The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day is an "upstairs/downstairs" type novel that sets two stories side by side, a public one involving the English aristocracy and political class during the interwar years and the decline of the Empire in the years following, on one hand, and the private life and emotional regrets of the butler of Darlington Hall, Mr. Stevens, as he reflects back on his past during a drive out west in 1956. The two big discoveries towards the end of the novel are that Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer (this disgrace explains how possession of Darlington Hall has passed to a more or less vulgar American owner) and that the feisty housekeeper Miss Kenton has been in love with Stevens all along. The question all this poses is how we are to connect these two stories. 

I wanted to read the novel (I had seen the film in college) because I was reading Gillian Rose's book Mourning Becomes the Law. She discusses the novel in a chapter titled "Fascism and Representation." Here is what she says. "Impotence and suffering arising from unmourned loss do not lead to a passion for objectivity and justice. They lead to resentment, hatred, inability to trust, and then, the doubled burden of fear of those negative emotions. This double burden is turned inwards or outwards, but both directions involve denial." What is at issue is a reading of fascism as "the nihilism of disowned emotions."  I wonder. 

I think Rose gets something right in emphasizing a big difference between the book and the movie. "In the film, the loveless upbringing of the servant, confessed by his father on his deathbed, is substituted for his unexplained conviction of having inherited the benign but exacting notion of selfless service from his father in the book." 

But I think Rose also gets something important wrong. She believes there are two competing ideals and definitions. She opposes "dignity as unstinting service to the novel Lord" and "dignity as the liberal, representative notion of citizenship." Darlington Hall, she says, is a "microcosm" of the appeal of fascism, because we see how a servant who is "free in their initial pledge of loyalty... become[s] unfree in their consequent total rescinding of the right to criticize." Now, that is certainly a theme that Stevens takes up, in just about those terms (on p. 200). 

Rose is on the right track that the relationship to the father's ideal is all-important. But I do not think there are two ideals of dignity at stake. There is, on my reading, a way of upholding the ideal to the letter (in the case of the father) which is at the same time the deepest betrayal of the spirit of the ideal (in the son). We find the same theme in its typical Englishness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. This is perhaps too schematic but let's see where it goes. 

The most beautiful image in the novel, I think, concerns the father when he is confronted with his mortality, when he has been humiliated in a moment of human weakness. He retraces the steps where he faltered, and Miss Kenton, observing him, remarks that it appeared "as though he hoped to find some precious jewel he had dropped there." As I see it, the elder Mr. Stevens rightly embodies "dignity" in a sense that is meaningful and real. In the example where he has to serve as the valet to the General responsible for the death of Mr. Stevens's son during a badly managed action in the Boer War ("a most un-British attack" on the civilian population), the elder Mr. Stevens betrays nothing of his repugnance and anger. But those feelings are there. They are kept down in his "professional being." Here is how our Mr. Stevens puts it: a great butler wears his professionalism like a suit, and "he will only discard it when, and only when... he is entirely alone." But there is a discord, a minimal difference, which we would identify with the self. We can glimpse this in the sad painfulness of (secretly, stubbornly) confronting his weakness and decline, his hurt pride "a precious jewel" that cannot be picked back up. 

For our Mr. Stevens there is no inner difference, no discord. There is therefore no spirit, or only a confusion between letter and spirit that is total. At the moment when he has absolutely severed any tie between himself and Miss Kenton, wounding her terribly, telling her that he has "not taken anything [she has] said to heart" at the climactic moment of their (missed) relationship, he considers this to be the apex of his "dignity." The evening is a "triumph": "I had, after all... managed to preserve a 'dignity in keeping with my position' ... in a manner even my father might have been proud of." What he has actually done is commit moral suicide. As he puts it later, what we can only regard as catastrophic errors of judgment and vanity were not even owned or lived as his. "I can't even say I made my own mistakes." This acknowledgment is too little, too late, surely. 

Back to the question at hand. Ishiguro is very clear about the fantasy structure of the servant who does not only want to wait upon the lord but to be mistaken for him, to inhabit his privilege, indeed to usurp him and (in the face of the American owner of Darlington Hall) to be more convinced and faithful to the ideal than the aristocratic class itself. It is the lords who cannot be trusted with lordship. 

So, is that really "fascism"? Could fascism be staved off by a liberalism of fellow feeling? Here the figure of Lord Darlington comes in. He is in his own way a prisoner of his role as much as Mr. Stevens, so we should judge his occasional noblesse oblige (he visits the homes of the poor and suffering at the moment he is closest to actual fascist "blackshirts") as a requirement of his position rather than part of his "true character." Lord Darlington's political mistakes are not, absolutely not, because of something pathological in this individual. There is much that is "good" about Lord Darlington (Stevens is absolutely right about this) but it all turns sour because he also has no distance from his role. He is a fascist because he is a Lord. 

The troubling conclusion one wants to avoid is that fascism could be avoided if someone like Mr. Stevens could just "loosen up." The last page of the novel teases with this idea, which is meant to be totally insufficient. (As if the prescription were just to be more like Mr. Farraday.) But the point about "disowned emotions" is completely elsewhere. The problem is not (only) that Mr. Stevens is too "dignified" to allow the messiness of human feeling to ruffle his exterior. The problem is that denial and coldness and separateness are the basic facts, what come first. We cannot just live out in the open exposure with death and hate and pain. Lord Darlington and Mr. Stevens are not different in this regard from you and me. But something else begins, or could begin, when denials stop working, when "some precious jewel" slips away and cannot be found again. Everything depends on what can be lost. If nothing can be lost, there is not even denial. 

