Arthur Rose has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1- 4742- 5864-7
ePDF: 978-1- 4742- 5867- 8
eBook: 978-1- 4742- 5866-1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
To my parents
For whom we do the things we do
Acknowledgements
In one sense, this project originated out of a series of conversations with Sam Durrant and Brendon Nicholls. That my signposting remains frustratingly obdurate will amuse them greatly. Steven Connor and Richard Brown made helpful comments to a first incarnation and, in so doing, improved subsequent drafts immeasurably. My anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury honed a rusty manuscript, as did Ben Bollig, Adam Winstanley, Maebh Long, Ryan Topper, Peter Rose, Michael Springer, Luna Dolezal, Phil Horkey, Mike Marais, Thando Njovane and Marco Bernini, each of whom gave of their time and energy to help me tackle issues ranging from Peronism in Argentina to comma placement in referencing material. A single telephone conversation with Robbie Duschinsky helped me to crystallize four years of thinking. Mark Richardson and David Avital were patient and supportive editors at Bloomsbury.
A whole contingent of friends and intellectual comrades helped. In Leeds, Ashraf Riadh Abdullah, Gustavo Carvajal, Alejandra Ortiz, Ed Powell, Adrian Knapp, Henghameh Saroukhani, Katie Elphick, Chris Stone, Ragini Mohite, Emma Trott, Hannah Copley, Stefan Skrimshire, Elizabeth Pender, Kasia Mika, Michael J. Kelly, Claire Lozier, David Sugden, Ruth Swanwick, Jane Taylor, Jane Plastow and Mark Taylor-Batty. In Durham, John Moles, Jane Macnaughton, Corinne Saunders, Sarah McLusky, Rebecca Oxley, Andrew Russell, Marco Bernini, Will Viney, Rick de Villiers and Marc Botha. In South Africa, Simon van Schalkwyk, Jennifer Malec, Donald Powers, Joe Palmer, Paul McNally, Ross Esson, Tim and Jeanne Matthis and others unmentioned. In South Korea, Chull Wang. In Argentina, Fabian, Sarah, Fiona and Lucas Martinez. This not to mention those people in the Beckett, Borges and Coetzee communities, who, in ways small and large, have helped bring this book to print. To those not enumerated, my apologies: such lists necessarily remain incomplete.
My parents, Peter and Celia, bore financial and emotional burdens in helping me see this project to its close. This book is dedicated to them. My sister, brother-in-law and nephews, Sarah, Sean, Sebastian and Sam provided solace and privacy when I needed it (and barrages of guffaws when I didn’t). Chris and Denise Mathew provided a home away from home, and Jill and Imogen Ashfield didn’t give up on me. For this, and love, I thank them.
Abbreviations
Diogenes of Sinope
DL Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. R. D Hicks [1925] (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972)
Jorge Luis Borges
Dr Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin: UP Texas, 1964)
CF Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998)
L Labyrinths, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 1970)
OC1 Obras Completas Tomo I: 1923–1949 (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996)
OC2 Obras Completas Tomo II: 1952–1972 (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996)
OC3 Obras Completas Tomo III: 1975–1985 (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996)
OC4 Obras Completas Tomo IV: 1975–1988 (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996)
TL The Total Library: Non-fiction 1922–1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger (London: Penguin, 2001)
Disj Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984)
SB1 Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume I: Novels, ed. Paul Auster, intro. Colm Tóibín (New York: Grove Press, 2006)
SB2 Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II: Novels, ed. Paul Auster, intro. Salman Rushdie (New York: Grove Press, 2006)
SB3 Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III: Dramatic Works, ed. Paul Auster, intro. Edward Albee (New York: Grove Press, 2006)
SB4 Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, ed. Paul Auster, intro. J. M. Coetzee (New York: Grove Press, 2006)
SBL1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009)
SBL2 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 2: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)
J. M. Coetzee
AI Age of Iron (London: Penguin, 1998)
D Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000)
DBY Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harville Secker, 2007)
DP Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992)
Du Dusklands (London: Vintage, 1998)
EC Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003)
EWSB ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujour’dhui, Vol. 19 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008): 19–31
F Foe (London: Penguin, 1987)
GO Giving Offense (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996)
IHC In the Heart of the Country (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)
LTMK Life & Times of Michael K (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983)
MP Master of Petersburg (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994)
SS Stranger Shores (London: Vintage, 2002)
WB Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Minerva, 1997)
Y Youth (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002)
Introduction
Authority is the appearance of wisdom that accumulates around a speaker or a body of writing. It is earned sentence by sentence, rather than insight by insight. When this profusion of sentences has gathered enough weight, it coheres as a narrative voice or style. Only then may authority be recognized and capitalized upon. Such authority applies retrospectively. Returning to the first sentence brings to that sentence the authority accrued by the sentences that follow. Authority, then, is not simply generated by what is heard or read as heard and read, it also determines how a style comes to be understood, through rehearsal and repetition. A writer’s authority interpolates the reader into a particular mode of reading.
For the cynic, this authority is a ‘creation of human reason’, a ‘bagful of rhetorical tricks’ used for economic, intellectual, physical or spiritual profit (DBY 149). To dispel the mystique created by such tricks, authority must be viewed dispassionately, from a distance, free from spurious claims to influence or vatic inspiration. Style and Form, viewed cynically, are merely the collection of rhetorical devices needed to deliver authority. Perhaps because they are not fooled by form, cynics can be rather suspicious when it comes to the niceties of literary fiction: ‘Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as outdated [hinfällig] as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask’ (SBL1 514).1 ‘How’ something is presented, the métier of literary form, ostensibly gulls readers with flashy rhetoric. Even ‘the presence of gold letters on binding’ might give a book ‘increased authority’ (CF 492). But if cynics do not attend to literary form as something other than the persuasive art of baseless authority, they forget that their own task – to deface authority’s
currency – is performed through the careful interrogation of form. Authority might be based on fiction. It might even be fiction. Even so, it remains a necessary fiction, not least for cynics, who ground their criticism less on facts than the authority of their opinions.
