Inadvertent Obscenity #7

When shall I be well enough to swing, I wonder?

Mary Elizabeth Braddon The Trail of the Serpent

Fragment 215

Barthes writes:
One might call “poetic” (without value judgement) any discourse in which the word leads the idea…
This suggests for me a taxonomy of poets, those in which the idea leads the word, and those in which the word leads the idea.

Idea leading word:
Auden
Brodsky
Walcott
Browning
Byron
Dryden
Emily Dickinson
etc
This group of poets constrains language to express an idea (which can often be an image). The idea predominates, and language serves the expression of the idea. Words are sought and placed together to give power to the idea.

Word leading idea:
Hopkins
Keats
Dylan Thomas
Yeats
Donne
Ezra Pound
e.e.cummings

etc
This group of poets is intoxicated with the breathy, physical, auditory power of the word; the word becomes a physical object, although an impermanent one, and ideas are often buried beneath, lost within the power of the expression.

Come to think of it, this might also be an Apollonian/Dionysian taxonomy…

Pasternak's Theory of History

History is a second universe created by humanity, with the aid of time and memory, in response to the fact of death.

Fragment 209

In 1934 the Nationalist government, worried about the growing numbers of Chinese switching their allegiance to Communism, instigated the New Life Movement. Largely the brainchild of überbitch Madame Chiang, the movement was designed to provide an alternative ideology to the persuasiveness of Communism as an intellectual system. Presented as a ‘gift’ to the Chinese people from their beloved Generalissimo Chiang Kai Sheik, the New Life Movement was part of the a general trend towards totalitarianism thought structures which were the most salient feature of the 30s. However, while Communism provided a complex, internally consistent system with its own history and (often bitterly) contested schools, (the semblance of) intellectual rigour, a discourse in which one could participate, and a lofty, noble aim, the New Life Movement was simply a series of decrees aimed at changing behaviours, at improving social mores; essentially it is a list of manners, a manual of etiquette.
The slogan was thought the best means for promulgating the New Life Movement.

Clothing should be tidy and clean.
Buttons should be well buttoned.
Hats should be worn straight.
Shoes should be worn correctly
Food should be eaten in an orderly manner.
Sit upright.
Do not throw food on the ground.
Bowls and chopsticks should be set in order.
Do not make a noise while eating and drinking.
Rooms should be kept clean.
Do not write on walls.
Furniture should be simple.
The home should be tranquil.
Walk and sit with erect posture.
Be punctual for appointments.
Speak after others have finished eating.
Help you neighbour if a fire breaks out.
Do not laugh when others have funerals.
Try to mediate the quarrels of others.
Aid others who have fallen.
Keep silent in meetings or at the theatre.
Do not scold, swear at or hit others.
Do not laugh or talk loudly on boats or in buses.
Do not call out in restaurants or teahouses.
Be polite in conversations.
Keep to the left when walking down the street.
Do not overtake others while walking.
Stay in line at the station when buying tickets.
Stay inline when entering a public place.
Say good morning to others every morning.
Say goodbye when you leave your friends.
Do not gamble or visit prostitutes.
Do not smoke opium.
If you pick up something on the street, return it to its owner.
Be careful of public property and try to make use of scrap materials.
Salute the national flag when it is raised and brought down.
Stand while singing the Party song or the National anthem.
Salute your elders.
Be polite and courteous to women and children.
Help old people, women, and the weak in getting off boats and buses.
Be filial to your parents and love your brothers and sisters,
Take off your hat in meeting places.
Do not wear your hat indoors.
Be loyal to your friends.
Be fair in business transactions.
Reduce the number of meaningless parties or gatherings.
Be frugal at weddings, funerals and festive occasions.
Go to bed early and rise early.
Keep your face clean.
Keep your mouth and keep your hair clean.
Breathe fresh air.
Comb your hair.
Cut fingernails frequently.
Clothes should be kept clean.
Holes in clothing should be patched.
Bedding should be frequently washed and dried outdoors.
Children should be kept clean.
Sweep and clean your rooms frequently.
Drain ditches and gutters frequently.
Keep windows open as often as possible.
Keep tables and chairs clean.
Keep bowls and chopsticks clear.
Keep bathrooms clean.
Exterminate flies
Exterminate mosquitoes.
Exterminate rats.
Dump garbage in garbage cans.
Do not throw waste paper on the street.
Do not throw fruit peel on the street.
Do not post advertisements everywhere.
Get vaccinated.
Keep bus stations and docks clean.
Keep parks and theatres clean.
Restaurants, hotels and tea houses should be clean.
Bath houses and barber shops should be clean.
Every household should clean the street in front of its door each day.
Everyone should keep himself clean all the time.
Do not eat snacks.
Do not eat unclean food.
Do not drink unboiled water.
Do not get drunk.
Do not smoke.
Do not spit on the ground.
Do not urinate as you please.