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Why is The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, for all its obvious brilliance and energy, a bad book? One could point to the many irritating and verbose characters, the faulty construction of the plot, the simplistic passions which drive the principle actors, or the numerous overwritten and grandiose pronouncements during which the story vanishes entirely. For all its erudition and detail, the events and people in the novel belong to the heated logic of opera, not to life.

What strikes me as most flawed, however, is the interplay between the story and the historical setting. Using a device he will also employ in his later novel Les Misérables, Hugo has all the different plot strands gather around a popular uprising. The rabble of Paris attempt to storm the cathedral in order to rescue the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda (who has been saved from the gallows by the hunchback Quasimodo, who has claimed sanctuary from temporal justice for her as long as she remains within the church) with cudgels and torches and scythes. And, as in the June Rebellion of 1832 depicted in Les Misérables, this is a failed insurrection: King Louis XI sends mounted troops who easily rout the mob and (skipping ahead through some plot complications) succeed in hanging Esmeralda.

In the words of one of the King’s advisers, “the people’s time has not come.” The problem of the novel is Hugo’s own judgment on this actor, the people, and the looked-for moment when its time will have come. 

Who belongs to “the people”? Among the tramps, we find the philosopher and tragedian Pierre Gringoire, a Bohemian, and Jehan Frollo, the archdeacon’s brother and member of the petite noblessse. These two characters figure disproportionately in the novel, with many pages given over to their tedious jibes, but they play no essential role in the plot—they are like gears that spin but are not connected to any moving part. And then the two most wretched characters in the novel, Quasimodo and the Sack Woman, are also the most isolated, and set themselves up in opposition to the rabble. (Esmeralda, it turns out, is not a gypsy at all!) Readers of Les Misérables will recognize this situation from the barricades in that novel, where the main action consists of a capitalist and former Mayor, Jean Valjean, rescuing Marius, who is the grandson of a Baron. Hugo certainly has a very strange idea of who comprises a popular uprising.

The problem is not an abstract Marxist criterion—that Hugo fails to represent the “true” proletariat and instead stacks the deck against the masses by making them ridiculous and unmotivated, always bursting out when the moment is not ripe—but a deficiency of plot. The appearance of the crowd, so dramatically memorable for readers of these novels, is always an anti-climax. Jean Valjean has no commitment to the cause of the barricades, and if he saves Marius, he also spares Javert. The villain Claude Frollo has the same objective as the Tramps—to rescue Esmeralda—but he accomplishes with a key what they fail to achieve with a battering ram.

It seems to me that Hugo sets up an opportunity to bring the masses and their uprising into play in a way that would draw in the plot and history around it—and then squanders this opportunity. In Book X, Chapter V, King Louis XI observes the tumult at the cathedral with strategic caution, from within his tower at the Bastille. He interprets the uprising at first as an insurrection against the Bailiff of the Palace of Justice—that is, not against his own authority, but against a separate feudal jurisdiction. Hugo details the intricate and overlapping array of powers pertaining to medieval sovereignty:

A city was an assemblage of a thousand fiefdoms, which cut it up into compartments of all forms and dimensions. Therefore, there were a thousand contradictory policies, that is to say, no police at all. In Paris, for instance, independently of the one hundred and forty-one fiefdoms claiming manorial rights, there were twenty-five who claimed the right of administering justice, from the Bishop of Paris, who had five hundred streets, down to the Prior of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, who had four. The sovereign authority of the King was only nominally recognized by all these feudal agents of the law.

 In his reign, Louis XI has initiated “the demolition of the feudal edifice” and “tried to break this web of fiefdoms spread out over Paris,” and so he rejoices in the possible unconscious aid rendered by the crowd at this moment. Perhaps they will raze the Bailiff’s house and hang him, which would be a blow struck for the unification of powers in the monarch. (A similar crisis is dramatized in possibly the greatest film ever made, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.)

What we are seeing here is the genealogy of the absolute monarch, of everything that would be accomplished by Louis XIV at Versailles. This is precisely the problem, because Hugo is required here to make a complex judgment about this historical disposition of forces. Does he side with the rabble (which he has constituted with Bohemians, false Gypsies, goats, and aristocrats), or with the proto-absolutist forces represented above all by the Bastille? 

For a moment, it seems that the people are also involved in “the demolition of the feudal edifice,” i.e. that they are a progressive force, however they may be playing into the King’s own objectives. We might then see the full apparatus of feudal imbrications, allegiances, institutions, and ideologies sucked into the conflict—with all the dramatic possibilities of characters having to choose (social-historical) sides relative to their personal-intellectual insertion in the story. But this is not what happens. Instead, Hugo has Louis XI receive better intelligence from his advisers—it is not the Bailiff which is under attack, but the Church (under his protection) and his Parliament’s decrees. He then can crush the uprising with his cavalry.

In the final account, the fulcrum of the story is not any reckoning of historical actors engaged in a substantial social struggle, but the flaring-up of a thrilling background as a kind of pyrotechnic reflection of a love triangle. This evasion is what Georg Lukács is referring to in The Historical Novel, when he takes Victor Hugo to task for his “decorative subjectivization and moralization of history.” The marshaling of the illiterate, superstitious, destitute, proud, motley, and profane crowd of the medieval city, whether to be aligned with or against the shriveled, cynical cruelty of the feudal monarch—is a calling-to-account which never comes off. The decisions and recognition scenes that populate the final act—Quasimodo turns against Frollo; Esmeralda is not a Gypsy; Phoebus leads the witch hunt to find her; Frollo turns her over to the executioner—are arbitrary flourishes which leave the great conflict (the becoming of the people and their historical mission against tyranny) untouched. As Walter Benjamin remarked long ago, Hugo “had a profound vision of the life that was forming in the womb of nature and in the womb of the people. [He] never succeeded in fashioning a bridge between these two.”