Authority can never be understood in a vacuum. It has context, which applies equally to object (authority) and agent (cynic). The cynic, already implicated in claims to authority, is entangled in conditions of place, history and thought. Authority, too, emerges in the time of reading, the location of this apprehension and the manner in which it is received. But neither cynic nor authority are passive recipients of context. The cynic draws on authority to reconfigure context. Authority’s affordances, in turn, determine both the cynic’s actions and context’s reach. Authority, cynic and context cohere together in a practice called literary cynicism. This practice is exemplified by the Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Irish playwright, poet and prose writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89) and the South African novelist-academic J. M. Coetzee (1940–). These writers will be our cynics; their style, our index of authority; their fame, our context.
The project
This book aims to develop a critical rhetoric for literary cynicism as it emerges in World Literature after 1945. To achieve this aim, it undertakes stylistic analyses of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee to show how these writers use particular genres of paradox in order to reflect upon, and interrogate, the conditions of their literary fame and, more broadly, a cynical cosmopolitanism. The underlying assumption is that interactions among cynicism, fame and cosmopolitanism, as they appear in literature, turn around questions of literary authority and style, and are therefore best understood through rhetorical analysis, rather than the factual bases of social or political historicism or the more fluid articulations of affect.
Literary cynicism is a performative operation immanent to the late style of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee. Cynical cosmopolitanism is the extension of this performative operation to the sociopolitical rhetoric of cosmopolitanism. In explaining these axioms, I introduce cynicism as a concept that has received
substantial critical attention over the past thirty-five years. Then, I subtract what I call ‘literary cynicism’ from this debate. Something new happens to cynicism when it encounters the literary, and this book is an effort to track this newness. To do so, I try to grapple with literary cynicism as something immanent to the work: a style that emerges when one concentrates on recurrent techniques peculiar to specific writers.2 These techniques function through both operations and performances: their use influences the representation of ideas both in the works and outside of them, and their repetition, particularly in the late works, suggests a playful acknowledgement that use will always calcify into an established form. The consequence for literary analysis is as it appears to be: a method for addressing the conceptual knottiness of late style in Borges, Beckett and Coetzee.3
Late style implies an already existing literary authority for ‘great artists’. Edward Said took the end of the lives of such artists as the point ‘their work and thought acquires a new idiom, what I shall be calling a late style’.4 This late style coincides with ‘the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health or other factors that [. . .] bring on the possibility of an untimely end’.5 Deriving his term from Theodor Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s late style, Said addresses ‘late style’ as ‘a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it’.6 Said’s description seems a shorthand for the kind of literary cynicism I am working towards, insofar as late style, like cynicism, is a self-aware manoeuvre (‘nevertheless abandons communication’) against forms of authority both creative (‘fully in command of his medium’) and culturally hegemonic (‘the established social order’). But Said’s late style separates itself from literary cynicism under the sign of late capitalism. For, if late style consoles itself in the via negativa of a non-commodified art (‘a contradictory, alienated relationship’), this negative space ignores a problem raised by Frederic Jameson; that, in a general subsumation of everything under capitalism, even ‘the negative has been co-opted by the system – indeed, that the system needs negative critiques to keep itself going’.7
Jameson reroutes the path of the traditional ‘outsider’ – the via negativa –back into the purview of capitalism. In light of this insight, I read late style, Said’s ‘contradictory, alienated relationship’ to an ‘established social order’, as
a response to the systems of commodification with which the author is complicit: ‘he’ is not simply a part, ‘he’ is the order itself. The authority that Said grants late style – an apprehension of ‘an untimely end’ – relies on precisely a mystification of the author, who, in turn, permits ‘his’ transformation into a commodity: thus, the image of a genius who cathects transitory sufferings of the body into enduring artworks becomes itself the basis for selling more artworks. The mystery disguises the commodification of the author and perpetrates it. Coetzee provides something of an antidote to this mystification, when he writes of ‘late style’ in far more prosaic terms: as a response to boredom. Coetzee sets up a dialectic between an artist’s ‘great question’ and the ‘labour’ to answer it. But his sublation is neither solution nor resolution, it is affect: ‘when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you [. . .] you need to look elsewhere’.8 Although his understanding of late style itself is technical – as ‘stripped-down style’9 – it emerges out of banal affect, boredom. What actually bores Coetzee may be fascinating to some. Here, I am more interested in the strategy that leads him to use as disarming and disingenuous an affect as boredom to dispel the mystique around late style. Coetzee’s response to late style presents a challenge for this book: how to negotiate the affective commodification of late style where ‘everyone knows the score’ and ‘nothing is surprising’, without resorting to the synonyms Jameson gives for the co-opted negative space, like ‘opposition’, ‘subversion’ and ‘critique’, or fetishizing the authors’ ‘feelings’ as commodities in themselves.
Focusing on affective cynicism – ‘almost always taken to be incompatible with and detrimentally obstructive to scholarly inquiry’ – may be ‘conducive to critical work’.10 According to Nick Salvato, the conductivity of affective cynicism comes from ‘clinging’ to cynicism as an obstruction, rather than overcoming, circumventing or suspending it.11 By ‘cling’ (Salvato’s example is a wall, unsurprisingly), he means to embrace ‘in such a way that the “intensif[ied]” obstruction and the obstructive wall itself change, perhaps move, precisely because of the clinging and the more granularly textured feeling of, up, and against the wall that the clinging enables’.12 Salvato’s affective cynicism comes in the wake of Lauren Berlant’s influential Cruel Optimism (2011), in which the objects of desires are actually obstacles to your flourishing.13 But if cynicism as affective obstruction signals a change in approach to cynicism as an idea and to literary cynics as artists, ‘clinging’ to obstruction
implies a ‘durabil[ity] and duration’ to that approach.14 For this reason, I am inclined more to Salvato’s dormant structuralism, than his use of affect theory. My impulse here is to focus on the ‘durable’ affective language that has already calcified (over ‘duration’) into rhetoric.
