Spurious Quotation #15

If I was sensitive, I'd be dead.
Marilyn Monroe

From the lost papers of Dr.Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr

Grammatology Lecture Notes

Let us now consider the nature of Chinese verbs, and what they tell us about the Chinese historical world view. In order to fully understand the nature of the Chinese verb, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the verb in English.

Verbs in English –and all European languages- convey two meanings in one word: an action (go, walk, read) and the time when the action happens: (went, am walking, have read). The time of the action is signified by the verb tense. In the European mind, therefore, action is seen as inseparable from time. Our conceptual existence is time-bound, and our languages reflect this in the immense complexity of our tense systems. Our very actions and the states we inhabit are always contextualised as part of a time span. Our world is a linear progression from the past through the present into the future, and on. Time therefore takes on the metaphorical dimension of space, in which these two abstract concepts are understood as metaphors of each other: it’s high time, in next to no time, time flies, bring an event forward, put it back. The prepositions in at on are used for both time and space: in March/in the room, at 8.00/at the window; on Monday/on the table.
We exist suspended in a crux of time and space.

Chinese verbs, on the other hand, only give information about the action. Chinese has no tenses. Information about the time of the action is either signified elsewhere in the sentence, by means of a time chunk: yesterday, tomorrow, before, after and so on; or is left ambiguous and inferred from the context. Inconceivably, actions do not take place in time but in a timeless world. There is no orderly linear progression of time from the past to the future. Instead there is a timeless, static state, in which space and time are not metaphors of each other. The language does not allow the possibility of a conjunction of action and time, but specifically prevents it.

Along with the absence of tense, is the absence of any subjunctive mood. Chinese draws no grammatical or conceptual distinction between if I win the lottery, and if I won the lottery. The language (the mind) cannot hypothesise; it cannot imagine an alternative state of affairs, one that could be changed, one that could be bettered by actions taking place in time.

It is tempting to see in this an explanation of the tremendous inertia of Chinese culture, where things have remained basically unchanged for 5000 years. The Chinese mind exists in a timeless state of inertia, where actions are not seen as time-bound, time is not linear or progressive, time and space are not metaphors of each other, and there is no possibility of improvement.

On a more mundane level, the Chinese are notoriously bad at timekeeping, at time management, they have extremely limited spatial awareness, and most of the time have no idea where they are.

"The Bostonians" Henry James

This is an extraordinary account of a lesbian relationship, what was called in James’s day, a Boston marriage. The action plays out over the 1870s in the cities of Boston, New York and in the country around Cape Cod. Verena and Olive are activists in the woman’s emancipation movement and have set up house together. Basil Ransom, a Southerner (Civil War only over for 5 or 6 years) and a long-lost distant cousin of Olive, is in love with Verena. The book’s plot and central theme is the battle ground for Verena's soul: straight or lesbian, on the level of sexuality; modern emancipated woman or typical 19th century hausfrau on a deeper level.
However, James complicates things immensely by creating structural tensions between character and argument.

Olive is probably one of the most unpleasant female characters in James (Lord knows there are enough). She is a desiccated man-hater, rich, and while not exactly a dilettante, her motives for joining the struggle are not economic, but intensely ideological, idealistic and passionate. The Boston marriage is depicted as a marriage of unequals: Olive is basically paying Verena's father for Verena to live with her. It’s very difficult to like Olive Chancellor, but James is scrupulously honest in giving us her thoughts and motivations as objectively as possible.
Verena comes from a low middle-class background, her father is a pseudo faith healer, who had previously discovered a miraculous gift in his daughter, her ability to speak in public and move her hearers. She is corralled by Olive into the movement, and she enters into it whole heartedly. Olive’s role, and the ostensible basis for their relationship, is to ‘bring her out’. It’s never quite clear whether Verena is a naïve genius who is being not unwillingly exploited, or whether she is as calculating as her mother behind the façade of naivety.
Basil Ransom is a struggling writer of a Romantic appearance, and a defeated Southern gallant into the bargain. He has everything going for him. His views are extremely reactionary and conservative:
He was sick of all the modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that people should make much better use of the liberty they possessed... He thought the spread of education a gigantic farce- people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords-….you had a right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked at the matter with any desire to see things as they are, you soon perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of one person in a thousand.
(sounds like Gore Vidal at his most trenchant.)