What interests me about this list of slogans, is that they unwittingly reveal the texture of ordinary life in China during the 20th century; what the Nationalists wanted to change; and that they thought they could achieve it by means of slogans. (Mental flash here, image of thousands of people marching through the streets chanting Buttons should be well buttoned). The list also reveals the KMT ideology, a strange mix of Confucianism, paternalism of an almost Nazi breadth and depth, and Christianity of the YWCA variety, the sheer mad bossiness, remnants of which still underpin the social fabric and legal framework of Taiwan, and which is only now starting to dissolve under the pressures of modern materialism.

And how reliable can any truth be that that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a not?
W.H.Auden

Barthes on stupidity

Stupidity is a hard and indivisible kernel, a primitive: no way of decomposing it scientifically (if a scientific analysis of stupidity were possible, TV would entirely collapse). What is it? A spectacle, an aesthetic fiction, perhaps a hallucination? Perhaps we want to put ourselves into the picture? It's lovely, it takes your breath away, it's strange; and about stupidity, I am entitled to say no more than this: that it fascinates me. Fascination is the correct feeling stupidity must inspire me with (if we reach the point of speaking the name): it grips me (it is intractable, nothing prevails over it, it takes you in an endless hand-over-hand race).

Dostoevsky on the burden of consciousness

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness, but even any consciousness at all, is a sickness... For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia- that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms... How can a man of consciousness have any respect for himself?...Consciousness, in my opinion, is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfactions.

Fragment 208

Reading Sontag reading Lukacs reading the Modernists

Lukacs The Ideology of Modernism. Lukacs’s criticism of Modernism is the result, as Sontag says, of a mimetic theory of art which is simply far too crude and which does not acknowledge the alienation caused by the new awareness of the relation between consciousness and actuality (It is always merely a fragment, a phase: Lukacs) which came into being during the first decades of the century. There was a new awareness of the most secret places of life as Lawrence called it, and it was thought suitable to analyse them as the subjects of literature. This was the Modernist project.

Lukacs’s whole argument is based on a false premise which is so shockingly obvious: how could he not have seen it? Man is indeed a social animal but he is not only a social animal: he is also a conscious animal, and rather than the city being a mere backcloth as Lukacs says, it is the interaction between it and consciousness that is the Modernist theme.The communist Lukacs is blind to the individual. His argument is full of holes (not to mention the most unfortunate ironies of choice: the communist literary critic basing his arguments on the Nazi Heidegger’s definition of existence). What is the use and correctness of his distinction between the solitariness described by realist literature as a social fate and that described by Modernism as a condition humaine? Is not the condition humaine precisely man’s interaction with society? Is not social fate precisely the condition humaine? Lukacs not only appears to be blind to the ramifications of his own argument, but also ironically forgets Marxism’s own dictum that man’s social being determines consciousness. In other words, his position in society causes his solitariness.

Darkness is an absence of light, cold an absence of heat, dry an absence of wet: each absence defines a presence through its absence and thus becomes present in absentia. Likewise solitariness is defined as the absence of society or the absence of a perceived, a felt link with society. For Lukacs then to say that by concentrating on the solitariness of the individual, the Modernists excluded or denied society is both philosophically inept and patently wrong. What they did is focus on the individual’s experience of loneliness, on the felt experience of an absence or a breakdown of the link between the individual and society. How else can it be? Here he also gives a dishonestly false interpretation of Woolfe: solitariness is the inescapable central fact of human existence. Solitariness can only be experienced as an increased inwardness.

Moreover, to say as Lukacs does, that Joyce and Musil only use their respective cities as backcloths begs the question of whether Lukacs has done his homework and actually read them at all. Ulysses, by its very nature and intention is as much about Dublin as about the consciousness of the characters: it is an Odyssey around and through the city, and the city is reflected and created for us through the consciousness. A backdrop? To what? To the characters musings about the city... Dubliners by its title alone situates the individual and the city on an equal footing: the characters defined by place, nothing else. And Ulrich and his cronies spend the pages of Musil’s oeuvre debating endlessly about how the city shall celebrate the extraordinary year.

Finally, a critic who denies the genius of Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky? Really!), calls Conrad a short story writer and who criticises Neitzsche as a Nazi (and Heidegger then?) has no business being a critic, but should have become a journalist instead. As Sontag so wonderfully puts it: Lukacs is a radical failure of an entire sensibility and should be consigned to the madhouse.