Cassandra Voices

Tag: culture

  • Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

    In a quiet room, two men smoke hashish and discuss the inevitability of the Apocalypse. All the signs are apparent: unusual weather conditions, social unrest, unendurable suffering caused by poverty and war. Searching for a loophole, they weave theories of increasing complexity, involving Messiahs, the reversing of the Old Laws, and the triumph of the Feminine spirit. After a few more puffs, however, the older man’s ability to speak fails to keep pace with the increasing abstraction of his thoughts. He falls into a reverie, or perhaps merely sleep. Only he can tell which. The other man stays awake, watching his ideas play out in all their baroque intricacy and intensity, until he, too, is overcome by tiredness. The solution to the Apocalypse will have to wait for another day.

    Welcome to eighteenth century Poland, as imagined in Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated novel The Books of Jacob. A work of historical fiction, it straddles genres. On one hand, the book is the fruit of painstaking historical research, with Tokarczuk claiming to have worked seven years on the text. On the other, the novel’s ability to engage relies on the way it imaginatively enters its historical personages lives, and weaves compelling characters, relationships, and plots from the gaps in the historical record. The reader is told this in one clause of the book’s stylishly verbose title:

    The Books of Jacob 

    Or

     A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects.

    Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person.

    That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.

    The novel was originally published in 2014, and has been considered Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, and in November 2021, an English translation by Jennifer Croft was published by Fitzcarraldo. Croft had previously translated another of Tokarczuk’s books, Flights, for which they shared the winning of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

    Olga Tokarczuk in 2019.

    Summary

    The book follows the emergence, peregrinations and eventual dissolution of a religious sect built around a charismatic leader by the name of Jacob Frank. The sect was composed mainly of Jews, mostly Polish in nationality, who broke from the mainstream Jewish community. They believed earnestly that the end was nigh, and Jacob Frank was the Messiah. Frank’s teachings consisted of homely expositions of esoteric Kabbalist theories, involving such things as a Trinity of four parts, and the notion that God created the world without being aware he was doing it.

    Frank led his followers into new territory not just in the world of ideas, but also in respect of their place in European society. As Jews in Poland, they were barred from owning property, taking noble titles, and were perpetually subjected to suspicion and animosity, especially in times of social unrest caused by wars and famines. Frank convinced his followers that it was necessary for them to be baptised as Catholics. A barrowload of theological argumentation was provided to justify this move, and the group maintained many aspects of their culture even after their conversion, including unique clothing, refusal to eat pork, and a preference for marrying within the group. The cynical question can’t be dismissed: to what extent was the sect’s religion a front for a social movement?

    Jewish wedding with klezmer band in a shtetl in Russia, painting by Isaak Asknaziy, 1893.

    Musings on Contemporary Applications

    Many commentators on this novel have noted that it speaks directly to our time, but few have been more specific in saying how. Marcel Theroux’s excellent review for The Guardian, for example, ends without developing the tantalising suggestion that the book, “which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.” In the rest of this article, I would like to step away from the act of reviewing this book, and instead reflect on parallels with our current time.

    I propose three areas of comparison.

    1. The Nation State in Peril
    2. Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment
    3. Cults of Personality
    Administrative division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1789.

    The Nation State in Peril

    The Poland depicted in this novel is not the Poland of today, either in its geographical delineations nor, in many aspects, its culture. But the idea of such a nation stretches back to the eighteenth century.  

    In general those claiming to represent any nation like for its subjects to be obedient, to document themselves clearly for the State’s convenience, and to stay in one place. For these reasons perhaps the Irish state has long struggled to accommodate the Irish Travelling Community.

    This novel could be read as a meditation on the relationship between the nation and that which is ‘foreign’. After all, Jacob Frank’s last name is not a ‘real’ last name at all, but was a generic title applied to foreigners. Thus, Jacob Frank could be translated to ‘Jacob the Foreigner’. The group exists in a strange tension with Poland. Jacob doesn’t speak Polish, but still amasses a following in the country through his physical bearing, his charisma, and the compelling nature of his ideas in translation. Emerging from the Jewish community, and with theological ties to schools of thought widespread in the Middle East, the sect is both native and foreign at the same time. It comes from without, but gathers momentum because it speaks to a dissatisfaction within Polish society.

    Over the course of the book, the group ‘settles’ into a mode of being comfortable for the state. They stop being nomadic, they get baptised into the dominant religion, and they change their Jewish names to Catholic Polish ones. Jacob Frank tells his followers, “Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”(p. 229). Rather than solidifying the order of the nation state, as this action appears to do on the surface, it actually undermines the concept of nation by highlighting the fluidity of such markers of identity as one’s name, place of residence, religion etc.

    By definition, arising from the establishment of settled agriculture, a nation is opposed to nomadic forms of human culture. Nation states also tend to dislike groups with distinct languages or scripts. To be considered a good citizen, you should have one name, spelled one way, using no funny symbols, and you should never dare to change this. 

    The granting of land to the Frankists was not just to the sect’s interest, but was also greatly in that of the State’s. If the group held land, they would stop travelling around the country riling people up and gathering more converts. Moreover, it would be easier to keep an eye on them.

    As a member of a dominant religion, you conformed publicly with the society at large. You had your job, your Polish name, and  attended church. But in your own home, and in your smaller communal meetings, you discussed your true spiritual beliefs and worshipped in your own way.

    The freedom to practice one’s religion privately, without persecution or suppression by the state, is one which was hard won over the large few centuries. But in Jacob’s time, it was a primary issue, connected to what it means to live as an individual on a day to day basis.

