Giving Up (6 of 7)

(This is the sixth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

In the previous crumb, I wrote about the vanishing of human agency as we enter the New Testament, and the emergence of a world in which there seems to be no will but the will of God. There is something I dislike like about this movement, something deeply depressing. In a world so perfectly controlled, why bother to do anything, or even to want anything? But I also know this: like anyone, I at times want to change myself—because I keep doing something I regret, or because I feel something I wish I did not feel—and I have tried to make myself change by an act of will, and I have tried kneeling on the floor and asking for help, never mind Who might be listening; and what I have found is that the latter is usually the better approach.

Inasmuch as a story about the absolute agency of God is an invitation to give up our sense of control over our own lives, it is powerful medicine. This loss of agency, which seems to imply imprisonment, in fact frees us. And what it frees us from is not, as logic would imply, a sense of moral responsibility but rather the compulsion to make sense of our lives, to know precisely what they mean. When a person kneels down in wild surrender, and says, “I’m a hopeless sinner!” they do not mean, “It’s not my fault,” nor do they mean, “I’m going to stop trying to do right.” What they mean is that their intentions have come unhooked from outcomes. They still intend, but no longer with an expectation of success—and yet, not without hope, but with a new kind of hope, a hope that is not burdened with practical considerations but leaps past the practical to the sublime; a desire that does not bury its fire in schemes to attain its object, but burns purely and brightly in its elemental desiring. The result of this is lightheartedness.

This is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, the recognition that one is guilty for everything, before everyone, is always accompanied by a sudden capacity to perceive the beauty of the world and by an overwhelming joy. Growing up, I used to hear so much about guilt—about Jewish guilt and Christian guilt. It was not until I read The Brothers Karamazov that I understood that guilt could be precisely the opposite of what I had thought. I had understood it always as burdensome and neurotic, a hot, constricted, teeth-gnashing state of mind (the feeling of guilt). But immediately on reading Father Zosima’s story, I saw how the acceptance of one’s endless errors (the fact of guilt) was really the means of escape from that teeth-gnashing mood: because the teeth-gnashing came not from the desire to be perfect nor from the knowledge of one’s imperfections but from the mad belief that one could, by one’s own powers, attain perfection.

When a character in The Brothers K experiences this guilt/surrender/joy, he invariably falls on the floor and begins to weep. This is appropriate, because tears, even more than laughter, are a sign of lightheartedness (perhaps I should say ‘openheartedness,’ but I’m not sure I want to draw the distinction). It is when we cannot cry that our hearts are closed and constricted, and we are unable to perceive the world properly, for, like little Kay in Hans Christien Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” we have in our eyes a shard of the evil mirror that the wicked spirit made, in which everything appears ugly. And this is why, at the end of “The Snow Queen,” it is Kay’s tears—brought on by Gerda’s tears—that wash the shard of mirror from his eye. For it is in tears that we escape from the prisons we have made ourselves.

Before the shard is washed from his eye, Kay is in a state of mind that I recognize well:

Little Kay was quite blue with cold, indeed almost black, but he did not feel it; for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy shiverings, and his heart was already a lump of ice. He dragged some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, and placed them together in all kinds of positions, as if he wished to make something out of them; just as we try to form various figures with little tablets of wood which we call “a Chinese puzzle.” Kay’s fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of glass still sticking in his eye. He composed many complete figures, forming different words, but there was one word he never could manage to form, although he wished it very much. It was the word “Eternity.” The Snow Queen had said to him, “When you can find out this, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.” But he could not accomplish it.

Is this not a beautiful description of the mood of control and painful exertion towards ends that are either unattainable or meaningless (now one, now the other) in which we so often find ourselves? Note the tremendous symbolical compression here, how the whole ambition and failure of the rationalist project is captured in a few sentences: it can form every word but the one it wishes to form, the one that matters.

Presently, Gerta arrives, sees Kay sitting there, runs to him, and, finding him cold and unyielding, begins to cry; the tears fall on his breast and melt “the lump of ice” around his heart:

Then Kay burst into tears, and he wept so that the splinter of glass swam out of his eye. Then he recognized Gerda, and said, joyfully, “Gerda, dear little Gerda, where have you been all this time, and where have I been?” And he looked all around him, and said, “How cold it is, and how large and empty it all looks,” and he clung to Gerda, and she laughed and wept for joy. It was so pleasing to see them that the pieces of ice even danced about; and when they were tired and went to lie down, they formed themselves into the letters of the word which the Snow Queen had said he must find out before he could be his own master, and have the whole world and a pair of new skates. …The Snow Queen might come home now when she pleased, for there stood his certainty of freedom, in the word she wanted, written in shining letters of ice.

