You Must Change Your Life

Whenever I travel abroad, I like to tailor my reading to the destination. So, as I prepared for my recent trip to Budapest, I resolved to familiarize myself with the greats of modern Hungarian literature. Realizing that this was something of an ambitious project to complete in a week, I decided to limit myself to a couple of novels only. And as luck would have it, two works by the celebrated scholar, poet and novelist Antal Szerb have recently been published in new English translations (done by Len Rix): Szerb's first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), and his greatest work Journey by Moonlight (1937), apparently every cultivated Hungarian's favourite book.

My idea of matching book to destination didn't quite work out, since neither of these novels is actually set in Budapest, nor even in Hungary: The Pendragon Legend is a sort of Gothic-adventure pastiche set in Wales and England, and Journey by Moonlight follows the peregrinations of the main character, Mihály, as he wanders Italy in search of his past (or perhaps of a past that never existed).

This is a novel of nostalgia; of nostalgia for the void of memory, for death. But that's not quite it. Rather, this is a nostalgia for a richer kind of nostalgia, a feeling once experienced but not fully identified, of a sensual longing for oblivion. Emotion is experienced always at one remove: a yearning for a sense of yearning you imagine you once had, as a child. A yearning to be able to yearn for the present moment, in the memory of your future self. Nothing more than an adolescent fantasy, perhaps. But the performances of adolescence are often played out in memory with a strange force of feeling that has become, or always was, entirely alien to us.

It is difficult to convey a sense of the novel's tone, its irony, now gentle, now mordant; the deadly serious and profound treated always with a certain playful humour and lightness of touch; or to convey the impression one gets of the main character, by turns self-pitying and philosophical, a man of conviction and of cowardice, his words wheedling at times, at times almost wise. Mihály is, to be sure, naïve, emotionally illiterate, unable to face the realities of adulthood; but he also sees that the knowledge of what it means to live life is not easily won, that there is always something missing from a life traded out in the economies of marriage, work and happiness, that knowing how to live is in large part learning how to die.

Mihály's opinions about the bourgeois life he never quite brings himself to reject are often amusing, sometimes true. His thoughts on the 'great abstract mythology' of money, and its religious rites, for example. Often his voice is indistinguishable from the drily acerbic voice of the narrator, as here:

Work was the promised reward for a young man setting out, for completing his studies, and work was the penitential act and punishment for those who met with failure.

And then there are his thoughts on love, often shot through with an adolescent cynicism we most of us hope to outgrow, but just as often speaking of emotions I recognize: the polarities of love, the necessity of distance, and the illusion of closeness. Or, when sitting down to dinner with his wife, 'he could already, a little, look upon her as a lovely fragment of his past, and he was filled with solemn emotion.' 'He loved to relocate himself in his past, at one precise point, and from that perspective re-assemble his present life...and this re-ordering would always give the present moment a richer charge of feeling'; or else 'converting the present into a past': '"what will such memories hold, what associations of feeling?"' This compulsion to aestheticize the moment lived, to commit it proleptically to the memory of a future self, is surely shared by anyone who reads literature, and is influenced by it. It can diminish the experience itself, of course – but every aesthete knows that the cultivation of the memory is far more important than the living of the experience.

Mihály's religious historian friend Waldheim explains to him that death is an erotic instinct, and that all ancient cultures were drawn to the seductive force of the death-hetaira. Christianity, once the darkest of death-cults, says Waldheim, later 'succeeded in sublimating and rationalising the yearning for death, or, in plain language, they watered down the desire for death into desire for the next world, they translated the terrifying sex-appeal of the death-sirens into the heavenly choirs and rows of angels singing praises.' The death instinct, though, persists as an unconscious drive, as Freud tells us – or is this, too, a modern delusion, part of some atavistic fantasy, a yearning after some ancient, elemental 'charge of feeling'?

How do we distinguish between the games we play with memory and history, and the tricks memory and history play on us? How is it possible for any gesture, any act – even suicide – to be anything other than disingenuous? And is it possible, when it cannot be said without quoting Rilke, to say with genuine feeling:

"'If this landscape is reality....if this beauty really exists, then everything I have done in my life has been a lie. But this landscape is reality.'"

Et mihi res, non me rebus, subiungere conor

Strange to think that the reading of literature was not always the preserve of the harmless drudge, nor was it always a mere divertissement for the leisure classes, nor always a pleasant occupation meant to bridge the time spent not doing stuff. Strange to think that people used to take poetry so seriously that they would even use it to guide their lives. Strange to think that literature at one time had the power to destroy kings and cities – et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes.