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

In the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the catastrophes which befall the heroes are announced beforehand. In the Agamemnon, Cassandra foretells her slaughter and Agamemnon’s by Clytemnestra, and the subsequent revenge by Orestes. In the Oedipus Rex, both Tiresias and the Delphic Oracle presage the horrible self-discoveries which remain to be made by Oedipus.

This foreknowledge raises questions of responsibility and freedom. If things have to be this way, am I truly free to avoid them? And, if it is not my actions which made it so, then in what sense am I accountable for what happens? For the tragedians, the answer was: the difference one can make is precisely one’s being. Character is fate. There is no escaping pain or the change it makes in us, but we do not only suffer blindly—we make this fate our own.

As Bernard Williams writes in Shame and Necessity, the later Athenians imagined that it was possible “to control the political and practical world by empirical, rational, planning… There is a game against circumstances, but it is one that we might be able to win, because it is stupidly played by the other side.” This, he argues, hopes to trade one kind of constraint (the arbitrary irony of destiny) for another (political power and coercion over other agents). Plato and Aristotle are “on the same side, [both] believing in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations.”

This latter viewpoint is that of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, in which the scientist Hari Seldon is able, by a statistical method called Psychohistory: “that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli,” with the “necessary assumption… that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random.”

In this first volume of the Foundation series, psychohistory predicts the downfall of the Galactic Empire due to its own inertia and excessive size, and the Seldon Plan is a guiding mechanism to ensure that the collapse will be minimally disruptive and that a second Empire (rather than barbaric chaos) will arise in its place. That is, unlike Greek tragedy, Asimov skips quickly over the negative prediction (the downfall) and concentrates on the ameliorative process of the recovery.

Foundation is not really a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, held together by the premise of inevitable and foreknown “Seldon Crises,” in each of which “freedom of action will become… circumscribed so that [one] will be forced along one, and only one, path.” In each crisis, one is “faced by hard necessity, and… action is forced on you. The nature of that action—that is, the solution to your dilemma—is, of course, obvious!” The consoling teleology: “Whatever devious course your future history may take… , the path has been marked out, and that… end is new and greater Empire!”

On occasion, Seldon himself appears in pre-recorded messages to inform the actors of their progress according to his plan, but the purpose of these is inscrutable and probably merely to reinforce the narrative conceit. The Seldon Plan begins with an initial deception to hide the purpose of the Foundation from its operators, but each time he reappears, he remains bound to conceal his foreknowledge and guidance from the blind bearers of his statistical predictions. This means that the Seldon Crises are pre-resolved, they are turning points, but their outcome is not in question.

Here we can see the difference between the tragic foreknowledge of the Greeks. The tragic hero knows, but can do nothing with this knowledge (except suffer regret and an obscure responsibility). Oedipus tries to evade his prophesied outrages, but it is precisely this evasion which ensnares him. In Foundation, we have the much less interesting prospect of acting, without foreknowledge (Seldon cannot tell the Foundation any specifics, since this would throw off the statistical model) but also without consequences (since whatever happens is already guaranteed to work out, ultimately, for the pre-ordained good).

This outlook can be criticized in ethical, ideological, or religious terms (Dostoevsky’s parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” has anticipated and devastated Asimov’s position in advance), but it simply is unsatisfying narratively. The interesting thing is to act without guarantee; time and again Asimov shows us “risky” and dynamic solutions to the political crises that arise. Why then drag out Seldon to assure us that this was not, after all, exciting and courageous, but merely necessary and obvious?

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

In his great study The Historical Novel, Georg Lukács draws a parallel between the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Hegel’s philosophy of history. But he also notes that “Scott had no knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word.” The point is not that Scott was a dummy, but that the Marxist critic has to say the smart, philosophical things for him. Scott could only write these epochal works. We must explain them in ways he would never have been able to write or understand.

The contemporary novelist is different, in that she has foreseen the shopworn theoretical appropriations of her work—even if this appropriation is still allowed to proceed and guarantee a lasting and lucrative place on college syllabi. In an older generation, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and Toni Morrison, and (as Nicholas Dames has argued) among newer writers, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Jennifer Egan, all already know their Hegel (so to speak—their Adorno, their Said, their Derrida). If we critics come onto the scene to explain their works, it is only to trace the steps of a foregone conclusion. Gayatri Spivak’s readings of J.M. Coetzee often feel this way: what can the postcolonial academic critic say that the novelist has not already foreseen and brilliantly “hidden”? (Elizabeth Costello has produced at least one such masterful reading, by the philosopher Cora Diamond.)

Undoubtedly Coetzee has constructed a puzzle for us: Is this what he thinks? Why does he not just come out and say it? The device of the book and its tireless parading of content (in the form of lectures, responses, debates) has encouraged many academic papers about its engagement with philosophy, animal rights, as well as studies of Coetzee’s self-reflexivity and distance.

The book all but dictates this response. For instance, when Elizabeth Costello the character opines that the traditional novel is “an exercise in making the past coherent,” we can take the bait and ask if Elizabeth Costello is a traditional novel? Does it make the past coherent? Is “she” coherent enough as a “person” that we should ascribe this “belief” to “her”? Or, when Elizabeth voices her suspicion of rationalism—“Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand.”—are we supposed to apply this suspicion to our own literary hermeneutics?

But we do not have to play along. Elizabeth Costello does not get to set the terms of its reading, no more than any other book. No one takes Tolstoy’s own reading of War and Peace (the second epilogue) seriously. Dante would not have understood why a reader would read the Inferno without desiring to pass to Paradiso. Sterne’s Tristam Shandy has as complicated a framework of ideas and voices as Dostoevsky or Coetzee, but it is not necessary to read Sterne’s sermons or Locke’s philosophy to get the joke. Coetzee does not get to pick the terrain (“traditional novel,” “coherence,” “belief”) on which we read his book.

