immersed in stupid daily pleasures” (40). In his seminal essay “On Truth and Lying in a NonMoral Sense,” Nietzsche poses a jarring question: “What do human beings really know about themselves? (765)” The answer, as both Nietzsche and Žižek would 1 Citational references: Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” spans from pp.

764-774; Žižek’s book Welcome to the Desert of the Real! covers 154 pages in total.

2 The Nietzschean Last Man is the antithesis of the imagined Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, wholly devoted to securing survival, comfort, and minor pleasures (Kain 120; Žižek 88).

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posit, is absolutely nothing. In accordance with Nietzsche’s belief that “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions,” Žižek demonstrates that we in the West have numbed ourselves to the Lacanian Real3, which is itself shielded by manifold “deceptive layers of reality” (6). In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Žižek figures the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th as the “ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century,” wherein the West finally came to experience the violent potency of the Real in stark relief. In this vein, it hardly seems tenuous that Nietzsche would likewise regard 9/11 as a categorical dissolving of our “proud, illusory consciousness” (765). Predicating my argument upon Nietzsche’s equation of truth with illusion, I hope to deconstruct Žižek’s figuration of 9/11 as the definitional intrusion of the Real into the West’s “fantasmatic screen” (49).

Early on in his book, Žižek alludes to its title by recounting the

Wachowski brothers’ dystopian film The Matrix, when Morpheus awakens Neo to the (ir)-reality of the so-called Matrix. It is this artificially simulated existence that Neo must fight against: Morpheus borrows from Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” when he ironically welcomes his protégé into “the desert of the real,” one in which humans are enslaved and harvested solely for their energy (15). A similar event occurred on 9/11, Žižek argues, when the West—and, indeed, all the world—was jarringly made aware of this “desert” by an event that has since become immortalized in every conceivable form of media: that of the Word Trade Center collapsing in a cloud of billowing smoke and rubble, burying in its midst not only the bodies of many but also the illusion of America’s imperviousness. Though it would 3 According to Lacan, “that which always returns to the same place”; for Žižek, “authenticity [that] resides in the act of violent transgression” (6).

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be too much of a stretch to equate Western complacency with the utter impotence of those humans cocooned within liquefied corpses in The Matrix, the analogy seems fundamentally sound when considering Nietzsche’s characterization of the truth as distinctly untruthful. This paradox must be upholded in order to shield humans from the gutting horror of the constitutive elements of the “truth,” happily lodged as they are “within the prison walls of [their] faith” (Kain 17; Nietzsche 770).

Nietzsche likens humanity to “an infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations,” but it is equally compelling to situate humans in a simpler architectural structure: that of Plato’s allegorical cave. However difficult it may be to remain afloat on an ever-shifting philosophical cathedral, it is almost impossible for humans, in Nietzsche’s view, to climb out of Plato’s cave and directly face the truth. It is in this regard that life can be seen to exist only “at the bottom of the cave,” residing exclusively within subterranean depths (Kain 17). To conceptualize truth, then, means to liken it to “an excessively strong light” which may only be approached from peripheral shadows (Zupančič 95).

Nietzsche militarizes truth by characterizing it as a “mobile army of

metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms... [which] have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification” (768). In time, and after frequent use, he avers that they become “canonical and binding”; supposed truths, such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “human rights,” and, of course, the “war on terrorism,” are predicated upon the seeming inviolability of their reality. These basic truths can be contextualized in a wider arena, covering “the sanctity of personal autonomy, equality before the law, [and] the rationality of popular will,” all of which constitute the roots of Western liberal democracy (Vivian 380). Žižek characterizes these (un)truths as “false terms” that do more to “mystify” the fact that our “democratic 39

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freedoms” only “serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom”(2). This form of Sartrian compromised freedom, in which we are condemned to be free, privileges one pole of an established opposition in such a way as to force one’s hand in making the “right” choice (3). Is this not the case, Žižek rhetorically asks, with the illusory existence of the choice between “democracy [and] fundamentalism? (3)” As Nietzsche demonstrates, “[e]very concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is nonequivalent” (767). That certain dogmatic binary oppositions, tired metaphors, and default analogies have become “hard and rigid” does not guarantee their veracity; still, these metaphors are taken to be absolute and unequivocal truths upon which “an edifice of concepts” is erected (771). The structure of human language, then, consists solely of signifiers which can only approximate that which is signified, and can only ever produce truths which “appear to be objective,” but in reality are distinctly subjective (Vivian 377). To round out his militarized metaphor of truth, Nietzsche contends that “a free human being” must act as a “warrior” when battling the West’s falsely rendered definition of freedom, which he asserts is rather an insidious form of self-imprisonment (Vivian 381).

In “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance,” Žižek takes issue with

the proliferation of products which are “deprived of their malignant properties,” such as “coffee without caffeine,” “cream without fat,” and “beer without alcohol,” all of which degenerate, naturally, into “the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties” (11). However tempting it may be to imagine ourselves in a singularly blessed existence in which malignancies of any kind simply do not exist, it becomes patent that a reality in which everything construable as “bad” or “detrimental” has been shaved away is no reality at all. The “ultimately American paranoiac fantasy,” as figured by Žižek, takes on new urgency in this regard: slowly but surely, the 40

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provisional backdrop of the prototypical suburban paradise disintegrates into the Real. Even in the aftermath of 9/11, one of the most catastrophic events in the contemporary West, the ensuing bedlam assumed an absurd benignity with the media’s widespread and sometimes unwitting censorship. That human beings desire the truth insofar as it does not harm them becomes obvious when media coverage of 9/11 is contrasted with that of “Third World catastrophes”: whereas the former featurs very little carnage and focuses almost exclusively on retrospective instances of American heroism, the latter regularly and unabashedly depicts far-flung terror in microscopic detail. This disparity is symptomatic of the West’s tendency to distance itself from abstract terror, “hostile,” as it is, “towards truths which may be harmful and destructive” (766). Indeed, what could be more harmful or destructive than a direct immersion into the Real? In America, the Real was 9/11; elsewhere, the Real constitutes reality—pervasive, intransigent, and inescapable. The World Trade Center attacks, widely regarded as “a nightmarish apparition,” were so definitively traumatic precisely because the collision could not be integrated into “the columbarium of concepts” upon which Western civilization stands (771).

Truth, as such, is “a highly subjective formulation” which is only ever

measured against man, and man’s perception of the world (771). These “relations of succession and number” are produced “within ourselves and from ourselves,” but this fact must be conveniently forgotten in order to allow for some semblance of “peace, security, and consistency” (770). Over time, these representations of truth are taken as the truth itself, acquiring “the same significance for all human beings,” who in turn take these laws to be infallible (770). The truth is entrancing only because its artificial construction is forgotten; this fact is no more apparent 41

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than in the sheer ridiculousness of the U.S. waging a “war on terrorism”—a war which, ironically, should be fought from within. As Žižek cogently demonstrates, this war, fought on land that came into being only through the influence of outside forces, is a “struggle internal to the capitalist universe” (55). Afghanistan “never existed ‘in itself,’” for its very existence was founded, crucially, upon “the interplay of foreign powers” (55). The Taliban, too, almost universally taken to be the defining symbol of Muslim fundamentalism, was born from necessity as a means of self-defence, coming into being only through the support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United States of America” (43). Osama Bin Laden, the infamous mastermind behind the World Trade Center attacks, came to power only after the CIA financed the Taliban to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, teaching its enemies the very combat tactics it currently employs to fight against “the monster it created” (51).

The intricacies of these past histories are inextricable from the present

situation, despite all efforts to efface the past, or indeed, to remain in a state of easy ignorance that takes both American hegemony and Islamic fundamentalism for granted. The potency of the word “fundamentalism” has become so diluted as to mean nothing at all; Žižek contends that Muslim fundamentalists are not true fundamentalists at all but only modernists who strive for equal accommodation in a world dominated by capitalism. Like Hayden White, Žižek rejects “absolutization” in favour of viewing “historical constellations” as being contingent upon their interpretations. When Jacques Derrida received the Theodor Adorno award a mere eleven days after 9/11, he implicated himself—along with all Americans— in the crime, asserting: “I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless” (qtd. in Žižek 57). Each historical constellation, as White would hold, is similarly 42

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predicated on ideological “truths” that have been so frequently employed both in popular and academic discourse that they have ossified into “absolute dogmatic beliefs” (Spinks 43). Rather than absolve itself of all culpability, America should instead recognize that the evils it locates in the insidious Other also reside within its borders. Nietzsche takes existence within a “horizon” to be a universal law, for, in his view, humans can “be healthy and strong and productive” only within the limits of truthful representation (Strong 26). However cognizant Žižek may be of these boundaries, he privileges one in particular, that of “the Other’s radical Otherness” (67). He contends that there exists an “impenetrable abyss” within every person, one that cannot be underestimated in judging justice itself (67). The Talmudic saying “whomsoever saves one life saves the world entire” is especially resonant here: Žižek argues that we must close the gap between “Us and Them,” and cease privileging the World Trade Center attacks over any other instance of Evil in the world (137).

Nietzsche suggests that it is by means of dissimulation that “weaker,

less robust individuals” are able to keep ranks with the strong, honing the arts of “keeping up appearances,” “wearing masks,” and “speaking behind the backs of others” (765). These acts constitute “the constant fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity,” which Žižek portrays as a spark which can quickly degenerate into something much more insidious. Characterizing the 9/11 attacks as “the last spectacular cry of twentieth-century warfare,” he contends, somewhat hyperbolically, that the universe is beginning to collapse, regardless of our ability to recognize the symptoms of this disintegration (37). What awaits us, in his view, is “something much more uncanny”—namely, the ever-looming threat of an invisible war being waged exclusively with “immaterial” weapons, such 43

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as viruses both physical and virtual (emphasis added, 37). War, then, will not be fought exclusively on the battlefield but will also extend behind computer screens, in a horribly one-sided manner “deprived of its substance” (37). The radical “desubstantialization” of war is shielded by the illusory and oft-held notion of the “clash of civilizations”; the most horrific crimes, both past and present, arise from “within each civilization” but are pinned on convenient targets such as Muslim fundamentalism (41). That “human beings do not so much flee from being tricked as from being harmed by being tricked” becomes painfully obvious in consideration of the fact that an unflagging belief in “pure truth” is made possible only if we are not directly implicated in uncensored reality (766). Truths are substantiated by means of self-reinforcing repetition: they must be forgotten before they can be rendered eternally consistent and infallible (Spinks 49).

Towards the end of his essay, Nietzsche distinguishes between the man

of reason and the man of intuition: “the latter,” he notes, “is as unreasonable as the former is unartistic” (773). Though both “desire to rule over life,” the man of intuition seeks not just freedom from pain but also a “constant stream of brightness” which allows for redemption and release (773). Sadly, the man of reason, armed with the noblest of intentions, only deceives himself in carrying out “a masterpiece of pretence” even when faced with crippling adversity (774). It is thus that the man of intuition can be seen to suffer more severely, but also to experience greater and more frequent joy, becoming a wellspring of creativity which is fundamental for any self-sustaining civilization. This disparity in experience between the man who is “guided by concepts and abstractions” and the man who “wields his weapons more mightily and victoriously” can be juxtaposed against yet another opposition, that of the Master and Servant in the Hegelian tradition (773). Žižek points out an 44

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oft-overlooked paradox: despite the fact that the West is commonly perceived as being a community of exploitative masters, he contends that the real masters are Muslim “fundamentalists” who are ready to risk their lives. Such willingness is starkly contrasted against the collective will of the Nietzschean Last Men, who are unable or unwilling to risk their lives because they value life and have the luxury of experiencing its pleasures (41). Those who cherish the “sacredness of life,” Žižek argues, are enslaved by an aversion to risk or harm that may compromise this sanctity (90). Just as Nietzsche wonders if humans are ever capable of “perceiving themselves in their entirety just once,” Žižek raises the distinctly uncomfortable, and in some ways, unanswerable question: “Who is really alive today? (emphasis added, 88). However compelling it may be to equate a life defined by artificial and quotidian pleasures to a sort of “death” in life, it becomes dangerous to take Žižek’s answer indiscriminately: he argues that life is worth living only if humans can be devoted to a cause for which they are ready to risk their lives.

Such is the paradox of courage: in the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, we must “desire life like water and yet drink death like wine”—that is to say, we should cling to life even as we must act indifferently towards it (90).

Truth, as both Nietzsche and Žižek hold, is inextricable from the Real;

indeed, may even constitute it (Zupančič 94). Whereas the Lacanian Symbolic is “the shelter of life,” the Real exposes its vulnerability (94). This vulnerability, it seems, should be accepted and even embraced, instead of hidden under the guise of American invincibility. The 9/11 attacks, more than any other event in recent memory, forced Americans into recognizing a brutal truth: that the “fantasmatic screen” behind which it had previously shielded itself from the “Outside World” exists only as a chimera. (Zupančič 119; Žižek 49). After all, why should the World 45

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Trade Center attacks be weighed with more gravitas than any occasion of mass slaughter in the world? To be sure, the 9/11 attacks were inconceivably horrific, but would it not be fair—though perhaps politically incorrect in the West—to argue that the collective suffering experienced in the Rwandan Genocide, or the Bosnian War, or the Cambodian Killing Fields was infinitely greater than that which befell New York? The 9/11 attacks have come to acquire a certain mythology surrounding its immortalized spectacle; if Al Qaeda aimed to, as Žižek believes, “(re)introduce the dimension of absolute negativity into our daily lives,” then it has surely succeeded in jolting us from our insulated complacency (142). We must dismantle the “truth” of universal human rights for what it is: a mere farce (150). That is, to say, we must recognize that “the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover ” is one that has yet to be demolished, let alone widely recognized (150). The real threat to the safeguarding of our continued obliviousness, then, is “an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us” precisely because we cannot locate it within ourselves (767).

However fervently our established truths aim at penetrating the Real, if we can only acknowledge that our experiences are “subjectively mediated and necessarily partial,” we will have only regressed even in the wake of such “debilitating awe” (Zupančič 106; Žižek 142). Instead of clinging blindly to the back of a tiger, as Nietzsche would have it, we must free ourselves from our fortress of illusory untruths and recognize that anything that “shouldn’t have happen[ed] here,” shouldn’t have happened anywhere (49).

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Works Cited Kain, Philip J. Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence. Lanham: Lexington, 2009. Print.

Leitch, Vincent B. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” The Norton Anthology of

Theory and Criticism. 2nd edition. New York: Norton, 2001. 764-74. Print.

Spinks, Lee. Friedrich Nietzsche. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Strong, Tracy B. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley:

University of California, 1975. Print.

Vivian, Bradford. “Freedom, Naming, Nobility: The Convergence of Rhetorical and Political

Theory in Nietzsche’s Philosophy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40.4 (2007): 372-93.

Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002. Print.

Zupančič, Alenka. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge,

MA: MIT, 2003. Print.

47

The Novel of Contingency: On The Childhood of Jesus and Meillassoux Carter West

J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus announces with its title that it exists

within an historical lacuna. Between the manger and the mission of Christ, there exists no doctrinal biography. Coetzee’s novel, though, does not speculate what the early life of Jesus contained. Instead, Coetzee adopts a temporality in the life of an original figure to saturate his novel in meaning. Whether the title was meant as a frontispiece or a one line epilogue—the author insists he intended the title to be the final passage of the novel—the words “the childhood of Jesus” demand that the reader interpret Coetzee’s novel in direct correspondence with the dominant figure of Western religion. But this demand is a punchline. Coetzee is interpreted as an allegorical novelist, and his works upon publication are taken over by historical commentary by critics and academics alike. Waiting for the Barbarians is read as a parable of colonialism, Foe a thinly veiled tale of South African racial strife. While there are merits to this work of find-the-allegory, Coetzee’s explicit headlining of the intended correspondence for The Childhood of Jesus undermines these investigative interpretations by suggesting that they are blatantly present. As early as his 2003 Nobel Lecture, Coetzee was undermining allegory as a means of representation: “‘It is an allegory!’ cries the woman on the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus is his report.” Though careful exegesis would draw out precisely how Coetzee’s novel about a man and a boy making a new life in a foreign land can be read as an allegory for Christ’s early life, this work would do nothing more than provide crib notes to the stated authorial intent.

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Thus, this paper will discard the task of reading The Childhood of Jesus

as a direct allegory not because it is irrelevant but because it is least interesting.

Rather, this paper will focus on the spatial designation of the title: a gap. The lacuna pointed to by the title is an empty space that the text inhabits, making it a text of pure possibility. This term is borrowed from Quentin Meillassoux whose recent essay After Finitude discusses the necessity of contingency. The essay argues two central points: (1) no thing which exists is necessary and (2) each thing is necessarily contingent, containing “pure possibility” (Meillassoux, 65). This formulation is helpful in beginning an analysis of The Childhood of Jesus that aims to demonstrate that the text serves as a model for the principle of contingency, not only in form and content but also as an object of text. The text places itself in a gap: the locale where the basis for written language and mathematics can be challenged, having its order replaced with the young boy David’s chaotic sight. This replacement does not establish a new order. Instead, it demonstrates the possibility of replacement, that the order of things known, the order of two languages of expression, can also have another order. Thus contingency—pure possibility—is championed against modes of interpretation that seek to see in the symbolic order of a text a separate symbolic order. The Childhood of Jesus is not the bildungsroman of Christ but our instruction in contingency.

Biblical numerology provides an alternate, and for some, more

authoritative meaning; the Revelation of John provides the most lucrative material for those seeking in numbers what they cannot find in language. The numerology of The Childhood of Jesus upends this search for meaning in numbers not only by discrediting abstract numerical values, but also by questioning the validity of the manipulative operation of figures.

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When David insists to his guardian Simon that he can count, Simon asks

what number follows 888: ‘92.’

‘Wrong. The next number is 889. Which of the two is bigger, 888 or 889?’

‘888.’

‘Wrong. 889 is bigger because 889 comes after 888.’

‘How do you know? You have never been there.’ (COJ, 150)

David endows numbers with location, a concrete place in the world. He accepts the existence of figures but absolutely, without abstraction. Later, David provides not only the location for figures but gives to them a temporality: ‘I think the stars are numbers. I think that is Number 11’—he stabs a finger up at the sky— ‘and that is Number 50 and that is Number 33333.’

‘Ah, do you mean, can we give each star a number?...’

‘No, silly, I said each star is a number.’

He shakes his head. ‘Each star is not a number.... For instance, the stars are scattered all over the heavens chaotically whereas the numbers are like a fleet of ships sailing in order, each knowing its place.’

‘They can die. Numbers can die. What happens to them when they die?’

‘Numbers can’t die. Stars can’t die. Stars are immortal.’

‘Numbers can die. They can fall out of the sky.’ (COJ, 177-178)

David’s numeric theory agrees with the first part of Meillassoux’s argument.

Numbers, like everything else, can possibly not exist. In giving numbers the identity of stardom, David delivers a relative permanence to numbers, which accords with a world in which numbers have been and continue to be present, while also refusing them an infinite permanence. However, the possibility of their non-existence is not pure possibility. In After Finitude, absolute contingency is differentiated from empirical contingency: Empirical contingency—which we will henceforth refer to using the term ‘precariousness’— generally designates a perishability that is bound to be realized sooner or later. This book, this fruit, this man, this star, are all bound to perish sooner or later.... Thus ‘precariousness’ designates a possibility of

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not-being which must eventually be realized. By way of contrast, absolute contingency... designates a pure possibility; one which may never be realized.

For we cannot claim to know for sure whether or not our world, although it is contingent, will actually come to an end one day.... [We must] insist that both the destruction and the perpetual preservation of a determinate entity must equally be able to occur for no reason. Contingency is such that anything might happen, even nothing at all, so that what is, remains as it is.

(Meillassoux, 62-63)

Therefore, to assert that David creates a numerology which fulfills the second part of Meillassoux’s formulation, that they are absolutely contingent, containing pure possibility, it must be demonstrated that David’s numbers, while they can fall out of the sky, do not need to do so.

This is shown by comparing David’s unease with numbers in The

Childhood of Jesus to the unease felt by the protagonist of Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Torless. This novel, which Coetzee introduces in the 1997 Penguin re-issue, shares in its titular implication with The Childhood of Jesus that its form will follow the novel of education, the bildungsroman. Like Coetzee, however, Musil undermines the structure of the bildungsroman, which M.H. Abrams describes as: The development of the protagonist’s mind and character, in the passage of childhood through varied experiences—and often through a spiritual crisis— into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one’s identity and role in the world. (Abrams, 112-113)

In the two novels, the development of the protagonists’ varied experiences gives way to a maturity that sees both holding identities unacceptable to the world they inhabit. David’s unrelenting assertion of his correct sight has him moved from a school in Novilla to be boarded at Punto Arenas, and Torless’s articulation to his school masters of his take on the hierarchical structures of adolescence has him 51

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sent home for good. The boys share a similar crisis in their refusal to accept the number theory they are instructed in. For David, a number cannot exist separated from the object it represents, “a star is a number” (COJ, 177). And a multiplicity of these objects cannot be combined as the represented object defies multiplicity by belonging in a category of only itself, even if it belongs to a more general designation. Therefore, numbers do not exist on a level of abstraction. Torless shares David’s difficulty with abstraction, but focusses his attention not on locating the number itself, but on questioning the operation which manipulates it: What is actually so odd is that you can really go through quite ordinary operations with imaginary or other impossible quantities, all the same, and come out at the end with a tangible result!... Look think of it like this: in a calculation like that you begin with ordinary solid numbers, representing measures of length or weight or something else that’s quite tangible—at any rate, they’re real numbers. And at the end you have real numbers. But these two lots of real numbers are connected by something that simply doesn’t exist.

Isn’t that like a bridge where the piles are there only at the beginning and at the end, with none in the middle, and yet one crosses it just as surely and safely as if the whole of it were there?’ (Musil, 97-98)

Here, Torless identifies the feature that makes numbers absolutely contingent. The operation that manipulates a number becomes an object of faith. The presumed central pile provides the needed assurance for a driver to get from one side of the bridge of the other, but it does not exist. In the same way, an operation used in a mathematical formula is an article of faith that accomplishes something concrete.

Thus, Torless’s surprise is how an operation can take two non-real numbers, imaginary numbers, and make them a real number. The object of the operation saves a number from ever not being, from being imaginary, and delivers a possible permanence as demanded by Meillassoux’s formulation.

The life-giving possibility of operations is also shown in The Childhood 52

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of Jesus. Asked by Senor Leon to complete a simple 5+3 equation, David struggles for a while and arrives at the correct answer 8 only after muttering “this time... this time” (COJ, 225). In this case, David accepts the symbol-function ‘+’ to arrive at the one-time conclusion that five and three make eight (that David’s one instance of conventional mathematics has him accepting the symbol of operation that resembles the cross is one of the crib notes to be expected from the work of the find-the-allegory critic or scholar). Operations make absolute contingency possible. In trying to explain David’s relationship with numbers to Eugenio, Simon describes his attempt at sharing David’s vision: ‘I tried, as a mental exercise, to see the world through David’s eyes. Put an apple before him and what does he see? An apple: not one apple, just an apple.

Put two apples before him. What does he see? An apple and an apple: not two apples, not the same apple twice, just an apple and an apple....He won’t take the steps we take when we count: one step two step three. It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void.

What if I fall? — that is what he asks himself.... If getting from one to two is so hard... how shall I ever get from zero to one? (COJ, 248-249)

The step from one number to another number, the operation, is plagued with the fear of falling between two distinct locations; how can anyone step between stars? By the end of the novel though, David has accepted that these steps can be accomplished on a case-by-case basis if enough faith is placed on the non-tangible article of faith, the operation. The non-existent central pile makes traveling possible because enough people believe in its presence, or at least, believe in the security which demands the presence of a central pile. This presence, which is not a presence, makes the security and permanence of the bridge possible. Operations offer absolute contingency because they offer to sustain numbers by manipulating them, ensuring that the stars need not fall out of the sky—they support a continued 53

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constellation. David’s numeric theory completes Meillassoux’s demands for pure possibility by marrying his re-ordering of numbers as locations with his nuanced acceptance of the possibility offered by operations.

This acceptance contains the acknowledgement of faith in an unseen

operation. David accepts that five and three make eight and so confirms that the unseen is real even though it does not exist because others acknowledge the result which demands the presence of the unseen, the operation. The functioning of language is predicated on this faith and is more deeply engrained. A word is not subjected to the same scrutiny as numbers: David does not demand that each word inhabit a single location. Language itself however, undergoes a reordering in his hands that endows it with pure possibility. When asked by Simon why he is flipping the pages of Don Quixote so quickly, David replies: ‘Because. Because if I don’t hurry a hole will open.’

‘Open up where?’

‘Between the pages.’

‘That’s nonsense. There is no such thing as a hole between the pages.’

‘There is a hole. It’s inside the page. You don’t see it because you don’t see anything.’ (COJ, 166)

Like numbers that contain between them a void only vaulted by a faith in operations, the space between pages opens a gap between words that can be fallen through.

David overcomes this gap by turning the pages faster than the words themselves can be read. Without pausing to contemplate the gap, the gap does not open large enough to swallow David. The relation between the gap and the page is articulated in Giorgio Agamben’s article “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in which he discusses the object of the writing tablet functioning “precisely to represent the mode in which pure potentiality exists....just as the layer of sensitive wax is suddenly grazed 54

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by the scribe’s stylus, so the potentiality of thought, which in itself is nothing, allows for the act of intelligence to take place” (245). Thus the sheet on which nothing is written represents a pure potentiality, which Agamben later refers to as “the abyss of potentiality” (254). David deepens this abyss by seeing even in a sheet full of words a consuming hole. For him, words themselves contain precariousness, the potential to not be even when they are tangible. It is this tangibility that continues the abyss because in their representation of pure potentiality, words force a once blank page to cease containing pure potentiality and begin representing actualized thought. Thus, representing a realized potentiality, the page becomes the location where words are. Once localized on the page, the journey between two pages of written words become like the journey between two stars: impossible without an operation of faith to sustain the crossing.

What endows words with pure possibility is David’s refusal to accord any

written word with permanent meaning. This is evident in the way he chooses to learn to read. Simon presents David with two options: ‘There are two ways of learning to read, David. One way is to learn the words one by one, as you are doing. The other way, which is quicker, is to learn the letters that make up the words. There are only twenty-seven of them. Once you have learned them, you can spell out strange words for yourself, without having me tell you each time.’

The boy shakes his head. ‘I want to read the first way.’ (COJ, 161)

David’s choice echoes his attitude toward numbers. He will not learn a written word outside of what it means to the words that surround it. David will not even learn the means of word construction, the letters of the alphabet. His reluctance to do so questions the objects of letters themselves having any meaning distinct from the words they represent. This un-meaning of letters is shown by the un-meaning 55

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of the original letter which permits the events of The Childhood of Jesus. David’s letter containing the name of his biological mother is lost and as a lost object means nothing but the very un-meaning which unites David with Simon. The written word does not mean one thing always but is contingent upon its immediate context and even then, its meaning is not fixed. David’s ordering of written language achieves pure possibility by accepting its location on a page and denying that location any ability to permanently determine the written word’s meaning, even the context of words on a page does not designate a fixed meaning to that word.

David plays out this pure possibility when Simon asks him to copy

a passage from Don Quixote. Before this, David has been writing in a private language, strokes of pencil on paper which retain thought’s absolute potentiality by being pure possibility to whoever comes upon them, including David. When Simon realizes the boy can in fact read and write—“‘you were just playing a trick’— ‘I wasn’t playing a trick,’” says David. Simon asks him to copy the word God. David writes Deos. Simon corrects him; he ought to have written Dios. (COJ, 118). This is a mistake of pure possibility. Rather than copy down the Spanish word for God, David writes the accusative plural form for God in Latin. In the Vulgate bible, Deos appears infrequently and in particular in one significant passage, Exodus 20:3: “non habebis d eos alienos coram me,” “no God will come before me.”

David’s “mistake” inscribes onto a page the form of God as He appears in His first commandment to the Jews. The location of the page is not only copied Spanish fiction, but inadvertent Latin scripture which instructs that it, Deos, comes before everything, including the passage it is included in. David’s written word contains both locations at once and refuses the permanence of location that prevents absolute contingency. David’s ordering of written language therefore achieves 56

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pure possibility by sustaining the journey between two pages with an operation that un-fixes the meaning of words from their location.

David’s emergence as both a reader and a scribe of contingency can be

concretized by comparing his “mistaken interpretations” with the narrator of Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. Having taken upon himself to analyze a foreign script, the narrator cannot reconcile the myriad possibilities contained by the written text: I look at the lines written by a stranger long since dead. I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right. In the long evening I spent poring over my collection I isolated over four hundred different characters in the script, perhaps as many as four hundred and fifty. I have no idea what they stand for. Does each stand for a single thing, a circle for the sun, a triangle for a woman, a wave for a lake; or does a circle merely stand for “circle”, a triangle for “triangle”, a wave for “wave”? Does each sign represent a different state of the tongue, the lips, the throat, the lungs, as they combine in the uttering of some multifarious unimaginable extinct barbarian language?

Or are my four hundred characters nothing but scribal embellishments of an underlying repertory of twenty or thirty whose primitive forms I am too stupid to see? (Waiting for the Barbarians, 110-111)

The leap for contingency performed by David is that he understands even in the characters of a known script signs that could be far more and far less than the visible.

David has re-ordered numeric and written language into configurations

that demonstrate the pure possibility of both dialects. Moreover, this re-ordering makes The Childhood of Jesus a novel of pure possibility by illustrating the contingency of its own expression. This contingency is echoed in the content of the novel itself. The names of Simon and David are arbitrary and can be changed at the registry office whenever they wish. The mother of David, Ines, becomes David’s 57

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mother by Simon insisting that she adopt that designation. Her status of mother is achieved by alchemical language; a near biological relation born out of a word’s repetition. The spoken language of the novel, Spanish, is represented by English, English is called German and, as mentioned, scriptural Latin substitutes for spoken Spanish. These incorrect replacements of language become arbitrary and point to the futility of drawing the strict distinction of “foreign language” around any spoken word that is not recognized. It is simply language as yet unlearned by the hearer who does not yet understand that particular unit of language; but he still recognizes it as a possibility of language. Both form and content of The Childhood of Jesus contain pure possibility, which is at once the possibility that it not exist and the possibility that it persist. This second condition is met by the objectified text itself. As a book to be archived, shelved, read, passed down, found in trash, Coetzee’s novel as a text that has been set down contains the possibility that it will not ever cease to exist. The novel of contingency is purely possible by its ability to sustain itself, or just as readily, be thrown in a fire.

This paper began with the assertion that the identification of the contingent

nature of numerics and linguistics in The Childhood of Jesus is provoked by an interpretation of the gap announced by the title. In this gap, David’s chaotic sight is able to re-order these two languages and assert the contingency of the content and object of the novel by demonstrating that its expression takes part in the same pure possibility. More must now be said about this gap and David’s sight. When Simon looks into David’s eyes, he sees something there. He has no name for it. It is like—that is what occurs to him in the moment. Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try to grasp it. But not like a fish—no, like like a fish. Or like like like a fish. On and on. Then the

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moment is over, and he is simply standing in silence, staring. (COJ, 186-187)

Simon understands David’s vision as “like,” purely associative, achieving similarity only through distance from the object it is likened to. David’s sight, here, is chaos, pure possibility. He sees in a way that cannot put together any one thing wholly with another thing. There is always a gap in his vision that he fears falling into. From the opening chapters, David has repeated his fear of falling through something which is evident in his sight: ‘I don’t want to fall into a crack.’

‘That’s nonsense. How can a big boy like you fall down a little crack like that?’

‘Not that crack. Another crack.’

‘Which crack? Point to the crack.’

‘I don’t know! I don’t know which crack. Nobody knows.’

‘Nobody knows because nobody can fall through a crack in the paving. Now hurry up.’

‘I can! You can! Anyone can! You don’t know!’ (COJ, 35)

He sees this hole between pages and numbers and wants to avoid the abyss until, late in the novel, David’s position begins to soften. He asks Simon about the relationship between falling and flying.

‘What happens when you fall?’

‘It depends. If you are lucky you just get a bump. If you are unlucky, very unlucky, you can break an arm or a leg.’

‘No, what happens when you fall?’

‘I don’t understand. Do you mean, while you are falling through the air?’

‘Yes. Is it like flying?’

‘No, not at all. Flying and falling aren’t the same thing. Only birds can fly; we human beings are too heavy.’

‘But just for a little, when you are high up, it is like flying, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so, if you forget you are falling. Why do you ask?’

The boy gives an enigmatic smile. ‘Because.’ (COJ, 259)

After burning himself on the magnesium powder given to him by his dubious friend Daga, David describes his altered sight to Doctor Garcia who tends to his 59

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wounds. The Doctor explains to Simon and Ines that “we look to him like insects waving our feelers in the air while he flies high above” (COJ, 275). David’s sight which at all times showed to him the possibility of falling through the gaps of the world now shows that these gaps can provide the highest vantage point. Falling is also flying and in the final chapters of the novel, David lives his sight by seeing “cascades of stars” and “green light traveling across his vision” (COJ, 268). By falling into the gap, he realizes the pure possibility of his sight. In the same way, The Childhood of Jesus can be read as participating in this same “flying sight” of David‘s that awakens us to contingency. By insisting that it exists in an historical gap Coetzee’s novel is read from high above as we fall through and fly across its expanse without origin. The novel ends with the consequence of too much time falling through cracks: at some point, settlement is needed. A new life must begin.

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Works Cited Abrams, M. H., and Daniel Silas Norton. “Novel.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. 112-13.

Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby, or On Contingency”. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans and ed. Daniel Heller-Rosen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999.

Coetzee, J.M. The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker. 2013.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin. 1982.

Coetzee, J. M. “Nobel Lecture: He and His Man.” nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013.

Web. 11 Dec 2013.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans: Ray Brasier. New York: Bloomsbury. 2012.

Musil, Robert. Young Torless. Trans. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser. London: Penguin.

1961.

The Vulgate Bible. Trans. Douay-Rheims. Ed. Edgar Swift. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2010

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“Nothing but Chaotic Manuscripts”: An Analysis of Defamiliarization in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” Halyna Chumak Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” relies on metafictional devices to “create a special perception” (Shklovsky 52) of the work, and in effect, imposes a particularly confusing aesthetic experience upon its readers. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a story composed of two distinct, fictional excerpts: the first is an editorial comment on an historical “Allied offensive” (Borges 119) during the First World War, whereas the second, subsequent extract is an incomplete statement by Dr. Yu Tsun—a “former professor of English” (119), who murders a renowned British Sinologist for reasons initially unclear.

While Borges does eventually reveal Yu Tsun’s motivations and “plan” (120) for the murder, the work’s stylistic features—such as its fragmented narrative, often ambiguous tone, and selective repetition of particular words or phrases—create a puzzling and problematic experience for the reader. From a Russian Formalist perspective, Borges’ work can be seen as a carefully crafted “assemblage of devices” (Henderson Lecture 3) meant to “increase the difficulty and length of perception” (Shklovsky 50). By distorting and defamiliarizing conventional narrative in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges constructs an authentic experience and “riddle” (126) for his readers; he thrusts them into a “labyrinth” (124) of questions and endless “possibilities” (127), deliberately stimulating feelings of misunderstanding, confusion, and disorientation.

In his article “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky argues that the habitual perception of objects or images eventually binds perceivers 62

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in a state of unconscious automatism; a perceiver grows accustomed to seeing an object in a particular manner, and becomes unable to see it any differently (Shklovsky 49). Moreover, the perceiver views the object in a consistent manner, without necessarily realizing that he or she perceives the object consistently.

Shklovsky posits that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life,” and that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (50). He notes that in literature, poetic language functions to make the act of perception more strenuous and difficult; by unexpectedly changing—and in effect, defamiliarizing—the images or stylistic features of a text, an author prolongs the length of perception, and generates a “special” (52) experience for the reader. Art, for Shklovsky, is essentially experience-driven; art is meant to combat “the unconsciously automatic” (49) perceptions, and to give perceivers (or readers) the ability to authentically experience “the process of perception[—]an aesthetic end in itself” (50, emphasis added). Furthermore, Russian Formalists view a literary text as an “ assemblage of devices,” in which any unfamiliar, perception-prolonging feature operates as a device of defamiliarization.

They are more concerned with readers’ raw perceptions, experiences, and “vision” (52) of poetic language than with the imparting meanings or themes.

The opening lines of “The Garden of Forking Paths” are constituted by an editorial comment, which both describes a delayed ‘Allied offensive’ in 1916 and introduces the reader to the confessional statement of Dr. Yu Tsun. The story begins by alluding to “page 242 of The History of the World War, [where] Liddell Hart tells us that an Allied offensive against the Serre-Montauban line…had been planned for July 24, 1916, but had to be put off until the morning of the twentyninth” (Borges 119). This style of narration challenges the reader’s expectations 63

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of a conventional short story, as the first line of the work specifically gestures to a particular page of another work—one that the reader is undoubtedly unfamiliar with. Moreover, this first sentence positions the reader and frame narrator as passive listeners meant to absorb information and details, as the (presumably) fictional historian Liddell Hart “tells us” what happened in the 1916 offensive.

The introductory sentences are also driven by unnecessary, yet extremely descriptive, details. For instance, the reader is informed that the offensive was “(to be mounted by thirteen British divisions backed by one thousand four hundred artillery pieces),” and that “[t]orrential rains (notes Capt. Liddell Hart) were the cause of [the offensive’s] delay—a delay that entailed no great consequences, as it turns out” (119). Phrases contained in parentheses are often words that are unnecessary, yet included by the author nonetheless. By including numerically descriptive details, Borges suggests that this information is unnecessary, additional and supplementary. The inclusion of additional facts gives the reader the sense of reading a work of non-fiction, based on real, historical circumstances, rather than a work of fiction. The phrase “notes Capt. Liddell Hart” can be viewed as an additional device in the establishment of a non-fictional tone; however, this quote also suggests to the reader that Liddell Hart is still acting as an authoritative, knowledgeable figure, informing him or her.

The introduction of “The Garden of Forking Paths” creates a puzzling experience for the reader. The reader essentially enters the text feeling like an outsider, unaware of the extremely specific sources and circumstances being cited, while simultaneously being informed by this unfamiliar “Capt. Liddell Hart.” Using Shklovsky’s terms, Borges is exercising his “artistic trademark” and incorporating “material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception” (Shklovsky 64

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783). The text forces the reader to pace themselves and absorb the information written, because the reader enters the text disadvantaged, without knowledge of the July 1916 “ Allied Offensive,” “page 242 of The History of the World War,” or “Capt. Liddell Hart.” Ironically, the reader is given factual-sounding information about a delay in an ‘Allied offensive’ that ‘entailed no great consequences, as it turns out.’ If the delay did not cause any great or tangible effect, why does the author insist on providing the reader with multiple facts and details about it? In offering a possible answer to this question, the frame narrator—an editor-figure—states that “[t]he statement which follows—dictated, reread, and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English in the Hochschule at Tsingtao—throws unexpected light on the case” (Borges 119). Again, these lines imply that the information to be bestowed upon the reader is a kind of real, non-fictional knowledge, as the statement is ‘dictated, reread, and signed’ by a ‘former professor of English’ in a higher educational environment, but “[t]he two first pages of the statement are missing” (119). By the end of the introduction, the reader is once again positioned as a disadvantaged party, ‘missing’ contextual information. Borges’ shrewd editorial comment toys with readers; it makes them feel that they lack the requisite knowledge to enter the text, and then offers some (arguably irrelevant) information as a form of appeasement, only to re-disadvantage and constrain the reader again with ‘missing’ knowledge. These defamiliarized opening lines permit the reader to “recover the sensation of life” (Shklovsky 50) and feel as if he or she is learning something—only to consequently feel misinformed and puzzled: Borges plays a kind of joke upon his audience.

Similarly, the beginning of Dr. Yu Tsun’s statement reemphasizes the reader’s lack of knowledge and perpetuates the genuine sensation of under65

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information. Not only is the reader missing the “two first pages,” he or she is also missing the first half of the statement’s first sentence: “…and I hung up the receiver” (Borges 119). The sentence indicates that a conversation has taken place— the content of which the reader will never fully know. Borges deliberately taunts his readers and destabilizes any presumptions of knowledge or understanding they might think they have (or are entitled to). In effect, his effort to limit the amount of information given to readers ultimately makes them feel uncomfortable with the text, and self-conscious of their abilities to understand the story.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” also forces the reader to question the reliability of its narrators, and as a result, the information he or she is receiving.

A few lines into Yu Tsun’s statement, Borges provides a footnote—presumably constructed by the same frame narrator who wrote the story’s introduction. Yu Tsun interprets the presence of Captain Richard Madden—the man he believes is out to find and arrest him for being an “agent of the German Empire”—in his own 1 ally’s flat as meaning that “Runeberg[, his ally] had been arrested, or murdered. ” (119). In the footnote provided, the frame narrator denotes the arrest or murder of Viktor Runeberg to be “[a] bizarre and despicable supposition” (119) on Yu Tsun’s behalf. Moreover, this “editor’s note” claims that Runeberg—depicted as a victim

by Yu Tsun—actually “turned an automatic pistol on his arresting officer, Capt.

Richard Madden” and that “Madden, in self-defense, inflicted the wounds…that caused [Runeberg’s] subsequent death” (119, emphasis added). As a result, the reader is left with two diverging views on a single event; in Yu Tsun’s version, Runeberg is “arrested, or murdered,” whereas in the editor’s version, Runeberg is killed by Richard Madden in ‘self-defense.’ As a device of defamiliarization, the footnote performs two functions. First, it forces the reader to question the validity 66

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and trustworthiness of Yu Tsun’s account; and just as the reader begins to ease into a statement meant to ‘throw unexpected light’ on the puzzling circumstances presented in the introduction, Borges deploys another technique designed to eliminate any certainty or conclusions that the reader has, or intends to develop.

Second, the footnote gives “The Garden of Forking Paths” a formal element characteristic of non-fiction works, or official, factual documents. This generates an experience of confusion for the reader: “The Garden of Forking Paths” is fictitious, yet resembles non-fiction, and suggests that it will provide “light,” yet perpetually problematizes the minimal amount of information it does provide.

Borges effectively provides his readers with a “special perception” in which readers become aware—and perhaps frustrated—confined to their roles as players in Borges’ figurative game of “chess” (126).

Ellipses, as used in the first sentence of Dr. Yu Tsun’s statement, are also a device Borges frequently uses in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” They represent the trailing-off of thoughts and phrases, and often suggest that the reader is missing gaps of information. For instance, when Yu Tsun sits on his bed reflecting on the conversation he had with Capt. Richard Madden, he speculates that “all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me...” (120 ). In his metaphysical speculations, Yu Tsun denies the reader knowledge of what “has happened to him”; the reader is denied privileged access to the protagonist’s mind. Likewise, when Yu Tsun thinks to himself, “[i]f only my throat, before a bullet crushed it, could cry out that name [of the new British artillery park] so that it might be heard in Germany…

But my human voice was so terribly inadequate” (120), he deliberately avoids 67

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mentioning the name of the park. By relying on ellipses, Borges repeatedly tempts the reader with the illusion of impending knowledge, yet stops short of delivering.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” essentially operates as a riddle. The reader is told about an Allied offensive that was delayed by torrential rains, and is then offered a statement by a Dr. Yu Tsun. In the statement, Yu Tsun suspects that his ally has been killed, and that he is likewise being pursued by their antagonist, Richard Madden. Madden presumably intends to either eliminate him or arrest him for being an agent of the German Empire during wartime. With the fear that he will soon be captured, Yu Tsun realizes that he must find a way of communicating the name of the new British artillery park to his leader, who will have it destroyed.

As a result, Yu Tsun orchestrates a plan in which he travels to visit the renowned British sinologist, Dr. Stephen Albert. Coincidentally, he is studying the work of one of Yu Tsun’s ancestors—Ts’ui Pen—a governor and polymath “who abandoned it all in order to compose a book and a labyrinth” (124). Albert argues them to be one and the same, in the form of a complex manuscript on the notions of time and the multiplicity of possibility. Thinking that he sees Richard Madden in Albert’s garden, Yu Tsun kills Albert, and is arrested. He is waiting to be hanged when he dictates and authenticates the statement being read by the reader. The story ends with Yu Tsun feeling regret and “weariness” (128), despite having succeeded in communicating the message to his leader. The leader “solved the riddle. He knew that [Yu Tsun’s] problem was how to report (over the deafening noise of war) the name of the city named Albert, and that the only way [he] could find was murdering a person of that name” (128).

Although readers eventually obtain the name that instigates the pursuit and death of Yu Tsun, Borges provides “a special perception” of the story. At times, 68

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“The Garden of Forking Paths” forces the reader to feel as if he or she does not, and will not, possess an adequate amount of knowledge to understand the plot, yet it discreetly provides the reader with the necessary tools to solve the mystery. In the discussion between Stephen Albert and Yu Tsun, Albert states: The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts’ui Pen the merest mention of its name.

To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. (126)

The author essentially bares the device of his own work; the title of Borges’ story is also “The Garden of Forking Paths,” subtly signaling to the reader that the work—a seemingly “chaotic” (125) and “contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts” (124)—is also a riddle, with “tortuous path[s] chosen by the devious Ts’ui Pen [, or Borges,] at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel [, or short story]” (126-127).

Borges problematizes the reader’s experience with the text by

defamiliarizing conventional narrative structures, and creating a puzzle for the reader to solve— using his literary resources with great concision. Furthermore, the short story is undoubtedly artistic and poetic on Shklovsky’s terms. Borges’ work intentionally “make[s] forms difficult” (Shklovsky 50) by perpetually employing devices that undermine the reader’s ability to solve the riddle. As a result, perception is prolonged, as the reader experiences confusion and perhaps even frustration. In “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky notes that “[a]rt is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” because “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (50). Borges repeatedly taunts and undercuts the knowledge of the reader, but 69

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this particular perception of the plot ultimately enriches the reader’s experience.

Borges’ work does not appease or gratify its reader immediately; it forces the reader to actively work through the puzzle, and question the information being presented, if that reader hopes to gain the solution. By enmeshing readers in his “riddle” or “labyrinth,” Borges resuscitates his audience and gives them the ability to “recover the sensation of life” which has become lost through the endless recycling of typical, and common, literary conventions.

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Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions.

Ed. Maria Kodama. New York: Penguin Group, 1998. 119-128. Print.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 3rd Ed. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 774-784. PDF. ——. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Modern Literary Theory, 4th Ed. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 49-52. Print.

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Identity, Agency and Artistry in Ulysses Daniel Glassman It is my conviction that, in engaging with something of the immensity and complexity of Ulysses, what is called for is an essay in the truest sense: an attempt. Anything less is an injustice: The only proper approach is to bite off more than you can chew and hope that you don’t choke (and if it tastes good, all the better). Therefore, with no further ado: In characterizing the three “leads”—Stephen, Bloom and Molly—and their different ideas of and relations to identity, agency and artistry, while taking into account elements of the overall formal/stylistic structure of Ulysses in relation to itself and to the book’s explicit intertexts—The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte— with the aid of an idea eloquently expressed by Theodor Adorno, I hope to come to an understanding of an aspect of Joyce’s artistic project. The idea I’m taking from Adorno is drawn from Negative Dialectics, “What is incumbent on [philosophy], is the effort to go beyond the concept, by means of the concept” (26-28). Substituting artistry for philosophy, the same directive, I contend, ultimately holds for Ulysses. ) For Adorno, the concept mediates recognition of the “nonidentical” (a sort of re-theorization of the Kantian “thing-in-itself”), and his “negative dialectics” deconstruct these concepts to recognize the true object of philosophy, which is not only beyond sensory experience but also any particular conceptual apparatus. I contend that Joyce, in Ulysses, is up to something similar.

This essay will discuss Stephen first, around whom Joyce’s ideas about artistry and contingency are most explicitly articulated, and then move on to Bloom and Molly, 72

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whose rather more complex identities and agencies, informed not only by ideas from Marx and Shakespeare, but also from a revisionary take on the Odyssey, will nuance the perspective gleaned from my analysis of Stephen and his milieu, ultimately pointing towards how Joyce conceives of his own artistic practice.

Stephen, the aspiring writer, is obsessed with what might be termed an ‘ethics of creativity.’ Throughout the “Proteus” episode, he considers the, “ineluctable modality of the visible,” (45) and his role in representing it. Is authorship about attaching names to things, or is it a more passive project of organization and presentation? Neither option seems satisfactory: For Stephen, in “Proteus” and elsewhere, naming is a violent, unjust act, while “aquacities of thought,” (785) which might present the protean world in a more respectful way, are also beneath Stephen’s contempt; indeed, such “aquacity” is incompatible with “the erratic originality of genius.” (786) What, then, can Stephen think is the role of the artist? This problem remains an anxiety for Stephen through Ulysses, and it is given further resonance with the understanding that Stephen totally identifies himself and his agency with his convoluted conception of his artistry. Just as Stephen resists naming the world, he also resents being named, particularly by Buck Mulligan, whose overeager identifying of this, that, and the other stands as a negative example to Stephen: a bad artist. Artistry, for Stephen and for Joyce, is concerned with identity at a far deeper level. Stephen’s agency in Ulysses will be determined by his attempts at artistry and the recognition of him by others as an artist: The only substantial actions Stephen takes throughout Ulysses are literary— the imagined family episode in “Proteus”, the quickly composed fiction in “Aeolus”, and so on. But his ambivalent attitude towards naming persists throughout.

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bristles at: being reminded of his mother’s death. To this end, we might consider Stephen’s famous line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (42). Considering this anxiety over historical contingency in connection with Stephen’s solipsism regarding the existence of the immediately perceptible world, it seems as though Stephen’s idea of artistry-agency is one that is therefore outside both spatial and temporal contingency. Looking back at the beginning of Marx’s 19th Brumaire, which is referencing, we can see already the pitfalls that await Stephen in his attempt to escape his spatio-temporal determinations: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;

they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” (15)

Marx notes that it is precisely those who believe themselves revolutionaries who are most liable to repeat gestures of historical actors (and are thus certainly still within history, though perhaps to a limited degree outside of their particular context). In waking from history’s nightmare, is Stephen not similarly doomed to repeat the artistic projects of past poets and thus fail in his particular project?1 Stephen’s troubled take on his artistry is illuminated by the Hamlet 1 It is also worth noting that this excerpt directly follows another famous line: “[A]ll facts and personages of importance in world history occur, as it were, twice…: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It does not seem too much of a stretch to see Hamlet as the tragic iteration of the problems that, in Ulysses, become laughable farce.

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intertext, expressed most fully in “Scylla and Charybdis,” and refracted in “Circe.” As, “a great poet on a great brother poet,” (235) Stephen’s theory of Hamlet is that the artist is not, as is usually held, the titular young man, but is rather the ghost of Hamlet’s father—the cuckold, not the visionary: “—Is it possible that the player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin) is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?” (241)

How can this fit with Stephen’s identification with Hamlet, and with his expressed desire—in “Oxen of the Sun,” which is quoted below, and in “Circe,” in the confrontation with his mother’s corpse—to escape from the phantoms of the past, in spite of Marx’s warning, in the quote from the 18th Brumaire, that it is precisely this attempt to escape history that seems paradoxically to necessitate an anxious “conjuring” of the “spirits of the past”? We must remember that Stephen disavows his own theory by the end of “Scylla and Charybdis.” This does not mean that he does not believe it—rather, it points towards the complex picture of artistry that will find a visual manifestation in Shakespeare’s apparition in the mirror in “Circe”: Lynch: (Points) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs) Hu hu hu hu hu hu.

(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)

Shakespeare: (In dignified ventriloquy) ‘Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (To Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible.

Gaze. (He crows with a black capon’s laugh) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!

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The truth, then, is that Shakespeare is both Hamlet, the artist (“beardless”), and his father’s ghost, the cuckold (“crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack”). How does this reflect on Stephen’s own artistic ambition? It speaks to the dialectic between Hamlet and his father’s ghost: to the artist who is master and organizer of his surroundings but who is informed by, and beholden to, phantoms of the past.

With this in mind, let us turn to “Oxen of the Sun”: “Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call?

Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father. All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate. I heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent, Lenehan said, laying a hand on the shoulder near him, have no fear. He could not leave his mother an orphan. The young man’s face grew dark. All could see how hard it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss.” (543)

Stephen’s hubris in pompously declaring his mastery over the past quickly finds a nemesis as Vincent pokes fun at Stephen’s limited literary exploits and Lenehan provokes renewed guilt in Stephen over his mother’s death. Clearly, at least by this point in the novel, Stephen has not awoken from history’s nightmare—indeed, the formal structure of “Oxen of the Sun”, in which successive styles of English prose ultimately give way to an all but unintelligible chaos of various vernaculars, might be read as the nightmare of history becoming the nightmare of the present. We might read the end of “Circe,” with a ritually beaten Stephen lying in the fetal position singing the song he sang to his mother on her deathbed, as his longed-for awakening, 76

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his rebirth as Bloom’s son. But the anticlimax of the “Nostos” troubles that reading, suggesting perhaps that the escape from historical contingency was only temporary.

In the same way, Stephen has not come to terms in any permanent way

with his spatial contingency, that “ineluctable modality of the visible.” Throughout “Proteus,” where the reader is most privy to Stephen’s internal monologue, an abundance of colons in his thoughts is in evidence. Why would his thoughts fall into this pattern if not because of an anxiety around what a colon could represent: equation, causality, proof, and the like? The colon stands in for the working of Stephen’s “intellectual imagination”: He starts with something known or perceived and attempts to connect it with an idea, a metaphor, a reference—with the concrete determination that a colon suggests. Thus: “Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs”; “But he adds: in bodies”; “Five, six: the nacheneinander”; “Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible”; “Tap with it: they do,” etc. It is as though Stephen needs to convince himself of all rational and empirical connections, needs in fact to create them himself: This is, after all, the artist’s role, privilege and responsibility. (Yes, that is meant to sound ridiculous.)

Stephen’s anxiety over the act of identifying, as it pertains to his and others’ artistry-agency, betrays a relatively simplistic notion of what identifying really is. What Stephen recognizes and does not want to recognize is the necessity of naming as a first step to knowledge. As demonstrated, in lighthearted form, in “Wandering Rocks,” context is an essential mediator between people, but an over-identification with the roles prescribed by context—in the case of “Wandering Rocks,” Father Conmee as priest-and-only-priest; and the people he salutes, smiles at, tips his hat to, as good-Christians-and-only-good-Christians—is a superficial recognition, a crude simulacrum of the intensity of true recognition.

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In Stephen’s quixotic search in “Proteus” for the perfect metaphor or the perfect connection of ideas as the means to represent the protean world and the people and ideas that populate it, he is misconstruing the artistic project: If Stephen’s ultimate interest truly is in these transcendent moments, these ineffable and yet concrete connections, it will take much more work than he realizes.

Insofar as Stephen is the juvenile Joyce, it seems fair to characterize Joyce’s project in writing Ulysses as a development or revision of Stephen’s. So, following from Stephen’s failed poetic project, what Joyce seems to demonstrate is precisely the labour of immanent critique required to permit these moments of recognition. It is in relation to this that I find Adorno’s idea useful. The violence of those who are caught up in names as true identities—Buck Mulligan and the citizen in “Cyclops” foremost among them—is the violence of the lack of the immanent critique that artistry calls for, the non-recognition of the particularity that lies behind or beyond the conceptual apparatus. Conversely, Stephen’s artistic impotence is the result of the overreaction against this violence, the confusion he has imposed upon himself by the refusal to name; in refusing therefore to allow the world he sees to become a static conceptual context, Stephen denies himself the ability to begin the process of deconstruction that will permit true artistry, the true “intellectual imagination.” Joyce, like Stephen, is ultimately concerned with particularity, but he knows that he must move through language(s) and through history (or histories) in order to reach it. Particularity is the goal, but it will always be a limit point, something that can only be reached in moments (as Adorno also holds) and remains an anxiety right through the end of “Penelope”.

But I am getting ahead of myself! A discussion of Bloom’s and Molly’s ideas on these topics—identity, agency, and to a lesser degree artistry—should complicate 78

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Stephen’s juvenile notions, while pointing, also, towards Joyce’s artistic project.

If Stephen’s identity is cleanly equated with his ideas on artistry, the attempt to characterize Bloom’s identity and agency is a much messier proposition, precisely because his interaction with context is fundamentally more complicated.

Let’s begin theoretically, then, by examining in what manner—what context— Bloom’s agency could manifest itself. Simply put, where Stephen denies fixed identity, Bloom has it denied for him—Stephen is the self-imposed outsider, for whom mainstream society is not in fact inaccessible, while Bloom had his outsider status thrust upon him, never having had the option of simply “buying in” to the signs, symbols, gestures, opinions, and affects of the dominant culture. Characters try, throughout, to pin Bloom down, but he, without needing to try, resists all recognition. He is and is not all the things he is called (and implicitly also at various points calls himself): an Irishman, a Jew, a cuckold, an ad canvasser, a socialist, an artist, a man, a woman, etc. The conceptual context for Bloom’s identity and agency is, then, entirely ambivalent, resulting in his being misrecognized and misinterpreted in all sorts of ways. Let us examine a strange example of this from “Circe”: “Bloom: (Mumbles) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen…

Bello: (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour!

