Braudel on the lack of a historical perspective in the social sciences

Sociologists and economists in the past and anthropologists today have unfortunately accustomed us to their almost total indifference to history. It does of course simplify their task.

Fragment 728

Notes on Dickens 8

Class mobility: Dickens is full of class mobility and characters who are on the make, both minor characters: Bailey, Guppy, Bradley Headstone; and major ones, whose class mobility mirrors the narrative trajectory of their respective novels: Pip, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby. In the Sketches especially, we see the emerging urban middle classes creating routines of pleasure for themselves: Mr Augustus Cooper joining the dance academy, Miss Amelia Martin taking part in amateur concerts, the whole family enjoying themselves at Astley’s. Class mobility is always hugely precarious in Dickens, both materially and spiritually. Economic forces may pull a man down just as surely as they can lift him up in the rapidly expanding economy of the city (How well he knew this from his own childhood experiences!): Is there any man who has mixed much with society… who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, was a respectable tradesman, or a clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit with good prospects and decent means…?
On the other hand, economic success can have dire consequences for the soul, stifling all warm human feeling as middle class responsibilities (respectability, Sabbatarianism, temperance) replace working class pleasures: puffed up conceit is not dignity. Snarling at the little pleasures they were once glad to enjoy, because they would rather forget the times when they were of a lower station render [such people] the objects of contempt and ridicule.
This social mobility also effected Dickens personally, and could be seen in Dickens’s dress. The notorious bright fancy waistcoats of his youth were gradually replaced by the uniform black of the Mid-Victorian gentleman, as the dandy evolved into the paterfamilias and the respectable figure of society.

Correspondence #7

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.

Flaubert
Madame Bovary

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Conrad
Under Western Eyes

Only very simple things can be said without falsehood. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Iris Murdoch
Under the Net

Language is a virus from outer space.

William Burroughs

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

Notes on guilt and shame

One of the most salient differences in terms of exercising social control between Western cultures and Confucian Chinese cultures is the difference between guilt and shame.

In Western cultures guilt is the operative form of social control. Both Protestant (going against your conscience) and Catholic (usually sexual guilt) cultures have developed guilt as a mode of monitoring and controlling the self. Moreover, guilt presupposes an already developed self that can take (or reject) orders from the conscience.
My conscience says ‘No’!, says Launcelot Gobbo, in an internal dialogue between an individual ego and one of its components: the conscience. For the Western individual, moral virtue is an internal dialectic between components of an ego. The individual might certainly refer to an external system (Catholic, Protestant, legal) in making ethical decisions, but still, there is an internal debate. In Western cultures, the individual thinks to himself: if I do this, can I live with myself, giving rise to a whole mythology of guilt, repressed or otherwise.

In Confucian Chinese cultures, on the other hand, shame is the operative form of social control. Shame does not presuppose an individual so much as emphasise a collective. If the people be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good, says Confucius. Instead of internal dialectic we have a collective consciousness, led by notions of virtue and propriety imposed from without. There is no glimpse of an individual here, but a unit in a group aiming at uniformity. In Confucian cultures the person thinks to himself: if I do this, can I get away with it?

The operation of shame can be observed on two levels, the social, and the linguistic.

On the social level, family and baojia system operate to make shame a deciding factor in preventing vicious actions. The baojia system, in which households are registered and an overseer for good behaviour appointed, was instigated by the Qing, but adopted both by Nationalist and Communists, and is still in operation today. Everyone watches everyone else, and infringements are either reported up to the next level (in cases of serious crime), or handled within each baojia (in cases of merely transgressive social behaviour). In such an environment, social ostracism, or shame, is a terrible punishment in itself. This breeds the uniformity (and creates the harmony desired by Confucius), which is so nauseating to the Western individual, with his notions of freedom and individual rights. Everyone behaves, because everyone is watching.

On the linguistic level, shame operates through a curious adjacency pair. An adjacency pair is a pair of utterances, the first of which always summons the second. The most common adjacency pair is question/answer: How are you/I’m fine. Where are you going?/Home. but there are others: Here./Thanks. I feel terrible./What’s up? Thanks./You’re welcome. I’m so sorry./ Don’t worry about it. Adjacency pairs are extremely powerful measurements of social mores, because they operate so unconsciously on an individual level, but are so essential to the smooth operation of social relations. If the second part of the pair is not forthcoming, or is delayed, the first speaker thinks the second speaker is at best unmannered, at worst, unsocialized.
In Chinese, the most common adjacency pair is: buhauyise/meiguanxi, and both terms are extremely difficult to translate and grasp. Buhauyise literally means I’m embarrassed, but pragmatically has a wide range of uses, such as I apologise, I’m afraid that… Please forgive me… Please don’t blame me… It’s not my fault… and so on. Meigiuanxi literally means There is no relationship, or connection, but its range of pragmatic meanings includes Don’t worry… It’s of no consequence… Doesn’t matter… Forget about it… and so on. The pair is used whenever something goes wrong, or social mores have been transgressed. I know that a wrong action on my part, if discovered by my group, can be largely smoothed over by eliciting meiguanxi. If I utter buhauyise when it is discovered that I have done something wrong, the offence is immediately smoothed away when you respond – as you are utterly compelled to do by the power of the adjacency pair- meiguanxi. The compunction to avoid or abstain from vicious action, therefore, comes not from the inner dialectic, but from the social dialogue. Wrong actions can be carried out in secret with no moral stress on the part of the individual. If they are discovered, the resulting shame may be smothered in the oil of social discourse.