*

The topic of the book is inadequacy. (Not, as James Wood thought he detected, death.) The inadequacy of the lover to be the thing desired. The inadequacy of words on a page to stand up and proclaim, this is what I mean! The inadequacy of the performer to the role. The inadequacy (or refusal) of the speaker to comply with the terms of the invitation to speak. The inadequacy of our consciousness to imagine the experiences of other beings. The inadequacy of a conference or lecture to respond to a topic like evil. The inadequacy of our “beliefs” to give an account of ourselves.

And then the response of the character, Elizabeth Costello, to this piling-on of disappointments, frustrations, cross purposes, impossibilities, and impositions.

*

In the first chapter (Coetzee calls them “lessons” but we do not have to), Elizabeth receives a prize from an American college, for which she is expected to give a public address. —She queries her son, an academic, “What exactly do they want from me?”, but none of his practical, immediate answers satisfy her. — “It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail,” she says. —“It doesn’t work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with the show… It’s the only way they have… They want to honour you. It is the best way they can think of doing that.” 

Elizabeth is a withholding mother, an uncharismatic public speaker, a frustrating interview. As a public literary figure, she knows and resents what people want from her; her strategy is to pretend not to understand, so as to throw their presumption back in their faces. “No one in this place wanted to hear about realism,” the subject of her lecture, her son tells her. Still, the son has sex with an attractive academic editor, not because of anything about himself, “but because he is his mother’s son.”

Elizabeth asks aggressive questions for which she already knows the answer. She foists her morbid self-concerns—her age, her impending death, her vanished looks—upon unwilling audiences. She scores “cheap points” hectoring people about meat-eating, by making polarizing comparisons to the Holocaust. At all times she seems bent on making someone else feel bad or uncomfortable or challenged. —“That is the note on which…the proceedings [come] to a close: acrimony, hostility, bitterness… [Her son] is sure that is not what [the prize committee] wanted. Well, they should have asked him before they invited his mother. He could have told them.”

Elizabeth’s sister is a missionary worker in Africa. They disagree about the value of the humanities, about religion, about the prospects of meaning for a human life… but they are interchangeable as hostile, prickly, icy old women. When her son says that he has not had time to ask her about the sudden intensity of her concern for animals, Elizabeth brushes aside the excuse: “A better explanation… is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you.” Her sister concludes a lecture by announcing, “I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you.”

It is a strange thing to keep doing, showing up places and disappointing people, telling them how little you can comply with their expectations or needs. At one point, she delivers a tirade, a judgment of obscenity, against an author who is literally in the audience, proclaiming that “the consequences have arrived,” in the form of her unseemly, unsolicited gripe.

The question of the book, then, is what would you have to think about yourself to justify being such an odious thorn in the side of everyone? And here is where Coetzee’s book is remarkable, because we can enter into Elizabeth’s passions, the way she sees things, her inconveniences and fears and regrets, the indignities that she goes through. Even her confusions: “She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying… On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief.” —When she declares that she is out to save her soul, we can weigh this concern. When she is cornered into saying what she considers the truth, what voices she will speak for, there is unmistakable self-reflexiveness in her answer: “Do you think the guilty do not suffer, too?”

Finally, Elizabeth’s answers, her belief, her agonized, pressurized judgments and self-castigation, are indefensible. I mean, this is not a reading of her character, this is the plot: she is indefensible. Whatever writing, believing, advocating, confessing, challenging, repeating, are supposed to do on their own—they don’t do.

My Struggle (Book 1) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It would be folly to make grand pronouncements about the entirety of My Struggle before having read all six volumes, indeed before the whole work has even appeared in English. One never wants to be in the position of the undergraduate laying claim to the entire edifice of Dante’s Divine Comedy or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, having only just hung his coat up in the entryway. But there is value, I think, in noting how an author “works up” his material and themes—even if we expect that, in a truly inspired work, we are due for a reversal and transformation of these early footholds.

In this spirit, I want to look at only a few quotations from the first book of My Struggle, which I hope will indicate what Knausgaard is up to, and why we should care:

• “There is no one who does not understand their own world.” 
• “I had no history.” 
• “By then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

I could have chosen any number of variations on these sentiments, and a number of additional themes besides: death, family, art and reality, alcoholism, the feeling of being different from other persons, the banal seductions of narcissism, and so on. Alternately, one could speak of the great set-pieces which dominate the novel: a long replay of an adolescent New Year’s Eve, or the preparations for a family member’s funeral. Lastly, there is the remarkable joining of the jagged, non sequitur recollections that Knausgaard is seemingly just toggling through.

There is no plot to speak of, but the assemblage is less random than it feels in the reading. The entire point of the New Year’s Eve episode, it would seem, is that present experience, while one is “in it,” is always looking in the wrong place. From page 56 to 144, Karl Ove (as we will call the central character) has no idea about the oncoming, defining disaster of this epoch of his life, namely his parents’ divorce (page 166). Perhaps this episode will come to attach itself to some other meaning as the book goes on: already there is a horrible irony in the effort Karl Ove goes to hide alcohol from his family...

The main question I have about the narrative at this point is how interested Knausgaard is in motivation. For example, in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust takes great care to outline the mechanisms of desire, jealousy, habit, association, the ambitions and disdains relating to class, the Oedipus complex around the maternal goodnight kiss, hypochondria, and so on. Each of these is an explanation, something we can point to in answering the question why [does a character do such and such]? Balzac, Wagner, Zola, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Racine—the great line of Proust’s forebears—all have their own bank of motivations and drives. We will have to see how Knausgaard stands in this respect, in future volumes.

