Cornel West on James and Royce

From West's 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosophy: It is no accident that American pragmatism once again rises to the surface of North Atlantic intellectual life at the present moment. For its major themes of evading epistemology-centered philosophy, accenting human powers, and transforming antiquated modes of social hierarchies in light of religious and/or ethical ideals make it relevant and attractive. The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.

Elizabeth Warren

Monozygosity

An essay always under revision for me. I was reading too much Joan Didion at the time (first draft in 2012) and it certainly shows. My first draft contained an absurdly pretentious pose--I plopped in the entire Shakespeare sonnet without explication of any kind: figure it out! I must have thought. I hope this version is more humble. 

We were at one time a singular being. This is a curious feeling.

We were born on the same day in March of 1990. About nine months earlier, for a certain period of time, were were a single individual. Did we itch to be two? As monozygotic twins—identical twins—we come from one egg, one strand of DNA. What possible combination of cosmic motivations, global environmental factors, genetic susceptibilities, evolutionary hiccups, astrological alignments, and regional weather conditions could transform one person into two people? More simply put: what split the egg? To counter a common question put to me—usually unthinkingly—What is it like being a twin? I will often play the cynic: I don't know, what is it like not to be a twin? This is both coyly humorous and strategically avoidant. But after all, what a stupid question. Nevertheless, I will deign: What is it like to be a twin? In truth, it’s wonderful.

*

My sister and I are walking up the hill to campus for final exams. We are arguing about music, bickering and bantering in our own shorthand, and I wonder if I could ever do the same with a romantic partner. I have showered and been up since seven, I dress in an affected manner, deliberately (ashamedly) academic; she has rolled out of bed and thrown on a hooded sweater. I am headed to an English Lit. exam, she is headed to History of Rock and Roll. Our argument is preposterous: The Ramones vs. Glenn Gould. I am saying things like, “What did the Ramones do for music? They knew three guitar chords,” and she cannot believe we are related. Even I realize I am full of it, but I enjoy (as does she) the back and forth.

For as long as I can remember, my very identity has itself been a conversation piece, a nice icebreaker if you will. Hello have you met Laura? Did you know she’s a twin? Identical. They look exactly alike. A lazy but accurate skeleton of the conversation I will have with a previously unacquainted stranger for possibly at least the next ten minutes. Topics we are likely to cover:

-Do you fight a lot?

-Do you share boyfriends?

-What are the key differences in appearance as well as personality?

-Who is Baby A?

-What’s it like?

-Did you ever switch?

-Has your being defined as ‘one of two’ ever resulted in a sort of anxiety-ridden identity crisis?

I was only asked the latter once by a psychology major deeply interested in Jungian archetypes. I think I answered yes.

I remember being struck by the story of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Helen of Troy (they are often conflated under one label, the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus. One wonders whether they—if any Castor and Pollux ever existed—would have felt their individuality erased by such a label, or whether they would have cared at all. Or perhaps the common name would have been a comfort). Whether they were born out of one egg or two varies; regardless, the two are never depicted without the other. The two fought in battle together until Castor, fatally wounded, called out to his brother. All-powerful Zeus offered Pollux either a full ticket to Olympus, or merely half time, sharing his immortality with his brother. Pollux chose the latter; the brothers split their time between Hades and heaven. I do not imagine the choice was much of a choice at all for Pollux.

Imagine if you will having someone around, with whom you may always converse and bicker and banter and yet never tire. Imagine having the privilege of claiming: I am a solitary person, I require space and quiet and myself alone with my thoughts, and yet always knowing to the very pith of your being that you are not, and have never really ever been, alone in the world.

*

She is, once again, telling me about the greatness of The Beatles. The record player makes its revolutions in the background, the diamond needle moving against the miniscule ridges of a vinyl copy of Rubber Soul. We take turns flipping the finished record over, not bothering to put on something new. Her animated face will never grow old, not like this, not when expressing her admiration for Lennon-McCartney. Prosaic moments such as these are when the mind, relaxed and open, wanders down paths without particular intention or chosen destination. I feel the warmth of this moment, the darkness of the winter evening outside exaggerated by the bronzed light within the room. We will live like this forever.

We are permeable beings, porous, full of holes at the microscopic level. What is it, exactly, that separates one person from another? We have never been far apart, always like Castor and Pollux, in relation to the other. I am never really alone. This is a comfort. But while you are half of a whole, created and formed in the same moments, there is unfortunately no precise way to determine who will die first.