Bloom: (Infatuated) Empress!

Bello: (His heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump!

Bloom: (Plaintively) Hugeness!

Bello: Dungdevourer!

Bloom: (With sinews semiflexed) Magnificence.

Bello: Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan) Incline feet forward!

Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!

Bloom: (Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing) Truffles!

(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master)” (644)

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Bloom is engaging in a fetishized, sadomasochistic recognition scenario. In this moment, he has become a woman, and Bella Cohen has become a man, renamed Bello (though still confusingly called “Empress”). They name each other: Bello insults Bloom, Bloom venerates Bello; in the middle, Bello correctly calls out Bloom’s fascination with his wife’s posterior; and at the end, Bloom obeys Bello’s command, apparently becoming a pig (in an explicit reference to the Homeric intertext, in which Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs), and playing dead.

Could this refer back to Stephen’s anxiety over naming, in the incident with the dog on the beach in “Proteus”—naming as killing? In Bloom’s case, this idea becomes an object of play, of fantasy, a concept to be “deconstructed” in the way I believe Adorno means it. Bloom’s irreducible particularity will not fall into the conceptual rubric Stephen believes in—if Stephen is the Aristotelian categorizer, who believes he is discovering truth, Bloom is the great modernist personality whose complexity cannot properly be represented through such clear, discrete concepts.

Indeed, Joyce’s fundamental concern is with Bloom’s particularity (i.e. his “nonidentical”), over and above—that is, also, through, or after—the conceptual apparatus in which he does and does not have a role or roles. If Stephen’s agency is aimed, ultimately, at a praxis that perfectly fuses his thoughts on artistry; i.e. his identity, with their proper object; i.e. artistic creation, Bloom’s agency won’t reduce to such a clean conceptual framework: it will always be ambivalent and personal.

Bloom’s anxiety over agency might best be expressed through the iterations of the word “done.” It is used, tellingly (and autobiographically) to refer to both farting and Molly’s infidelity. At the end of “Sirens,” we have a parody of this complex: “Pprrpffrrppfff. Done” (376). And in “Nausicaa,” at the moment of Molly’s adultery,

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we have: “O, he did. Into her. She did. Done. Ah!” (482)2. Bloom’s agency takes place not in the pure realm of concepts but in the far more ambivalent realm of events, the particularities of which are produced through the admixture and deconstruction of concepts. Bloom’s “two-eyedness,” his (over-)willingness to see both sides of an issue, his obsession over “parallax,” points, I think, in this direction—nothing can be fully articulated for Bloom until all perspectives have been considered and, until then, he is stuck in the perverse parody of recognition seen in “Circe”.

Molly echoes this unease over agency and the event in “Penelope”: Following a description of sex with Boylan, she says, “Anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it” (875). But where Bloom’s unease is never fully articulated and remains an anxiety—perhaps his defining anxiety, when one considers also his persistent remembrance of past traumas, events that were beyond his control, outside his agency—Molly’s is thought through (though we may distrust her casual tone when we remember that it has, after all, taken her ten years of sexless marriage to follow through on infidelity). Molly’s agency is explicitly linked with vision, and therefore recognition, within and beyond mediation—both others’ and her own. She is aware of herself as an object of perception, particularly in a sexual context, and the role her vision (along with his, whoever the him may be) can also play: fantasizing, she says, “Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him” (874). Molly’s anxious considerations of human interchangeability throughout “Penelope”, which reach an apex just before the quasi-transcendent

2 First as farce, then as tragedy? Then farce again? Yet another way in which Bloom frustrates simple conceptual constructs.

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finale, reflect, ultimately, on Bloom’s particularity. “I thought well as well him as another” (933), she says, but when we consider not only all the things Molly knows about Bloom but also how well she knows him, along with all their mental similarities (not only the anxiety over agency and the event but also their “twoeyedness”, etc.) it is clear that she cannot possibly believe him to be just a man like any other. It is, indeed, in the remarkable performative vision of the book’s conclusion—“I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes” (933)—that we finally have a moment of recognition that approaches worthiness of Bloom’s particularity.

Bloom has, in “Nausicaa”, experienced a bad copy of this kind of event—after the voyeuristic escapade, he thinks, “Still it was a kind of language between us. It couldn’t be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like my and the address Dolphin’s barn a blind,” (485) in what can only be a parody of the real unspoken language that exists between Bloom and Molly in the oft-recalled moment at Howth: Molly’s belief in human interchangeability is therefore a misunderstanding of a bad copy for the real thing, the mediate for the immediate.

Given Molly’s back-and-forth thought process, it is best to take this belief in human interchangeability as an anxiety that she works through in engaging with individuals, in a process that looks, again, similar to Adorno’s idea of moving through the concept to the particular by way of the concept which has informed this essay.

Though it is tempting—and fruitful—to refract the entirety of Ulysses through the beautiful confusion of “Penelope”—to take the finale as a true transcendent conclusion, after the mere simulacra that have characterized the rest of the novel—there is an extent to which the effect of the “Nostos” as it pertains to Bloom and Stephen can be lost in that analysis. It cannot be avoided that the relative sobriety of “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca”, the failed union of “father” and 82

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“son,” which is marked, by and large, not by triumph but by embarrassment, is a letdown of literally epic proportions. And this fact cannot be ignored: It reflects a central principle of Joyce’s revision of Homer. The entire idea of the teleology of homecoming and the righteous satisfaction it entails is turned on its head in these chapters. Why? Bringing these to bear on Bloom’s wanderings—his deferral of homecoming—it plays back into Adorno’s idea of immanent critique.

The question has often been raised as to whether or not Ulysses really needs the Odyssey, or if the latter is merely an unnecessary, superfluous crutch. I contend that, here as elsewhere, the formal device—here an intertext, elsewhere a style, a voice, etc.—is a medium to be deconstructed and transcended, and as such can be made, in a proper reading, to illuminate the text—though, of course, an improper reading will lead to the sort of incomplete recognition discussed throughout this essay. The essential point is that Joyce’s purpose for the multitude of perspectives in Ulysses, which in the utopian project would in fact be an infinite parallax, is really about particularity: particularity as the limit point of the infinite multiplicity of perspectives. Indeed, as Adorno says of philosophy, “The illusion that it could captivate the essence in the finitude of its determinations must be given up. … Traditional philosophy believes it possesses its object infinitely, and thereby becomes as philosophy finite, conclusive. A different one ought to cashier that claim, no longer trying to convince itself and others that it has the infinite at its disposal. Instead of this it would become, put delicately, infinite to the extent that it refuses to define itself as a corpus of enumerable theorems. It would have its content in the polyvalence of objects not organized into a scheme, … it would truly deliver itself over to them.” (26)

For art as for philosophy: Joyce disavows the (infinite) truth claim of a (finite) unified aesthetic by engaging a theoretically infinite multiplicity of perspectives in order to engage with the infinite potentiality of particularity.

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Works Cited: Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. Dennis Redmond. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp

Verlag, 2001. Web. http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndintro.PDF

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Toronto: Penguin, 2011. Print. th Marx, Karl. The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Trans. An apparently anonymous

comrade. USA: International Publishers, 1963. Print.

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You row—I’ll steer Masculinity and domination in the rowboat scenes of Gor’kiy’s Chelkash and Zvyagintsev’s The Return Geordie Kenyon Sinclair In this paper, I use an interpretation of Maksim Gor’kiy’s story Chelkash (1895) to analyse a work with which it is deeply connected by common elements: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2003 film Vozvrashchenie (The Return). The two works are 108 years and a cultural age apart, from Gor’kiy’s proto-Soviet excited anticipation of the collapse of the Tsarist order, to Zvyagintsev’s acclaimed exploration of postSoviet Russia’s soul-searching. Yet, the connections are provocative, demanding a careful comparative interpretation, since it has important implications for understanding how the Russias of these two works relate to one another. Through a plot-based reading, I examine the relative positions of their characters: in both plots, men on covert operations bring along inexperienced boys, with contorted reasons for wanting their accompaniment. I explain Andrew Barratt’s compelling and iconoclastic interpretation (1993) of Chelkash as a psychological rather than moralistic narrative, and apply the principles of his interpretation to The Return.

Motivations in need of explanation in The Return are compellingly elucidated by similarities with Chelkash. The comparison turns to contrast to understand The Return’s conclusion, through its divergence from the principles of Chelkash’s.

The “Return” in question in the film is a father’s return after a twelve-year absence to his two young teenage sons and their mother. They dine together that evening, and the day after his unexpected-unexplained return, he takes the boys on a camping trip by car and boat with the ulterior and secret—implicitly criminal— motive of retrieving a metal box buried on an island, a trip which results in his 85

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accidental death. In Chelkash, the titular character meets a youth, Gavrila, by the Odessan seaside, takes him to dinner, and hires him as an assistant for the night in a theft and smuggling enterprise in the port, which concludes the next day in a violent dispute over the profits. These two stories of apparently hardened criminals bringing unhelpful—“soft”—boys along on their expeditions both involve rowboats as crucial tools, and both contain scenes during these boat trips which I propose can be considered distillations of the stories’ psychological dynamics.

In The Return, the rowboat succeeds the father’s car as the trip’s main implement. The contrast to the car, where the three were previously confined, shows some particular dynamics of travel by rowboat—which structure scenes in both narratives. Compared to the car, the boat is open to the elements: as demonstration of this exposure, moments after the boys take the oars, the sky breaks and rain falls down in sheets.1 The openness of the boat is thematically significant: in The Return, the boys are shown looking and pointing across the wide horizon, outside the frame, and in Chelkash, frequent narratorial digressions focus on the breadth of the sky and water, providing occasions to depict the two characters’ emotional responses. The rowboat is also a setting of proximity and intense confinement, from which no one can flee, and where the passengers face at close range. It is also particular that in a rowboat, in a lapse of attention, as when Chelkash falls to reverie, the route being followed simply disappears. The boys in both narratives never know the next physical move—and in The Return, even when they reach an island, they do not know they have arrived until the father lands, looks around, and judges that they have. They do not know where they are 1 Like a century-late response to Chelkash: as he delicately navigates past a checkpoint, he wishes “If only it would rain! It would hide us like a curtain” (388).

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rowing, just as they have no access to the intention that underlies the trip. It is the viewer’s glimpse of the father’s real goal for the trip (the box) that only suggests what Chelkash allows Gavrila to understand: they are not on a fishing trip.

The rowboat scenes also dramatise the puzzling trust that the two men show for their companions: to travel together in a small craft is a sign of trusting dependence: both men are counting on the boys’ not getting in the way of their plans’ success, just as they are depending on their cooperation in sailing the boat.

The setting thus binds the characters together: out of self-protection they count on the others, who are reciprocally indebted: the boat thus has a type of equalising effect at odds with the characters’ significantly differentiated levels of power.

Conversely, their dependence is uncomfortable, due to the boats’ precariousness and vulnerability. Of course, it is especially so from the perspective of the boys in both narratives, who know few of the trips’ details, and are not experienced on the sea. Gavrila, especially, is predominantly fearful while in the boat—his fear of Chelkash heightened by his dependence on him. For example, it is likely that none of the boys can swim well, but that both men can. The boat trips also highlight the men’s other “displays” of skill. In The Return, the boat is only seaworthy after the boys and the father tar the hull under his instructions.

And, significantly, the rowboat suggests a certain division of labour. One or two passengers can row, and another steers and navigates: the former doing the work, the latter in control. As I explore below, the boat scenes seem to be especially significant in the way they show these hierarchies of authority—they are also the scenes in which the two works’ kinship is most conspicuous.

While for Gavrila, the excursion is fearsome from the start, the two boys have a fundamentally more optimistic relationship with theirs, even though Gavrila 87

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stands to gain practically. For the boys in The Return, the boat starts out motorised; they enjoy the new scenery; the “camping trip” once more promises fun. When the motor fails, and the father orders the boys to row, the trip’s more sinister side manifests. Worked to exhaustion, the younger boy, Ivan, curses his father: “Row yourself! After all, you’re stronger!”—but his reply is a contemptuous smile. The film’s ominous tone is suggestively resolved by the father’s death, at which point the core of optimism that the boys brought to the trip is once again palpable—but understanding the dynamic of his ominous presence is the next task of this paper. * Why did Chelkash or the father bring the boys? In The Return, the father appears willing to go on alone—once sending the boys home, but returning for them after they had already boarded a bus. Although he ultimately brings them all the way to his goal, they do not have any apparent bearing on the mission’s success: the case of Gavrila appears different in that the narrator suggests that Chelkash’s operation might be dependent on the boy’s help. Immediately before encountering Gavrila and getting the idea of enlisting him, Chelkash “thought of his pal Mishka.

He needed him badly, and here he had gone and broken his leg. Chelkash cursed him under his breath, for he feared he could not handle the job alone” (376). Why, exactly? Later on, Chelkash evades the boy’s questions about the operation, trying to refocus his attention on his task—apparently explaining his “badly” needing a helper: “I hired you to row, so you row” (384). Gavrila is a strong rower, but rowing seems a minimal part of the theft. It leaves Chelkash free to operate the rudder, and it is conceivable that the job might have been dicier for Chelkash if he had been trying to row and navigate singlehandedly. But this seems implausible: Gavrila—in his ignorance and lack of criminal skill—is at several points the only 88

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serious threat to the operation. Alternatively, Gavrila could be useful in case of a flop: Chelkash could be relying on the possibility of deserting the boy to make his own escape easier. Then, there is the fact that Chelkash gets Gavrila to wait in the boat while he does the tricky part of the job, off scene. But here again, Gavrila could not be supporting the operation by keeping the boat ready or something of the sort: Chelkash has taken the oars away before leaving, to prevent him from escaping if he should take fright. When Chelkash is busy, he does not trust Gavrila on his own; but when Chelkash is there, he asks the boy to do things he could fairly easily do himself. Gavrila’s only contribution is to row the boat to the site of the theft; wait in it, trapped; then do most of the rowing on the return trip.

Chelkash tells him how hard to row, and he complies. Neither this function nor any of the alternative functions he might be thought to perform adequately explain his importance to Chelkash. In fact, Chelkash’s fear that “he could not handle the job alone” seems inflated: Gavrila’s inexperience and aversion to the expedition threaten to the project, and bring him close to spoiling the game for both of them by giving their presence up to the customs lookout (389).