    Reading the novel, I found my mind turning to the tension between private and public existence in our time. It seems to me that the division between public and private that may have existed in the eighteenth century is slowly being eroded in our own times. After all, surveillance is no longer something that happens in the street, but has now intruded into every facet of private life. Citizens keep voice-commanded devices in their bedrooms, their kitchens. We each carry around devices with camera that face both outwards to the world, and back at our faces, with microphones that record the words we speak. Our phones, without which modern life is difficult to manage (how will you get a job, stay in contact with friends, pay for your visits to the cafe?), have become an instrument of power that destroys the fragile barrier between public and private life. Without this barrier, will the possibility of quietly practicing non-dominant ways of life (religion, community, culture) be permitted for long? 

    In Catholic Poland of the eighteenth century, the Church and the state were intertwined. In Neoliberal Ireland of the twenty first century, the state is intwined with the interest of corporations.

    But the corporations have an edge. It is to companies like Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Google and Amazon that the vast majority of surveillance capitalism belongs, not the state. Google knows where I go on a day to day basis, what I buy, what music I listen to and what blogs I read, much more intimately than the state does. What does it mean for a non-elected body to have such power in a nation? Is it comparable to the power the Church had over the kingdoms of Medieval Europe? If Google ordered it, would Ireland join a Crusade?

    Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926), the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

    Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment

    It was reasonable for Europeans to feel apocalyptic two hundred years ago. There was terrible wealth disparity, with peasants and kings living side by side, social unrest, culminating in the French Revolution and a succession of natural disasters, like the Lisbon earthquake.

    It is fair to say that there is similar apocalyptic sentiment around today. Although the average standard of living is higher now than the average eighteenth century Polish peasant, the extent of wealth inequality has become absurd. In a globalised society sweat shop workers produce iPhones for the satisfaction of wealthy consumers who fantasise about building mansions on Mars, while the planet shudders under the weight of our cumulative impact.

    Natural disasters will always happen, but it is interesting to note our increasingly panicked reactions. Words like hellish and apocalyptic are bandied about when we see forests burn, amidst an increasingly sense that we are to blame. If we contrast this with an event like the Lisbon Earthquake, the reaction it evoked for many was to question the Divine plan. How could God allow such awful things to happen to Europeans?

    The Frankists believed that in the end times, the Messiah would come, and when this happened, all the old laws would be reversed and thrown away. It was this logic that allowed Frank’s followers to change their Jewish names, ignore all the rules for living laid out in the Talmud, and experiment with bizarre new (or, perhaps, archaic) modes of sexual behaviour. What changes in our culture will we see when a large enough percentage of the population truly accepts the possibility of apocalypse?

    North Korean poster featuring Kim Il-Sung.

    Cults of Personality

    Jacob is not the most intelligent character in this book. At the same time, he often downplayed his intelligence, calling himself a ‘simpleton’. The intellectual backbone of the Frankists were a group of older characters, deeply versed in Jewish scripture and Kabbalah. In their nightly discussions, they would provide the raw material to Jacob, who would then draw from this wisdom in his actions and speeches to the rest of the followers. 

    What Jacob had was charisma, above all else. He was like a magnet, drawing people to him through an invisible force. Without Jacob, the group had no coherent identity: a group of Jews who had forsaken their birth names, the teachings of the Talmud, and their homelands. The teachings of the group, too, had no unity apart from Jacob. It was, in effect, a cult of personality.

    There is an interesting passage near the end of the novel. In this scene, the stories of Jacob’s life are being recorded. Being old, and the revered head of a movement, the stories have become increasingly mythic in nature. But what strikes one observer is that the story of the Frankists as a group, and the story of Jacob’s individual life are intertwined.

    …the Lord tells his tales, and he and Jakubowski write them down, until out of these stories Jacob’s life starts to emerge – a life that is simultaneously the life of this ‘us’. (p. 86)

    Normally, we think of individualism and group-based living as being diametrically opposed. But here, they’re interdependent. But what does it mean for an individual to represent a group?

    People are always more persuasive than ideas. And it’s interesting how a charismatic personality can stimulate interest in esoteric ideas among people who would never have dreamed of engaging with such ideas otherwise. Just look at how many young men are now reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and Dostoyevsky because of the viral popularity of Jordan Peterson. Or how many hipsters are reading Hegel because they like Zizek.

    This is not to be critical of reading Jung or Hegel, or to mock people for reading outside their comfort zone, but it is  notable that they mostly read Jung in the context of Jordan Peterson, or Hegel in reference to Slavoj Zizek. And these personalised forays into philosophy or psychology come with ideological baggage. 

    Slavoj Žižek, ©Basso CANNARSA Opale/Alamy Stock Photo

    A Peterson fan is likely to read Jung to find proof of the mystical solidity of the division between the Masculine and Feminine spirit, or the impenetrable irrefutability of biological determinism. A fan of Zizek will read Hegel, and, in all likelihood, understand very little, but will at least be more impressed and willing to listen to Zizek the next time they hear him speak, because clearly he understands things they do not…

    All this reference to authority has something medieval about it. In the Middle Ages, it was enough to say that Aquinas wrote something to take it for granted that it was true. There was a finite list of ‘authorities’ that you could quote with impunity. And it was considered appropriate to defer to such authorities than try to prove the truth of something by original argumentation.

    The scientific method broke with this, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. No, it said, we can’t take any ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’ truth for granted. We can’t hold anything true on the grounds of ‘authority’, because we no longer trust these powerful institutions like the Church and the State to tell us what is true and what isn’t. Let’s give power to the people! 