I think of a Shakespeare sonnet, number sixty-four. When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age…loss, death is inevitable. I worry too often, the thought creeps up in the places I am most comfortable, unreasonable scenarios. I wonder who would cope better, which survivor? When I have seen such interchange of state, / Or state itself confounded to decay: the worst scenario. Norman Rush calls it the “hellmouth,” the “opening up of the mouth of hell right in from of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my love away. Living involves loss, but loss always shocks us. The injustice of it, the utterly unwelcome, yet wholly predictable facts of life seem still distant to me. I am young but already sense, abstract and foreboding, a shortness of time.

Who will die first?

Families, people in love have the same thought, but I cannot help but wonder whether the knowledge of a common origin, a onetime shared existence, might increase the loss; or am I exaggerating my own tragedy? Nevertheless, two possibilities: who will be left behind?

Since I first conceived of her mortality I have never not been afraid.

Nietzsche’s Response to Enlightenment Idealism

An essay I wrote a few years ago but never posted. My first encounter with Nietzsche--feel the excitement:


Perhaps the greatest source of Nietzsche’s authority is best stated by himself:

Posthumous human beings—like me, for example—are understood worse than timely ones, but they are listened to better. More accurately: we are never understood—and that’s the source of our authority… (Nietzsche 7)

This epigram seems to demonstrate that Nietzsche had at least some inkling of the power he held over his readers. Today, Nietzsche is one of the most divisive, well known, and incontrovertibly misunderstood contributors to the modern philosophical tradition. The most central obstacle in attempting to come to certain conclusions about Nietzsche is that Nietzsche asks more questions than he provides answers. It is extremely tempting to label Nietzsche: misogynist, nihilist, rational, irrational, atheist, hedonist etc. One could probably make a case for any of these labels. To label Nietzsche, is to misread Nietzsche. To confine him to a label is to assume a logical consistency. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, as Emerson (one of Nietzsche’s more admired authors) would have it. This confinement underestimates the complexity of Nietzsche, as a reading is more like a study in contradictions. Considering Nietzsche rejected rational thought in general, logical conclusions are antithetical to the whole of his philosophy. This is not to say his ideas are in chaos, only that Nietzsche is anti-systematic. (Lecture 4/14) It is clear that Nietzsche is large and does contain multitudes. While Nietzsche rejects many ideals of the 17^th century Enlightenment, much of his philosophy stems from an Enlightenment tradition. He is an anti-Enlightenment thinker, and in many ways, an Enlightenment thinker.

Descartes, the father of Enlightenment thinking, is an especial target of criticism for Nietzsche. Descartes sees sensory perception as a deception. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes plainly states, “…our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine.” (Descartes 18) So here Descartes tells us to doubt all external perceptions because he strongly believes in internal rational analysis. In other words, think before you act. Nietzsche turns this entire philosophy on its head in Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche explicitly writes, “’Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses…they do not lie”. (Nietzsche 19) Here lies the fundamental difference between Nietzsche and Descartes. To Nietzsche, living is feeling; specifically, acting off of the urges and instincts which may be retrained or denied by reason. Descartes’ very definition of the self heavily conflicts with Nietzsche.

Descartes describes the idea of an intrinsic separation between mind and body, known as Cartesian Dualism. The idea itself, places identity within the mind, with much less value associated with the body. Descartes explains,

Thus this “I”, that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body, and even if there were no body at all, it would not cease to be all that it is. (Descartes 19)

As we can see, Descartes regards the body as theoretically superfluous to one’s existence, or at least to the experience of existence. The rejection of rational identity is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche equates such rationality to an Apollonian state. The Greek figure of Apollo represents truth, order, reason, perfection, system etc. Essentially, Apollo is a representation of all that is weak and effeminate in the eyes of Nietzsche. Moreover, Nietzsche certainly held Dionysian qualities in the highest regard. Near the end of Twilight, Nietzsche posits:

Saying yes to life even in its most strange and intractable problems, the will to life, celebrating its own inexhaustibility by sacrificing its highest types—that is what I call Dionysian, (Nietzsche 91)

Here we find one of Nietzsche’s most prominent passions, the will of life. To truly live, Nietzsche finds, we cannot be bogged down by heavy systematic reasoning. He wishes to live by instinct and writes, “Everything good is instinct—and consequently is easy”. (Nietzsche 31)

The Enlightenment was a period when science and revelation could finally begin to separate. Reason and not scripture would now pave the way to truth. Any casual reader of Nietzsche can conclude that he rejects religion as a whole. One would then think that Nietzsche might embrace much of this Enlightenment thinking. Indeed, in many ways he does. While the Enlightenment did take the first step in transferring academia into a more secular form of learning, the reality is that the 17^th century was not yet ready to completely cast off religion. Instead, religion was accommodated and reconciled with science. And this accommodation is the receiver of Nietzsche’s wrath. Deism, in particular, sought to secularize the moral tradition of Christianity. Because of their identity with Christian morality, Nietzsche finds the Enlightenment thinkers just as reprehensible as the Christians he so prominently despises:

They’ve gotten rid of the Christian God, and now they think they have to hold onto Christian morality all the more: that’s English logic…if you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. (Nietzsche 53)

This “English logic” likely refers to John Stuart Mill, an English contemporary of Nietzsche, who was a proponent of 19^th century Rationalism. Nietzsche views Mill as a backwards thinker who lives in 17^th century ideology. Mill, while dismissing Christianity in general, states his belief in the validity of a Christian moral code:

I believe that other ethics than any which can be evolved from exclusively Christian sources must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind…it is not necessary that in ceasing to ignore the moral truths not contained in Christianity men should ignore any of those which it does contain. (Mill 49)

This is a sort of cafeteria style philosophy which Nietzsche criticizes Mill for. It’s odd because Nietzsche seems to think you either can take Christianity and therefore you are a mindless sheep, or you take none of it and are thus better off for that decision. This is a rather black and white view, one which is not consistent with the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In fact, Mill’s utilization of Christian morality along with his dismissal of the Christian faith echoes exactly what Nietzsche does with Enlightenment rationalism. While Nietzsche rejects the Enlightenment in general, he utilizes its more rational reasoning in his rejection of mysticism and theocracy. Thus perhaps, here Nietzsche cannot justify himself in his criticism of Mill’s methods. Of course, as stated above, Nietzsche should never be taken as a rationally consistent critic.

If there is one label Nietzsche has never been confined to, it is that he has never been accused of being unoriginal. Whether he is criticizing the Enlightenment, or utilizing it (or both) one can be sure that what he is saying has never quite been stated the same way before. He is provocative and one is forced to confront every belief one has even taken for granted while reading him. Our offenses are our “Idols”; idols which Nietzsche believes should be reevaluated. Above all, to rely on our instincts, and reject conformity (especially as displayed in organized religion) perhaps then one can truly live. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”¹

Works Cited

Descartes, René. Discourse on the method for conducting one's reason well and for seeking truth in the sciences. Hackett Pub Co Inc, 1998.

Mill, John Stuart. On liberty. Hackett Publishing, 1978.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the idols, or, How to philosophize with the hammer. Hackett Publishing, 1997.

1 Emerson, Self-Reliance

James Wood Review

Just reposting an article posted on the Siren Journal's page. I reviewed James Wood's The Fun Stuff and Other Essays--quite fun.

http://sirenjournal.org/reviews-discussion/how-nonfiction-works-james-woods-the-fun-stuff-and-other-essays/

Lecturing at Bryn Mawr in 1965, the late critic Frank Kermode remarked “[i]t is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives.” Critics instead must “attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.” If Kermode’s role as a critic is a “lesser feat” than that of the novelist, the poet, the Artist (capital A), then the role of the critic will always be secondary. But anyone who has read Kermode does not lament he never wrote a novel; his nonfiction is too engaging, too intelligent.

Today nonfiction is, of course, everywhere—arguably too many places: Popular science; memoirs of celebrities and software company CEOs; micro-histories and macro-histories; miracle diets, morally obligatory “last lecture” inspirationals (as seen on Oprah), and a surfeit of self-help drivel. No doubt informative, possibly entertaining, never the less, because these genres privilege content over form, they require little in the way of artifice, little in the way of being written well.  Can we enjoy nonfiction again? Fortunately, the literary essay, rooted in Montaigne, never quite went away. The essay (Montaigne’s word, “to try”), has grown: we read personal essays of experience; analytic meditations; lectures and essays of ideas; columns; lyric essays and nature essays; essays on literature, and film, and music. From E.B. White to Joan Didion to David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens, the nonfiction essay has grown invaluably versatile.

And what of Frank Kermode’s critic, the critic of literature, of art? Literary criticism seldom reaches a general audience: so sheltered by academia, criticism means to be inaccessible, consciously steeped in esoteric vocabulary and pure verbiage. From criticism, one wants intelligent writing in what Wordsworth called “the real language of men”. Christopher Hitchens’ essays on literature, particularly on Orwell, may have come close to achieving that potent combination. Yet, even at Hitch’s best one wishes he had gotten his hands just a bit inkier, gone just a bit deeper into the text—he seldom bothered with footnotes or citations.