“There is no one who does not understand their own world.”

In the most obvious sense, this is plainly wrong. At the least, it is what in the philosophy of Hegel functions as a speculative remark: we have to re-learn what terms like “understand,” “own,” and “world” mean. Because one wants to immediately retort: children don’t understand their world. But what we learn is that children don’t have a world of their own, or to the extent that they do, then this cul-de-sac of ignorance and exclusion is well-understood.

Much of Karl Ove’s task is putting things in their right place. This has a few different iterations, some small (which house are we going to call “the house of the bottles,” for instance), but the very large thing to be put into place is his father, and even how his father put things in their place, organizing his life:

I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two. Even though I still still can’t say that I understand him or know what kind of person he was, the fact that I am no seven years older than he was then makes it easier for me to grasp some things... The meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another. 

Over and over in the story, Karl Ove finds that he cannot “read” his father, that he is opaque, that he is transgressing the partitions and categories Karl Ove has built around him, diverging without invitation from an earlier impression. As in Proust’s insistence that no room is a priori habitable, but only acquaintance and immersion silences the clocks, softens the footfall, lowers the ceilings, and so on, “understanding one’s own world” is really a procedure of ignorance and limited perspective, not of cognitive grasping or curiosity:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it… At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. 

In Proust, of course, this procedure primes us for recognition scenes, the coming-upon a well-known quantity in an unknown aspect, or the unexpected union of two “separate” characters (or places) in a disturbing identity. For Knausgaard, however, the point seems to be more a matter of scale and regulation. He wants to keep a distance, to monitor proximity and intensity, as in his curious image of time as a boat in a lock. To understand something is to be at a safe distance.

“I had no history” 

That must be it, I thought, and closed my eyes briefly to rid myself of the feeling that I was an idiot, which this train of thought had produced, since it was so obviously based on an illusion. I had no history, and so I made myself one, much as a Nazi party might in a satellite suburb. 

My Struggle is, obviously, titled after Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When Knausgaard compares himself to the Nazis in the above passage, however, he is not invoking the embattled destiny of a Volk, but rather how deracinated and belated he feels. The Nazis conjured by this analogy and by the book’s title are not trying to resurrect a past, to summon up primal associations, but are almost pathetic. Defeat is something that, hopefully, if you move far enough away from, people will not associate you with, and you can work without that baggage. And so Karl Ove has cut himself off from his past, from his family, striving for equilibrium and the lowering of tension.

It is curious for the writer of an extraordinarily detailed, multi-volume memoir to proclaim that he has no history, and moreover, no interest in his personal past:

I remembered hardly anything form my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. 

Now I had burned all the diaries and notes I’d written, there was barely a trace left of the person I was until I turned twenty-five. 

And while I spent a lot of time thinking about the past then, almost a morbid amount of time… the past is now barely present in my thoughts. 

Again, we have to learn to read “I had no history” as a speculative remark. Karl Ove has a history, a past, a memory, and so on. But wants to not have these things, for memories to no longer stir up anything or intrude. (In this sense it is the opposite of le temps retrouvé. The author of My Struggle would prefer le temps perdu.) When Knausgaard discusses the book as his only way of dealing with the past, the point is not to “exorcise his demons” or some such traumatic-cathartic approach; he is very explicit: writing is about breaking down, in the sense of chewing, making manageable. In writing about his father, Karl Ove stresses that the obstacle was the proximity of the subject; in discussing the art of Rembrandt, it is the “distance between reality and the portrayal of reality... this interlying space”; writing is about “the there itself” of writing, not (as in a traumatic confrontation) “what actions are played out there.” And it is true so far that history, the past, is useless clutter. There is simply nothing to do with it but set to work on it, scrubbing it away.

“But by then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

“On the inside” has two meanings in the novel. One is: to be included, invited, generic, a familiar, part of a crowd; the other meaning is almost the opposite: the smoldering trap of one’s own private self-mistrust, the perspective of falsity and inevitability that keeps one at a distance from the first meaning.

The first meaning is the dullness of a zero-degree of egoism, embodied by the adolescent Karl Ove, which the author Knausgaard is at the furthest distance from. In the past tense: “I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.” But in the present tense: “I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me.”

To be inside is to be “a focal point,” someone to whom “people paid attention.” At the same time, Karl Ove is afflicted by how his speech impediment must sound to others, how he looks, how his opinions sit in the hand.

Being on the inside also turns out to have a secret terror: Karl Ove is worried that if he gets drunk, he will slip into the world of those he detests, “allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference.” This guardedness and analysis prompts a painful self-consciousness: “All spontaneity vanished ... My awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside it.” In this sense, the imagination of the attention of others turns into the scrutiny Karl Ove imposes on himself. He remains socially “outside” because he is always “outside” in sense number two:

As a rule I was always aware of how I looked, of how others might think of what they saw… It had never happened that the eyes that saw me meant nothing at all, or that the surroundings I was in were as if expunged.” 

The other meaning of “inside”/“outside” is the difference between spontaneity, the present, awareness, the unprotectedness of responding and feeling, as compared to retrospection, dissection, judgment, and shame.

I didn’t care anymore. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside. 

There is a nightmarish compulsion built into this second meaning, reminiscent of Saint Paul: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”

How could we have been so stupid? It wasn’t what I had wanted, in fact it was the very last thing I had wanted... Yet that was precisely what I had done. 

It remains to be seen, of course, what Knausgaard is going to do with these questions.