    A philosopher like Habermas would argue that this striving for objectivity, atomised and isolated from the rest of human knowledge, is fruitless. Truth arises as part of a conversation.

    In our own times, with information so freely available, but also requiring some conscious effort to sort the chaff from the grain, there has been an explosion of cults of personality. With its ability to present the human face in motion and voice in high definition, the internet, more so than even the radio (which had such a devastating role in boosting dictators in the twentieth century), allows for the easy transmission of charismatic personalities. 

    You could argue that this is the bookish side of the larger celebrity culture, but it’s worth paying attention to this phenomenon when you consider the extent to which popular discourse is driven by these popular thinkers, such as:

    •  Jordan Peterson
    • Slavoj Zizek
    • Sam Harris
    • Ben Shapiro
    • Christopher Hitchens

    Note: Having a cult of personality isn’t necessarily a damning judgment on the individual in question. It just seems to be the way the internet works at present.

    Note 2: Isn’t it interesting that all these people are male?

    Jordan Peterson. Image by Gage Skidmore.

    Many of these popular thinkers are not true intellectuals. They often speak in vague statements. They contradict themselves etc. But this may be part of the charm. In The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk describes the effect Jacob has on crowds:

    …he makes quite the ruckus, with his strange gestures and the odd things that come out of his mouth. He speaks so enigmatically that it’s hard to figure out what he means. That’s why people stay together for a long time after he leaves, trying to interpret for themselves and one another the words of this Frank, this foreigner. What did he say? In some sense, each can only understand it all as best as he can, in his own way. (pp. 639-638)

    This doesn’t sound dissimilar from the comments section on a Jordan Peterson lecture.

    These figures mostly appeal on the level of personality. Their fans don’t care if they are not the most intellectually sophisticated thinker in the academy. They’re engaged more on the level of watching somebody they like and admire, such as a friend, grapple with issues that they feel effect them. And of course, this being a cult of personality, they identify with these figures. Ben Shapiro is a knight, a hero, valiantly slaying the libs for ‘our’ sake. These figures gain support and popularity by virtue of being ‘on our side’. Even if they don’t identify with the group, they can win support by scoring argumentative points against one of the group’s enemies. Thus, Jordan Peterson was admired by many neofascists, despite his denouncement of that viewpoint, because he criticised the culture of ‘wokeness’ on so many occasions. 

    Perhaps these popular figures are tapping into the archetype of the prophet? A figure who speaks enigmatically but urgently, calling for us to change our ways before it’s too late. In a neoliberal system that seems impervious to innovation unless it is in order to exploit the planet and human beings more brutally; it’s thus understandable that there’s a thirst for a powerful voice of urgency among young people. This is what the movie Don’t Look Up primarily conveys: a sense of powerlessness, of not being heard when the apocalypse is so painstakingly obvious.

    Lay It to Rest, Lad

    In a room bothered by the noise of traffic, two men quietly smoke hashish. They speak of the imminent apocalypse. All the signs are there: natural disasters, odd weather conditions, vast wealth inequality, the strong preying on the weak. They weave intricate theories, drawing from the half-baked ideas of internet grifters. The sun sets, but the light of the screens stay on. Sleep will not come soon.

    Featured Image: Hendrick ter Brugghen, Esau Selling His Birthright, c. 1627.

  • A Fairy Tale of Dún Laoghaire 2

    I knew the game was up when my mother told me that Santy had given her a list. I had heard about his many imitators and knew they were just benign North Pole ambassadors who lacked his Arctic magic.

    I met one of them once in Lee’s on the main street of Dun Laoghaire, in a family sized camper tent with a strip of silver tinsel stretched around the entrance. His cotton wool beard dangling on an ear-itching elastic band as his nicotine coloured fingers rummaged in a plastic laundry basket that was loaded with presents. There were two baskets, one dark blue for boys and one pale blue for girls.

    He sounded just like the driver of the 7A bus who brought me home from school every day. “Ah, son have ye been a good lad?” It was like First Confession all over again except with different costumes and just like my first time in the confession box armed with a few well-rehearsed sins, I told him that apart from puncturing my neighbour’s bike I had been a good boy. He coughed and scratched the stubble under his beard. “Ah, you’re a decent lad, a fine fella….” He was a little unsteady in the deck chair where he was sitting and I was afraid he might fall over and injure himself. That wouldn’t do, not with it so close to Christmas; there was lot of work to be done yet. That’s how Santy was in Lee’s. Or was he one of the ambassadors? I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he seemed very anxious to leave George’s St as soon as he could and get back to The North Pole. This was the busiest time of year and every hour spent here in Lee’s was time lost from directing operations in his snow drifted toy factory, far from Dun Laoghaire. All of that cold and blizzard white frightened me, I imagined the North Pole as a television screen of swirling frozen static, with no button anywhere that could ever switch it off.

    Why had he ended out living in such a desolate place? Something eerie hovered around Santy. Who was he really? Had he done some terrible thing? He spent his life making toys in the world’s most inhospitable place. Was he trying to say sorry for something? And who were the elves? The only dwarf I’d ever seen for real was the one who sold newspapers outside Glasthule church on Sundays. He frightened me; I’d take my mother’s hand and cling to it like a gold ringed shield as we walked inside. My mind chalked up questions. How had a team of news-paper-men ended out working with Santy? How had they met?

    Then one night, a few days before Christmas, a dream came to me that put me right about so many things. There were seven other dwarfs I’d heard of before; the ones who lived with Snow White. I always liked that story but felt it ended very unfairly for them, with all their joy taken away from them by a tall Prince on horse. Each time I read it, I hoped that she would stay with them, that she would explain to the Prince that he’d have to find another story but she always rode off with him, leaving them behind, unhappily ever after.

    In the warm cinemascope of my pillow, I saw the seven of them trekking towards the world’s darkest corners and everywhere they went they wept for losing her and cursed themselves for being short.  Their tears froze when they fell to the ground. Everywhere they went to forget their sadness; they’d leave behind acres of ice and snow, a dark white continent of loss that spread out behind them like a cape that would never be big enough to conceal their seven tiny broken hearts.  And that was how I learnt that The North Pole had come to be.

    Trailing far behind them I saw a man, who looked like a drawing from a story book, swaying in the cold and losing his balance on huge grey mirrors of ice. He was weeping too and cursing what he had done years before. He had let go of a rope that dangled deep down into a well. Children used to speed up and down the well, like a thrill ride, collecting pebbles down below but one day he, the village well man, had let go of the rope, his trembling hands not sure of themselves and two children were drowned. I learnt at age eight that the saddest people wander the furthest.

    And so the world’s saddest tall person and the shortest tearful seven met each other and started on this strange enterprise together. Santy was forever lamenting what he’d done and the dwarves learned to forget just a little, the young woman who’d once danced through their days, as they helped him build his toys in the cold.

    I was always relieved when a dream put me at ease and whispered some new part of an old truth to me. I’d add it to the old truth and for a moment my mind would ring clear as bell with fresh understanding. It was as if I saw further and more clearly how things really were. I kept these truths, the old and the new, like nuggets, deep in my story pockets, to help me along my way.

    When I was leaving the tent in Lee’s he handed me a package from one of the baskets. I pointed at him and asked him, “Santy, did you really once work at a well? I know how The North Pole was born.”

    “Am I well? Sure, Santy is always well, off with ye now”

    My mother pulled impatiently at the hood of my duffel coat.

    “Ah, what are you saying to the man, Billy…?”

    She had said it, “The Man.”

    So he was not Santy, he was “a man”

    I knew that Santy wept most days for what he had done.

    I tore my package open and saw that he had mistaken me for a girl; a string of plastic pearls, a tiny mirror and a comb.

    I went home, put on my necklace and waited for the real Father Sadness to come.

    Feature Image: O’Connell Street, Dublin, Christmas Tree, Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, Santa Claus, Dublin Photographic Archive, 1988.

  • The Empty Unconscious

    Banality is the byword of mass consumerism

    There’s a piece of public art that for a year or more languished on the edges of Union Square in Manhattan, before moving to a more innocuous location in Midtown.

    It’s a piece of bronze and laser cut steel in the form of a thick-waisted businessman, peering up into the sky. The statue, by Jim Rennert, is called, “Think Big.” This rotund figure struck me as a bizarre but predictable contrast with Union Square itself, site of labor protests, political demonstrations, and various working class events over the past century and a half.

    Then, on its cusp, a fattened, besuited, becalmed, moronic middle-manager stands, gazing into the clouds wonderingly. The figure itself looks like the Everyman of modern capital, depicted in the altruistic framing of business propaganda: a harmless, innocent, well-intentioned, exceedingly milquetoast middle-aged man of the people who does his earnest best to help his genteel corporation make a tidy profit, and drawing his modest share of the revenues to support his family. What could be wrong with that?

    Aside from the stomach-churning inanity of it, the statue has elided every conceivable aspect of its form that might imply or evince the raging class war between workers and suit-wearing corporate servants, themselves alighted like parasites on the broad husk of the Big Capital. A class war that is blood-soaked and pitiless.

    Yet our statue goes to great lengths to present the antithesis: the anodyne complacency of the humming mid-century office space, a hive of drones doing their daily duty. It is truly nondenominational, reflecting the most catholic of images, the most generic.

    “Think Big is a sculpture that serves to inspire everyone who works hard every day to achieve their dreams and goals. The towering businessman gazes upward at the Manhattan skyline, contemplating the possibilities that lay within his vast surroundings and reminding us that if we “think big” any dream is attainable.” – jimrennert.com

    Ersatz Replica

    Philosopher and aphorist E.M. Cioran once wrote that, “Existing is plagiarism.” If to be is to simply be an ersatz replica of the palatable, then why exist, either as individual, artist, or work of ‘art’? Nobody has asked Rennert.

    The statue, the name of which is like much modern advertising – quite clearly it is the first name that entered the brain of the artist (or advertiser, as the case may be). Thinking big, as it were, entails thinking big on behalf of the corporation for which you work; the ideas are not truly your own; the mission of the business is not your mission (unless you internalize it); and the life trajectory, even, is one set by the whim of the corporate market to which you sell your labor.

    Rather differently, the labor strikes and protests that once occurred in this space, were fuelled by men and women fighting to have all of the things elided by the statue, shaved away by the sculptor’s judicious hand: your own mission; your own ideas; your own life and career trajectory. Thus, Herbert Marcuse wrote: ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties, but work in alienation.’

    How well the Think Big man resembles this perception: a drone, like others in appearance and wardrobe and function, alienated from his own desires, subordinated to those of a faceless overlord of industry. As a representation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), it is equally apt, as that class sits as a bourgeois buffer between elitism and populism, between a secular aristocracy and the abject proletariat, both classes growing exponentially so that the metaphorical abyss widens in two senses: vertically and horizontally.