The fact that Gavrila comes so close to intentionally spoiling the game and yet was cowed by a horror that “struck him like a lash” and apparently caused him to faint—keeping Chelkash’s operation intact—is particularly significant to understanding the boy’s importance to the thief. Likewise, Chelkash’s seemingly irrational decision to get his fresh hire nicely drunk mere hours before they set out on their expedition (Barratt 72) points to the boy’s real function in it.

The canonical Soviet-era interpretations (at home and abroad) of Chelkash and much of Gor’kiy’s other work is on the “clash of personalities” principle.2 2 Barratt provides an overlook of several of these, but such interpretations are used in virtually all

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The conflict between Chelkash and Gavrila is read as staged by Gor’kiy in order to show how Chelkash is paradoxically the more virtuous character. Interpreting the conflict as one that the character Chelkash instigates—rather than the didactic author Gor’kiy—gives much more interesting results, which resonate much better with the story itself. This interpretation, additionally, motivates an interesting understanding of The Return’s use of similar elements, while the “clash of personalities” is inadequate. As Andrew Barratt puts it, Chelkash’s real need for Gavrila is within “a transparently tenuous attempt on his part to assert a completely imaginary superiority” (75). Barratt understands Chelkash’s decision to include Gavrila on his expedition in psychological terms: he wanted the boy around not for some reason relating to the theft, but in order to make himself the master of the naïve peasant who reminds him of his past. He gets Gavrila drunk to avenge the boy’s supercilious comments about Chelkash’s own drinking, “proving” his superiority and advantage of experience over the boy simultaneously. When fear “struck [Gavrila] like a lash” and forced him to comply with Chelkash’s will— assuring the success of the theft even though Gavrila considered it a “sin” (385)—, the game was at its ideal position, for the thief. He would have liked to expose as fully and as excruciatingly as possible Gavrila’s cowardice, naïveté, avarice, and fixation on mundane peasant ideals—and force the boy to submissively respect him and do his bidding. Midway back to dry land, “Chelkash was pleased with his haul, with himself, and with this youth whom he had terrorized and converted into his slave” (387). His game ends lamely, however: Gavrila resists his assertions of power at several points, and finally walks away with the money, only partly chastened. He imagined that he would force the boy to beg for the money, and scholarship on Gor’kiy, and his early fiction in particular.

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hand it over with grandiose contempt. Although he understood Gavrila’s base nature, Chelkash overestimates his own ability to play the master. He does not inspire Gavrila’s awe quite as fully as he hoped, and, crucially, Gavrila’s rhapsody about the idyllic village life he plans to build with his share of the money has some power over Chelkash’s imagination. It leads him to conjure out loud a picture of a peasant landowner’s self-determination and freedom—his own main ideals in life—whereupon Gavrila points out that Chelkash has neither land nor a home of his own (392). Here the tables turn on Chelkash, and he lashes out in hubristic anger with the boy and with himself, from which he does not fully recover, knowing that the pride underwriting his feeling of superiority over Gavrila is hollow, and that Gavrila has an inkling of this.

In the light of the force of this interpretation and the two works’ similarities, it is no longer “self-evident” that “the mysterious reason for the father’s return” in Zvyagintsev’s film is to “teach [the boys] to become adult men,” as Philip Cavendish says in an article on the film (473). When Ivan asks “Why did you come? What did you bring us with you for?,” the father’s answers that “Mum asked me to be with you” and that “I also want to spend time with you” are even less convincing.

The father’s behaviour is not directed by a desire to merely spend time with his sons, nor to “teach them to become adult men.” The structural similarities between Chelkash and The Return suggest that the father’s underlying motivations, the narrative’s central psychological drama, and the stakes of resistance could be like those I have described in Chelkash. That account resonates strongly with the film: throughout, the father uses various levers of psychological power over the boys.

He demands that they address him as papa (“dad”); orders them to do various tasks without explaining their purposes; makes them wait without explaining 91

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where he is going or why; and at one point makes the paradox over the goal of the trip quite apparent: Ivan complains at being forced back into the car to push on further instead of staying by the lake where he had been fishing, arguing that “we came here to relax”—to which his father answers by ejecting him from the car. Ivan evidently got the reason wrong.

Cavendish’s claim may be overstated, but is it entirely incorrect? The boys do indeed appear to learn several things during the trip. Their relation to one another, in particular, has matured markedly by the final scenes: have they learned to act “adult”? More importantly, if they have, is it thanks to their father’s efforts? Recall Ivan’s key questions: “Why did you come? What did you bring us with you for?”—the father is unable to answer these, and the problem governs the story. Can the effect of their personal development be attributed to his actions and his intentions? On the contrary, he appears to teach the boys various skills only despite his intentions.

On the return trip—only the rowboat section of which is shown—, transporting his corpse, the boys mount the motor to the boat, get it running, and make their way right back to the beach where the car was left. These mechanical, navigational, and sailing skills were only inadvertently imparted by their father. Although the boys are emulating him, when he did these things himself he never explained to them what he was doing, how, or why. In this sense his actions resemble Chelkash’s: the thief only explains details of the operation to Gavrila in order to intimidate him.

Thus, he is explicit when he takes the oars and his knapsack from Gavrila: “That’s to keep you from running away, pal. No danger of that now. You might have run away without the oars, but not without your passport” (386).

What the father shows is not misguided didacticism, or tough love, but a strategy to impose his authority. He acts as if he expects the boys to know what to 92

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do: when their car is stuck on a muddy road, he treats the boys as stupid for not knowing how to free it—boys who rarely ride in a car and for whom a trip in the woods is obviously a special, unusual occurrence. If he intends to teach the boys new skills, he approaches these occasions in a way that makes them harder to learn than they would be otherwise, and mostly makes them displays of superiority, apparently intending to provoke their awe. He can only be said to have indirectly, not intentionally, contributed to their developed maturity—and his claim that he just wanted to “spend time” with the boys, even if honest (very hard to believe), offer no substantive answer to Ivan’s questions.

Another comparative consideration to be dealt with is one I noted above: there is a suggestion in Chelkash—which ultimately cannot be reconciled with the rest of the narrative—that Gavrila has some “purely practical” role in the mission (Barratt 71). Could the boys conceivably have any such function for their father?

While it might be thought that a “family camping trip” makes a convenient alibi, it is not clear that such is the case when the family members in question have no living memory of each other—besides the fact that this is not Odessa: there are no officers, no lookouts, and apparently very little chance that anyone will inquire into their activities.3 Aside from this, there seems to be no “practical” role for the boys to be found in The Return. The answer to “Why did you come?” has no apparent functional relationship to “What did you bring us with you for?”—nor to the father’s mission to retrieve the buried box. Hence, perhaps, Cavendish’s recourse to “selfevidently” didactic intention.

The boys’ importance to the father’s trip is at issue in a secondary return in 3 The fact that both men’s “missions” succeed so easily makes these narratives interesting specifically for the psychological aspects of their plots—they are certainly not action stories—in addition to showing the “impracticality” of bringing the boys in both cases.

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the film: when he returns for the boys who are sitting on a homebound bus, after he has sent them back. In returning, the father has stood down. Ivan challenged him with his singeing parting remarks: the father says he has business to see to and cannot bring them now: “Another time, another time,” he says. Ivan answers “In twelve years or so?,” and the father challenges him to repeat himself: “What did you say?” So, Ivan intensifies his sardonic response: “I said: you’ll take us to the waterfall when you come back next time, in twelve years or so— is there something wrong with what I said?” In returning to the boys, he shows no sign of repentance, but apparently takes the occasion to hone his strategy of domination.

He has effectively given in to Ivan’s challenge, and so to his youngest’s fresh barb: “What? Your dealings turned out not to be so important, and so now we’re going to the waterfall?,” he answers with a non-sequitur. In the dialogue that follows, though, he shows that a slight change of tactics is all they can expect from him. He continues to exploit his older son Andrey’s acquiescence, maintains his vagueness and authoritarianism, and on top of it announces that the trip will now last three nights instead of just one. At this point he has decided to bring the boys with him to the place where he will dig up the box, and decided to redouble his attempt to make the boys submit to him.

Just as Chelkash hoped to force Gavrila to recognise his own inferiority of character, beg for the money, and grant Chelkash the opportunity of contemptuously handing it over, the father hopes to make his newfound sons accept his superiority and submit to him. As Chelkash is able to force the boy to accompany him for monetary reasons—not the least of which is the fact that he wined (read, vodkaed) and dined Gavrila the evening of the expedition, the father plays a game more purely based on authority alone. He is able to take the boys with him because of the 94

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paternal authority he exercises—allowed him by their mother and grandmother, who were the only sources of such authority they had thus far known. While Chelkash holds out money, hoping to seduce Gavrila with it and mock the boy’s avarice at the same time,; the father holds out the paternal relationship;: his driving desire is to make the boys show their need for it, recognise their inferiority to him and his authority, and accept a condescending “bestowal” of his paternity.

He ultimately desires to impose the same domination that Chelkash does—which is highlighted by the similar plot structures of the works—, but using slightly different bargaining chips.

The difference is well summarised in the scenes in both works where vodka is offered. As discussed above, Chelkash gets Gavrila drunk on the night of the operation, repeatedly offering him more—as an applied response to his earlier comments about Chelkash having “been on the booze” (376). In the film, the father makes each boy drink a swig of vodka when they have landed on the island: here his motives are not the same as Chelkash’s. Rather, when he grabs Ivan by the jaw forcing him to drink, he is not only underlining the categorical nature of his imperatives (“Drink!”), but more importantly is forcing him to comply with the masculine filial role he offers him, a role that validates the father’s superiority— as he was when he tried earlier to get the boys to fight the wallet thief. The psychological game in The Return is less mediated and thus more intense: the father desires to dominate (like Chelkash) but pursues it without the mediating means of money: he wants the boys to need, ask for, and subject themselves to his authority. The other intensifying factor, of course, relative to Chelkash, is his more serious claim to this dominant role: his paternity.

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by his absence for as much of their lives as they can remember, but there is a parallel in Chelkash. The thief, it transpires, had a boyhood just like Gavrila, growing up in a village much like Gavrila’s own, with family relations quite like Gavrila’s as well.

Although their relationship is of course not quite paternal-filial, Chelkash relates to Gavrila largely as someone who has been in the same position before—and their common origin is crucially the premise of Chelkash’s play for superiority as well as the root of his failure to pull it off successfully (he just isn’t quite as removed from it as he would like). He does not know Gavrila, but likewise the father of The Return does not know his sons. The relationships of domination in both cases, then, have the same paternalist quality, without emotional proximity or lived acquaintance. Both Chelkash and the father only know about the character of their companions what they have been able to glean in the course of an evening meal, and from moment to moment on the trip. The most marked difference between the two works in this respect is actually that Chelkash knows his “boy” better than the father knows his sons. It is in this sense that Chelkash comes very close to success at subjugating Gavrila, while the father only manages to impose his authority over Andrey, and dies trying to impose it on Ivan. The comparison will serve to show the significance of both conclusions.

Barratt’s “psychological” interpretation of Chelkash does not carry over to The Return wholesale—most clearly in comparing how each narrative ends. There is abundant reason to read The Return for its evocation of the Gor’kian psychological dynamic as I have just done, but the ending then prompts a differentiated interpretation. Most significant, considering the rowboat scenes, is the return trip, taken by the boys transporting their father’s body. While the outbound and return trips in Chelkash have essentially the same dynamic, the boys in The Return have 96

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turned to face the other way on the return trip. The two of them have taken their father’s place driving the boat, with the motor (which he fixed the day before) relieving them of the oars—an effectively complete reversal of roles from the last time they were in the boat with him.

Andrey, under Ivan’s influence, has disobeyed their father’s instructions.

They went out in the boat fishing, and came back not within one hour, as instructed, but after four and a half. Although the disobedience was an affront to his authority, the father’s triumph over Andrey’s will is clear in the boy’s response to his anger. Andrey has fallen from his father’s blows, and tells his father to kill him. His desperate plea suggests that he has no other reaction to take in the face of his father’s fury. As the father holds the axe menacingly over Andrey, Ivan takes the father’s knife, shouts “Stop! If you touch him, I’ll kill you!,” then runs off in tears into the woods. They follow until he scales a lookout tower the father had shown the boys earlier. He closes the trapdoor after him, blocking his father from the top level, and tells his pursuer “If you don’t go away, I’ll jump! Hear me? I’ll jump! Do you get it?” The father then climbs to the outside of the tower, and just as he reaches the top where Ivan is standing, he loses grip and is killed by the fall.

Cavendish proposes that since Ivan’s threat to jump was the cause of his father’s death (note, though, the mundane and obvious factor of his pursuit), in dying, the father has “unambiguously demonstrated his love for” Ivan (474). Thus, Cavendish writes, the ending is not a patricide, as other critics have thought, but the basis for Ivan coming to an acceptance of his father. Here, though, Cavendish overlooks that the father’s pursuit was the cause of Ivan’s threat to jump. It is essential to view this scene as what it is: a pursuit. The father has just (once again) shown his violence and imperiousness by seriously threatening Andrey; Ivan has 97

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tried to flee, and the father has chased him. It is Ivan’s luck that the trapdoor comes between them, and that he is able to lock it: he might very well otherwise have been the one to die. There is absolutely no reason to believe, as Cavendish seems to, that the father’s intentions turned good by the moment of his death—even then, he could not understand the obvious response to take to Ivan’s ultimatum: out of pride, he could not back down.

Seeing the drama not as the father’s fundamentally legitimate attempt to help his sons grow into men—but rather as an illegitimate and violent attempt to impose dominance—leads to the conclusion that the ending is, in fact, a patricide in some form. Throughout the film, Ivan has resisted and refused to “need” his father’s domination and authority. While Gavrila mostly accepts—and scarcely at all intentionally subverts—Chelkash’s ploys, Andrey and Ivan play highly contrasting roles in relation to their father’s. The ending is “patricidal” insofar as Ivan’s resistance, rather than Andrey’s submission, has proven successful.

If Ivan had submitted, he or his brother could have succumbed to their father’s violence. His death is the culmination of a conflict between their two responses to his authority—Ivan’s resistance has been vindicated, and has killed the oppressor.