"Ulysses" James Joyce

The Eumaeus chapter. What on earth is going on here? After the mad Irish rhapsody of the Circe chapter, which goes on, on and on, piling madness on madness, image on image, the reader longs to return to a slightly more normal prose environment where the laws of the universe apply, and some recognizable reality holds sway: some nice 19th century realism, for example. The mind can only deal with so much unreality. It either threatens to become boring, or to become meaningless. Joyce has judged the distance perfectly. In the relationship between the Circe and Eumaeus chapters, the whole nature of fiction is put in the balance: Circe makes us long for a realistic world, Eumaeus gives it to us in all its bathetic banality.
But something is wrong with the prose. It sags, it’s lumpy, full of absurd tautologies: the eyes were surprised at this observation, because as he, the person who owned them pro. tem. observed, or rather his voice speaking did: All must work, have to, together; platitudes: Probably the home life, to which Mr Bloom attached much importance, had not been all that was needful and cliché: a magnificent specimen of manhood he was truly, ..with sentences that ramble on and on getting lost in their digressions. It is a model of inept writing: slightly disturbed in his sentry box by the brazier of live coke, the watcher of the corporation, who though now broken down and fast breaking up was non other in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability –from dictates of humanity, knowing him before- shifted about and shuffled in his box, before composing himself again in the arms of Morpheus.
What is Joyce trying to do here? In the Odyssey, Eumaeus is the swineherd who stays at home to look after Odysseus’s realm while Odysseus goes off to Troy. The tautology and over-precision of the discourse at which we mock, is the result of a mind that has had lots of time to ruminate, but not much matter on which to ruminate, the mind of someone who has stayed at home, in other words. Also the mind of one who is old and tired (at this stage in the cabman’s shelter, it’s one o’clock in the morning and Stephen and Bloom are both the worse for wear for drink), the thought processes spinning out, repeating themselves, digressing, the language careless, unreflecting, unremembering of what it has just said. One would expect the language to get in the way, for this type of writing to be boring and untransparent, and yet, miraculously, the growing relationship between Stephen and Bloom comes through with surprising clarity.

Correspondence #6

Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant.

John Milton
Paradise Lost

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods, with warm breast, and with Ah! bright Wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
God's Grandeur

Fragment 2007

The Modern Library list of ‘100 best novels published in English since 1900’ has stirred vast amounts of controversy since it was published ten years ago. Some interesting points which arose in the subsequent discussions, are the preeminence of American writers (as against the under representation of Indians, for example, who have written some of the best novels certainly in the latter half of the century); the whole notion of a list, and the random number of a 100 (rubbish, lists are great!); the preeminence of modernism in the list (all that Conrad, Forster, and Woolfe); the under representation of women writers (the inclusion of the grossly overrated Wide Sargasso Sea seems to Murr to be a sop to the feminists’ objections in this area); the weighting of the list towards books published in the first 50 years of the century.
Another very interesting debate was stirred when readers polled their own 100 best novels, creating a list in which Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard feature very heavily in the top 10. This for Murr stomps all arguments about who knows best: readers or critics. Readers who think the rancid incompetent drivelings of Rand and Hubbard are the best fictional works in English simply should never be let out of the house, let alone be allowed to vote on an issue like this. Vive l’ elite!
The ones in italics are those I have read. The ones in bold are the ones I think should be removed. Either because I have read them and think they are crap, or because I don’t think the writer is worth inclusion in any list of greats: D.H. Lawrence, who is execrable, Dreiser, who is just exceptionally boring, and Hemingway, who is too full of Hetero Posturing to be truly great. I also loathe Anthony Powell as a person (I hate that kind of English aristocratic snobbery, and Powell was very rude about Auden, an immeasurably better artist and human being). Apart from these, I have not removed anything I have not yet read, to give the benefit of the doubt to the Board.


1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7. CATCH-22
8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
13. 1984 by George Orwell
14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
36. ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
52. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
57. PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling
79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
87. THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
89. LOVING by Henry Green
90. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy
93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles
94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
96. SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

This gives me 11 books to replace. Here is my (preliminary, tentative) list of inclusions.

1. MYRA BRECKINRIDGE/MYRON by Gore Vidal
2. NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE(Series) by Gore Vidal
3. CARPENTER'S GOTHIC by William Gaddis
4. THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis
5. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
6. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole
7. A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth
8. A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry
9. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein
10. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
11. THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing