In the last post, I quoted a passage from Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall in which the author alluded to that ancient euphemism for dying, 'to go unto the greater number' (abiit ad plures: 'he went over to the majority').
'To go to the greater number' is an expression whose antiquity stretches at least as far back as (or 'as high as', to use the formulation favoured by Browne – interesting, isn't it, how time is conceptualized differently depending on one's perspective: the Renaissance man's modest deference to the greatness of the past, versus our own arrogant belief that we live at the vanguard of history) Plautus, whose play Trinummus, written in the third or second century BCE has the line 'quin prius me ad plures penetravi?' ('Why haven't I yet gone over to the greater number?'). Apparently Homer uses a similar expression in the Odyssey, but I haven't been able to track down the reference.
Now, I'm slightly embarrassed to confess this, but I did vaguely believe something I remember reading (a claim I have tentatively repeated to others) that there are as many people living today as have ever lived. This is the sort of thing that sounds so implausible, such a violation of common-sense assumptions, that we half-believe it might be true. It's not, of course.
But that said, I don't find it remotely plausible that the world population has grown from around 1.7 billion to around 6.5 billion (or 'billions' if you prefer the Gordon Brown method of reckoning) within the last hundred years; and yet it is the case. There are people alive today who have seen in their lifetime an ear-bleedingly rapid multiplication of human lives on a scale unimaginable to those that lived in the forty-odd centuries since the first work of literature (we might as well postulate that as a pis aller starting point for human civilization). We certainly seem to live in 'interesting times', as the old Chinese curse had it (or didn't have it, as the case may be; I personally doubt that this was ever a popular saying: it's too witty for that).
We've all seen versions of that minimalist artwork that shows the rate of change in the world population since the beginnings of humanity. And a mind-boggling sight it is too: witness, for example, this graph of world population growth between 10000BCE and 2000CE. That diagram, as a visual representation of the way we live now, is a more appalling monument to human folly than any Bosch painting or Hogarth print.
Browne says that for the ancients, the idea that the dead outnumbered the living might have been, for them, a misinterpretation of the facts. This is, of course, a literary conceit (and a very nice one at that); but it cannot possibly be true. The ancients surely shared with the rest of humanity the strong conviction that their population did not exceed that of the realm of Pluto (who was, after all the god of wealth and plenty, and who got the lion's share of things when they were divided three ways between him, Jupiter and Neptune). And they probably didn't give much thought to the notion (not being a forward-thinking bunch, as a rule) that more people might live in the future than had lived in the past. The Romans, it is clear (or, at least, the official discourse of the Empire), had little regard for the future except in terms of their own persistence: they couldn't really imagine a time when their dominion would end, when other peoples would overwhelm their civilization, and bring it to naught. But the end was not long in coming, and things escalated from there.
The Romans, being a superstitious lot, didn't like to say 'he is dead', preferring instead the euphemistic periphrasis 'he has lived' ('vixit'). I think I read that in Montaigne, or somewhere. This is quite nice; although I would guess that it's more of a grammatical peculiarity than a matter of cultural sensibilities: after all, the Romans also liked to say 'he has spoken' ('dixit') when they really meant 'he's finally shut the fuck up'. The way we're going now, won't the greatest distinction be due to those of whom we might say 'he has died', rather than 'he has lived'? After all, any old idiot can live: it's dying that's a rarity these days.
July 29, 2006
July 28, 2006
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
I've been dipping in and out of Thomas Browne's brilliant Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a copious repository of received ideas, false beliefs, and unaccountable enormities duly catalogued and debunked by this great explorer of the 'untravelled parts of Truth'. Herein we may learn, inter alia, that, contrary to the teachings of Avicenna, it is not in fact good practice to get drunk to the point of vomiting at least once a month; that, pace Pliny the Elder, diamonds cannot be softened by goat's blood; and that (amazingly) it is not the case that storks only live in Republics. Moreover, it is false that beavers gnaw off their own testicles in order to escape their predators. Why they would do this I cannot imagine, except perhaps as a bizarre diversionary tactic. (Browne, come to think of it, does compare it to Medea's murder and dismemberment of her brother, whose limbs she scattered to detain her father in pursuit.) According to the author, this belief was, in ancient times, 'experimentally refuted by one Sestius, a Physitian'. One dreads to think how...
I found particularly interesting Browne's assessment of the apparently widely held belief that it is possible to have sex remotely: ''Tis a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of Physick, which say, there is no generation without a joynt emission, not only, a virtual but corporal and carnal contaction.' Well, quite.
Thomas Browne isn't an author I was that familiar with (despite having read – and, to my shame, repeated – the claim, which I now believe to be erroneous, that his Religio medici is some kind of 'fake'), but the other day I happened to read an excellent short novel by the Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo, entitled Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans. It's a sort of intertextual detective story (I won't say a 'metaphysical detective story', because I find that description unhelpful: all detective stories are metaphysical), in which Borges himself features heavily as a solver of abstract mysteries in a fictional universe that looks very like his own (or at least that of an obsessive reader of his books). And the key to the intrigue, it becomes apparent to the attentive reader, is to be found in a throwaway paragraph at the beginning of one of Borges' own stories (I won't say which one, for fear of spoiling the dénouement) – which, like the word in the riddle whose answer is 'chess', is never mentioned in the novel. There are plenty more references to Borges' stories (and to Poe's) – as well as to the kabbalistic magus John Dee – to keep you guessing anyway, so chances are you won't untangle the intrigue before 'Borges' himself does.
Anyway, in that novel, the character Borges might be observed to remark upon 'Sir Thomas Browne, that magnificent seventeenth-century madman, and one of my favourite authors'. It is said, also, that Browne 'wrote a treatise on the X, which he saw as the union of temporal knowledge and magical knowledge.' This must refer to Browne's Garden of Cyrus, which is a discourse on the quincunx. Incidentally, 'quincunx' is a brilliant word not used often enough in English; whereas in French 'quinconce' is relatively current – perhaps because of traditional French predilection for geometrical gardens?
Published at the same time as that work, in 1658, was an essay on the recent discovery of some ancient funeral urns in Norfolk, entitled Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall. This is a wonderful little book, and as a 'consideration of times before you, when even living men were Antiquities, when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said “to go unto the greater number”.', a musing upon those 'sad and sepulchral Pitchers, which have no joyful voices; silently expressing old mortality, the ruines of forgotten times', it surely has no equal. So much in this short work is supremely affecting, like this, for example:
Or this:
Anyway, having read the Verissimo novel, I betook myself to my Borges, and hastily re-read the story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which opens the English collection Labyrinths. The story, of course, ends, wonderfully, like this:
By the way, there is a fantastic Thomas Browne site here. Well worth a look (but beware errors of transcription, not to say typos reproduced from the original editions – in the two short passages I copied above, there were two glaring errors).
Addendum:
Given Browne's own careful analysis of the means by which Error encroaches upon Truth (whether by 'Misapprehension, Fallacy, or false deduction, Credulity, Supinity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and Authority'), it is appropriate, in a perverse way, that the typographical errors I mentioned above have already insinuated themselves into this great Internet of ours. In particular, the passage transcribed on that University of Chicago site as: 'Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings' (which is nonsense) has made it onto a list of Thomas Browne quotes here, not to mention a GCSE/A Level EngLit site here. Of course 'shares' should be read for 'snares', and we could afford to lose that comma, too (although it does, admittedly, appear in the 1658 text). Proof, "if proof be need be", of the insidious power of that invisible agent Error.
I found particularly interesting Browne's assessment of the apparently widely held belief that it is possible to have sex remotely: ''Tis a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of Physick, which say, there is no generation without a joynt emission, not only, a virtual but corporal and carnal contaction.' Well, quite.
Thomas Browne isn't an author I was that familiar with (despite having read – and, to my shame, repeated – the claim, which I now believe to be erroneous, that his Religio medici is some kind of 'fake'), but the other day I happened to read an excellent short novel by the Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo, entitled Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans. It's a sort of intertextual detective story (I won't say a 'metaphysical detective story', because I find that description unhelpful: all detective stories are metaphysical), in which Borges himself features heavily as a solver of abstract mysteries in a fictional universe that looks very like his own (or at least that of an obsessive reader of his books). And the key to the intrigue, it becomes apparent to the attentive reader, is to be found in a throwaway paragraph at the beginning of one of Borges' own stories (I won't say which one, for fear of spoiling the dénouement) – which, like the word in the riddle whose answer is 'chess', is never mentioned in the novel. There are plenty more references to Borges' stories (and to Poe's) – as well as to the kabbalistic magus John Dee – to keep you guessing anyway, so chances are you won't untangle the intrigue before 'Borges' himself does.