    This bourgeois buffer provides an aesthetic disguise for the dirty business of capitalism. They are not the sweat-drenched coltan miners in the Congo, but the svelte marketers who ply the ether with iPhone ads. His hard edges have been sanded down; he is perfectly polished, nonthreatening, inoffensively bland.

    Eugene V. Debs five times candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.

    Virtue Hoarders

    In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu historicizes this class. As the Socialist Left in America was progressively destroyed by the public relations efforts of big business, the haute bourgeoisie sided with capital. She writes:

    When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.

    She describes them as ‘salaried mental workers,’ including doctors, lawyers, advertising managers, IT professionals, and bank managers who reproduce the status quo, having abandoned political radicalism in favor of cultural wars and careerism.

    This is the buffer class, idealized in the sanitized vision of Think Big. Yet Think Big betrays the idea of simple reproduction, revealing the compulsion of neoliberalism to shave cost to stave a falling rate of profit. As Liu puts it:

    In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.

    Image: © Constantino Idini.

    Delirium

    E.M. Cioran says Western societies are beholden to – fatally obsessed with – technology, innovation, and the drive of capitalism for rapid obsoletion, and the process of ceaseless enhancement and replacement. He says they are in a state of ‘delirium,’ but adds (in Drawn and Quartered) that this kind of breathless preoccupation with novelty is itself relatively new in history:

    Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilizations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West.

    Given that societies are anchored in historical circumstance, they are subject to the same iron law of all civilizations, that they will eventually ‘sag and settle’ as the initial dynamism dies. How much more likely in a society built on an idée fixe, a fetishistic mania.

    And yet – small consolation for those whose lives are on a far faster downward trajectory than civilization itself.

    Hence the siren call of rebellion will continue to outline itself precisely against this insipid, pulseless figure paradoxically anchored at the center of a monomaniacal society. A society the signature of which is the fixity of its preoccupation with profit – and the consumption that enables it.

    U.S. President Donald Trump displays the signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on May 11, 2017.

    The American Dream and Authenticity

    This cultural underbelly outlined above is eviscerated not just by the corporate art we are confronted with, but by the modern narrative of the American Dream™ ; this statue is just a recent embodiment of it.

    Anyone, color and creed aside, through their efforts and ingenuity, can do or be anything they wish to be. No material circumstances obtain in their pursuit of happiness. Class is a byword of another era, trampled underfoot by the ascent of free-market capitalism, which brooks no discriminatory practice in its market-rendered even-playing field.

    As any sentient being can observe, this is a historical fiction, a deceit reproduced daily through the channels of mass media and its advertising, entertainment, and news content, all of which is owned and operated by elite capital and managed by its flyblown class of sycophants.

    Essayist and playwright John Steppling gets at much the same thing in his book Aesthetic Resistance And Dis-Interest (2016). He writes, in the context of the dissolution of art as an anchor of culture, of the loss of art’s radical conscience in favor of corporate cliche.

    Steppling would despise the ‘Think Big’ statue. Its banality is that of a Jeff Koons work, the more celebrated the less memorable. He argues that mass electronic screen culture has destroyed something critical in the collective consciousness, namely the space for authentic art.

    He also notes that art is radical insofar as it refuses to adopt particular meanings, just as space is forever unyoked to purpose, yet radically ratifies none, and is the necessary background to all purpose.

    He quotes Robert Kullot-Kentor, biographer of Theodor Adorno, ‘Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society…’ As Steppling later adds, ‘It’s purposelessness is its radical expression.’

    And again: ‘Art is self destructive. It is guided by impulses that are anti-social, but only insofar as they question the status quo, because the status quo cannot survive history or memory.’

    What artists like Rennet and Koons produce is effortlessly mainstream; it doesn’t challenge the status quo but rather reifies it. It is therefore not art. There is no question posed by the skygazing statue, no threat emerges. It is the reproduction of the placid mind of endless consumption, of ceaseless salesmanship, the mind of the individual cog in a system that it neither sees nor questions. Deification of the quotidian.

    Steppling says the clue to the decay of society is the sense that culture is themed by ‘the inauthentic and counterfeit.’

    That sensibility, that sinking feeling, for me, is most evident in the hypocrisy of modern advertising. Ads relentlessly tell us they are making commodities to make our lives better – that is their mission and purpose. Yet that is a half-truth at best, a full-blown deceit on a bad day.

    Products are produced for profit, first and foremost. They are made to solve the sometimes real but largely artificial needs of consumers only insofar as they must. The initial aim of the product line is the MVP, or Minimally Viable Product.

    This is the industry jargon for a commodity that meets the minimum threshold for sale-ability. Beyond that – innovations that improve the product – are seen as incurred costs, unnecessary but sometimes preferable if the cost-benefit analysis predicts higher profits with higher quality. This corrosive smile that fronts modern culture is the clue to the erosion of meaning but also somehow echoes the voice of the Cassandra exposing its desiccated spirit, having submitted itself to the hegemonic ideal, represented by the bland everyman that serves none but the needs of blind profit.

    Mass Infantilism

    Alongside the denuded character of the Think Big skygazer – alongside the erasure of individuality, i.e., authenticity, in its homogeneity – is its infantile sensibility; yes, the only quality it truly has.

    Its puffy childlike hands loose at its side; its rounded babyface; its gaze more wondrous than critical. Steppling says the infantile is a product of capitalist culture.

    To paraphrase: the Oedipal narrative of the child overcoming his father as a path to self-actualization is denied by modern neoliberal society.

    Neoliberalism denies meaningful work in a race to the bottom rungs of servitude. It denies meaningful leisure as labor is stripped evermore of its rightful surplus, no small measure of that margin being lost time. And it ultimately leaves in its infectious wake a featureless figure, bereft of purpose and means, a man unable to exceed or even succeed the father.

    In such a state, the man opts for a permanent infantilism. Hence our recidivist culture that seems to drag us back, back, back toward childhood, finally into the warmth of the womb, the original safe space, protected by ignorance just as ignorance is unconscious bliss.

    Benjamin Barber was an earlier prophet of our devolution. His seminal work Consumed detailed the ways in which commodity culture manufactures artificial needs beyond the realm of actual needs, an entirely predictable eventuality given the desperation of capital to continuously expand the marketplace of consumption.

    Industry compels consumers to confuse needs with wants and then promises happiness through the instant gratification of that wanting. As one reviewer astutely noted, Barber, ‘…ably identified many of the contributing factors, not the least of which are our collective cultural boredom and our naive but doomed expectations of fulfillment via uncontrolled acquisition.’

    The consequence of unlimited choice and acquisition is an infantile impatience with what one has as one is perpetually enthralled by novelty, the tradition-destroying feature Cioran lamented.

    We see this trend everywhere. Often in Hollywood, which has found a stupendous revenue stream in the marketing of superhero comics to adults. Once, Superman was a movie for kids; now it is a movie for adults who have yet to put away childish things. Which is all of us.

    As Steppling notes, the superhero story is the dream of childish omnipotence, a kind of puerile fantasy that adults once shed by the time they exited their teens. Now the happy myth persists well into adulthood. Its Manichean quality is a mirror of the imperial narratives of the state: one side is all good and the other all bad.

    This reductive dichotomy is the cornerstone of modern consumer narratives, whether in entertainment or news, and has been instantiated in the programming strategies of major media entities.

    Another feature of the infantile is what Stuart Jeffries alludes to in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his biography of the Frankfurt School. Namely, the infantile nature of modern man as his culture radicalizes identity politics by the insistence that its demands be instantaneously gratified, less an urgency than an hysteria. What more emblematic aspect of childhood than the baby that screams when denied what it wants?

    But we see it in advertising, especially, and in general marketing. What does a professional basketball franchise ask its roster of players when interviewing them for promotion? [Giggling] What would your superpower be (if you could have a superpower)? As game show music plays in the background.

    Likewise in broadcast advertising. A bank commercial shows a middle-aged father dancing around in a virtual reality headset while his more mature daughter plays on her mobile. Faces of consumers are increasingly banal in disposition, blank gazes, wide innocent eyes, awaiting information from the sales shill embedded in the commercial, the messiah of commerce. In the idealized playground of consumerism, modern man is a tabula rasa at 35, eyes awaiting the advent of the next shiny distraction.

    If the endless spectacle of mathematically correct diversity casting is defended as reflecting the social ideal, and hence instructive, what is the repetition of the unsophisticated and simpleminded consumer in ads but an admonition?

    Steppling interestingly notes that the infant mindset in adults feels incomplete, perhaps through its Oedipal failure to assert its worth and power. As such it must deny many facets of reality that might undermine its fragile psyche.

    It must turn away from the wars raging, the coming barbarities narrated by arbiters of power, the afterthought that is endemic poverty and illness. We must turn to safer, more simplistic answers and the narratives that attempt to legitimate them; the ones espoused by the cult of decrepit professional liberalism, window-dresser of society’s distemper, pollyanna in purgatory, to whom we light a votive every day at dusk.

    What Lies Beneath: Sometimes Nothing

    As an art theorist, Steppling notes a simple dichotomy in art that applies more broadly: good art, or art, shows an artificial reality and then shows the actuality beneath it; bad art, or non art, just show the artificial reality. In this sense, most broadcast advertising is bad art, or non art. It normalizes artificiality, the uncritical acceptance of every sales pitch, taking the pitch at face value.

    This is reflected in bourgeoisie art criticism, which seems to again and again strip art of its system critique and either reinterpret it as a celebration of industry or a critique of individual foibles within a benign landscape of earnest employee/consumers.

    Hence the narrative of history is penned not by the victors but by their dutiful scribes, the professional parasitic class who earn their livelihood through sycophancy and servitude. In service to the status quo.

    Fold your hands behind your back and think big—on their behalf. Your passage through will be as frictionless as first class air travel. But say bon voyage to your dreams. This is inimical to the artist. Because art undermines. Art challenges. Art unsettles. There is no safe space in art. No diversity calculus. No appeasement of the herd.

    We are thus left with a modern culture which no longer understands the term ‘sell-out’, which sees brand partnerships as a path to social uplift, not recognizing the inherent contradiction of allying with the perpetrator of inequity in order to rectify inequity. The irony is lost on us because there is no irony. The artificial is all. Irony would require a second perspective. In the marketplace of consensus, no second opinions exist.

    Feature Image: © Constantino Idini

    Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital media industry. He has published in a variety of progressive publications including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and The Hampton Institute.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net

  • Review: Richard Kearney’s Touch

    Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press.

    The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we are told, asks how we are to reconcile the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity. Unfortunately, however, it contributes little towards answering these questions, spending most of its few pages mulling over the history of philosophy and Western medicine; lingering around the goalposts without registering a direct hit.

    This is disappointing because Kearney has his finger on the pulse of a real undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our mainstream cultural model. Many of us believe that something has gone wrong, so we turn to our writers, artists and public intellectuals to identify the root cause. Is capitalism to blame? The invention of print? The discovery of fire?