This too is exactly right: when we give up our ambition to attain eternity/infinity through reason and control, then it comes back to us as gift. The year before “The Snow Queen” was first published, another Danish author wrote a very different sort of book that treats a strikingly similar theme. “Only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity,” writes Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling. What Kierkegaard speaks of here is a giving up of all hope of attaining one’s desires—and yet, he tells us, beyond this resignation lies something else (which he calls "faith"), whereby we can get back everything we have given up “by the power of the absurd.” Presumably, icicles dancing with joy, getting tired, and lying down in the shape of a word counts as “the power of the absurd.”

God's Will (5 of 7)

(This is the fifth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

This definitive sorting of the wheat from the chaff in the New Testament comes with a marked reduction in human agency. On the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus, the great persecutor of the Christians is suddenly enveloped in light, blinded, cast down on the ground, and told by God what he is to do. Thus Saul becomes St. Paul through no choice of his own but by the will of God. As God himself tells another of his followers in a vision three days after Paul's conversion, “he [Paul] is chosen as a vessel unto me” (Acts 9:15).

When Peter, in his weakness, denies Jesus, this is only confirmation of Jesus's supernatural power, for Jesus has already predicted it. And when Judas betrays Jesus, this too is part of the plan: “I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, he that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me” (John 13:18, emphasis mine, of course). We find ourselves, it seems, in a world where there is no will but the will of God.

Yet, here again the Gospels display a strange transitional quality. The quote I gave in the preceding paragraph is from John, the last of the Gospels. The betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane, as told by John, gives the same impression of a plan in which “every hair is numbered,” in which nothing is permitted which is not part of the workings of the plan:

Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him, went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye? They answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am he. And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them. As soon then as he had said unto them, I am he, they went backward, and fell to the ground. Then asked he them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I have told you that I am he… (John 18:3-8)

 Now here’s Luke’s version:

And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss? (Luke, 22:47-48)

And Mark’s:

And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders. And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely. And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him. And they laid their hands on him, and took him. (Mark 14:43-46)

And Matthew’s:

And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people. Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast. And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him. And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus, and took him. (Matthew, 26: 47-50)

In John, the tables are turned: the betrayal is only another opportunity for Jesus to display his power. In Luke, Jesus knows what is to come. In Mark, we do not know what Jesus knows. Only in Matthew, the first of the gospels, do we find any suggestion that Jesus is himself deceived, any hint that this betrayal might cause him pain and dismay. It is not, of course, as if the plan has gone awry in Matthew's version: Jesus must be betrayed so he can die and be resurrected. But there is a sense that the machinery is not wholly known, that it contains elements that even God does not know perfectly. There is a margin, however thin, for uncertainty. There is a circumference, however vast, to God's power.

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The Wheat and the Chaff (4 of 7)

(This is the fourth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

The clear light of the New Testament shines on the persons who inhabit it. The shadows of the Old Testament lie thick on the persons who inhabit it. Already in the gospels, this effect is visible: Herod is bad, Judas is very bad; the other eleven apostles are good. Sometimes they show weakness, as when Peter, fearing the soldiers and the mob, denies that he knows Jesus, but this does not indicate that Peter has fallen, only that, as in the garden of Gesthemane, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

A person may change in this new world: he may transform (like Judas) from good to bad or (like Paul) from bad to good—indeed, with the arrival of Paul, conversion and transformation will become central themes—but in the final tally, he must fall on one side or the other, amongst the saved or the damned.

The Old Testament is full of degrees of goodness. Moses is the greatest of the prophets, but he makes mistakes, and his life ends with the punishment for these mistakes: he must die in the wilderness, never to enter the promised land. King David is beloved of God but, at the height of his glory he schemes to have a man killed to cover up an illicit affair with the man’s wife, and for this a curse is laid on him and all his house. Saul is eaten up by murderous jealousy for David, but we see unmistakably a better nature within him and a real love for David, warring against his destructive impulses. Solomon is wise and blessed but he grows proud, is led astray, worships false gods, and as punishment for his sins, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are rent apart, never again to be united. But Solomon is not ultimately fallen or redeemed. He lives, does some good, some bad, and then he dies and “sleeps with his fathers.”