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Dead Ends

Thomas Mann writes about the paradox of Anna Karenina as “the greatest society novel in all literature” which is also “an anti-society novel.” Tolstoy prefaces his novel with the Biblical admonition, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” But Mann wonders where in Tolstoy’s novel the difference can be located between God’s punishment and the fatal constrictions placed on Anna by society: “How far do they coincide in the heart of the socially circumscribed human being?” And indeed the greatness of that novel is the complexity of Tolstoy’s response to Anna’s self-destruction. At no point is she an innocent victim of society; at no point do we not understand and sympathize with her. But this is only to say that Tolstoy is everywhere wrangling with questions of guilt and error. The question of responsibility and error is not absent; it “hovers unanswered over the whole novel.”

Buddenbrooks, another candidate for “greatest society novel” poses similar questions: Do the Buddenbrooks deserve their decline? Does Thomas’s death pay back his unscrupulous dealings with Herr von Maiboom’s estate? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons? Was there some alternate, evasive course of action possible and not taken?

These must be answered in the negative. Mann is not interested in tragic causality, whereby the hero (in Sidney Lumet’s phrase) creates the situation, and the situation strips him down to his essence. In the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy, for instance, every decision is a mistake that reveals the character. His heroes are the sum of their miscalculations, weaknesses, blindness, regrets, and wrong turns. We understand them, but we would (now) do everything differently. Buddenbrooks has no irreversible, fate-sealing moments. In this, it differs from the prototypes of the “decline of a family” genre, Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Theban plays. The disasters awaiting the House of Atreus and the House of Thebes are built, as Cassandra prophesies: “For in the home a dreadful anger waits. It does not forget and cannot be appeased.”

Buddenbrooks, unlike these tragedies, is both forgiving and forgetful. Forgiving, because catastrophic effects don’t threateningly pile up—they dissipate and fade into background. The family’s decline is inexorable, but not crushing and didactic, as in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The Buddenbrooks are not bankrupted or otherwise “ruined” financially or socially. Forgetful, because the disastrous marriage between Tony Buddenbrook and Bendix Grünlich is not a permanent black mark, as it would be in another novel.  “The years slipped by. The traces of what had befallen Consul Buddenbrook’s daughter grew more and more blurred, both in town and in the family.” Contrast with the tragically memorious Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, or Baron Innstetten in Effie Briest, neither of whom have heard of a statue of limitations. Past sins are eternally valid and actionable for these characters. Not so for Buddenbrooks, which is a record of entropy, lapses, and the wearing effects of time.

This is not just a feature of Buddenbrooks’ world and plot, but its form. The novel is episodic, continually skipping forward, foregoing any effect of concatenation and causality. Sometimes it is “just one thing after another.” A contrast might be helpfully drawn here with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The reader of Proust must be especially attentive because, as with a mystery novel, any small detail might come back later. Proust narrates with the eye of the jealous lover. Buddenbrooks is as detailed as you could want, but does not presume much “recall” on the reader’s part. The narrator shares our distracted lapses: “Sometimes we happen to recall someone, think of her, and wonder how she is doing, and suddenly we remember that she is no longer to be found strolling about the streets, that her voice is no longer part of the general chorus, that she has simply vanished from the arena of life and now lies beneath the earth somewhere.”

Nicholas Dames has drawn a distinction between the modernist novel, which we imagine as engaged in “heroic acts of preservation,” and the Victorian novel, in “memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat.” In Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, we find rather “the death of memory,” and recollection operates only by a nostalgia that is useful for the present. The goal is “to eliminate the possibility, in psychological terms, of traumatic fixation, and in narratological terms, of the eruption of desultory, chaotic reminiscences.” Life is then conceived as “no longer burdened by the past, a life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally memorizable.”

Where does Buddenbrooks fit? Here is a passage following Tony’s divorce:

She was soon enjoying her role of ‘innocent woman afflicted by tragedy’; her wardrobe was dark now, her pretty ash-blond hair was parted and neatly drawn back, just as she had worn it in her youth; and, to compensate for her lack of social pleasures, she found inexhaustible joy and great dignity in the gravity and importance of her new situation and provided the household with her views on marriage, Herr Grünlich, and life and destiny in general.

Tony transforms her own bitter failure into a generic type, an identifiable “role.” She begins to dress the part and perform “experience” as an empty set of gestures. This is recollection only insofar as Tony’s alteration is general and socially recognizable. 

She is assiduous about recording the event of her divorce in the family ledger:

She assumed a serious face and approached [her father], saying, ‘You did enter it in the family records, didn’t you, Father? No? Oh, then surely I should. Please, give me the key to the secretary.’ And right beneath the lines that she had entered after her name four years before, she resolutely and proudly wrote: ‘This marriage was dissolved by law in February of 1850.’

Then she laid down her pen and pondered for a moment. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I know very well that all this leaves a blot on our family history. Yes, it does—I have given it a great deal of thought. It’s the same as if there were a splotch of ink on this page. But don’t worry, it’s up to me to see that it is erased. I am still young… One can’t spend one’s whole life being the silly goose I once was. Life sweeps one along with it.’

The legal details that Tony firmly presses onto the page immediately are canceled out as so much illegible ink: she sees her entry not as an archive but as a “blot” or “splotch.” And no sooner has she written it than she is striving to have it “erased.”

From this point on, moreover, Tony began to use a certain phrase frequently: ‘After all, life is like that…’ And at the word ‘life’ she would open her eyes wide in a pretty but serious sort of way to indicate what deep insight she now had into human life and human fate. 