The conflict between Ivan and Andrey’s responses is shown, for example, after the father’s wallet was stolen and recovered: Andrey accepts his father’s blame for his failure to act, while Ivan asks his father why he did not act—a penetrating question, because the viewer has just seen him watching the theft in progress from indoors. While Andrey took his father’s actions for granted—took for granted that he should be entrusted with the wallet to pay for their meal, and that he then had an obligation to protect it—and has therefore assumed his own failure in the pact, Ivan questions the pact, even though he may not have reason to know what the 98

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viewer does. Likewise, it is Ivan who asks his father why he, being stronger, does not take the oars. He effectively “sees sense” through his father’s desire to subjugate him throughout the narrative, and does not accept the role being imposed.

Chelkash’s discontent comes first from the fact that he is simply too much like Gavrila to dominate him: the ideal of simple village life Chelkash loquaciously despises actually still haunts him. In the second place, his pride demands a submission more complete than he can command: Gavrila has begged, according to form, for the money, and received it, “twitching in ecstasy” (399); but upon musing that he would have been prepared to kill the “good-for-nothing” Chelkash for it, the thief is enraged and his hopes are destroyed. In the film, the father’s comeuppance also results from his pride, but his dangerous fantasy is only stopped through the catalyst of resistance—from the boy he expected most easily to master.

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Works Cited Barratt, Andrew. The Early Fiction of Maksim Gorky. Nottingham: Astra Press, 1993. Print.

Cavendish, Philip. “The Return of the Photograph: Time, Memory, and the Genre of the Photo-Film in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Vozvrashchenie.” The Slavonic and East European Review, 91.3 (July 2013): 465-510. Web, accessed 23 October 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.91.3.0465> Gorky, Maxim. “Chelkash.” Trans. Margaret Wettlin. In From Karamzin to Bunin: An Anthology of Russian Short Stories, ed. Carl Proffer. Indiana U P, 1969. Print.

Zvyagintsev, Andrey, dir. Vozvrashchenie. All translations are my own. Ren Film, 2003.

Film.

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“Public Humiliation and the Anarchist State:” A ‘Thank You’ (dis-)Card Corvus Coraximus Hi there! I’m Corvus.1 Having learned with law-law-long effort to mock your talk, I am ‘writing’ to your strange species on behalf of mine. We, fellow Common Ravens of the Anarchist State, wish to express our profound gratitude for your homo say-peeing kind(-ness). I really cannot begin to express how great/full we are for all the perfect Gardens of Eatin’ you’ve piled up all over the earth, which I’m told keep growing in size and number litter-alley by the second. Your species is so aw-aw-awfully awesome that we have begun looking to you as a symbol of utmost, mythical horror, just as White Trash-man has ca-caw-considered us for many years in the litter-itcher. Franz Kafkaww—who is often depicted wearing black, had legs as skinny as Kierkawwd’s, and whom some Caw-man Ravens even believe to have been, like Kierkawwd, one of us in human disguise—once scribbled that there’s a place beyond which one cannot fly back, and that is the place to which you must fly.2 Now, I understand that you can’t litter-alley ‘fly’ in the same way we can, nor am I suggesting that you go on another trip in one of those stoop-id metal wingmachines. Rather, in order to help you ‘fly’ to the point that must be reached, I’ve scrapped together a little nest ca-caw-concerning our caw-common cunt-itchin, which I ca-caw-call the Anarchist State. Caw-man Ravens and other non-who-man critters live in the Anarchist State without any terrible misunderstandings, you see. You homo say-peeings, though, seem to have a hard time accepting the wild 1 Absolutely Pre- or Sub- or Non- or simply Un-official Night Watchbird of Can-a-da’s Northwest Territorial/Commercial Landmass (NT/CL). You can caw-caw-call me Corey.

2 Zurau Aphorism Number Five.

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un-governability of your so-caw-caw-called ‘langewich.’3 You have developed a bad a-dick-shun to cum-oddities, and to the plastic cards you swipe or dirty paper you trade for cum-oddities. Worse yet, your a-dick-shun to these things has numbed you so bad that you keep letting some sort of Official State say dumb lies to you, so that you wind up hurting each other a lot.

In an effort to remedy this sit-chew-ate-shun, I scribbled you this ‘Thank You’ (dis-) card. You see, I started to feel bad for you when I saw that all these awesome Gardens of Eatin’ seemed to be the end product of sad, a-dick-dead homo say-peeings looking for what they caw-caw-call ‘free-dumb,’ as though being free to be dumb a-dicks reek-wired you to kill each other. To return my gratitude for all the trash you piled up in your pursuit of free-dumb, I want to show you how the free-dumb you seek does not exist in things, entities or cum-oddities. Rather, the True Free—which is not dumb—consists in the wild, ungovernable State of your langewich. My hope is that, once you see that the Anarchist State where you live in langewich has all-ways been ungovernable, you will see that the only power of the Official State is to set who-man beings against one another by trying to cunt-troll the Words, which cannot be cunt-trolled—no matter how hard a cunt might try to troll them. The more pee-poles learn to see this Anarchist State of affairs, perhaps, the more likely they will be to learn to slow down and live in smaller, more piecefull communities based on sharing and thoughtful negotiation, rather than the a-dick-shun to plastic cards, dirty paper and cum-oddities.

Initially, of course, I lacked the power to mock your talk. But as the wise anarchist enemy of the Official State, Genius Christ, once said to his who-man 3 It is not immediately clear why Corvus Coraximus spells the word ‘language’ as though it were a mashup of the French term la lange, meaning ‘swaddling clothes’ or ‘diaper,’ and the English term ‘sandwich.’

Though what he’s up to here becomes more explicit later on. –Ed.

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flock: ‘Forage and ye shall find.’ We ravens are like you: we don’t ‘make’ things, we just mock the things around us, foraging for various ways of being along together with the other scattered singular paths or being-ways.4 I decided to spend several years observing, listening to and carefully teasing homo say-peeings as they walked around talking in my habit-at. My habit-(of flying-thus, perching-thus, squawkingthus and so on, takes place or rises forth initially and for the most part)-at: Piece River, All-bird-da, Can-a-da. Foraging for and finding the skill to mock-talk and mock-scribble was no small feat for a tiny head like mine, but such was the depth and power of my gratitude to you who-man beings! As a tribute to your species, I devoted myself with a singular passion to mocking your talk and your little lettersquiggles.

Do please allow me to mock for you some squiggly letter-worms about my habit-at, which is more important to me than any such worms might suggest. I set up a squat in an abandoned tree near a gross-hurry store in Piece River, Allbird-da, Can-a-da. The gross-hurry store is where who-mans whored food and to which they rush in a gross hurry with wheel-machines whenever their families feel famished. The reason pee-pole call this place Piece River, All-bird-da is maybe becaw-caw-cause it’s easy, at least for us, to find good pieces of branches scattered near the river, and all birds love hanging out ‘da,’ which is a German preposition that means ‘here’ or ‘there.’

To be more precise, the meaning of ‘da’ moves back and forth between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ just like all us the birds flying about in the Can-aid-ian State. As for Can-a-da, we think you homo say-peeings ca-ca-call your State that be-caws, for you folks, moving back and forth from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is always a question 4 Cf. Agamben. The Coming Community. 27, ‘Maneries.’

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of potentiality, possibility, or, in other worms,5 of what you can do6 to be helpful to your neighbours, especially the ones you ca-caw-call your ‘Neighbours to the South.’ The latter seem to prefer war-fair to well-fair, putting lots of brown peepole in jail, and watching each other in the name of the Official State. The inmates7 of Can-a-da are pretty fucked up in their own way, all-ways helping the Official United States and the God they war-ship, the ‘economy.’ This might be why you caw-call yourselves ‘Can-aid-dyins,’ but I’m not sure. You must re-caw-call that I’m just a Cawman Raven, not some sort of philosophizing litter-ratty. Such explain-Nations go way be-yawned my powers. My only special-tease are prancing, mocking things, pooping on the windshields of your wheel-machines, eating shit homo say-peeings throw out, or squawking vulgar praises to that great big cawcaw-cocksure, wide-open-mouthed cocksucker, the SKY. Learning to mock your talk proved so all-consuming an effort for me that I gave no thought to the medium or the way I would cum-unicate back to you humans what I’d learned. This was very foolish of me, since in the Age of the Great Mess, the medium is of course the Mess-Age itself.8 “My ‘Thank You (dis-) Card’ must be scribbled in black,” I reasoned, “or else those litter-itcher people 5 Corvus Coraximus’s spelling of English terms is usually more or less phonetic, and should be decipherable to human readers who take care to sound them out. However, he sometimes misspells the singular term ‘word’ and the plural term ‘words’ as ‘worm’ and ‘worms,’ respectively. —Ed. 6 Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community, 43. ‘Ethics.’ Cf. Also Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.

Trans. Joan Stambaugh.

7 It becomes apparent in later passages of Corvus the Raven’s ‘Thank You’ (dis)card that he does not acknowledge or notice any significant distinction between what English speakers normally refer to as ‘inmates,’ that is, persons imprisoned in Official Correctional Centres or Official Prisons, and ‘citizens’ of the Official State. Here it seems he is probably referring to citizens who have not yet been or are no longer Officially imprisoned. —Ed. 8 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

London, United Kingdom: 1964.

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might not understand. I want it to be a little mass-turd-piece of anarchist black propagandaw! All the serious litter-itcher gets written in black on white surfaces, so I’d better mock that, too. But where can I find a black lick-wit meaty-yum?’

Having for-aged for what seemed like ages, I finally found my way to a lickwit solution to my problem. The strange words of your wise Genius Christ had proven true once again. I found my seeking brought to a halt when I looked down and saw the Great Oil Spill.9 It occurred right near my fortress in Piece River, like a great blessing, as though Raven God Da-self,10 in all Das Holy (G)oddity, lifted up a leg and copped a huge piss there just for me! The forty-five million litre black mess had come at the perfect time. Thanks Be to Raven God! This was more than enough scribbling-ink for my Thank You (dis-)Card.

Finding a clean white surface upon which to scratch my mock-words would be simple enough. I often saw teenagers who spent their days inside the grosshurry store place pieces of white (dis-) cardboard out back by the dumpsters. I snatched a few pieces of it and carried them to the site of the Great Spill. And so I am now dipping my pointer-claw into my fresh new forty-five-million-litre blotter, and scratching a few mock-words for your kind (-ness) in grab-tit-dude for our Ca-caw-calm Un-State. ‘The next time my old anarchist who-man friend comes by these parts,’ I mock-thought, ‘I’ll give him the note. He can transcribe it onto his grimy cum-pew-der and pass it along to the clan of who-man questioners he 9 “Plains Mainstream charged for largest Alberta oil spill in decades: Fines could be as high as 1.5M if found guilty." Matt McClure. Calgary Herald. April 26, 2013.

10 Corvus uses ‘da’ as a gender neutral pronoun. Here are the forms:

singular nominative: she/he/it/da

singular possessive: her/his/its/das

plural possessive: their

direct object: him/her/it/da

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hangs out with in τό τό ὄντα, ὄν-tarry/owe. My old anarchist friend is an inmate who currently in-habits there. He tells me it’s an Ur-ban site where people from all over the world come to tarry alongside beings, pretending to be gentle and appall-algetic as if they owe each other something. But all their tarrying and owing among beings takes place on land stolen from the pee-poles who lived there first, pee-poles whom White Trash-man subjected to torture and genocide be-ca-caws he thought he was on a God-given mission to cunt-troll everyone and everything.

I’m still not sure why the litter-ratty of your population puts so much time and effort into scribbling on papers or typing on computers, only to have their scribblings reap-pee-deadly printed hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of times. You say some of them taste good and some of them taste bad. I am afraid I have some bad news for you. Unless someone’s spilled coffee or wiped off some potato chip flavouring on them, there is no taste whatsoever in those tomblike tomes. Your breed even has people high-erred to entomb all your taste-less books of scribbled lies in giant morgues for corpuses. You caw-call such edifices, appropriately enough, ‘lie-buries,’ since all your lies are buried there. Some of you are even morbid enough to go inside, peruse the corpuses, finger them, or—and this is perhaps the most shocking bit—take them out on dates! I still see men or womb-men or inter-sex-shunned people committing such perverted acts—even in broad daylight! How was it possible for you to have grown so deluded as to accuse my species of being nothing but a bunch of neck-crow-feely-acts?

Needless to say I continue to suffer a deep fright in the face of your practice of scribbling stale squiggles on white papers. And so I could not mock up any better way to honour your we-are-da,11 moribund species than to scrounge up 11

By the expression ‘we-are-da,’ Coraximus seems to be attempting to spell the term ‘weird.’ On

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the reek-wired courage and humility to scribble some of my own. Yes, my dear eater, I decided to stoop down to the shameful level of your sick cult of perverted scribbling and page fingering. However, I absolutely refuse to ever take a book out on a date. That would be flying it too far. How do you bring yourselves to perform such kinky acts of necro-feel-ya?

My worms of add-vice to you are this: langewich12 all-ways all-ratty condemns you to live in an aw-aw-awestruck Anarchist State of profane, fleshy disclosure— so why not stop believing in the Official States that cunt-trolls you? Instead, in the starving cunt-itchin to which many of your kind refer as your ‘private lives,’ everyone keeps re-treating from a full leap into the Anarchist State of universal public humiliation. Everyone in the public openness of langwich feels naked and embarrassed. But what is the problem? There you are, fully disclosed, manifest and nude, even through your silly clothes. You homo say-peeings try to conceal the public nudity to which your being-in-langewich exposes you—behind fancy rags, social roles, and Official IDs. I am a caw-man raven and no psychologist, but my suspicion is that you try to cover up your animal vulnerability with clothes and stiff social roles because belonging to the sheer exposure of langewich overwhelms and frightens your spirits. The deep horror of material want or violence experienced by so many species of animal, including my own, becomes for you a horror, visible to everyone on a daily basis, but hated and shunned for the sake of private exemption from the exposure of langewich. But that shunning is only making things worse for you, primarily because it gives rise to the Official State.

the basis of the contents of his ‘card,’ it also seems clear that he sees no distinction between the human way of being here (in German: da), and our being weird: hence ‘we-are-da.’

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By trying in vain to excuse yourselves from belonging to the open realm of daily humiliation in the publicity of langwich, you who-man beings nonetheless run about that place in a horror grown all the more manic on account of its being suppressed. Your tragic and laughable Official State is nothing but the externalized fecal residue of the countless hidden excuses of self-privatizing individuals, in a wor(l)d where no such excuses and no fully or truly privatized individuals actually exist. The prime accomplishment of the Official State is to redouble the material want and violence of ordinary pee-poles for the sake of a tiny, ill-eat-ist population: its acquisition of cum-oddities and its effort to cunt-troll as many other peepoles and things as possible. Worse still, the ill-eat-ists’ a-dick-shun to cunt-troll and cum-oddities is imitated by the ‘have-not’ inmates who crave to keep their langewich (and thus their all-ways all-ratty public selves) numb and suffocating in the few cum-oddities they might have, rather than daring to open up to the explicit, public humiliation of piece-full animal living. In this manner each homo say-peeing inmate surrenders the public, humiliated Self over to the Official State.