If we tend to think of Solomon as wise and forget his faults or of Saul as wicked and forget his virtues, this is because we are engaging not with the bible but with subsequent cultural-religious traditions that have resolved the inherent ambiguity of the text into a more straightforward morality.

No such misreading is required in the New Testament. The text makes clear on which side each character falls. There is a ruthlessness to this, and a terrible simplicity. There is also a great romanticism: life, under these narrative rules, becomes a dire struggle, attains a drama that perhaps was impossible when each step was only a step, each turn only a turn.

As Josipovici has pointed out, sin and redemption in the Old Testament are not definitive and final. They refer to individual actions, they do not define entire lives: “If you sin, then, like David, you may repent, or, like Ahab, you may not. Even if you do you may, like Jonah, sin again. … When someone’s eyes are opened in the Hebrew bible it is not so that they may suddenly understand the falsity of their whole past life but only the immediate error under which they have been laboring… But for Paul, the important act is not repentance but awakening, an act of faith which totally transforms life” (Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God, pg. 242).

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Poetry and Narrative (3 of 7)

Everything I said yesterday about the uncertainty and openness of meaning in the Old Testament refers specifically to the narrative sections of that document. The so called "Books of Poetic Wisdom," especially Psalms and Proverbs, usually make their meaning much plainer and more definite.

This runs counter to our modern notions about poetry, but it makes sense from another angle: in narrative, we are in the realm of events, a realm where first things happen, then we try to understand them. But in lyric poetry (the mode of Psalms) and wisdom poetry (the mode of Proverbs) we are in a realm of emotional interpretation and judgment: here, interpretation comes first and other things follow. If there are events, they come out of emotion and recollection (in lyric) or in the service of a particular lesson (in wisdom poetry). In these forms, then, details emerge under the aegis of a guiding thought; they are born already under the light of a reason that does not fit them into a pattern after they emerge, but rather draws them up out of darkness in the very process of pattern-making.

It is interesting to remember that narrative has this inherent capacity: not to interpret the world but to give us the world prior to interpretation.

But, of course, a narrative is also inevitably a pattern.

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Acts (2 of 7)

In my eagerness to write about St. Paul, I skipped over Acts. In its own way, Acts evinces a radical break with the mindset of the Old Testament, but the break is more hidden. There is, in this book, no personal narrator and little of the internal or the subjective. And there is still a sparseness to the storytelling, a shortage of detail. Yet this sparseness does not produce the openness, the ambiguity, the strangeness that characterizes the Old Testament.

Reading the OT, we may understand the physical events but we rarely can be sure what they mean. Samson takes a liking to a Philistine woman, and he goes down to a place called Timnath to see her:

…and, behold, a young lion roared against him. And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but he told not his father or his mother what he had done. And he went down, and talked with the woman; and she pleased Samson well. And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion. And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat: but he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.
(Judges 14:5-9)

What on earth is going on here? Why was there honey in the lion's carcass? Did Samson do wrong in eating it and giving it to his parents? Why didn’t he tell them where he got it? Did all of this have something to do with Samson's intention to wed a non-Israelite? The text never answers these questions. We are left to make our own meaning, a meaning which can only appear definite if we insist on burying the ambiguity inherent in the text beneath a rigid religious program.

I have picked one out of hundreds of examples. Nearly all the narrative sections of the OT, and even some of the legalistic sections, have this opacity, this refusal to reveal any clear, fixed system of meaning. Even God’s will often does not supply a fixed point. Sometimes, in a passion, he purposes destruction, only to be talked out of it by a mortal. Often he claims to be on the point of abandoning his previous plans. After the flood, he strikes what sounds very much like a note of regret. 

In the OT, we find a vast sequence of events from which we must make our own meaning, and this meaning therefore comes after the events: first they occur, then we look at them and interpret.(*) In this context, sparseness—the absence of interstitial details, of interior thoughts, of mood, of atmosphere—constitutes a shortage of clues, an openness to many different readings. The text is like a skeleton without flesh or ligaments: it can bend into all sorts of shapes.

But in Acts, the events seem to come already embedded in a definite system of meaning. For a new plan has entered the world, a plan that sweeps up everything and determines in advance the pattern of events and the significance of each one; a plan in which there is not room for negotiation or revision. So the sparseness of Acts becomes not ambiguity but simply brevity.