In pursuing rhetorical readings of the writers, I also dwell only briefly on their histories and archives. Benjamin Schreier, a singularly ‘clinging’ cynical critic, puts it well in his stinging attack on historical research: ‘I have no interest in arguing that literature cannot be read historically [. . .] My goal has been rather to indicate how the cynical critique of normalization extends beyond the texts at hand to implicate as well the practice of interpretation that would claim to recognize their relevance or historical significance.’15
Debating the historical importance of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee is circular, insofar as historicist criticism takes their continued recognition to be a (self-fulfilling) sign of their relevance or historical significance. I would rather expand on the consequences of this circularity, moving its implications from the reflexive to the diffractive.16 Rather than resist the interpretive ‘wave’, whereby the only alternative to endorsing the scholarship’s existing hegemonic legitimacy is to dispel that legitimacy, I draw attention to the various obstructions that diffract this circularity into different rhetorical strategies. Each writer pursues a different form of literary cynicism in their response to the ‘self-grounded validity of authority’, the better to understand how ‘legitimacy’s self-evidence’ wanes in light of ‘cynicism’s knowledge of authority’s inescapability’.17
My main concern with restricting myself to rhetorical analysis is not simply that I appear to traduce good affective and historicist criticism in an age of intellectual reproduction. By not engaging with cultural-historical conditions in extensive detail, I risk perpetuating problematic assumptions that all relations within the Global South must circulate through the Global North.18 The South-South relationship between Coetzee and Borges is obscured by their transportation via Europe, here represented by Beckett. In the Paradoxes, I do meditate on a European diaspora in countries that have often served as gateways between Europe and South America or Southern Africa. But I do not commit myself to an analysis of South-South relations. There are other, more suitable writers to that task than Borges and Coetzee, with less overt allegiance to North-South cultural hegemony. In light of these complicities, my attention
to Beckett usefully, if somewhat problematically, unsettles a strict geographic focus on the Global South.
The Global South is not just a geospatial term. It also designates a particular cultural-economic epoch, whose existence post-1945 is retrospectively inaugurated by the Brandt Report (1980) and continues into the present. Within this epoch, the marginal privilege Borges and Coetzee enjoy – as white, male criollo subjects from the Global South – begins to mutate. Insofar as Beckett, a middle-class Anglo-Irish émigré in Paris, also hails from a relatively peripheral, gateway country, Borges, Beckett and Coetzee coincide in three biographical features: they each begin their lives enjoying a relative ethnic privilege in their region; this privilege is somewhat compromised by personal infractions with their states; as the marginality of these states is entrenched (under Bretton-Woods and other economic conditions), the historical contingency of this privilege becomes more and more difficult to ignore. Where the Brandt Report, in strident tones of self-determination, argued for a need to move beyond ‘historical guilt’, since self-righteousness never put food in anyone’s belly, by the 1980s the sense given by the three writers is of exacerbated historical guilt. This may explain why Borges, Beckett and Coetzee are each driven to forms of political conscience in the 1980s, which cast prior beliefs into relief, open up political engagement in the present or propel them towards future work. These heterogenous sites manifest in responses to the 1976–83 Dictatorship in Argentina (for Borges), the Socialist Bloc (for Beckett), and Late Apartheid and particularly the death of Steve Bantu Biko in 1977 (for Coetzee).19 Their responses to the ideologies that underpin these sites are, by and large, cynical of state control and cultural hegemons. But this cynicism opens up, rather than resolves, the problem of distinguishing them for study, since reflexive cynicism – the awareness of ideology – is, by the 1980s, becoming generalized.
Jameson marks the 1980s as the time when economic deregulation and globalization, combined with the reduced efficacy of the ‘socialist bloc’, allow for a subsumption of everything under capitalism, together with a general awareness that this is so. In fact, Jameson continues: ‘I would call it cynicism, this totalised form of awareness of capitalism [. .] I do think this is an age of generalised cynicism, in the sense that everybody knows what the score is. There is nothing surprising to anybody about this system, and in that sense,
maybe cynicism is the best term for it.’20 This cynicism might have been pervasive by the 1980s; that certainly didn’t stop Beckett from noticing a similar ‘social cynicism’ in 1937. When his brother, Frank, was married, Samuel Beckett diagnosed ‘the awful unconscious social [c]ynicism that knows that what the relationship comes down to in the end is Gongs & tea-trolleys, that without them there is no “together’ ” in a letter to Thomas McGreevy (SBL1 537).21 Beckett opposes the ‘social cynicism’ of things ‘trundling you out of a relation into a condition’ to a mode of auto-impoverishment closer to Ancient Cynicism, conducted ‘in the meanest of bed sitting rooms, where at least one owned nothing i.e. was owned by nothing’ (SBL1 537). In a cutting parable (1957) about the populism of Juan Domingo Perón – Argentina’s president from 1945 to 1955, who infamously demotes Borges to Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in 1946 – Borges likens the cynic to an imposter who exploits the ‘credulous love’ of the poor for gain (material and ideological).22 Borges’s cynical imposter is contrasted to ‘a fanatic, a sad wretch, a dreamer’ (Dr 31; OC2 178): all subjects who share a ‘delusion’, a veil through which the cynic is able to see. Like Borges, Coetzee identifies cynicism as a conventional operation of disbelief. In Doubling the Point (1992), he contrasts ‘Cynicism: the denial of any ultimate basis in values’ with ‘Grace: a condition in which the truth can be told clearly, without blindness’ (DP 392).23 ‘Denial’ implies activity, where ‘condition’ implies passivity, hence my assignation of cynicism as the operation, where grace is, perhaps, to be regarded as a state. But it also knows the material score: values have their price. Beckett’s historical condition, Borges’s agent and Coetzee’s operation all present a strikingly conventional cynicism. There is, in other words, nothing exceptional about cynicism as it appears in Borges, Beckett and Coetzee, excepting only the attention their reflections on cynicism garner because of their literary authority.
Ironically, literary authority itself is one of the casualties of Jameson’s ‘generalised cynicism’. Coetzee, in his letters to Paul Auster, identifies ‘the late 1970s or early 1980s’ as the moment when ‘the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner lives’.24 While he is ‘quite prepared’ to reconcile this loss of authority with diagnoses of ‘a political or economic or even world-historical character’, he feels ‘there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure’.25
It is beyond this study’s scope to tie the loss of literary authority to the broader trends of globalized capital. Rather, the story begins from a coincidence between the decline of literary authority and the increase of generalized cynicism. While a historicist response might locate this coincidence in the 1980s, here the focus will be more structural: something coheres in cynicism that naturally rejects the mysticism of literary authority.26 A paradox emerges when cynicism and literary authority combine in Borges, Beckett and Coetzee: no other writers of the latter half of the twentieth century were granted more literary authority on the basis of works that did more to dispel the mystery of literary authority. This paradoxical use and abuse of literary authority coheres in what I will call ‘literary cynicism’.