Anyway, in that novel, the character Borges might be observed to remark upon 'Sir Thomas Browne, that magnificent seventeenth-century madman, and one of my favourite authors'. It is said, also, that Browne 'wrote a treatise on the X, which he saw as the union of temporal knowledge and magical knowledge.' This must refer to Browne's Garden of Cyrus, which is a discourse on the quincunx. Incidentally, 'quincunx' is a brilliant word not used often enough in English; whereas in French 'quinconce' is relatively current – perhaps because of traditional French predilection for geometrical gardens?
Published at the same time as that work, in 1658, was an essay on the recent discovery of some ancient funeral urns in Norfolk, entitled Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall. This is a wonderful little book, and as a 'consideration of times before you, when even living men were Antiquities, when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said “to go unto the greater number”.', a musing upon those 'sad and sepulchral Pitchers, which have no joyful voices; silently expressing old mortality, the ruines of forgotten times', it surely has no equal. So much in this short work is supremely affecting, like this, for example:
Darkness and Light divide the course of Time, and Oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living Beings; we slightly remember our Felicities, and the smartest stroaks of Affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and Sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into Stones are Fables. Afflictions induce callosities, Miseries are slippery, or fall like Snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no Stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in Nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered Senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our Sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.
Or this:
'Tis opportune to look back upon old Times, and contemplate our Forefathers. Great examples grow thin, and are to be fetched from the passed world. Simplicity flies away, and Iniquity comes at long strides upon us. We have enough to doe to make up our selves from present and passed Times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction. A compleat piece of Vertue must be made up from the Centos of all ages; as all the beauties of Greece could make but one handsome Venus.
Anyway, having read the Verissimo novel, I betook myself to my Borges, and hastily re-read the story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which opens the English collection Labyrinths. The story, of course, ends, wonderfully, like this:
I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
By the way, there is a fantastic Thomas Browne site here. Well worth a look (but beware errors of transcription, not to say typos reproduced from the original editions – in the two short passages I copied above, there were two glaring errors).
Addendum:
Given Browne's own careful analysis of the means by which Error encroaches upon Truth (whether by 'Misapprehension, Fallacy, or false deduction, Credulity, Supinity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and Authority'), it is appropriate, in a perverse way, that the typographical errors I mentioned above have already insinuated themselves into this great Internet of ours. In particular, the passage transcribed on that University of Chicago site as: 'Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings' (which is nonsense) has made it onto a list of Thomas Browne quotes here, not to mention a GCSE/A Level EngLit site here. Of course 'shares' should be read for 'snares', and we could afford to lose that comma, too (although it does, admittedly, appear in the 1658 text). Proof, "if proof be need be", of the insidious power of that invisible agent Error.
July 13, 2006
Happy as Larry
I have been moved to write this post by a 'a kind of mental tic douloureux sufficient for [my] parody of rational behaviour', which, upon my reading of this post in the journal of the august John B., caused me to perceive a compelling point of resemblance between the excerpt he quotes from Flannery O'Connor, and a passage I read in Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy; which passage follows.
This is quite funny (in the typical Beckettian way), but what (you may well ask) has this to do with the dilemma formulated by the 'Misfit', between on the one hand the idea that the miracle truly happened, which would demand a faith in Christ, and on the other, the conviction that it did not happen, which leaves us with no moral responsibility except to the primacy of the will?
Well, not that much, to be honest. But the novel as a whole has many interesting things to say about the philosophical possibility of a life of the mind detached from the 'colossal fiasco' of reality, or an 'authentic consciousness' if you prefer (I demur).
I certainly do not agree with the claim, made in the post linked to by the post to which the post linked above links (clunk!), that an atheist position which fails to pursue the Tyler Durden philosophy jusqu'au bout is fundamentally hypocritical or inauthentic. There is, still, the possibility (I should say, the demand) for an authentic philosophy of life without a belief in a power that transcends the self: humanism is one option, though it is not entirely (philosophically) satisfactory; another is the cultivation of an Epicurean or Stoic ataraxia; or perhaps of Neary's Apmonia (αρμονία?), the mediation between the extremes of frenetic action and the calm of the rocking-chair.
Elsewhere in the novel, Murphy speaks of 'the Belacqua bliss', the state of mind proper to the 'half-light' between the apprehension of the bright forms of the physical world and the obscure flux of preconscious thought (in which the self is 'but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom'). Belacqua, you will remember, appears in the Purgatorio lounging in the shade of a rock halfway up the mountain, in no hurry to get to Purgatory. It is not that the life of sensual self-indulgence is a life worth living; no, rather it points to the possibility of a withdrawal into the mind, for a period of respite from desire (as long as a lifetime), in the realm of dreams, between life and its expiation.
Later, working in the sanatorium, Murphy comes to envy the patients their absolute commitment to the inner life, the 'little world' divested of the importunate demands of empirical reality and the gravamina of the body.
The patients have definitively decided the matter in favour of the little world, the Microcosm. Murphy himself is suspended between the two, unable to commit absolutely to the life of the mind, to withdraw from the empirical world, despite willing it. He is unable to attain to what might elsewhere be called the religious, the transcendent experience; perhaps something like what John B. calls the authentic 'embracing of the not-empirical'.
But is not the realization of this suspension of the point of mediation, this ephectic stance between the two worlds, in fact a viable way of living? Can there not be a commitment to the inner life, purified of the impedimenta of the self and its desires, that does not nevertheless deny our involvement in self-experience and empirical reality? Murphy's failure argues that there cannot.
Is it not possible to live on the basis of a provisional commitment to the 'little world'? Can we not rehabilitate those 'beatific idols of the cave' so unjustly impugned by Plato? To maintain a silence, 'that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so'? And, if we cannot, is it not worth living as though we might?
The melancholic's melancholy, the manic's fits of fury, the paranoid's despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark.
This is quite funny (in the typical Beckettian way), but what (you may well ask) has this to do with the dilemma formulated by the 'Misfit', between on the one hand the idea that the miracle truly happened, which would demand a faith in Christ, and on the other, the conviction that it did not happen, which leaves us with no moral responsibility except to the primacy of the will?
Well, not that much, to be honest. But the novel as a whole has many interesting things to say about the philosophical possibility of a life of the mind detached from the 'colossal fiasco' of reality, or an 'authentic consciousness' if you prefer (I demur).
I certainly do not agree with the claim, made in the post linked to by the post to which the post linked above links (clunk!), that an atheist position which fails to pursue the Tyler Durden philosophy jusqu'au bout is fundamentally hypocritical or inauthentic. There is, still, the possibility (I should say, the demand) for an authentic philosophy of life without a belief in a power that transcends the self: humanism is one option, though it is not entirely (philosophically) satisfactory; another is the cultivation of an Epicurean or Stoic ataraxia; or perhaps of Neary's Apmonia (αρμονία?), the mediation between the extremes of frenetic action and the calm of the rocking-chair.
Elsewhere in the novel, Murphy speaks of 'the Belacqua bliss', the state of mind proper to the 'half-light' between the apprehension of the bright forms of the physical world and the obscure flux of preconscious thought (in which the self is 'but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom'). Belacqua, you will remember, appears in the Purgatorio lounging in the shade of a rock halfway up the mountain, in no hurry to get to Purgatory. It is not that the life of sensual self-indulgence is a life worth living; no, rather it points to the possibility of a withdrawal into the mind, for a period of respite from desire (as long as a lifetime), in the realm of dreams, between life and its expiation.
Later, working in the sanatorium, Murphy comes to envy the patients their absolute commitment to the inner life, the 'little world' divested of the importunate demands of empirical reality and the gravamina of the body.
The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. "I am not of the big world, I am of the little world" was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave? In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.
The patients have definitively decided the matter in favour of the little world, the Microcosm. Murphy himself is suspended between the two, unable to commit absolutely to the life of the mind, to withdraw from the empirical world, despite willing it. He is unable to attain to what might elsewhere be called the religious, the transcendent experience; perhaps something like what John B. calls the authentic 'embracing of the not-empirical'.