Tony’s “deep insight” is a tautology, mere phrase-making and posturing. And yet has she gone through the same experience and made the same error as Sue Bridehead, Dorothea Brooke, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina. Still, she does it again a hundred pages later, marrying the doltish Herr Permaneder, and this too comes out badly. She marries her daughter Erika off with no better luck. And yet:

She met all these very adult experiences with something like incredulity, and [...] she experienced them with a child’s gravity and a child’s sense of importance and—most of all—a child’s inner powers to overcome them. She did not understand what she had done to deserve her suffering; for, although she sneered at her mother’s great piety, she shared in it, believing that justice is rewarded on this earth.

In short, Tony’s suffering is short-sighted and spiteful. She registers and savors the wrongs done to her, but only as expletives of scorn and slighted pride:  “Babbit!”  “That Möllendorpf woman, or Hagenström, or Semlinger, or whatever, that Julie, that creature!” Even in being brought low by time, Tony is  “unutterably smug.”

Very late in the novel, Tony comforts her nephew Hanno, a frail and artistic child who has been sent to the seashore for health reasons but has returned with no improvement.

It was Aunt Tony who showed the most ready understanding for Hanno’s yearning for the sea, which was like a wound that slowly scabbed over but would begin to sting and bleed again at the least touch of the rigors of everyday life. She obviously enjoyed listening to his descriptions of life in Travemünde and joined in enthusiastically whenever he wistfully sang its praises.

“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the true things in life will always be true, and Travemünde is a beautiful spot. Until they lower me in my grave, I will always have happy memories, you know, of the weeks I spent there one summer when I was just a silly young goose. I lived with a family that I liked so much, and they were fond of me, too, it seemed. I was a pretty young thing back then —I’m allowed to say that now that I’m an old lady... Yes, what a wonderfully exciting time I spent with them. I learned so much there, you see, views and opinions and facts that have stood me in good stead all my life, and if other things had not interfered, all sorts of things that just happened—the way they do in life—I could have profited from it even more, even though I was a silly young goose. Do you want to know how stupid I was back then? I wanted some of those pretty colored stars that jellyfish have inside them. So I wrapped a whole bunch of them in my handkerchief and took them home and laid them out neatly in the sun on the balcony, so they would dry up. That way, I thought, only the stars would be left. Right... and when I went back to look, there was just a big wet spot. And it smelled a little like rotting seaweed.”

This brings us to the figure of Hanno. If  Tony “had never once felt the need to swallow a defeat and overcome it in silence... Nothing left unsaid gnawed at her; no unspoken emotions weighed her down. And so she did not have to carry her past around with her,” Hanno seems designed to feel every prick of the world’s torment with heightened sensitivity and tearful, weak endurance. 

Hanno is the anti-Tony. We can see this in the record he makes in the family ledger. If Tony wants to erase the blot made by her marriages, Hanno draws under his own name “two neat, lovely horizontal lines across the bottom,” explaining to his incredulous father that, “I thought... I thought... there wouldn’t be anything more.”

Any reader of novels will recognize in the passage where Tony consoles Hanno a warning about the “wrong” way to make permanent the blissful moments of life. One cannot preserve the lights of youth by setting starfish out to dry. One has to write a novel! So David Copperfield and Remembrance of Things Past teach us. Hanno is the only possible candidate for this task, being a “tenderhearted dreamer” rather than a practical man of business. Hanno is absorbed by a passion for Wagner and Beethoven, but the greatest passages of the novel are reserved for explaining Hanno’s weakness, how inadequately shielded he is from so many “instances of decline, dissolution, and termination” that slam his family and his own fragile being:

He had once again felt how painful beauty truly is, how it plunged you into shame and yearning despair and at the same time gnawed away at your courage and fitness for daily life. He had felt it as a dreadful, gloomy mountain pressing down on him so heavily that once again he was forced to admit that something more than private grief must be weighing him down, that some burden must have oppressed his soul from the very beginning and would suffocate him one day.

Hanno’s artistic sensitivity is indissociable from the pain he seems destined to bear the full brunt of. This is the cruelest irony. To be an amnesiac like Tony is to be invulnerable to the past, voluble and irrepressibly expressive. Thomas Buddenbrook, his father, is wracked by an awareness that he is only performing his own life, that he is out of step with his time and duties, but his habits, artifice of dignity, and disappointment with others make up a shield against this awareness. Memory is a threat, while to feel is to be swallowed up in a swarm of anguished, cacophonous racket. The music Hanno improvises belongs to “the fanatical cult of nothing... There was also something insatiable and depraved beyond measure in the way it was savored and exploited. It sucked hungrily at its last sweet drops with almost cynical despair, with a deliberate willing of bliss and doom, and it fell away in exhaustion, revulsion, and surfeit.” His improvisation is the closest thing that Buddenbrooks presents to its own recapitulation and appropriation of the past, but it ends in exhaustion, without a witness: the motifs simply wear themselves out.

Readers of The Magic Mountain will recognize here Mann’s “philosophy of disease” [Quotation from his essay on Goethe and Tolstoy]:

Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a willful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is?

“Spirit is disease.” Notice how far we are from the Hegelian idea that spirit is history. Disease is inescapably presentist, while history is burdened with the accumulated wreckage of the past. Although Mann has written one of the great historical novels, in the sense of Buddenbrooks being a period piece, it is a history that sinks, voiceless, into the mire, its lips murmuring as they are dragged beneath the whirlpool.

History in Buddenbrooks is a debâcle, but one that vanishes wordlessly, without any return of the repressed or messianic plea or twilight of the gods. There is no blame or moralizing about how the bad end was avoidable. There is only the underscoring that this was a dead end of history, bequeathing nothing: account closed.