On an ideological level, James sets up these two systems: the modern sexual emancipator, the radical conservative: Verena has to choose between them. James is sedulously non-judgemental in his voice, and in his marvellously insightful analyses of his characters.
Structurally, however, the radical conservative system is linked to the male heterosexual, and the modern sexual emancipator with the female, lesbian. This structural conjoining creates a tension in the work: with whom is one meant to side? With whom does the narrator side? With whom does James?


James’s narrative voice in this novel is a marvellously gossipy and indiscreet presence, of acute insight and omniscience, and delighting in the most subtle shades of irony:
Basil Ransom spent nearly a month at Marion. In announcing this fact I am very conscious of its extraordinary character.
Miss Birdseye is a very elderly feminine activist from a previous generation, retired and nearing death. Here’s how the narrator talks about her: At the end of her long day’s work she might have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had certainly qualified her to enter, and to which, apparently, would so soon be opened to her. The voice is at once lyrical, elegiac and ironic, perfectly balanced, sympathetic and yet coolly removed.

The key scenes of conflict between the characters are written with an immensely precise metaphorical intensity, lifting them into the realm of a metaphysics. You can cut the air with a knife between the characters. There are extended meditations on the way insignificant events –a walk in the square –can have enormous significance in the memory later, and have ramifications for the story and the lives of the characters that can never be guessed at.

James is at the peak of his descriptive powers in this novel. The scenes of city life and nature are sublimely visual and limpid, and provide a contrast to the rather abstract social problems and arguments posited by the characters in the story.
Here is Basil watching Miss Birdseye on the summer veranda:
His eyes did not rest on the distance: they were attracted by a figure seated under the trellis, where the chequers of the sun, in the interstices of the vine-leaves fell upon a bright coloured rug spread out on the ground.
It’s somewhere between Kroyer, Sisley and Redon, the closest verbal equivalent to impressionism that any contemporary writer in the language was capable of (except perhaps Kate Chopin). In its limpid beauty and expressiveness, James’s prose matches the dash and verve of Dickens. Both are supreme verbal artists.

Dorothy Parker on the one dependable law of life

Everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

"The Pax Britannica Trilogy" James Morris

This trilogy of books about the British Empire was written thirty years ago, and the author’s methods and views are now completely unfashionable in academia and discredited by the resenters of post colonial (pseudo) theory.

Morris’s mission is to capture the aesthetic of empire, and this he certainly does. The whole conception of the book is deeply artistic, the three volumes standing in relation to one another as a triptych. The first volume describes in a vaguely chronological fashion the gaining of the Empire, from the dilettante beginnings of the East India Company to the increased professionalism and hardening of attitudes after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, to Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. The second volume is an in-depth look at all aspects of the Empire at the climacteric of the Jubilee, taking in the structure, the life, the technology, the art, the wars and the attitudes towards Empire: a vertical slice right through the heart of Empire. The third volume takes us back to a chronology of the decline of the Empire, from the jubilee to Churchill’s death in 1965, a few years before the start of the writing.

Morris has no theory of history he is trying to work out, no ideological axe to grind, but is out to capture the sights and sounds and smells and fears and joys of Empire, told from the side of the Empire builders of course (History to the defeated may say alas, but cannot help nor pardon). His method is essentially that of the novelist. Each chapter is a snapshot of a particular moment. Consider the chapter on the board meeting of the Hudson Bay Company, for example, from which he weaves backwards and forwards from the history of the company, how they got to this ‘present’ moment, to the consequences for themselves and their place in the grand historical, imperial sweep of things. He describes with a novelistic eye for detail and feel for characterization the people involved; and the names of history really do come alive: Gordon’s vacillation at the siege of Khartoum, Rhodes’s unscrupulousness, Parnell’s childlike love for Katherine O’ Shea.
And yet this is not only top down history: we are given the poignancy of the homesick letters to his mum of a young unknown Empire builder on his voyage out, the songs and bawdy catchphrases of soldiers and sailors of the Empire; contemporary poetry, paintings and photos are quoted and meticulously ‘read’ to help us understand how the Victorians themselves perceived their Empire.