Cynicisms
Three responses to cynicism have already been put to work, albeit somewhat haphazardly: Jameson’s ‘cynicism as the total awareness of capitalism’ (cynicism as historical condition), Salvato’s ‘cynicism as obstruction’ (cynicism as affect) and Schreier’s ‘cynicism as operation’ (cynicism as deconstruction). They provide a general schema for the proliferation of ‘cynicisms’ since the early 1980s, which have generally tried to separate the historical circumstances of cynicism, and its affective consequences, from its operation as a mode of embodied thought.
Responses from 1979 to the mid-2000s share a tendency to split contemporary cynicism, often regarded as a ‘malaise’ of disbelief, from an ethically rigorous Ancient Greek Cynicism, exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope. Later responses tend to collapse the distinction. It is worth rehearsing this scholarship, in which early attempts to rehabilitate cynicism from itself largely give way to a strategic co-option of cynical approaches. Nick Salvato usefully classifies their various objects of analysis into accommodational, critical and renovated cynicism: a cynicism that risks servicing structures of power, a cynicism that exposes such accommodations and a cynicism whose ‘paradoxically ascetic theatricality [. . .] obtains in the service not just of negative critique but of positive philosophico-political commitment’.27 In the chapters that follow, I’ll shuttle between my own dialectic of redemption and strategic co-option in
order to demonstrate how a ‘paradoxically ascetic theatricality’ might work, whereby Borges, Beckett and Coetzee ‘simultaneously accommodate power and preserve an exteriority [. .] to its operations’.28
In order to understand the terms in play, it is necessary to distinguish what is usually meant by Ancient Cynicism and contemporary cynicism. Ancient Cynicism designates (whether positively or negatively) those Greek and Roman philosophers who, following a cynical life characterized by askēsis (practice), arête (virtue) and parrhesia (frank speech), sought to live ‘according to nature’.29 A cynic, after ‘kuón’ (dog), designates a philosopher who attacks established authority by challenging their opponent ad hominem, as an intervention of bodies, not of arguments or minds. Contemporary cynicism describes a disenchantment with ideals, whether they be political, subjective or aesthetic. In the early 1980s, a rapprochement of ancient ‘dog-men’ with contemporary cynics is popularized by Peter Sloterdijk’s bestselling work of cultural historicism, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), which appeared just as Michel Foucault was concluding his final Seminar, The Courage of Truth (1983–84). The latter was primarily a historical excavation of the Ancient Cynics as prime proponents of parrhesia (also translated as fearless truth-telling). These two approaches – cultural historicism and classical scholarship – determine much of the work on cynicism until the mid-2000s.
Common to the two approaches – contemporary cultural studies of cynicism (represented by Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek and Timothy Bewes) and renewed interest in histories and genealogies of classical Cynicism (Hans NiehuesPröbsting, Foucault, R. Bracht Branham and M. Goulet-Cazé) – is an effort to recuperate Ancient Cynicism from contemporary cynicism. Sloterdijk goes so far as to argue for division of the term: the Ancient Cynics were, to use Sloterdijk’s term, kynical, whereas contemporary cynics are, well, cynical. Kynics use their interventions to upset the status quo, to trouble power blocs to which they did not belong. By contrast, contemporary cynicism is understood as ‘enlightened false consciousness’, in which those techniques previously used by the oppressed to ridicule their masters are turned over to the hands of those very masters. Recent responses to cynicism in the work of David Mazella (2007), Daniel Mayfield (2015), Benjamin Scheier (2009), Louisa Shea (2010) and Sharon A. Stanley (2014) eschew this oppositional division between Cynicism as the ancient discipline of truth-seeking and
cynicism as modern dissemblance. Rather, they argue in their respective ways, cynicism is a ‘tactic’ or ‘operation’ that has been deployed in different ways at different moments in history: ‘Cynicism is no longer an intrinsic, unalterable possession of particular subjects but rather a weapon that can be taken up to navigate particular epistemological and social dilemmas and laid aside when it is no longer appears useful.’30 In this light, the paradox of cynicism comes to be precisely its utility: its efficacy emerges in its ability to identify other paradoxes, as ‘temporary and adaptable practice[s], rooted in an uncertain, contingent world’.31
Foucault hints at this contingency when, in his last seminar, over 1983–84, he begins to examine parrhesia as a form of speech that emerges when speaking out carries significant risks for the body that speaks. Foucault was interested in Cynical parrhesia because of its fragility. Cynicism offered a form of ‘care for the self’ focused on ‘bios’ (life), while cynical parrhesia drew on ‘an essential connection between living in a certain way and dedicating oneself to telling the truth [. . .] without doctrinal mediation’.32 Truth, in this context, is to be understood in relation to the true life – a life ‘unconcealed’, ‘unalloyed’, ‘direct’ and ‘stable’, in Foucault’s terms – with Cynicism taking the themes of the true life ‘to their extreme consequence’.33
Foucault’s consideration of the Cynics is primarily a historical excavation of their practices in Ancient Greece. In his session on 29 February 1984, however, he suggests Cynicism reemerges in modern art:
I think it is especially in modern art that the question of cynicism becomes particularly important. That modern art was, and still is for us the vehicle of the cynic mode of being, of the principle of connecting style of life and manifestation of the truth, came about in two ways.34
Foucault’s ‘two ways’ invoke art as testimony and as revelation: ‘the modern idea that the artist’s life, in the very form it takes, should constitute some kind of testimony of what art is in its truth’ and the idea that art itself must establish a relation to reality that is not about ornamentation but about laying bare; in Foucault’s terms, the ‘violent reduction of existence to its basics’.35 One of the examples Foucault gives is, unsurprisingly, Samuel Beckett. Yet if Foucault’s evocative ‘call to arts’ introduces us to ‘literary cynicism’, it runs the risk of returning Beckett (or Borges or Coetzee) to the cabinet of philosopher-sages,
who will teach doctrinal ‘truths’ through an art that is also self-generating. Foucault does identify this as an area that needs further research. He neither justifies his claim nor offers any further explanation as to how this writing is to be characterized. His ‘laying bare’ of ‘art’ and the ‘artistic life’ are given no methodology, nor is the separation of ‘art’ from ‘artist’ entirely clear.