I take the last lines of 100 Years of Solitude to be doing the same thing. There, too, the family and its memory “would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” and their family records and “everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The underground man represents a certain type of freedom. Or at least a kind of revolt. A revolt against reason, which would classify, mathematize, systemize, and reify our nature in the name of instrumental pragmatics. Against these utilitarian classifications, the underground man asserts desire, chaos, destruction, the irrational, perversion, and against teleology, calculation, finality, and egoistic self-interest. In short, freedom and flux against control and partition. 

These philosophical positions will remind us of any number of postures: Existentialism, Deleuzian schizophrenia, and of course, Dostoevksy's original targets for his satire/caricature: the nihilists and radicals of the 1860s. Notes from the Underground is not a set of positions but a performance; not a polemic but a (one-person) dialogue; not a critique of society but an immanent critique (à la Hegel) of the contradictions and unravelling of this subjective position and its fraught, untenable paradoxes.

The "radical" positions of the underground man can be summarized as follows:

• Consciousness is not to be equated with rationality, but with suffering.
• Desire is independent of egoism and utility.
• Consciousness is immobilizing and incompatible with action, in a kind of Zeno's paradox.
• There is no possible, final foundation for certainty and justification.

Now, on their own, these are positions we should take seriously, criticize, etc. But these positions are not on their own. Rather they emerge, seething, from a bilious insecurity. They are determinate positions, moored in the dubious niches of the underground man's screed.

To begin, the "free, unfettered desire... one's own fantasy, sometimes roused to the point of madness" is not at all represented as free, but (in René Girard's) term is always in Dostoevsky a mediated desire. The underground man has no desire that is original to himself: he learns what to want from the others. The entire address of Part One is quivering with a cringing, crouching anticipation of the (imagined) audience's judgments and response:

(That's a poor joke, but I won't cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would be very witty; but now, having realized that I merely wanted to show off disgracefully, I'll make a point of not crossing it out!)

I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements. I knew that they had been swarming inside me my whole life and were begging to be let out; but I would't let them out, I wouldn't, I deliberately wouldn't let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions and--and finally I got fed up with them, oh how fed up! Perhaps it seems to you, gentlemen, that I'm repenting about something, that I'm asking your forgiveness for something? I'm sure that's how it seems to you... But really, I can assure you, I don't care how it seems...

These contradictory elements are, to be sure, masochism / sadism, exhibitionism / isolation, vanity / self-humiliation, etc. But there is no masochism without the other's desire; there is no exhibitionism without the other's gaze; there is no self-humiliation without the super ego's surveillance.

Thus, the revolt of the underground man, his maintaining a "loophole" for himself, an escape route to evade finalization and objectification, is always voiced, petulantly asserted:

Of course, it was I who just invented all these words for you. That, too, comes from the underground. For forty years in a row I've been listening to all your words through a crack. I've invented them myself, since that's all that's occurred to me. It's no wonder that I've learned it all by heart... But can you really be so gullible as to imagine that I'll print all this and give it to you to read?... Confessions such as the one I plan to set forth here aren't published and given to other people to read. 

But what does it mean, this undermining of consciousness by desire and the willful frustration of reason? "Desire is a manifestation of all life," we are told. Consciousness is the analytical awareness of this desire to desire, the registering of the sore, rusty taste of dissatisfaction. Consciousness, further, is the agent of this frustration, when it becomes the obstacle itself (as in the discussion of revenge in Chapter I).

What kind of life is manifested by desire, though? Wouldn't we rather say that the Notes evince an avoidance of life? and life's replacement by an unceasing stream of words? The underground man cuts off everyone entirely, is "terribly afraid of being seen, met, recognized," whose apartment "was my private residence, my shell, my case, where I hid from all humanity." And this paranoid isolation... this is the concept of life that follows from the above philosophy. "I wanted to remain alone in my underground."

To be thrust into life is to not have all the answers. Only in the underground does one have all the answers. In life, there is every chance that one will be drawn into the needs and pleadings of others, their sad stories, and find oneself bound (constrained!) to responsibility. To be thrust into life means any number of situations where there is no possible "last word." But the underground man's entire philosophy means having the last word. This is the point of making a scene.

A word about his much-vaunted freedom. It is a bluff, a filibuster. There is no last, fundamental desire at the bottom of the underground man. There is only the next response, the arbitrary shift to one side. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, "The underground man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own inspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person from life but rather as the subject of...[a] dream."

He says as much himself, if you know where to look. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving to himself constantly that he's a man and not an organ stop!" That is, the point is the proof, the unattainable certainty and guarantee that one is independent, unconfined, not calculable. This is the cruelest paradox (one also found in Crime and Punishment): the whole story of the underground man is to misbehave so badly, to say something so unforgivable, to cut people off so irreparably, that one's isolation will be confirmed and permanent. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving..." means that this very logic of autonomy is subordinated to a quest for finality: to really be left alone forever. But this is just what is intolerable. 

What the underground man wants in this last, undefinable freedom of desire is not freedom or an ontological flux, but to have held something back from the game of otherness. As I wrote elsewhere, "The self-importance of the scandal purports to 'hold back' some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need..." It is really being-something-at-all which is disgusting to the underground man. 

Of course, you can read this on the last page: "We're even oppressed by being men--men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We're ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible 'general-human-beings.'"

Dostoevsky equates this self-disgust with a cynical need for power, the suppression of pity: "For me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority." Finally the underground man blurts out, at the critical juncture of his moral life, "They won't let me... I can't... be good!"

Why? Because to be loved, to be needed, is above all to be weak. The utmost exposure and vulnerability rob us of power. When the prostitute Liza understands that the underground man himself was "unhappy," sees that "it must have been very painful for me to utter all of this," it is this sensitive perception which is unforgivable. The entirety of the Notes is a dodge to make sure that this never happen again.