And yet it is the case. This is why I am fascinated by the sortes Vigilianae and Homericae, a method of divination apparently widespread in antiquity, and yet more widespread in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The method consists in the random selection of a line or sentence from Homer or Virgil, usually done by opening one's book at random and then letting a staff fall on the page; or else by throwing dice. The persistence of this rite into the Renaissance and beyond seems to me to be one of those cases where refinement and learning, far from edging out superstition, depend on it for their very survival. Erudite rationalism and dumb superstition are shown to be two sides of the same coin.

Such methods of divination have long been applied to sacred texts. They still are, no doubt; but there can't be many people today who use the pagan classics in this way. Still, every reader of Dante knows that Virgil, the poet's guide to the ins and outs of sin and redemption, was a proselytizing Christian avant la lettre. And Virgil's books, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were sacred texts, a reputation that relied mostly on people's appreciation of the Messianic flavour of the fourth eclogue. In the Purgatorio, Dante meets the ancient Roman poet Statius, who explains how he became Christian after reading this very poem (a poem written before the birth of Christ, don't forget).

Homeric lots had a long history in antiquity: Socrates in prison used them to determine the day on which he was to die. The Roman emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus fell upon a line in the Iliad that told him his time in the top job would not last long: sure enough, he was deposed and executed by a rival within fourteen months. Homeric lots told Brutus that Pompey would lose the battle of Pharsalus. One wonders why he didn't switch sides there and then, instead of waiting to do it after the inevitable defeat.

Plenty of emperors used Virgilian lots to figure out their fate (among them Alexander Severus, Hadrian, Gordian II, and Claudius II), but, in contrast to those that diced with Homer, these seem almost always to have got a positive response: your reign will be long, you will defeat the enemies of Rome, you know the drill. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the Iliad (much more popular than the Odyssey for this sort of thing) is all about war and slaughter and being killed in imaginatively brutal ways, whereas the Aeneid tempers that stuff with a fair bit of the old 'Rome is great, Empire's definitely the way to go' (pace, of course, the revisionist readers of Virgil's epic who see it as essentially antagonistic to Augustan ideology).

Using Homer and Virgil to determine their fate didn't seem to do much good for any of these people, since they had no choice but to fulfil the prophecy and get on with things. The destinies predicted by Homeric and Virgilian lots – at least, those recorded by history – are suspiciously self-fulfilling, almost as if the historical instance has been chosen retroactively to match the verse. Funny, that: destiny's a rum old deal.

Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (about which I made some nugatory remarks here) has a whole section devoted to the debunking of beliefs in the efficacy of Virgilian lots. There is a footnote to this section, a late addition by another hand, which is worth quoting in full, if only for the deliciously laconic conclusion:

King Charles I. tried the sortes Virgilianæ, as is related by Wellwood in the following passage: —

"The King being at Oxford during the civil wars, went one day to see the public library, where he was showed among other books, a Virgil nobly printed, and exquisitely bound. The Lord Falkland, to divert the king, would have his majesty make a trial of his fortune by the sortes Virgilianæ, which every body knows was an usual kind of augury some ages past. Whereupon the king opening the book, the period which happened to come up, was that part of Dido's imprecation against Æneas; which Mr. Dryden translates thus:

Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes,
His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose.
Oppress'd with numbers in th'unequal field,
His men discourag'd and himself expell'd,
Let him for succour sue from place to place,
Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace,
First let him see his friends in battle slain,
And their untimely fate lament in vain:
And when at length the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace;
Nor let him then enjoy supreme command,
But fall untimely by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied in the common sand.

"It is said that King Charles seemed concerned at this accident...."

Most of the above examples I lifted from Rabelais, in whose Tiers Livre there is a rather amusing treatment of the Virgilian lots phenomenon. Panurge wants to use them to determine whether or not he should marry (in fact, the whole book is taken up with his attempts to find an answer to that question). Pantagruel, ever the voice of reason (well, almost), counsels Panurge thus:

Aussi (respondit Pantagruel) en vos propositions tant y a de si et de mais, que je n'y sçaurois rien fonder ne rien resouldre. N'estez vous asceuré de vostre vouloir? Le point principal y gist: tout le reste est fortuit, et dependent des fatales dispositions du ciel.