Morris knows, with Collingwood, that the essence of history is the inwardness of the actants, and he gives this to us in delicious dollops.

He is also alert to the influence of geography and climate on history, and his descriptions of place are marvelously, visually and sensuously evocative. The books are packed full of queer facts and wonderfully arcane information: the Indian Mutiny started because of a rumour that the new cartridges used in the Indian regiments were greased with pig and cow fat, and therefore deeply offensive to Muslim and Hindu belief; the Senior Judge’s house in Salisbury, Rhodesia, was prefabricated in England and then sent out to Africa- and that it was made of papiermache.

While his story is told from the Empire builders’ point of view, he is by no means blind to the plight of the natives. Although his attitudes and manner are now outdated, in spite of what the resenters would have us think, we cannot blame him for that. He describes the nobility of the Zulus and their battle technique; he is upfront about the Indians’ contribution to the construction of Empire as their Diaspora spread throughout the Imperial possessions: the West Indies, Fiji, South Africa; and tells us with shocked clarity about the vicious reprisals the British took after the Mutiny. And yet at the same time, he is alert to the fact that on the whole the Empire benefited the subject peoples perhaps more than it oppressed them: the railways opening up the dark heart of Africa to trade and civilization, for example, and the way there was a conscious policy to let vast tracts of the Empire govern themselves, if only to cut administration costs.
(I can hear the resenters in the back row gasping in horror at the way I am writing this, but let us not forget, oh you naïve and illogical descendents of Rousseau, that the British ruthlessly abolished many of the more revolting customs of your ‘noble and innocent savages’ such as foot binding, cliterodectomy, suttee, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery and head hunting, and that as a result of British engineering and British medical advances, famine and mass outbreaks of sickness were largely eradicated throughout the Empire.)

Morris’s language is ravishing: he is a real artist in the medium. His sentences have a beautiful rhythm, and he has an eye for the most haunting image and an ear for the most resonant metaphor. Over all, laced through and through, is a very delicate irony at the (often) sheer madness of the Victorians as they went about building and keeping their Empire, taking with them their collapsible canvass baths, their gin sundowners to keep off malaria, their solar topees, and their endless boring games of cricket under the tropical glare...

Fragment 208

My objections to post-colonial theorists are objections based not on race, but on objections to their reasoning.
The Awakening is criticized by black feminists for suppressing the stories of black women, focusing on the liberation of one (white) female: “The great unexamined story, one far more disturbing than the fiction privileged in the text, is the narrative of sororal oppression across race and class.” absurdly writes Elizabeth Ammons. But this is precisely the story not told by Chopin. Why should she have told this story: why should it have interested her? So that she could be counted a liberal black feminist too? To make the resenters happy?

It seems to me to be the strangest and falsest and most wrong-headed critical strategy: to criticize a book for what it is not, for what it leaves out. It is based on a fundamental ignorance –even dislike- for the basic process of artistic creation: the selection and combination of telling detail for an expressive end. One simply cannot include the whole world.
The supposedly democratic, liberal bias of this type of criticism is in fact a form of intolerance: Chopin is being criticized because she is different from her critics, because she is interested in subjects other than the oppression of black women. The same strategy is used by the same group to criticize Conrad. Heart of Darkness is not about black Africans, so it’s a bad book, runs their argument. If the resenters had their way, a ghastly uniformity would be imposed on all artistic expression.
One might as well reject Matisse simply on the grounds that he is not Picasso.

(However, if one critises such PC theory openly, one lays oneself open to the charges of racism, much the same way that if one criticizes Isreali policy towards the Palestinians, one lays oneself open to charges of antisemitism. Chucked shit sticks.)

My glorification of Western culture is not based on racism. One might call it rather, culturalism. It simply is superior. Cultural relativism is simply hypocrisy at 3,000 feet. Where are the African tribes who have designed and built aeroplanes from scratch?
Anyway.