Although it may be defended from the false shadows of nostalgic essentialism, Foucault’s cynic seems troublingly close, Rahel Jaeggi has noted, to Nietzsche’s metaphor of the sculptor who turns (cynical) life into ‘selfinvention’ or ‘creative self-formation’.36 As Jaeggi goes on to argue, the notion of self-creation as a mode of poiesis is ultimately unsustainable, since it suggests the self who invents itself ‘invents itself as something new and [. .] is free and unhindered in the fashioning process’.37 For all its theoretical excitations, I turn away from Foucault’s free-standing cynic, in order to contemplate cynicism as a form of ‘appropriation’, by which, again referring to Jaeggi, ‘the self is less a work of art one makes oneself into than a practical-experimental process one is caught up in’.38 ‘Appropriation’, like ‘invention’, aspires to a nonessentialist understanding of self-formation; unlike invention, appropriation acknowledges that it must use the materials already given, whether through the external impositions of reified structures or the internal realization of certain habitual patterns of behaviour. The challenge, then, is to think how literary cynicism emerges when an author’s late style is taken as an act of autoappropriation, when writers write about their artistic lives, that is, as literary authorities.39 Borges, Beckett and Coetzee are literary cynics, insofar as their subjectivity, their performance of their subjectivity and their politics cohere in the formation of a style that is auto-appropriative.
Even as subjectivity is folded into literature, politics and performance, so too is the literary cynic a folded subject. First, as a topic for discussion, ‘the literary cynic’ turns cynicism as a lived practice or form of philosophical life into a literary genre. Life-become-literature reflects itself in the aesthetic preoccupations of literary symmetries and asymmetries, rather than in the everyday presentness of lived practice. Second, the literary cynic turns his gaze inwards, in a diffractive response to straightforward articulations of his life or work. Finally, the ‘literary cynic’ is difficult to distinguish from the ‘practicing cynic’, because any description, story or anecdote about a practicing cynic necessarily turns this figure into a literary character.
Perhaps for reasons of this indeterminacy, engaging with cynicism as a literary topic leads to a plethora of alternative models. Cynicism is the topic and inspiration of literary works in the Classical World: Menippus’s satires and Lucian’s ‘Philosophies for Sale!’ It exerted a significant influence on Renaissance literature, particularly in works by Montaigne and Rabelais. But most scholarly debates will at least gesture to cynicism as a tactic for literary thought in Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, written during the French Enlightenment, partly because it marks a shift to ‘cynical books’, rather ‘than books simply about cynics’.40 Previous incarnations of literary cynicism, where cynics are literary characters, did not push an author’s auto-appropriative performativity. Diderot’s break with the tradition from Lucian to Rabelais is to write himself into the dialogue. In this respect, my discussion of Rameau’s Nephew provides a structural paradigm for my analysis of auto-critique in Borges, Beckett and Coetzee: it demonstrates how the ‘groundless subjectivity’, or ‘alienation’, of cynicism may be contingently supported by formal rhetorical praxis (rather than affect or historical condition).
Rameau’s Nephew consists of a framing narrative, a dialogue between a philosopher Moi (‘Me’) and the nephew Lui (‘You/Him’), and the descriptions of Lui ’s interruptions: his various performances or actions during the conversation. Sharon Stanley describes the schema of Rameau’s Nephew as a two-step movement: ‘[W]e move from the first, incomplete, step of cynicism, a depiction of a false, hypocritical society, to its second, crucial component, a tactical wager that one stands to profit more from complicity than moral purity.’41 Stanley’s schema turns into movement what Lionel Trilling called ‘two intentions’: ‘the principle of insincerity on which society is based’ (‘with concomitant loss of personal integrity and dignity’) and the suggestion that ‘moral judgment is not ultimate’. Crucial to both accounts of Rameau’s Nephew, and to the Nephew itself, is dialogue as a generic form, since it is dialogue that generates cynicism’s vital encounter with sociability. If cynicism is a tactic, then it can only be generated by an individual taking a particularly contrarian view to what they understand to be the established norms and values of a society.
To adopt Stanley’s term, Diderot takes two steps in his treatment of cynicism. First, cynicism is taken up as the philosophy of the authorial persona-turnedcharacter. Then, through dialogue, the author-character (Moi) is confronted and confounded by the nephew (Lui). In staging a dialogue between the
sincere philosophe and the exploitative nephew, Rameau’s Nephew would seem to play out the division of cynicism into Ancient Cynicism and modern cynicism. This is the meaning given to it by Sloterdijk and, after him, Žižek and Bewes. But it might also show that traditional cynical critique, which relied on presence and embodiment, ceases to be verifiably sincere when translated into writing. Hegel recognizes this in The Phenomenology of Spirit, when he takes Rameau’s Nephew as the signature text for ‘the groundless self’, or, in Terry Pinkard’s gloss, ‘the cosmopolitan who attempts to live without any mediating institutions and to rely only on the force of his own talents [. . .] the nephew is simply presenting to his noble and well-off employers only a mirror of the alienated, “pure selves” that they themselves are’.42 Rather than the Cynics of Hegel’s History of Philosophy, who are denounced for ‘possessing but little Philosophy’ and who ‘did not bring what they had into a scientific system’, Diderot’s literary cynicism becomes, for Hegel’s Phenomenology, the basis for rethinking modern subjectivity as a cynical cosmopolitanism that presents, as its response to alienation, something akin to Jaeggi’s auto-appropriative praxis.
This ‘groundless’ subjectivity has, of course, some ground or content (‘the force of his own talents’) in rhetorical praxis, hence my particular focus on rhetoric in this book. Rameau’s nephew ‘is a compound of elevation and abjectness, of good sense and lunacy [. . .] He has no greater opposite than himself [. . .] What a chimera’.43 This collection of opposites may be better understood as a plastic relation between consistency and inconsistency. As Moi says, ‘I was dumbfounded by such shrewdness and such depravity; by such soundness of ideas alternating with such falseness; by so general a perversity of feeling, so total a corruption, and so exceptional a candour.’44 The nephew’s plasticity unhinges Moi, since the former’s subjectivity remains in flux between valid ideas and false ones. However, Diderot’s reader can identify the nephew’s consistent inconsistency, since Diderot will always describe the nephew through enumerated opposites: elevation/abjectness; good sense/lunacy; depravity/ frankness. Diderot’s stylistic consistency, enumerative opposition, catches something of the nephew’s malleability by not restricting him to a single binary pair. If writing disrupts the immediacy of cynicism, and therefore cynical sincerity, then it also, through stylistic consistency, creates spectral sincerity as a form of repeated action. Writing becomes, in stylistic repetition, the means for consistent change and, in this way, marks out the ‘field’ of a particular writer.45
Genres of paradox
Literary cynicism, I wish to suggest, is operative when the writer appropriates ‘his’ reified form as a commodity on a literary marketplace. This operation challenges the ideology of easy solutions, such as ‘resistance’ or ‘subversion’, but it also secures itself by grounding its presentation of ‘the groundless self’ (the author as commodity) in rhetorical consistency. Following Schreier, I understand cynicism ‘not as a specific, positive phenomenon [. . .] that can be diagnosed and pathologised but as an interdiction of the ability to make sincere judgements that arises in the operation of judgement itself’ (179). My own reading of this interdiction is that it has a secure rhetorical grounding: a concern with paradox.