Here again we find that the gospels do not fit nicely into either category. The four evangelists seem to know the meaning of their story and to present it in order to send a particular message; yet at the heart of that story is a character who refuses to conform his words or his actions to any straightforward system of meaning.

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St. Paul (1 of 7)

A couple years ago, I went looking for secondary sources on the bible. I tried Jewish, Christian and secular commentaries but found them all thoroughly unilluminating. Sometime later, a woman (with whom I subsequently made plans to conduct a certain ritual under a canopy), gave me a book by one Gabriel Josipovici called The Book of God. The first thing this book did was show me that I had been looking for the wrong sort of help from secondary sources; the second thing it did was teach me to read better; the third was to lay out a web of thoughts about biblical narrative, its treatment of character, its relation to other kinds of narrative, and the implications of all this for our relationship to our lives and ourselves.

Anything I now say about the bible is grounded in Josipovici’s ideas. What follows, especially the point regarding Paul’s subjectivity, owes a great deal to him.

*   *   *

The vividness and distinctiveness of the language of the King James Bible, which I imagine must have left its mark on all subsequent translations, exerts a powerful unifying force.*  The various books of the bible may vary in content, authorship, and genre, but they are all unmistakably biblical sounding. Because the bible is such an opaque document, because we are so often hard-pressed to make sense of what is being said, style rises to the surface. For modern, secular people, encountering this text largely in disconnected fragments—a line quoted here or there, taken from disparate books—our sense of the bible is primarily our sense of a certain linguistic style. As we all know, that linguistic style is not in fact native to the text.

[* Since writing this crumb, I've read parts of Tyndale's bible and discovered that the King James follows it very closely, so it seems the KJ is not the originator of the linguistic style I'm describing. - 7/2/2023]

Beneath this unity of prose style, one finds a radical divide— in mentality, in content, in narrative form— between the Old and New Testaments. The bridge between them is the Gospels. The Gospels still retain much of the narrative style of the Old Testament: its sparseness, its tendency to leave things unsaid, its emphasis on action and speech, its shortage of internality. But the story of the Jesus's life feels very different form the stories of the OT. The nature of God, the relationship between God and his creations, the conception of human history—all have undergone a transformation when we turn the final page of the OT and find ourselves in the opening chapter of Matthew.

With the epistles of Saint Paul (the great early organizer of Christian churches whose letters make up 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament), we enter a new realm entirely. Gone is the sparseness and opacity that forced us to surmise, to guess, to interpret, that left us, sometimes, utterly at a loss. Paul wants to make his meaning crystal clear. He has none of Jesus’s penchant for ambiguous parables nor the OT’s penchant for reporting bizarre events without explanation. Paul has a message of burning import, and he wishes to tell it. Here at last we have a first-person narrator of the kind we moderns are familiar with: a narrator who tells us what he thinks and feels, who reports his emotions, who speaks of his own hopes and faults. Paul exhorts from a point of view that we can recognize as personal in a modern sense.

The OT narrators are very different. They report what was said and done, but they never tell us how they felt. We do not know whether Daniel was afraid in the lion’s den. Indeed, the narrative does not stay with Daniel amongst the lions but follows the King who has imprisoned him there to his royal chambers and, with the King, discovers Daniel alive the next morning. Even in Jonah, the angstiest of the prophets, we never hear directly about Jonah’s emotions. In the belly of the whale, it is only in the words of Jonah's prayer that we learn anything of his feelings. When I think of Jonah's story, I think of how he feared to take up the burden of prophecy, how, like Moses, he doubted his ability, but when I turn to the text, I discover that I have inferred these emotions; in the text there is only action:

Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.
(Jonah 1:1-3, KJV)

The books of the Old Testament prophets move with strange fluidity between first and third person. The book of Daniel, for example, is entirely third person for the first six chapters. In chapter 7, we get first person, but only in quotation: “Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold…” (Daniel 7:2). His vision goes on and on, the first person persisting. We seem to be in an extended quotation (the bible does not use quotation marks), but gradually we become unsure. Chapter 8 begins “In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel…” (8:1). The third person has vanished—and it will not reappear. Daniel’s speech has become the book.

When we do find the first person in the prophets, it is sometimes unclear whether the “I” refers to the prophet or to God, whose words he is repeating. It seems to slip back and forth without anything to mark the change. There is something strangely unfixed about the identities of these writers. As characters in their own stories, they are clear, but as narrators, as speakers, they blur and dissolve into a perspective beyond the individual. They do not emerge as individual subjects, as speakers, as personal narrators.