Likewise, (replied Pantagruel) your proposals are so full of ifs and buts that I wouldn't know where to begin, or how to resolve anything. Are you not assured of your own will? That's the main thing in all this: the rest is a matter of chance, and all depends on the fatal dispositions of the heavens.

In other words, know your own mind before you start trifling with matters beyond your control. Nice advice, but even the most rational among us know that our decisions are not made by reason alone; and our 'decision procedures' (to borrow a term from computing) are not entirely calculable. We do very often require some arbitrary determining factor in order to pass from thought to the act. And if we're going to act irrationally, better to do it on the basis of a beautiful line of poetry than the flip of a coin or a badly-written horoscope.

With this in mind, I decided to give the Virgilian lots a go myself. Naturally, I carefully replicated the method set out by Rabelais in the Tiers Livre (well, not quite: I used a random number generator on the web). I have a two-volume edition of the Aeneid, so the rite proceeded in three stages: first, a number between 1 and 2 (result: 1); second, a number between 1 and 153 (excluding the commentary pages; result: 41); third, a number between 1 and 32 (the number of lines on the page; result: 25).

Now, I did say earlier that the Aeneid probably gave more positive auguries than the Iliad because it's less preoccupied with violent death than with the glorification of the Roman race. Here's what I ended up with (honest!):

ut tandem ante oculos evasit et ora parentum,
concidit ac multo vitam cum sanguine fudit.

Which gives something like:

When at last he came within sight of his parents,
He fell and poured out his life in a torrent of blood.

Ah well. I'll let you know how that works out for me.

Dangerous books

"Now hear the story of how that man of whom I had begun to speak, Cicero, always so dear and beloved to me since childhood, made a fool of me. I own a huge volume of his letters, which I wrote out myself in my own hand, because the copy was a problem for the scribes; at that time I was in ill health, but my great love of the work, my delight in it, and my desire to have it, won out over the physical difficulty and effort. You have seen that that this book used to stand in the door to my library, leaning on the doorpost, so that it would always be close at hand. So, I come in the room, thinking about something else, and it so happens that the fringe of my robe accidentally caught on the book; which fell on my left leg just above the heel and gave it a slight knock. I pick it up and jokingly say: ‘What’s the matter, my dear Cicero, why do you strike me?’ He says nothing. But the next day as I’m coming in he strikes me again, and again I pick him up and, with a laugh, put him back in his place. To cut a long story short: having been injured by him several times, I come to my senses and put him up on the shelf, as if he didn’t deserve to be on the floor."

Petrarch, Epistolae familiares XXI.10; Latin here (sections 15-17).

Quis erudiet ipsos eruditos?

This story ran on the front page of today's Grauniad. It is reported that the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman will next Tuesday refuse to accept the Fields Medal (the "maths Nobel", apparently), along with the $1m prize that goes with it. I particularly liked this paragraph:

He has also refused a major European maths prize, supposedly on the grounds that he did not believe the committee awarding the prize was sufficiently qualified to judge his work.

All of which raises the question: who will be the arbiters of the limits of knowledge? What is the role of institutions of learning when the great advances in human knowledge, both in the sciences and in the humanities, so often come from outside of the confines of the academy, or even in opposition to it – and when the established arbiters of culture are seen to be in no position to judge of their validity?

These questions have relevance, also, to the domain of literature and its reception. If our 'horizon of expectations' is ultimately defined and determined by the culture in which we operate, how do ideas 'from outside' penetrate and redefine those horizons? Is the myth of change, of novelty, just that: a myth; part of a self-regulating discourse of Truth according to which ideas are always susceptible to absorption into the great tentacular body of institutionalized knowledge? The 'catastrophe model' of knowledge, of the maverick thinker whose ideas oppose and disrupt existing structures of thought, is perhaps nothing more than a construct necessary to maintain the illusion of progress in an unchanging world.

Another aspect of this problem is pointed up in the part of the article that states that the Poincaré conjecture 'is difficult for most non-mathematicians even to understand' – a familiar journalistic side-step. This is quite typical of the way modern scientific thought makes its way into the popular consciousness. The problem, it seems to me, is not just that complex ideas cannot be expressed in simple language (although that is certainly true); but that the whole of the scientific discourse, in the domain of mathematics and physics in particular, is so detached from everyday experience that our encounter with knowledge must be based exclusively in trust. Our relationship to human knowledge has become one of fundamental alienation.

Slightly related, I do like this quotation, from Bertrand Russell, on the [non-]relation of mathematical truths to the world of empirical reality:

Pure mathematics consists entirely of such asseverations as that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is of which it is supposed to be true... If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bit of a disjointed post there. Ho hum.

esse est percipi

Over at Blog Meridian, John B. has written a very nice post on aspects of desire and voyeurism in Hitchcock's Rear Window.

To this I should like to add a few observations of my own, mostly prompted by my perception, upon re-viewing the film, of a resemblance between a certain scene towards the end, and a scene from another film to do with watching and being watched. I speak of Samuel Beckett's 1965 Film. It was at one time available for download from the thoroughly brilliant UbuWeb, but I can't seem to find the direct link right now; it's well worth tracking down if you have a spare 22 minutes.

For those who haven't seen Beckett's Film, the gist of it is this: a camera, shooting always at an oblique angle from behind his back, pursues Buster Keaton as he makes increasingly desperate attempts to avoid being seen. He hides from the gaze of other people who look upon him with horrified expressions; he finds himself in a barely furnished room, from which he strives to remove all traces of the other's gaze (this part includes a very funny scene with a cat and a dog). He eventually settles in a rocking-chair, where he is finally confronted by the eye of the camera itself.

There is a striking resemblance between this final confrontation and the scene in Rear Window in which Jeff is confronted by Thorwald. Up until the point at which Thorwald notices Lisa's signal to Jeff and looks directly into the lens of the camera, he has been the object, seen but not able to see. At that moment the polarities reverse and Thorwald becomes the viewer, Jeff the object of his threatening gaze. Thorwald enters Jeff's room, and the two face each other directly, both of their faces obscured in shadow. This sequence is filmed in a shot/counter-shot alternation, exactly as the final section of Beckett's film, in which Buster Keaton's "O" (the object of the camera's gaze) faces "E" (the camera's 'eye', manifested as the double of Keaton himself).

There are several points of similarity: before Thorwald enters the room, Jeff struggles to rise from his wheelchair, but is unable to move further because of his broken leg; Buster Keaton's character half-rises from the rocking chair but falls back, apparently paralysed by fear. Keaton wears an eye-patch on his left eye, both as "O" and in his manifestation as "E"; the eyes of Thorwald and Jeff are concealed behind a veil of shadow. In the shot/counter-shot sequence there is a close-up shot of the eyes of "E", which has its counterpart in the close-up on the bespectacled Thorwald. As Thorwald advances, Jeff uses the flash-bulb three times to blind him; there is a tight close-up on Thorwald's eyes, to which he raises his hands; Keaton's "O" repeatedly closes his eyes and raises his hands to cover them, apparently in terror at the sight of "E".

The reversal of viewer-object roles at this point in the narrative of Rear Window is figured in the relative positions of the characters: Thorwald stands, towering over Jeff, who is forced to remain seated in his wheelchair (previously Jeff's position had been 'above', his window being on a slightly higher level than the one opposite), just as "E" stands over "O", who sits back in his rocking-chair. It is interesting that Thorwald's first words to Jeff are "What do you want from me?", emphasizing the ambivalence of aggressor and victim, viewer and object.

The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's Film (see, for example, this blog post) are to be found in Berkeley's formulation esse est percipi: 'to be is to be perceived'. (And this is the crux of Murphy's dilemma, too.) My understanding of this, in the light of the comparison to Rear Window, is that there is no act – of viewing or of performance – that is free of consciousness on some level, whether it be self-consciousness (as is obviously the case in Film), or the consciousness of some other. All actions are performed for the benefit of the gaze of the other, of the symbolic order which structures every aspect of our self-experience – including (or especially) the erotic act.

Which brings me to certain issues raised in the post I linked to at the start of this entry. I agree with John B's observation that the tenants of the other apartments figure just as importantly in the film as Thorwald, thematically speaking. The occupants of the apartments are actors, performers: the ballet dancer, the musician, even the 'Lonely Hearts' woman, who acts out the fantasy of a romantic encounter with an imaginary suitor. For whom is this fantasy played out? Not for herself exactly, but for the gaze of the other, in which her enjoyment, her pleasure is located. It is not enough to dream: she must go through the motions of the idealized encounter in order to experience her own desire as such. And of course, Jeff, in his voyeurism, is only acting out a part too – whether of the amateur sleuth of detective stories or of the Peeping Tom of sexual fantasy; for whose gaze if not the gaze of the other through which we order and experience our desire?

This brings me to another observation made by John B, about the framed negative image of Lisa which Jeff keeps in his apartment. He is surely right to point out that this signifies that their relationship is not yet 'developed'; but there is something else, I think. The negative portrays the face of the object of desire in a monstrous light: she appears almost inhuman. (This relates, I am sure, to Vertigo, in which Judy is the obscene negative of Madeleine, and is portrayed as such in the shot of her profile in grotesque green light.) In the great scene at the start of the movie, in which an ominous shadow falls across Jeff's sleeping face – Lisa, who wakes him with a kiss – he playfully asks her: 'Who are you?'. His uneasiness around her cannot be reduced to anything so banal as 'fear of commitment'; rather he fears that she is something entirely other, that there is something in her that is more than herself: the obscene object of desire. 'To be is to be perceived'; and just as it is terrifying to be confronted with the inescapable 'there-ness' of consciousness, it is also terrifying to contemplate the loss of the illusion of our own autonomy, to open up to the other and to involve ourselves in them completely. No, the other's gaze must always be kept at a certain distance for desire to continue to function, and for the fantasy of romantic love, like the fantasy of 'Miss Lonely Hearts', to continue to be played out.

Budapest

I have just got back from Budapest, where I spent the last seven days attending a conference at which I presented a research paper (it went very well, thanks for asking). My flight into the Boschian nightmare that is Heathrow airport was delayed by several hours, enabling me to get myself disgracefully drunk before braving the chaos.

The time spent not confined in conference rooms in the oppressively classical Academy of Sciences I devoted mostly to sleeping, but I managed to skive off enough throughout the week to see a fair bit of the city.

And Budapest is one beautiful city. It is impossible not to delight in its neo-classical neo-Gothic neo-baroque splendour; in the tranquil beauty of the broad, noble Danube; and in the city's essentially nineteenth-century aesthetic: composed, measured, sometimes exorbitant, but exactly comme il faut.



Its structures are not particularly old: more or less everything is neo-this or neo-that, the city having been flattened by the Turks in the sixteenth century before its recapture by the Habsburgs a century or so later, and then largely destroyed again in the Second World War, and by the Soviet invasion. Not much survives of the city known to the 15th-century king Matthias Corvinus, who (point of national pride) brought the Italian Renaissance to Hungary long before it came to Northern Europe.

On the left bank of the Danube (rien à voir avec la rive gauche de Paris!) is the city of Buda, by turns grandiose — the imposingly classical Royal Palace dominates the city from its place on the hill, and the Matthias Church (Gothic- baroque, self- conscious, pedantic) soars skyward from amidst the throng of camera-brandishing pilgrims — and chocolate-box pretty (witness, for example, the silly confection that is the Fisherman's Bastion, the folly of some crazed fin-de-siècle architect, which is, perhaps, supposed to hark back to some non-existent Middle-European past).



The city of Pest, on the right bank, is the business end of things, but it is nevertheless throughout unrelentingly elegant in the nineteenth-century finery of its buildings and their ornaments. The Parliament building and the Saint Istvan Basilica dominate the Pest skyline, and the view from Castle Hill or the Chain Bridge can be exhilarating, even when le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle...


One of the stranger tourist attractions is the Szoborpark (Statue Park) just south of the city, an open-air museum filled with monuments from the time of the Communist dictatorship. Lenin, Marx and Engels preside over the entrance to the park, whose ticket office and gift shop are designed, with bizarre self-conscious humour, to simulate a warped time-warp. A 1950s radio blares out Soviet marching music alongside a sales display filled with crappy souvenirs and commie kitsch.











It is hard to believe that these statues once stood in the streets and squares of Budapest — an affront to the gentility of the city's aesthetic, as much as anything else...

The monuments in Heroes Square are much more in fitting with their surroundings, although they too, like so much else in Budapest, have a sense of somewhat overwrought artifice to them — but are no worse for that.



In fact, perhaps the overwhelming impression I took from Budapest was the sense that here was a city built with the express purpose of being breathtakingly beautiful. Here is nothing like the dirty grandeur of London's organic sprawl, nor yet the geometrical sensuality in old and new one finds in Paris. Not that there is anything 'fake' in it — far too elegant for that — but the city seems to have been created to delight the eye and ravish the senses.


By the way, my half-arsed attempt to learn Hungarian, reported on here a while back, eventually amounted to nothing more than the rote memorization of a few set phrases. I didn't brave morphology: the language has more than twenty noun cases, fer Christ's sake!

Translatio studii

Mirabile dictu, this blog has migrated here from http://raminagrobis.livejournal.com/