Cynicism’s engagement with the literary begins in a series of irresolvable paradoxes, emergent in phrases like ‘writing embodiment’, ‘claiming sincerity’ and ‘negotiating truth’. To embody something is to live it in the immediacy of bodily experience, but to write about that experience necessarily differentiates the moment of experience from the moment of writing. Sincerity, ‘the congruence between avowal and actual feeling’, is in some senses always claimed in the lived encounter, but to reinforce that claim by marking it, ‘I want to emphasis my sincerity’, raises questions about why sincerity, always presumed to be present, must be so forcefully re-presented. Here, contrary becomes corollary: an objective truth uttered by its self-avowed beneficiary can never be taken as freely given; self-recognition does not immunize a statement from self-interest. In each case, cynical engagement with an utterance becomes paradoxical when recast in literary narrative. Since cynicism strives for an immediacy of context in encounters, and literature recontextualizes such encounters as distant, their coincidence can only be resolved through paradox.
Michael Riffaterre adamantly defended the notion of ‘fictional truth’ as something that must simultaneously ‘declare its artificiality, and yet [. . .] somehow be true to hold the interest of its readers’.46 He called it a ‘paradox of truth in fiction’, and proposed to ‘seek a solution’ in the ‘diegetic implementation of narrative models’, in which a consistency of syntax develops a grammar that supplants conventional referentiality (where a word refers to a real thing in a real world) with substitutability (‘any verbal given will seem to be true when
it generates tautological derivations that repeat it in successive synonymous forms’).47 Riffaterre’s project aims to turn Saussurean linguistic arbitrariness into a grammatology that sidesteps Of Grammatology. My own reading of literary cynicism will not seek solutions to the paradox of ‘fictional truth’. I find it to be a necessary ‘knot’ or ‘obstruction’ in literary cynicism’s continued engagement with problems of form. My ‘resolution’ in this regard remains necessarily opaque until I have addressed what is meant by paradox.
Paradox is commonly understood to be a statement or situation that contradicts itself, but which may (or may not) turn out to be true. The philosopher W. V. O. Quine divides this understanding into three different types of paradox: veridical (statements which appear false, but turn out to be true), falsidical (statements which appear false, but turn out to be false) and antinomies (statements which bring about ‘crises in thought’: ‘an antinomy produces a self-contradiction by [following] accepted patterns of reasoning’).48 Wikipedia, with unusual perspicacity, extends Quine’s division to include dialethia, a paraconsistent logical feature in which a statement may be both true and untrue at the same time. Riffaterre’s term for dialethia, as a feature of syntax, is ‘syllepsis’: ‘using one word with two mutually incompatible meanings [. . .] The syllepsis a mere phonetic shape that is filled by two otherwise alien universes of representation’.49 My preferred term is ‘parable’, since it describes those paraconsistent moments in natural language when a single narration may apply simultaneously to two or more narrative contexts. Finally, a form of linguistic paradox, not immediately apparent in Quine’s account, but related to syllepsis, is the enantioseme: ‘words’, in the account of Roland Barthes, ‘which have the same form and contrary meanings’.50 A word like ‘cleave’, which, for reasons of convergent etymology, means both to bind together and to split apart, is an enantioseme. For Barthes, enantiosemes do not only evolve over the historical development of language; they are generated by their context, and shift as these contexts also shift. Thus, ‘the “bourgeoisie” is good when it is considered in its historical, ascensional, progressive role; it is bad when in power’.51
Forms of paradox, whether they are resolvable (veridical or falsifical) or irresolvable (antinomy, parable, enantioseme), give me distinct generic constraints for consolidating a rhetorical language to underpin authorial autoappropriation in literary cynicism. They also provide an infrastructure for understanding the literary language games in the works of Jorge Luis Borges,
Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee. I don’t mean to reduce the fictional work of Borges, Beckett or Coetzee to a series of paradoxes; nor am I interested in explicating their use of set paradoxes (the sorites paradox, for instance, or the paradoxes of Zeno).52 Instead, I want to suggest that, within repetitions of certain rhetorical features, a formal pattern is discernible that might usefully be called paradox. Observing this pattern in such general terms would be inconsequential if it didn’t drive the work to concerns beyond the merely literary to the sociopolitical positions outlined in my opening remarks: it is this complex coincidence between literature and sociopolitical concerns that makes of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee literary cynics.
By reviewing literary cynicism, I hope to measure operations of literary practice against the forms of life that Borges, Beckett and Coetzee perform for their audiences. The appropriative nature of these performances acknowledges, on the one hand, the expectations of audiences familiar with particular styles of writing, while, on the other, maintaining the surprise that first attracted these audiences. Literary cynicism demands this exchange be plastic since operative schemas are as likely to calcify into uninterrogated life as the narratives they are meant to operate upon: ‘[T]hose games are Borges’ now, and I will have to conceive something else’ (D 51). The work of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee interrogates life, but it also interrogates its own performance of this interrogation. Shuttling in this manner, between operation and performance, will, I hope, limit my own proclivities in the bind Oliver Feltham has identified between ‘angelic critique’ and ‘servile apology’: in which existing situations do not live up to their ‘true nature’ or justify themselves through relative successes.53 Translated to the context of literary criticism, and particularly author studies, this bind may be understood as taking as its starting principle processes of either decanonization or deification: emphasizing the flaws of Borges, Beckett and Coetzee, or recapitulating their place among the ‘great authors’ of the twentieth century.