James Wood though, captures in his essays both intelligence and—how shall we say—panache. His readers catch his articles in The New Yorker where he has contributed since 2007. His now famous review of John Updike’s Terrorist recalls for us the delight of an intelligent and mercilessly “ripping” book review, as well as of what criticism is primarily for: to examine and expose; to sound out as defective that which isn’t quite ringing (but should be). Wood is fun to read, and he is challenging; but what makes him truly engaging is his intellectual seriousness. He executes his role as a critic in earnest, and one perceives his genuine sense of betrayal at a poorly written passage (an author overshadowing his meagerly sketched character in the case of Updike), or frustrated anger toward the cheap exaggerations of what he views as the “enormous condescension of postmodernism” in writers such as Tom Wolfe and Salman Rushdie. He is widely read in both classic and contemporary works, and is as good on the Old Testament and Flaubert as he is on Bellow and Norman Rush.

Wood’s latest collection of essays, (The Fun Stuff and Other Essays; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2012) unlike his previous publications, feels looser and more comfortable, if altogether less consciously ambitious. Rather than making a statement or setting out a critical method (Wood has already done so inHow Fiction Works, an examination and appreciation of literature), The Fun Stuff is just damn good writing. . The jacket states the book is a study of contemporary literature, but Wood has always mixed the canonical with the modern-day (see his reference to Robert Stone in his essay on Flaubert in The Broken Estate) and so The Fun Stuff is more suitably read as a mixture of essays that Wood felt like writing rather than a collection with an overarching theme.

In “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” Wood writes with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up, jacket thrown over a chair. The successful literary critic is at his most casual, taking a break from Flaubert and Tolstoy to explore a more “poppy” subject: his own discovery and enjoyment of rock music, specifically the unrestrained Dionysian drumming of The Who’s Keith Moon. The essay is fun and fresh, and even in an essay on music Wood sprinkles references to literature here and there: you cannot separate the literary critic from the musicologist. In this passage, Wood recalls his childhood of classical music.  Between his appreciation of classical music and his undeniable attraction to rock, a reference to Philip Roth slips in:

Nowadays, I see schoolkids bustling along the sidewalk, their large instrument cases strapped to them like diligent coffins, and I know their weight of obedience. Happy obedience, too: that cello or French horn brings lasting joy, and a repertoire more demanding and subtle than rock music’s. But fuck the laudable ideologies, as Roth’s Mickey Sabbath puts it: subtlety is not rebellion, and subtlety is not freedom, and sometimes it is rebellious freedom that one wants, and only rock music can deliver it. (11)

His admiration of rock’s ecstasies brings an excitement to his prose, an undeniable playfulness that you might sense—but more reigned in—in his essays on literature. This is Wood “letting loose,” and thoroughly enjoying himself. He says fuck, uses exclamation points wherever he pleases,  makes a jab at the Eagles (who doesn’t?), and still sounds like he knows what he’s talking about—even when he’s gushing:

Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood…When you blow down an oboe, say, or pull a bow across a string, an infinitesimal, barely perceptible hesitation—the hesitation of vibration—separates the act and the sound…[b]ut when a drummer needs to make a drum sound, he just…hits it. The stick or hand comes down, and the skin bellows. (4)

Wood also sounds when struck, though by poor prose rather than a “stick or hand”. The essay on Paul Auster (“Paul Auster’s Shallowness”), a piece as favorable as the title suggests, recalls Wood’s review of John Updike’s Terrorist wherein Wood ruthlessly picked apart Updike’s transparent characterization of his American Muslim narrator. In How Fiction Works Wood uses Terrorist as a case study noting that, indeed, “good writers make mistakes”. Wood face-palms not over Auster’s preoccupation with the postmodern—cliché, bogus or borrowed dialogue—but out of despair with what the author fails to do with his own material:

Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work….Auster…does nothing with cliché except use it. Cliché is under no significant pressure in his work; it just holds its soft hands with firmer fingers in the usual way. (271-272)

For Wood this cliché is “ragingly unaffecting,” one of many cheap tricks Auster easily deploys, an authorial laziness that refuses the reader a revelation, substance, meaning. Meaninglessness, in a postmodern sense, often signifies some underlying truth of reality. Auster’s meaninglessness is just that: meaningless.

The classic formulations of postmodernism…emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence….language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in Auster’s work. The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue. (278)

Wood closes The Fun Stuff with the personal piece “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library”. The critic reflects upon the burden of emptying his late father-in-law’s collection of four thousand books. Wood asks, What do the books we own say about us? We buy and collect and read and die, and the survivors are left to redistribute. He imagines all of his books suddenly carted off:  how much lighter one might feel! Equally a joy and a burden, piles of books remind us of what we’ve yet and haven’t read; what we always been meaning to read; what looks nice on a shelf but really we know we’ll never actually read in this lifetime—the shortness of time nags at one looking over the workload of intellectual consumption for a lifetime. Wood never tells us how large is his own library, but one get the feeling his books will not be carted off anytime soon.

Turn of the Century Blog

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