Paul is the first such narrator in the bible.

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Seeing Ourselves (2)

But, of course, we also see ourselves as characters in film and television.

Film often evinces a novelistic conception of character: it develops through experience, it finds its value in specificity. In the sit-com, on the other hand, and to a large extent in the episodic drama as well, character is essentially static, and type is primary; individual variations are not wholly extraneous as they are in the statistical study, but they are secondary elements, add-ons to the core type. The new serial show naturally tends towards a more novelistic conception, but the handful of these that I’ve watched often seem haunted by the static, type-based conception native to their medium. And then, of course, there is the model of character found in television advertising.

At any rate, the specific conception of character adopted by film and television is less important than the nature of the moving image itself. The key feature of these media is that we experience the people in them first and foremost as sound and image. No depiction of character in prose can be as external as even the most perspectival film character. The force of the literal reproduction of face, body, gesture, tone overwhelms us. To see ourselves as these characters is to see ourselves from the outside.

What we imbibe from film is not a sense of ourselves as mind and spirit, but as look, gesture, and tone. To relate in this way to ourselves is disturbing. It generates a self-consciousness of a new type: a material self-consciousness, which applies itself not to our conduct or character but to our bodies, our voices, our clothes.

*   *   *

Perhaps this helps to account for the odd discrepancy between the faces of people fifty and a hundred years ago and the faces of people today—a phenomenon that I may or may not be imagining.

In the posed photographic portraits of the late 19th and early 20th century, the subjects are usually stiff, frequently odd looking; they look at the camera warily, as one looks at a strange, unknown device; at the same time, a wealth of personality seems to spill out of them. In candid shots of that time—I am thinking primarily of Walker Evans’s subway photos—the faces are without that wary stiffness and strangely expressive. I say strangely, because it is not the expressions that are so expressive but the faces themselves. Character seems graven into them, through some gradual erosion-like process. There is a graceful unselfconsciousness to even the ugliest of these faces that one rarely finds in contemporary faces. Or look at the faces of early film. In The Passion of Joan of Arc we meet with faces the likes of which no casting agent could summon up today. Even the faces of young lovers of the silent era have a strange soulfulness, a weight of character that is largely missing in today’s faces.

It would be going much too far to say that contemporary faces are all alike. They contain much variation, yet when I compare them to the faces of the past, this variation appears somehow flat. I begin to feel (almost inexplicably) that the faces around me are all in some way the faces of children: precocious, thoughtful, anxious, weathered, but still in some mysterious way child-like, as if their owners have not yet tasted too much of life. And when they become active, these faces evince the uncanny over-expressiveness of bad actors or even of masks.

In 1952, Satyajit Ray cast many of the minor roles in Pather Panchali and both leads from non-actors. On camera, these non-actors appear to be just what they are: the residents of a small village in rural Bengal. The same is true in many of the Italian neo-realist films: in The Bicycle Thieves, for example, Maggiorani, who plays the lead, was a factory worker; the boy who plays Maggiorani’s son was a flower-seller’s son whom De Sica spotted on the street in Rome. And the result is just what we would naively expect: these two ordinary, working-class people appear on camera to be just what they in fact are. This would never work today. Contemporary people are not capable of appearing to be what they are. Put on camera, they invariably begin to perform in the most generic and hackneyed manner. In the silent film era, an actor was someone who could appear strange, monstrous, full of wickedness or religious passion. Today an actor is simply someone who can seem not to be acting.

Of course, like so much else, this may all be a morbid fantasy of mine. I would like to try an experiment. I would like to dress up a bunch of modern people in outfits of the early 20th century, groom them accordingly, and then mix them up with actual photos of people from that time. I think I could guess which was which, nine out of ten times. I think most of us could.

I cannot help it if I appear to be a mad man, but lest I appear a lone mad man, I wish to point out that I am not the first to make an observation along these lines and to see something tragic in it. The following excerpts are from a 1973 article by Pasolini:

[In 1959], a provocateur among us [i.e. the Italian communists] would have been nearly inconceivable (unless he was an amazingly good actor) – in fact, his subculture would have marked him, even physically, as distinct from our culture.  We would have known him for what he was from his eyes, from his nose, from his hair!  …Now … [n]o one on earth could distinguish a revolutionary from a provocateur physically.  Physically, Left and Right have melted together.
…
I feel an immense and sincere unhappiness in saying so (or rather, a literal feeling of despair) – but in the present moment thousands and hundreds of thousands of faces of young Italians resemble more and more the face of Merlin.  Their freedom to have their hair look the way they want it to is no longer defensible, because it is no longer freedom.  The moment has come, instead, to say to young people that their style is horrible, because it is servile and vulgar.  Or better, the moment has come for they themselves to realize it, and for them to free themselves from this guilty anxiety to remain in synchronicity with the degrading order of the horde.

Of course these changes depend on political and economic developments as well. I'm not saying they're due entirely to the consumption of moving images. One of the convictions behind these "crumbs" is that effects usually have many causes. When someone says "Here's why," we should always reply (not-rhetorically) "And why else?"

Footnote to "Seeing Ourselves (1)"

Freud’s narrative acumen and his acute interest in the details of memory and thought have been largely forgotten; his legacy, in the popular mind, consists largely in this: that he taught us to mistrust the individual’s knowledge of herself. That insight was not wrong, but it opened the door to something altogether bad: the subordination, at the level of our own psyches, of individual experience to scientific knowledge.

If I am right that the statistical study has supplanted the novel as the implicit model of character, it is not because people now read studies instead of novels (although lately this may in fact be the case*), but because the study has taken on the truth-revealing power that formerly belonged to lived and imagined experience.

(*In that, so far as I can tell, most educated adults nowadays read articles rather than books and, if they read books, read mostly non-fiction. Clearly, novels almost never site statistical studies, whereas articles and non-fiction books do quite often.)

Seeing Ourselves (1)

In the age of the novel, people saw themselves as characters in a novel. This is why Freud’s early case histories read like short stories: because the implicit psychological model of his time was inextricably bound up in narrative—in its emphasis on specificity and in its gradual unfolding. Character in those days was seen as fundamentally something that developed, and that developed in large part through hardship, through error—that is, through the recognition of error and the overcoming of hardship. Error and misfortune, then, were not to be studiously avoided. One had to meet with these things, to know them, to survive them, in order to be a fully developed person.

One result of this kind of development is peculiarity. The characters in novels—the best ones anyway—are like twisted old trees. Their interest, their value, comes from their specificity. As readers and writers, we are not interested in how a character is like others of their type (quiddity) but how they differ from their type (haecceity). Their haecceity is what is important about them; their quiddity is only a sort of background.

Freud was was anxious about the degree to which his case histories read like stories (see for example his comments on this theme in the critical analysis section of “Elizabeth Von R.”). After all, his stated project was to develop a science of psychoanalysis. He wanted to identify configurations of symptoms, to discover the underlying structure of hysteria, of obsessive-compulsive disorder— structures that would be common to all hysterics, all obsessive-compulsives. For such a project, what mattered was not what made a patient unique but what made him a member of a category—not his haecceity but his quiddity.

People no longer see themselves as characters in a novel. The basic model of the psyche today comes from the psychological study—not Freud’s case histories, which were still four-fifths narrative, but the modern statistical study: the sort that purports to tell us about ourselves, to reveal our hidden biases, to pierce through our false self-conceptions.

In the statistical study, everything that was essential to a character in a novel becomes noise. Haecceity—the way that an individual deviates from type—is precisely what the whole field of statistics is designed to eliminate, in order to reveal the underlying “laws” of human behavior. In this new model, what is essential is our quiddity. Our haecceity is an extraneous element. No wonder then that we have such a horror of error and misfortune, that we try to guard desperately agains them—lest they drive us away from the mean (the “true” value), towards those ever-narrowing tails of the bell curve.

At the same time, we are encouraged to express ourselves, we are told we are special, we are hypnotized with visions of beauty and genius—of outliers. As with so many things, these contradictory elements exist side by side without conflict. The desire for specialness, the fetishization of self-expression, the striving for beauty and brilliance have themselves become not merely common but nearly universal qualities.

Let us learn to see ourselves once more as characters in a novel. Then our failures and frustrations will again take on the rich hues of an unfinished struggle with life. Then we can again begin to find something beautiful and worthwhile even in loneliness and disappointment. Then we can let ourselves grow strange. It will not be easy to go back to this conception of the self. Again and again, the conception that is native to the statistical study will seek to reestablish itself, and we will realize we are again seeing our lives and our psyches through its flattening gaze. But gradually, with persistence, we can regain the novelistic conception. It will help, in this process, to read novels, especially old novels, novels written when the novelistic conception of character was still dominant.

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A Weird, Out-of-the-Way Place

I find myself thinking about a book I read many years ago, about a man driving an RV through the backwaters of the United States in 1978. The writer took this trip after his wife left him and he lost his job, but the book isn't about his wife or his job or his life—these things are mentioned only in passing. The book is about a side of America that, in 1978, was already rapidly disappearing: weird little out-of-the-way towns, each unlike all the others, lonely roadhouse diners, people long settled into the land where they lived, stamped with the spirit of the hill or the bayou, drenched in particularity. I wonder what it was like to drive around this country 20 or 30 or 50 years before that, to see a world still largely unconnected by telephone and television, internet and interstate, when the little highways, winding over and under hill, passed through every town. To arrive in one of these towns was to find oneself somewhere specific and distinct, where speech and manners and beliefs were inflected with an irreducible local element.

Little is left of that world, and what there is seems to be largely preserved for the sake of tourism. It is a tired point: chain stores and superhighways and indistinguishable suburbs and so on. Never mind.

Here is what you can do: make of yourself a weird old place. Find a hillock or a wood of the mind and a build your soul a house there. Build it oddly, unreasonably, with rooms and corridors to your liking. So that, when people meet you, they feel they have come to the threshold of a strange, out-of-the-way place, unlike the places they are used to, somewhere that will take time to get to know. There is no reason to be inhospitable—you may as well do your best to welcome them. (People in weird old towns are often much friendlier than people in modern, anonymous places.) Show the visitor into your strange, dark sitting room, offer them tea. But keep yourself some locked rooms where guests are not allowed.

Is this not part of what it might mean to be an adult—if we discard all those external class-based markers (career, house, towels) and look for qualities that are not grounded in a system that has lost its capacity to impart meaning to almost anything?

The Vampire

Alright, so there is a confusion of categories: adolescent-rebel, adult-bourgeois, maturity-respectability. But why, as a child of the bourgeoisie, should I care? Why not just bite the bullet and become bourgeois?

As mentioned earlier, I have a mysterious incapacity to take this step; maybe if I could I would. But there is also something about bourgeoisdom that troubles me. It seems to me that there is no escape from it, that nowhere, or almost nowhere, could I find a group of people that does not hold its values and aspirations, that would not judge me a failure because I have failed to be bourgeois. It is almost as if the bourgeoisie is no longer merely a class but something more abstract.

Several years ago, a friend sent me an excerpt he had translated from a 1968 essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which Pasolini discusses the bourgeoisie in a manner that introduced a whole new category into my thinking, a category which has since come to seem essential to understanding the world I live in. Here is the excerpt:

I will often speak violently against the borghesia [the bourgeoisie], in fact, this will be the central theme of my weekly columns. And I understand very well that the reader will be “taken aback” by this fury of mine; well, what is going on here will become clear once I specify that by borghesia I do not mean a social class so much as a disease in every sense of the word. A very contagious disease, so much so that it has infected nearly everyone who fights against it – from the Northern workers, to the workers who have emigrated from the South, to the borghesi opposing the government, to the ‘isolated individuals’ (like me). The borghese – let’s describe the phenomenon playfully – is a vampire, who doesn’t find peace until he bites his victim on the neck out of pure, simple, and natural enjoyment at seeing the victim turn pallid, unhappy, ugly, devitalized, contorted, corrupt, restless, full of a sense of guilt, calculating, aggressive, terroristic, just like him.
        How many workers, how many intellectuals, how many students have been bitten by night by this vampire, and without knowing it, are becoming vampires themselves!
[…]
        From my solitude as a citizen, I will therefore attempt to analyze this ‘borghesia’ as an evil wherever it is found – meaning, by now, nearly everywhere (this is a more ‘lively’ way of stating that the borghese ‘system’ is capable of absorbing every contradiction – in fact, it creates the contradictions itself, as Lukács says, in order to survive by overcoming them).

Hollywood Rebels (2)

But, as we have seen, the political element reenters, or seems to reenter, in the form of class: the Hollywood rebel's rebellion is always both against the adult world and against the bourgeoisie, in such a way that the two are almost indistinguishable. (Well, almost always: there is also the rebellion against the “bigoted” working-class parent, but this is much rarer and has an overall different tone and quality; I actually can’t think of a specific movie that depicts it. The target of the Hollywood rebellion is nearly always wealthy and “respectable.”)