But is not the realization of this suspension of the point of mediation, this ephectic stance between the two worlds, in fact a viable way of living? Can there not be a commitment to the inner life, purified of the impedimenta of the self and its desires, that does not nevertheless deny our involvement in self-experience and empirical reality? Murphy's failure argues that there cannot.
Is it not possible to live on the basis of a provisional commitment to the 'little world'? Can we not rehabilitate those 'beatific idols of the cave' so unjustly impugned by Plato? To maintain a silence, 'that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so'? And, if we cannot, is it not worth living as though we might?
July 08, 2006
Saperlipopette!
I happened to read a piece in the Guardian Review last week, entitled 'From Zero to Hero' (cover splash: 'Why Tintin is as good as Proust'). Apparently it's an extract from Tom McCarthy's new book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (which despite my misgivings, I'm itching to read; the reviews are intriguing). The extract in question is a fine example of academic silliness, contriving as it does to make comparisons between the Tintin œuvre and (deep breath) Jane Austen, Henry James, Molière, Dumas, Conrad, Rabelais, Faulkner, the Brontës, Stendhal, George Eliot and Thomas Pynchon -- all in the space of two short paragraphs! Most of those comparisons have not a shred of substance to them (and I half-believe that the author had his tongue slightly in cheek when he made them), but some of them -- and some of the names that get dropped elsewhere in the article (Balzac, Dickens) -- as they thunder by do seem to bear a slight trace of the merest hint of a brush with meaningfulness. I say all this not as one of those sneery types (the sort that write dismissive letters to the Guardian Review whenever someone has the temerity to think about something *shock* in terms of something else), but as one who firmly believes that the Tintin books are great literature.
Before I forget, let me just say that one of the things in that article that irritated me unduly was the repetition of the claim (which I have read elsewhere more than once) that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing whatsoever happens'. This is plainly false: plenty happens in the book; it's just that no crime happens. Even in detective literature it is not uncommon for there to be an intrigue with all the appearance of a crime but which transpires to be nothing of the sort: see, for example, the Sherlock Holmes story The Man With The Twisted Lip, among others. In The Castafiore Emerald the story of the not-crime is managed expertly with suspense and irony (as you will remember, the magpie that turns out to have been the perpetrator of the theft is subtly drawn into the first frame and then again in the last); but stuff does happen. Still, it would have been nice to be able to say, as of Waiting for Godot where, famously, 'nothing happens...twice', that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing happens sixty-two times.' Missed a trick there.
Come to think of it, I would say perhaps that the basic approach of the critic here is wrong not because the comparisons are overstretched between high and low, between sublime and ridiculous; rather they fail because the Tintin books are not novels, and the collapsing together of two genres, the novel and the BD, for the purposes of criticism does neither any favours. Although certain aspects of the BD are undoubtedly modelled on novelistic techniques (as the author of the piece points out), there are (obviously) basic formal differences between the two media that demand different approaches to the portrayal of the passage of time and the unfolding of events (along with all that other stuff that goes with, like characterization and suspense and peripeteia and the interiority/exteriority interface and all that jazz).
Anyway, don't want to get into that here (I can't do narratology), so I shall proceed instead to talk about one particular aspect of the Tintin books that seems to me one of the many things that make them 'great': that is the portrayal of madness and disturbed psychological states.
Perhaps the comparison to Pynchon is not without merit: the peculiar brand of obscene surrealism that marks the Pynchonian fantasy is not so far away from certain hallucinatory sequences in Tintin. In The Crab With The Golden Claws the alcoholic Captain Haddock fantasizes that Tintin is a wine bottle and attempts to 'uncork' him -- a comical fantasy (it seems, indeed, according to one internet reviewer, to have been modelled on a scene from Chaplin's The Gold Rush), but one that is not without a sense of violent threat.
Indeed, the uneasy mix of the comedy of madness and the terror of madness (which is very like dream logic) is a defining characteristic of Hergé's particular vision. Very often comedic elements rely for their effectiveness on an underlying threat: the threat of physical harm, or more often, that of psychological harm.
This threat materializes at certain points and even, on occasion, involves our hero himself: in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin attempts to commit Philémon Siclone to an insane asylum, but instead finds himself locked up in a cell, having been taken for a madman. This particular episode made a strong impression on me when I first read it as a child; it seems to touch upon some primal terror, a terror which never becomes manifest, which is not pursued to its conclusion. And indeed, when I came to re-read the sequence later, it was of course nothing like what my memory had made it into: Tintin is only locked up for the duration of a few panels, and he escapes with his usual (very sane) aplomb and resourcefulness. The threat never escalates to the point of horror, but is suggestive enough to make an impression that is perhaps stronger and more lasting.
I can think of one episode in the Tintin books where the threat does approach horror, and that is the strange nightmare sequence in The Cigars of the Pharaoh. Tintin, having just discovered an empty sarcophagus marked with his own name, is drugged and abducted by (and this is presumably his own hallucination) bizarre Egyptian figures whose heads have been replaced by those of certain characters in the story. Tintin even sees himself as a crying baby. In the same volume, a poison dart is enough to bring on insanity in the victim -- and Hergé's peculiar vision of madness is uniquely disturbing.
In The Blue Lotus, Mr Wang's son, another victim of 'le poison qui rend fou', cheerfully informs those he meets that it will be necessary for him to chop off their heads in order for them to find the path to truth. The sense of threat here is difficult to define: the madman is at the same time a murderous religious fanatic and an exuberant, child-like player of games.
And Hergé's madman are a cheery lot: they are often portrayed dancing, skipping and singing songs. The function of songs in the Tintin œuvre might, indeed, be fruitfully compared to Pynchon; I'm thinking in particular of the popular, often obscene, songs that keep intruding on the narrative in Gravity's Rainbow.
Another point of reference that comes to mind is Hoffman's Der Sandmann (a story with which no student of psychoanalysis is unfamiliar): Philémon Siclone attempts to murder Tintin (the attack is carried out in that same childlike way as the one in The Blue Lotus), and, having been disarmed by our hero, protests that it was 'the eyes, the eyes' that made him do it. Those eyes, it turns out, belong to the hypnotist Fakir, the same one who later in the story conspires to get Tintin committed to the insane asylum.
Speaking of Tintin and Proust, for a long time I was labouring under the misapprehension that the twee-est of twee swearwords, 'saperlipopette', was a hapax of Hergé's, since I had only ever come across it in Tintin books. I was disabused of this belief when some time later I stumbled upon a second example of this ejaculation (so to speak), in Proust of all places. Perhaps they're not so far apart after all...which is just as well, I suppose, since having claimed at the start that the Tintin books ought not to be compared to novels at all, I went on to, erm, compare the Tintin books to a bunch of novels. Ah well.
Before I forget, let me just say that one of the things in that article that irritated me unduly was the repetition of the claim (which I have read elsewhere more than once) that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing whatsoever happens'. This is plainly false: plenty happens in the book; it's just that no crime happens. Even in detective literature it is not uncommon for there to be an intrigue with all the appearance of a crime but which transpires to be nothing of the sort: see, for example, the Sherlock Holmes story The Man With The Twisted Lip, among others. In The Castafiore Emerald the story of the not-crime is managed expertly with suspense and irony (as you will remember, the magpie that turns out to have been the perpetrator of the theft is subtly drawn into the first frame and then again in the last); but stuff does happen. Still, it would have been nice to be able to say, as of Waiting for Godot where, famously, 'nothing happens...twice', that in The Castafiore Emerald, 'nothing happens sixty-two times.' Missed a trick there.
Come to think of it, I would say perhaps that the basic approach of the critic here is wrong not because the comparisons are overstretched between high and low, between sublime and ridiculous; rather they fail because the Tintin books are not novels, and the collapsing together of two genres, the novel and the BD, for the purposes of criticism does neither any favours. Although certain aspects of the BD are undoubtedly modelled on novelistic techniques (as the author of the piece points out), there are (obviously) basic formal differences between the two media that demand different approaches to the portrayal of the passage of time and the unfolding of events (along with all that other stuff that goes with, like characterization and suspense and peripeteia and the interiority/exteriority interface and all that jazz).
Anyway, don't want to get into that here (I can't do narratology), so I shall proceed instead to talk about one particular aspect of the Tintin books that seems to me one of the many things that make them 'great': that is the portrayal of madness and disturbed psychological states.