Both positions rely on rigidly conceived relationships between literary practice, historical determinism and philosophical aesthetics: either their success has been determined by a literary marketplace eager to valorize particular aesthetic principles over others, or they are genius figures whose canonicity is assured through their inherent stylistic value. Both use a stable status quo to justify positions of critique or apology. Writerly agency may be used to support
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
“To make this candy lots of cherries are needed. The manufacturer is in the market for bushels and bushels of ’em, and so far hasn’t been able to get half of what he wants. I told one of his men about the big crop up here and especially about this grove on Cherry Farm, and I’ve come now to buy up all I can. He’ll pay big and he’ll give me a good commission and he’ll get plenty of the finest cherries in the world, so everything is all right for everybody and the world is a fine place.”
“Well, that certainly is good news!” cried Grandpa Martin. “Why, if I can sell all my cherries I’ll have some money, no matter if the flood did spoil most of my crops.”
“Oh, won’t that be great!” cried Ted in delight.
“And if you sell enough cherries you can give some money to the Crippled Home, can’t you?” asked Janet, softly.
“I can and will, my dear,” said Grandpa Martin.
“Let’s go and look at the cherries,” said the lollypop man. “Hurray!”
Oh, what a lot of cherries there were! No wonder Grandpa Martin’s place was called Cherry Farm! The trees in the grove bent down their branches which were laden with red cherries and black. Some were purple, and when the Curlytops ate them their faces and hands were all stained.
“’Ist like we tipped over de ink bottle!” laughed Trouble, who was given one or two cherries, not enough to make him ill, but enough to color him.
Then there were some big white cherries, with red cheeks, and Grandpa Martin called them “ox-hearts.” And when the Curlytops asked him why, not seeing anything about them like an ox, they were told the cherries had that name because of their large size.
“You have the finest crop of cherries of anyone around here!” said the lollypop man when he had gone through the grove. “My friend, the candy man, will buy all you want to sell, and pay you well. Then you will have plenty of money.”
“I’ll sell all my wife doesn’t want to can, and all these little Curlytops don’t want to eat,” laughed Grandpa Martin.
“Oh, how glad I am!” cried Jan. “Now grandpa can give some money to Hal’s Crippled Home!”
And so Grandpa Martin could. His cherries sold for much more money than ever before, being sent to the factory where the Chewing Cherry Candy was made. And, a little later, the lollypop man drove past the house with his red wagon and white horse and called:
“Oh, ho! Oh, ho! I love a goat. Come see my white coat, and get some cherry candy! Oh, ho! Oh, ho! Come get cherry candy!”
This the Curlytops did, and they said the new cherry chewing candy was the best they had ever eaten. Perhaps it was because it had in it some of Grandpa Martin’s cherries.
At any rate Grandpa Martin was given quite a sum of money for his cherry crop, and he could afford to give the hundred dollars to the Home for Crippled Children.
“Is Hal going to be cured?” asked Ted one day, after he, with Jan and Trouble, had been for a ride with Nicknack.
“The doctor is going to try to cure him to-morrow,” said Mother Martin. “We are to go over the day following and see how he is.”
And when they went, they found Hal sitting in an easy chair, his feet and legs covered with blankets. He was very pale, but he smiled.
“Oh!” exclaimed Jan a bit sadly, “can’t you—walk?”
“He will soon walk better than ever,” said the nurse softly.
“And then you’ll see me chase after the Mosquito Dwarf and drive him away from Princess Blue Eyes!” laughed Hal. “Just wait! I’ll run a race with Nicknack soon.”
“But don’t get our goat too tired,” said Jan. “For we may want to give the Princess Blue Eyes a ride.”
“That’s so!” laughed Hal. “We’ll ride her to her golden throne, down by the ocean waves where the green palms grow, and then——”
He stopped and seemed to be looking away, past the white clouds that were scudding across the blue sky.
“Then what?” asked Jan, for she thought it sounded like a story in which one has stopped after telling halfway through.
“Then,” said Hal softly, “maybe the Princess Blue Eyes won’t need me any more.”
“Oh, yes she will!” put in Ted. “There’s lots of mosquitoes left yet. I feel ’em biting me!”
And a few weeks later Hal could walk as straight as anyone, though he had to go slowly until his leg and foot fully healed. But he was very happy, and so were many other boys and girls in the Home who were cured and made more comfortable, because of the money Grandpa Martin gave when he sold so many cherries.
Then followed many fine vacation days at Cherry Farm. I could not begin to tell you all the Curlytops did if I had a book twice the size of this one But I can tell you about some of the things in another book to be called “The Curlytops on Star Island; Or, Camping Out with Grandpa.” In that you may read how Ted and Jan, to say nothing of Trouble, went to the island in Clover Lake, and had many adventures.
“Well, what shall we do to-day?” asked Ted of Jan, as they went out on the porch one morning, about a week after Hal had been cured and the chewing cherry candy made.
“Let’s go for a ride with Nicknack,” said Jan.
As they were going back to the stable where they kept their goat, they heard some one calling:
“Stop it now! You stop it!”
“What’s that?” asked Janet.
“Sounds like Trouble,” answered Ted.
It was Trouble. Baby William had taken Nicknack’s rope, by which the goat was tied to a stake just outside the barn, and this rope the little fellow had made fast to a wheelbarrow. Trouble wanted to have Nicknack pull him, but every time the goat straightened out the rope the wheelbarrow would upset, and Trouble, who had climbed in to get a ride, would be spilled out. But he fell on the soft grass and was not hurt.
“Oh, Trouble! What are you doing?” cried Jan, as her little brother tipped over for perhaps the fifth time, though of course Nicknack did not mean to do it.
“Me goin’ to gib rides an’ make money to buy cherries—’cause grandpa’s all goned,” was the answer. “Giddap, ole Nicknack!”
Nicknack, reaching for a choice bit of grass, overturned the wheelbarrow again, and out popped the little boy.
“Oh, you dear bunch of Trouble!” cried Mother Martin, as she laughingly ran to pick him up. “You are always doing something!”
And so he was. But, for that matter, so were the Curlytops. And, leaving them to have more fun on Cherry Farm, we will say goodbye.
THE CURLYTOPS SERIES
By HOWARD R. GARIS
12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. Jacket in full colors. Price per volume, 50 cents. Postage 10 cents additional.
1. THE CURLYTOPS AT CHERRY FARM or Vacation Days in the Country
A tale of happy vacation days on a farm.
2. THE CURLYTOPS ON STAR ISLAND or Camping Out with Grandpa The Curlytops camp on Star Island.
3. THE CURLYTOPS SNOWED IN or Grand Fun with Skates and Sleds
The Curlytops on lakes and hills.