Adolescent rebellion bears a peculiar relation to class: the adolescent (in the paradigmatic case) feels herself to be rebelling against everything her parents stand for; but in fact her rebellion is merely a developmental stage, a step on the way to an adulthood which will, in all likelihood, look much like that of her parents. So this sort of “rebellion” is actually a stage in becoming a bourgeois adult.

And this should not be surprising. A wholesale rejection of a value system usually dooms one to recreate precisely those features one thought one was rejecting. It is only when we remember the power and significance of the value system we wish to leave behind, when we in some sense hold onto it, that we can actually find a way away from it— just as it is only when we remember the confusion of not understanding something that we can be said to actually understand it.

*   *   *

All of this comes into much sharper relief when we consider a film that does not fall into the usual pattern. In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Cary Scott, a middle-aged widow falls for the younger man who prunes the trees in her yard, a free-thinker, with a distinctly bohemian lifestyle and philosophy. The match is opposed by Cary’s bourgeois social circle and her preppy college-student children, and Cary must submit to this pressure or rebel against it. She chooses to rebel, but her rebellion is wonderfully quiet. There is no drunkenness, no drugs, no hint of the young or the hip. She does not act out, she does not make any scenes. It is others in her community, in fact, who, resentful of her bid for freedom from the rules that constrain them or hungry for salacious gossip, make scenes.

What drives Cary’s rebellion is not the frustration of a teenager but the real dread of a lonely widowed housewife who can find nothing to look forward to but the company of the fancy new television her son buys her for a Christmas present. What Cary is trapped in is much more complicated and much scarier than what the adolescent is trapped in, and she is bound to it by very real ties. She has no wish to embarrass or hurt her friends and children, nor to renounce her responsibilities, and the choice to reject the value system she lives in is therefore difficult and painful—as it ought to be for a real adult. The gleeful slightly mean-spirited pleasure that we get from watching respectability shocked and embarrassed is not available in All That Heaven Allows. But the joy of liberation is, and in this way we discover what the standard Hollywood narrative has obscured: that that pleasure and this joy are very distinct sensations.

Hollywood Rebels (1)

I’ve been thinking further on the endless figurative rebellions of mainstream Hollywood. In many films, rebellion is an explicit and central theme—American Beauty, Office Space, The Breakfast Club, etc.— but even when it is not central, it is almost always present, at a level so deep that I am almost tempted to say that rebellion is the fundamental aesthetic position of Hollywood. It is through his or her rebellion, however trivial— the flouting of uptight manners, of teacher, of parent, of boss, of commanding officer, of social norm— that we recognize the Hollywood hero.

But it is a strange sort of rebellion that Hollywood shows us. For one thing, these rebellions always, as it were, dress up in the jewelry of political resistance, even though in most cases nothing is overturned, no structure dismantled or even threatened. Some middle-aged dad smokes pot and starts working out, some heiress falls for a poor artist but then he drowns, some teenagers write a manifesto and then feel better about themselves. We must ask how it is that these entirely apolitical narratives manage to achieve the edgy aura of political resistance and evoke the righteous joy of justice being done.

What they lack in real political content these rebellions make up for in performance: the rebels do not actually do much, but they strike excellent poses, flout norms with heroic coolness: they embarrass parents, do shocking things at garden parties, leave uptight people apoplectic. It is not the breaking of rules that makes audiences cheer gleefully but the flouting of them.

Flouting rules is exciting, because it suggests a lack of fear of consequences. But such a fearlessness is possible, for the Hollywood rebel, precisely because the rules that she is breaking do not actually have much hold on her. Real rebellion, whether it takes a political or a personal form, is always against constraints in which one is truly caught and enmeshed, against ties that have a real hold on one. To break such rules is terrifying. One expends one’s energy in breaking them; one has none left to flout them and strike poses.

But the type of the Hollywood rebel is not the political rebel but the adolescent. The adolescent’s aim is precisely to perform her independence. She may, in the process, break rules and weaken authority relations, but these actions are incidental: childhood always involves rules and authority relations, these are necessary and good, and their specific form is mostly a matter of culture; the adolescent’s psychological need is not to modify the parenting or pedagogical culture around her but to assert her independence. There is nothing wrong with this move (though we should remember that the very phenomenon of adolescence is a peculiar feature of modern industrialized culture), but we should not confuse it with political resistance.

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