    Kearney considers a neglect of touch as a key feature of our cultural predicament. It all began with the Greeks – he suggests – exemplified by Plato’s valorisation of the spiritually pure sense of sight over our beastly sense of touch. Now, we see the unhappy conclusion of such an idea; a culture founded around the image, where life is increasingly lived virtually at the expense of our physical existences.

    This mass sense of disembodiment, caused by engagement with digital technology, Kearney calls excarnation, a term loaded with esoteric theological significance. This aspect to our culture was brought into stark relief during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Thus, most workers and students began working virtually from their own home, as nationwide quarantines were enforced, and social distancing was put in place in supermarkets, restaurants, and other public places. We realised that this was, in a way, the logical next step to the virtualisation of education and work. We just needed one catastrophe to put it in place.

    Worthy Premise

    ‘A civilization that loses touch with flesh’, writes Kearney, ‘loses touch with itself.’ (p. 47). This is a worthy premise to a book, and from this beginning, one can imagine an author moving towards a rich discussion of the effects of ‘excarnation’ on such matters as sex, violence, sport, the prevalence of body dysmorphia, self-harm etc. in our contemporary culture.

    The topic of ‘touch’ is indeed broad, but contemporary writers and cultural critics have gained good mileage with similarly broad topics in the past. An example is Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty (2011), which takes the broad theme of cruelty as a foundation to a wide-ranging discussion on everything from avant-garde performance art, to the tropes of advertising, to the coverage of U.S. war crimes during the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    This book, however, fails to deliver on its ambitious premise. Instead of diving into an analysis of contemporary culture, it stalls before it starts with two lengthy chapters introducing a glossary of terms, distinctions and concepts that are seldom used later in the book.

    Kearney meanders through etymologies and distinctions, drawing neat moral messages from vague, linguistically questionable associations. The root cause of this may be the unnecessary broadening of an already vague theme. Thus, he writes:

    As I hope I clear by now, when we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses … we are talking about touch in a more inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. (pp.15-16)

    This is a little too sweet to swallow. Even if we accept the Heideggerian mysticality of this passage, it’s obvious that Kearney is widening his subject matter out of manageable proportion.

    Indeed, he draws strongly on Heidegger in his concern with words and their hidden meanings. At times, this can be surprising and intriguing, but at other times, the connections seem banal. He argues:

    But tact is not the same as contact. Being tactful with someone does not always imply immediate physical proximity. One can be tactful, for instance, by practicing discretion in particular circumstances, as one negotiates the right space between oneself and others. (p. 10)

    Handshake

    A baby-steps approach would be justifiable on philosophical grounds if Kearney wasn’t taking flights of fancy elsewhere. At one point, he speaks of the handshake as being the ‘origin of community’(p. 42) without adequately explaining how.

    Indeed, in many cultures bowing or other non-contact gestures are the norm. We turn to the endnotes to find an essay that ‘analyses the first wager of hand-to-hand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre.’ These literary scenes are certainly interesting, and may indeed point to episodes passed down through folk memory, but to suggest that they represent a historically verifiable moment in human history is unsatisfactory.

    The first chapter is structured around the questionably useful coining of new terms to describe sight, taste, smell and sound being used ‘tactfully’. ‘A person with tactful taste is savvy.’(p. 17), Kearney writes, a person with a good nose has ‘flair’(p. 21), and so on. But when we talk about the ‘tactfulness’ of touch we don’t really mean the sense of touch; remember we mean the metaphorical way of being in the world that touch acts as an analogy for.

    It’s odd to focus on the specifics of each sense when we’ve already established that we aren’t taking the theme of touch literally. In any case, is it still believed that there are only five senses? Isn’t it the case that there are many others beyond those traditional five?

    At this point in my reading, the unanswered questions become overwhelming, and I decided to stop thinking too hard about them. Instead, I focused on the texture of Kearney’s style, clearly influenced by Continental Philosophy. There is a lot of jargon, which is at times hard to follow. On the flipside, it is quite playful, making use of a number of touch-based puns and idioms. There is also a tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, and using words poetically. The following sentences give a flavour:

    Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensationalism: sense without sensitivity, perception without empathy, stimulation without responsibility. (p. 16)

    Savvy is a carnal know-how. (p. 18)

    For if ontogeny repeats phylogeny, it also repeats cosmogony. (p. 20)

    Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what resounds. (p. 27)

    In response to this, however, I am moved to quote Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’

    Visual Culture

    It is popularly acknowledged that we live in a ’visual culture’, and Kearney sees this ‘optocentrism’ as the source of our woes. In his own words, ‘Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact. Cyber connection and human isolation go hand in glove.(p. 5)’

    But Kearney never specifies exactly what a visual culture is, or what it means to live in one. What does the shortening of our attention spans, our growing inability to read longer texts, or the increasing popularity of podcasts and audiobooks actually mean in a ‘visual culture’? Do these elements suggest a deterioration in our visual faculties? Kearney doesn’t linger on these questions. In his eagerness to champion touch, he fails to determine exactly what it is he is fighting against.

    The second chapter of Touch is even murkier than the first. Kearney embarks on a historical tour of different philosophical considerations of touch, but only discusses two philosophers at any length: Aristotle, and Edmund Husserl. This leaves a gap of some two thousand years in between. Was there nothing to say about the Christian philosophers and touch, or about Descartes’s suspicion that his physical sensations could be a mere dream?