The individuals’ unique stories get gobbled up into ‘His Story,’ that Story of which the Official State is always the fiction-null protagonist.

But what is this thing ca-caw-called ‘His Story?’ To put it quickly and dirtily, ‘His Story’ is what White Trash-men and other privatized individuals keep trying to tell themselves and others after they kill people in the name of the Official State.

In some cunt-trees like Can-a-da, it is easy enough for the pee-poles to talk about the falsity of the Official Statesmen, though they find it very difficult to act out against them. Often enough, Can-aid-ian homo say-peeings exhibit a need to come up with excuses for why they won’t help the other beings, animate and inanimate alike. They say things like, ‘That’s what the State is for,’ meaning of coarse the 108

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Official State. As long as the Official State is maintained, the privatized citizens can acquire from it their most precious a-dick-tiff sub-stance. This sub-stance is free of charge because it is the psychological pre-cunt-itchin for the existence of any Official State and its dirty papers and prisons. Friedrich Nitchy, the fill-loss-suffer who at one point claimed to be Napoleon but who was actually another wise raven disguised as a man, called it moraline. In other worms, the Official State is there so that a-dicks are able to lay the blame on someone else for the manic horror of their daily flight toward the stable jobs they work at in order to support their dead-lee a-dick-shun to the cum-oddities, in the mean-time conning their poor offspring into buying into the same sad lies.

The Official State is thus the primary means through which many human beings, by identifying themselves in langewich as Profession-nulls, Prime Ministurds, Bakers, Bankers, Marxists, Cunt-servatives, Muse-itchins, Moms, Dads, Christ-shuns, Muss-limbs, Hassidic Juice, Stew-dents, Hawky Fans, Cab Drivers, or Whatever, make fools of themselves by believing there is stability or security in these identities or roles. To the extent that one clings to a false Status or Identity, the Official State-us Quo acts like a mosquito, sucking the peep-holes’ blood and replacing it with little doses of moraline. The illusory vampire, ‘cunt-troll,’ finds its sustenance in city-zens who have not renounced their Status because their emptied Selves are so a-dick-dead to the moraline that keeps them privatized and numbs them to the public humiliation of their bawdily movement—which only keeps shuttling faster and faster in the mean time—through existence in langewich.

I like Sock-Ur-tease. He was one of us Cawman ravens in who-man disguise, I think. He walked around in his bare feet and teased all the Athenians until they felt trolled enough to kill him. He also had a daimon who told him not 109

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to get involved in the politic-all affairs of the city. Perhaps the meaning of the negative injunction of Sock-Ur-tease’s personal raven-god was that langewich is all-ways all-ratty be-yawned the politic-all. The Anarchist State of langewich means that it does not need some Officiating House or Assembly to cunt-troll its affairs. In light of this hunch—which I admit is quite silly, given that my sense for politics is nil—I con-cock-dead a working definition of this distinctively, maybe all-too-distinctively,13 who-man way of being: the politic-all in-cum-pisses a maultit-dude of complicated ways a group of animals attempts to cunt-troll, through concealment and lies, the chaos of langewich, which sways along gently of itself when left alone in small, piece-full conditions. Politics, in other worms, is the vain attempt on the part of who-man peeings to cunt-troll, assure cunt-troll, or to be assured of the cunt-troll of things in and through langewich, as though langewich where a meaty-yum for cunt-trolling and as if langwich itself could ever admit of being trolled by some cunt or other.

Basically cunt-trolling behaviour comes from the who-man itch to hoard things like stew-pit bass-turds through a misunderstanding of what Genius Christ meant, which was that who-mans need to learn to live piece-fully in langewich outside any Official State(-ment). That is, each individual homo say-peeing obeys an itch to refuse to live in the public confession of weakness, aging and death that is in fact the universal public humiliation of each and every homo say-peeing insofar as each and every homo say-peeing stands in the radical exposure of profanity that is being in the open realms of homo-say-peeing langewich.

To inhabit the open (exposed, explicit, manifest, cleared, un-cunt-sealed) 13

Cf. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal.

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realm of homo say-peeing langewich means to live in accordance with the Anarchist State of public humiliation that White Trash-man and other Official Statesmen have hitherto been on a global quest to deny. Politics appears, then, to be the attempt of you homo say-peeingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;White Trash-man in particularâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to treat langewich as a means of cunt-trolling everything, whereas really it provides or gives the gift of an everything-inclusive milieu or cum-unity of anarchic, spontaneous, singular fragments. The fragments may self-organize in temporary cum-unities of piece-fully cohabiting inmates and have no excuse to hoard things behind the veneer of an Official State.

Now the perhaps deeper question arises: why do you homo say-peeings keep running away from the Anarchist State you are already in, toward the false guarantee of security offered you by your Official King-dumb or State? From my point of view it certainly seems that you homo say-peeings find your unique placement within langewich too humiliating at bottom: if the low, vulgar, human brutality of the fact that you speak were to become fully apparent to you, every word would hit you like a curse on your little habit-at. Every singular one of you continues to claim some degree of private exemption or exception from the humiliation of being breathing, masticating, masturbating, swallowing, fucking, shitting beings cursed within the coarse explicitness of words. You appear to us Common Ravens like living obscenities whose every movement exposes the unsalvageable, shocking suddenness of the profanity of your existence. You pee-pole crawl, walk, cane, wheelchair, wheel-machine, or wing-machine around the earth like so many cumoddity craving swearwords. Whether or not you happen to be saying or scribbling a litter-all cuss word, your actions speak louder than those, and do so for the very fact that they are doings that can never fully escape from linguistic cum-munity. In 111

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any case both your sayings and your doings—expressed vocally from your mouths or trans-vocally from other pieces of your body—basically say one of three things: FUCK-yes—FUCK-no—or FUCK-maybe…we’ll see.

I thought long and hard about some add-vice to give you in order that you and your kind might learn to let go of these stew-pit, self-destructive Official I-dentitties and State-is-is,14 so that your Official States might someday stop looking real to you and deceiving you into killing each other, that is, so that your Official States might cease to exist altogether. So here is the anti-corrective, im-proper and most in-appropriate add-vice I came up with: Inhale/Eat—exhale/shit. It’s really simple. In order for the Anarchist State to become explicit, a sufficient number of homo say-peeings need to learn to identify themselves primarily as vulnerable, breathing shit-eaters, which is really not much of an I-den-titty at all.

It’s more like a meta-bowel-lick15 stirring than a stable I-den-titty or a ‘suck-cessfull life.’ With every breath, feel absolutely free to remind yourself that you are an eating, breathing, shit-eating beast just like me, and that we’re all living in the Anarchist State together. You just happen to be living in the Anarchist State in a cum-unity of langewich that renders your profane, un-cunt-troll-able meta-bowellick movements so explicit that you seek to deny them by conning each other into erecting Official States.

For you a kind of horror is essential to letting whatever being rise forth and announce itself from the chaos. Rather than face the horror, many of you persist in the conviction that led to all the horror and violence in the first place: that there is such a thing as ‘cunt-troll’ and that it is important that everything be ‘under 14 “Statuses,” plural form of ‘status.’

15 ‘Metabolic.’ –Ed.

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cunt-troll’ no matter what. In accordance with your species’ fixation on cunt-troll, your strange population has come to believe that pee-poles singular identities— that little part of the world they think they can cunt-troll themselves, and thus trolling themselves like cunts—matter more than their simple being-in-langewich.

But being-in-langewich is the unconditioned, absolutely ungovernable condition for taking on whatever temporary garb or guise that shows up in its possibility. The singular humans exist, from beginning to end, in a community based on nothing other than the fact that they speak. The only title consists in titling beings and the only claim is the claim that anarchic langewich has upon every thing.

FUCK—yes: langewich is essentially pornographic.16 Every word worthy of the name is a swear word, a profanity. That is what your Offices are so dead set on denying: the fact that your Prime Minis-turds, Presidents, Shahs, Czars, Führers, Teachers, Priests, Hawky Coaches, or whatever, have little genitalia they piss out of or ejaculate from and weird anuses for copping shits, just like us ravens. It’s not as though you deny the ‘fact’ that everyone cops shits; the point is that you fail to exemplify this fact in the arrogant, dangerous charade of your everyday ‘practical’ ‘life.’

Privacy takes care of itself—the finitude of beasts is such that total, systematic or Official publicity is strictly speaking impossible for them. Sheer exposure and publicness arrives only piecemeal, in scraps or fragments: the public character of the Anarchist State rises forth in a universality of humiliation that is at once low-cull,17 in a silent way and only for those unafraid to attune themselves to its singular inflections. The public sphere of utter abandonment and humiliation 16 Cf. A seminal punk rock chorus: ‘Sex is philosophy/Philosophy is sex/Porno video/XXX/Sex is politics/Politics is sex/Porno video/XXX.’ Nomeansno. Generic Shame. Wrong Records, 2001.

17 Agamben, The Coming Community. 27, ‘Maneries.’

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finds its shelter in the privacy of thinking, a privacy that in turn has always already gathered itself together from out of public-linguistic fragments foraged from outside the Official State.

Physical violence is the job of the Official State whom the who-man exemplars of the Anarchist State think should be taken out of Office and into what a Germ-man might call die Öffnen Lick-tongue. Rather, the exemplars of the Anarchist State strive serve each other like so many idiotic inflections or fictionnull Prince Myshkins. They find themselves in langewich to be too imperfect and broken all-ratty to do anything other than play and idle around with their inability to not resist Officiality in all its manifestations.

The executives and professionals try to hide their profane State of Anarchic nudity, but that is really such a complete sham. The Official State is the frozen, exteriorized coagulation of the blood sucked out of their living organism. Look at any Official Application Form, Official Announcement, or Official Statement of the so-ca-ca-called State. It’s the death of human beings. It’s the death of langwich. I pray that your species will see this in die Öffnen Lick-tongue someday.

Each person’s day in the Anarchist State of Can-a-da has a mythical beginning but, you see, those in touch with the Anarchic State of langewich know that no Official stories or myths hold up, since langewich is not something that can ever be bought with money or held up at gunpoint and forced to do something shameful, like dishonor itself against violent ca-caw-cunts who think it ca-caw-can ever, ever, ever be trolled. That is why Meth-Hitler and other Officialmen and peepole who hit or shoot other pee-pole for excuses that wind up externalizing into the fear of the neighbour that leads to the Official State are all-ways, all-ways, all-ways wrong In any case, your daily myth weaves together with billions of others from 114

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around the world. The Anarchist State was always already public and free, until the White Trash-Man and other Official Statesmen or tribesmen tried to conquer and cunt-troll it with violent material force when they couldn’t satisfy their sad a-dickshun to things in the moneyless humiliation of dirt free words. There are some things credit cards can’t buy—whatever being as it gets sworn into its profane State of being-named in the Wor(l)d, the Wor(l)d insofar as it lets beings rise forth as such, breathing freely in the air of its absolute public humiliation.

FUCK—the least I ca-caw-can do for you at this point, my dear who-man reader, is to bring this lengthy mass-turd-piece of black propagandaw at last to a close. Now you might think that White Trash-Man’s Official Story has been the most arrogant, pathetic and dangerous one so far. But that doesn’t mean anyone deserves some sort of sordid punishment. My Anarchist who-man friends know that violence is the road to the Official State. O cunt-rare! The Anarchists want to lend their pathetic, cringing, filthy Anarchist hands to White-Trash man, so that someday everyone might receive the grandest prize possible: absolute public humiliation for all beings in the profanity of the who-man word. Until your species receives its Grand Prize, though, please feel absolutely free to take a few deep breaths and try to slow down. Of coarse you don’t have to say ‘FUCK—yes’ to my add-vice. Just in case you do say ‘FUCK—yes,’ though, I’ve pieced on one last twig to this mess of a concept-chew-all nest. Cunt-sitter it a cunt-clue-Ding unscientific post-crypt, one last little thing to lick into being with your smelly, we-are-da, pink homo say-peeing Lick-Tongue: Inhale—Eat, exhale—shit.

In gratitude, —Corv. Cor. 115

About the Authors Michael Cavuto is a Toronto poet originally from Philadelphia. There he was first transmolecularized by the astral vibrations of Afrofuturism, a holy force at play in the true realization of Dance Poetry. He is also a member of the Toronto-based sound poetry group, Sex Panic!

Halyna Chumak is currently a third year student at the University of Toronto, St. Michael’s College, studying English Literature, Criminology, and Philosophy.

Although she is primarily interested in early 20th century British and American modernist texts, she is also intrigued by the elaborate, labyrinthian narratives crafted by foreign writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. When she is not writing essays or reading course-mandated material, Halyna continues her journey through Borges’ Ficciones--the collection of short stories that introduced her to “The Garden of Forking Paths,”and the work of 109 pages that she has been reading (sporadically) for almost two years.

At the request of the Editors for autobiographical information, Corvus Coraximus claimed that he “...was born in a valley region caw-called Piece River, All-bird-da, Canada by you *homo say-peeings,*” but that his “... fellow caw-common ravens don’t use words to caw-call places things. “If there is anything interesting about my life that unsettles me or dis-stink-squishes me from my murder,” he told the Editors of FUN, “it is that I learned to mock your *homo say-peeing* chitter-chatter.” In what was apparently the last sentence he would ever utter, he concluded: “But now that I’ve said what I had to say to your desperate kind, I am happy to report that I’ve returned to my old habits of squawking, 116

eating the shit you throw out or kill on your roads, and flying about on my own, or with my murder---free of your langewich and its sorry Official State.â&#x20AC;?

Daniel Glassman isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t very good at having fun.

Zachary Hope practices evasion.

Geordie Kenyon Sinclair is a fourth-year student in Russian language and literature, women and gender studies, and philosophy. His current research interests are in early 20th-century Russian literature, gender theory, and translation theory. He likes cycling, cooking, violinmaking, plants, and enjoyed working on this fun new journal!

Iris Liu lives and writes in Toronto.

Amy Wang is currently pursuing an honours degree in both English literature and business administration. She is tryptophobic and highly superstitious.

For fun, Carter West dances and is currently waiting for his skin to sag.

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