Perhaps the comparison to Pynchon is not without merit: the peculiar brand of obscene surrealism that marks the Pynchonian fantasy is not so far away from certain hallucinatory sequences in Tintin. In The Crab With The Golden Claws the alcoholic Captain Haddock fantasizes that Tintin is a wine bottle and attempts to 'uncork' him -- a comical fantasy (it seems, indeed, according to one internet reviewer, to have been modelled on a scene from Chaplin's The Gold Rush), but one that is not without a sense of violent threat.
Indeed, the uneasy mix of the comedy of madness and the terror of madness (which is very like dream logic) is a defining characteristic of Hergé's particular vision. Very often comedic elements rely for their effectiveness on an underlying threat: the threat of physical harm, or more often, that of psychological harm.
This threat materializes at certain points and even, on occasion, involves our hero himself: in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin attempts to commit Philémon Siclone to an insane asylum, but instead finds himself locked up in a cell, having been taken for a madman. This particular episode made a strong impression on me when I first read it as a child; it seems to touch upon some primal terror, a terror which never becomes manifest, which is not pursued to its conclusion. And indeed, when I came to re-read the sequence later, it was of course nothing like what my memory had made it into: Tintin is only locked up for the duration of a few panels, and he escapes with his usual (very sane) aplomb and resourcefulness. The threat never escalates to the point of horror, but is suggestive enough to make an impression that is perhaps stronger and more lasting.
I can think of one episode in the Tintin books where the threat does approach horror, and that is the strange nightmare sequence in The Cigars of the Pharaoh. Tintin, having just discovered an empty sarcophagus marked with his own name, is drugged and abducted by (and this is presumably his own hallucination) bizarre Egyptian figures whose heads have been replaced by those of certain characters in the story. Tintin even sees himself as a crying baby. In the same volume, a poison dart is enough to bring on insanity in the victim -- and Hergé's peculiar vision of madness is uniquely disturbing.
In The Blue Lotus, Mr Wang's son, another victim of 'le poison qui rend fou', cheerfully informs those he meets that it will be necessary for him to chop off their heads in order for them to find the path to truth. The sense of threat here is difficult to define: the madman is at the same time a murderous religious fanatic and an exuberant, child-like player of games.
And Hergé's madman are a cheery lot: they are often portrayed dancing, skipping and singing songs. The function of songs in the Tintin œuvre might, indeed, be fruitfully compared to Pynchon; I'm thinking in particular of the popular, often obscene, songs that keep intruding on the narrative in Gravity's Rainbow.
Another point of reference that comes to mind is Hoffman's Der Sandmann (a story with which no student of psychoanalysis is unfamiliar): Philémon Siclone attempts to murder Tintin (the attack is carried out in that same childlike way as the one in The Blue Lotus), and, having been disarmed by our hero, protests that it was 'the eyes, the eyes' that made him do it. Those eyes, it turns out, belong to the hypnotist Fakir, the same one who later in the story conspires to get Tintin committed to the insane asylum.
Speaking of Tintin and Proust, for a long time I was labouring under the misapprehension that the twee-est of twee swearwords, 'saperlipopette', was a hapax of Hergé's, since I had only ever come across it in Tintin books. I was disabused of this belief when some time later I stumbled upon a second example of this ejaculation (so to speak), in Proust of all places. Perhaps they're not so far apart after all...which is just as well, I suppose, since having claimed at the start that the Tintin books ought not to be compared to novels at all, I went on to, erm, compare the Tintin books to a bunch of novels. Ah well.
July 07, 2006
Toads
After several months of trying to 'use my wit as a pitchfork, and drive the brute off', I have finally got a job.
'Ever since June', he said, 'it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job. I say a job is the end of us both, or at least of me. You say no, but the beginning. I am to be a new man, you are to be a new woman, the entire sublunary excrement will turn to civet, there will be more joy in heaven over Murphy finding a job than over the billions of leather-bums that never had anything else. I need you, you only want me, you have the whip, you win.'
Beckett, Murphy
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.
[...]
Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS
Mai '68 graffiti
'Ever since June', he said, 'it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job. I say a job is the end of us both, or at least of me. You say no, but the beginning. I am to be a new man, you are to be a new woman, the entire sublunary excrement will turn to civet, there will be more joy in heaven over Murphy finding a job than over the billions of leather-bums that never had anything else. I need you, you only want me, you have the whip, you win.'
Beckett, Murphy
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.
[...]
Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS
Mai '68 graffiti
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