4. THE CURLYTOPS AT UNCLE FRANK’S RANCH or Little Folks on Ponyback Out West on their uncle’s ranch they have a wonderful time.
5. THE CURLYTOPS AT SILVER LAKE or On the Water with Uncle Ben
The Curlytops camp out on the shores of a beautiful lake.
6. THE CURLYTOPS AND THEIR PETS
or Uncle Toby’s Strange Collection
An old uncle leaves them to care for his collection of pets.
7. THE CURLYTOPS AND THEIR PLAYMATES
or Jolly Times Through the Holidays
They have great times with their collection of animals.
8. THE CURLYTOPS IN THE WOODS or Fun at the Lumber Camp
Exciting times in the forest for Curlytops.
9. THE CURLYTOPS AT SUNSET BEACH or What Was Found in the Sand
The Curlytops have a fine time at the seashore.
10. THE CURLYTOPS TOURING AROUND or The Missing Photograph Albums
The Curlytops get in some moving pictures.
11. THE CURLYTOPS IN A SUMMER CAMP or Animal Joe’s Menagerie
There is great excitement as some mischievous monkeys break out of Animal Joe’s Menagerie.
12. THE CURLYTOPS GROWING UP or Winter Sports and Summer Pleasures
The Curlytops are involved in the loss of a book and how they recovered it.
13. THE
CURLYTOPS
AT HAPPY HOUSE or The Mystery of the Chinese Vase
The Curlytops explored and found plenty of enjoyment.
14. THE CURLYTOPS AT THE CIRCUS or The Runaway Elephant
The Curlytops have a grand time finding the elephant.
These books may be purchased wherever books are sold. Send for Our Free Illustrated Catalogue.
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY, Publishers New York
The Teddy Books
by Howard R. Garis
In Teddy, Mr. Garis gives his readers a sturdy, pleasant youngster of about ten years who has an eye and ear for mystery. You will like Teddy for his carefree youth, his audacity and his ability to take every adventure as it comes. Read these stories and follow Teddy through a happy succession of laughter, adventure and unusual mystery.
12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. Jacket in colors. Price, per volume, 50 cents. Postage 10 cents additional.
1. TEDDY AND THE MYSTERY DOG
Teddy decides to build a club-house with the aid of three or four of his chums. Before it is finished a strange dog appears through the bushes and leads the boys into many strange adventures.
2. TEDDY AND THE MYSTERY MONKEY
Teddy goes off on a merry chase after Billo, a delightful chimpanzee who likes bananas and the freedom of the woods.
3. TEDDY AND THE MYSTERY CAT
Once again Ted and his love for animals leads him into startling adventures—this time with a mystery cat whose alarming actions keep the boys guessing a long time.
4. TEDDY AND THE MYSTERY PARROT
A strange man with gold rings in his ears and a bright red bandana about his neck leaves a beautiful parrot, named Peter, in Mrs. Traddle’s candy store, and then disappears. Teddy and his friends take the parrot but lose him. Then follows a merry hunt for the mystery parrot and its owner. These books may be purchased wherever books are sold. Send for Our Free Illustrated Catalogue.
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY, Publishers
New York
BUDDY SERIES
By HOWARD R. GARIS
Author of the F “C S ”
12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. With colored jacket.
Price 50 cents per volume.
Postage 10 cents additional.
The author presents a distinctly modern juvenile series of stories for boys. Here we observe a really fascinating character-study of an up-to-date young lad, whose exceedingly energetic mind, and whose overflowing youth and vitality, are constantly leading him into new and more tangled situations, from which by wit, courage and luck, he manages to extricate himself in safety.
1. BUDDY ON THE FARM
Or, A Boy and His Prize Pumpkin
2. BUDDY IN SCHOOL
Or, A Boy and His Dog
3. BUDDY AND HIS WINTER FUN
Or, A Boy in a Snow Camp
4. BUDDY AT RAINBOW LAKE
Or, A Boy and His Boat
5. BUDDY AND HIS CHUM
Or, A Boy’s Queer Search
6. BUDDY AT PINE BEACH
Or, A Boy on the Ocean
7. BUDDY AND HIS FLYING BALLOON
Or, A Boy’s Mysterious Airship
8. BUDDY ON MYSTERY MOUNTAIN
Or, A Boy’s Strange Discovery
9. BUDDY ON FLOATING ISLAND
Or, A Boy’s Wonderful Secret
10. BUDDY AND THE SECRET CAVE
Or, A Boy and the Crystal Hermit
11. BUDDY AND HIS COWBOY PAL
Or, A Boy on a Ranch
12. BUDDY AND THE INDIAN CHIEF
Or, A Boy Among the Navajos
13. BUDDY AND THE ARROW CLUB
Or, A Boy and the Long Bow
14. BUDDY AT LOST RIVER
Or, A Boy and a Gold Mine
These books may be purchased wherever books are sold.
Send for Our Free Illustrated Catalogue.
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY, Publishers New York
HECTOR MALOT BOOKS
Large 12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. Jacket in Colors.
Price, per volume, $1.00 Net.
These stirring and intensely human chronicles from the pen of Hector Malot stand alone as the outstanding juvenile stories of an epoch. Their supreme heart interest, their lovable boy and girl characters, their wholesome and lively inspiration mark them as masterpieces in child experiences
RONNIE
Here is a moving tale of adventure and loyal endeavor filled with the salty tang of the sea and a brave boy’s struggle against hardship and peril. Published in France under the title “Romain-Kalbris” this beautiful story is destined to take a ranking place in the literature of all time.
NOBODY’S BOY
This is Hector Malot’s masterpiece—one of the supreme heart interest stories of the world—the compelling chronicle of little Remi, the homeless lad, who has made the world better for his being in it.
NOBODY’S GIRL
Published in France under the title “En Famille” this book follows “Nobody’s Boy” as a companion juvenile story. The building up of little Perrine’s life is made a fine example for every child.
THE LITTLE SISTER
More romantic and lively than other stories of this great writer, but of no less soul-searching interest, this literary creation of Hector Malot’s has won and will continue to win a strong place in the affections of all readers. These books may be purchased wherever books are sold. Send for Our Free Illustrated Catalogue.
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY, Publishers
New York
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CURLYTOPS AT CHERRY FARM ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