    As someone untrained in philosophy, I found the explanations of Aristotle’s thought particularly difficult to follow. I couldn’t tell where Aristotle’s opinions ended and Kearney’s began, especially since Kearney quotes Aristotle using terms like “tact”, which Kearney had given idiosyncratic definitions for in the previous chapter. Are we to take it that Aristotle aligned with Kearney’s usage of the word?

    At one point, Kearney remarks that Aristotle saw touch as the most foundational sense, since all the other senses rely on it. Food must touch the tongue to be tasted, soundwaves must ‘touch’ the eardrum, and ‘light strikes the iris’(p. 43). But was Aristotle aware that photons were material objects? And are photons actually material objects, if they have no mass, and can act like waves?

    When you start considering this subject at a quantum level, everyday notions of touch break down. After all, when I ’touch’ a table, at a molecular level none of the atoms in my finger are touching the atoms in the table, and I am only feeling the electromagnetic resistance of the table’s atoms.

    Likewise, none of the atoms in my body are ’touching’ each other, but are held in a bond through their orbitals. So, in what sense can you say that light ’touches’ the eye, or sound ’touches’ the ear?

    Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) by Arnold Böcklin.

    No Central Thrust

    Even if you accept all the concepts, definitions and distinctions found in the philosophical survey, your work won’t be rewarded because Kearney barely mentions them again. Instead, the text turns to medicine. In chapter three, he talks about literary/folkloric/mythological figures like Odysseus and Oedipus who embody a ’wounded healer’ archetype. Then, in chapter four he talks about the importance of physical touch in modern medicine, particularly in psychotherapy.

    At this point, to my mind at least, it became clear that there was no central thrust to this book, and my attempt to follow his train of thought would go unrewarded. Instead, I found a collection of loosely connected rambles through Kearney’s reading, with no development between the chapters.

    The final chapter on popular culture (social media, video games, movies) finally gave me what I had been hoping for – a discussion of touch in contemporary culture – but is, sadly, the least satisfactory of the lot. Kearney is clearly unfamiliar with the details or nuances of internet culture, consistently misusing terms. At one point, he refers to the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s emails as ’revenge porn’ (p. 119), a blunder that reveals a deep unfamiliarity with the expression he is using.

    At another, he disparages the state of internet discourse as infuriatingly simple compared to the Golden Age of communication that existed back in an Edenic past: ’communication is becoming daily more simplified by social media tweets, memes, acronyms, and hash tags – ’What’s up’ being replaced by WhatsApp.’

    Putting aside the cringeworthy final sentence, is it really self-evident that internet communication is more ’simplified’ than print or verbal speech? Couldn’t you argue the opposite – that the increasingly ironic, self-referential, meme-ified soup of internet discourse is actually maddeningly Baroque?

    Avoiding odious comparison, you could speak of internet discourse not as better or worse, simpler or more complex than speech, but just as a new modality which is still in the process of growth, of finding its feet and testing its limits.

    There are plenty of scholars analysing internet culture now. It may seem absurd to study memes, but when you consider their effect on politics, it appears intellectually reckless to dismiss them as simplistic, and unworthy of analysis.

    Grand Theft Auto V.

    Video Games

    The ignorance latent in Kearney’s cultural analysis hits a peak in his discussion of video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V (2013), which he calls ’controversial’. When describing it he first gives an inaccurate description of its contents, speaking of how players can ‘build or destroy cities’ (Is he thinking of SimCity (1989), perhaps?) and ’seduce strippers’ (according to my research on the GTA forum, you can only purchase lap dances from the strippers in the game).

    He gives an inaccurate account of what it feels like to play a game he surely hasn’t played. It’s ’vicarious’ he says. With ’a click of a button, one exits the world of tangible reality and enters a computer-generated universe’. If only GTA V gave one the escape from tangible reality Kearney imagines. Alas, however, technology can only progress so fast.

    After painting this Black Mirror-esque picture of the reality-warping power of the computer game, Kearney exhorts the lost souls of gamers that ‘it is but a simulacrum’, and warns against ’the risk of losing touch’. The only one out of touch here is Kearney himself.

    Apart from GTA V, Kearney lists a number of examples from modern media that deal with the sense of isolation and alienation engendered by digital media, referencing such titles as ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze, 2013), ‘The Truman Show’ (Peter Weir, 1998) and ‘Black Mirror’ (Charlie Brooker, 2011 – present). But all these works communicate much more nuanced and rich critiques of contemporary culture than Kearney is able to muster in this text.

    There are insights and interesting titbits scattered throughout the book, but on the whole it is lacking in a sense of progression, with little development from chapter to chapter, and a cumbersome amount of time is spent advancing distinctions and definitions that are never called into use.

    Columbia University Press claims that the No Limits series ‘brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go.’ With Touch, we see the weaknesses of this interdisciplinary approach, as the book’s lack of precision and relative naivete provides unsatisfactory responses to important questions in contemporary culture.

    Featured Image: A Missouri National Guardsman looks into a VR training head-mounted display at Fort Leonard Wood in 2015

  • Towards the Brink of the Cataract

    Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.

    Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.

    Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.

    Dara Beag O Fatharta from ‘Culchies – An Excerpt from ‘A Monk Manqué’

    My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’

    In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.

    Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.

    The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.

    A Monk Manqué II: Thaura Mornton

    The Truth of the Three Williams

    It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.

    We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.

    The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.

    Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:

    Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
    No more to The Minstrel Boy.
    Give us back our sons and daughters,
    Say that Ireland is over.

    Northern Ireland, 1969.

    Great War

    How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.

    I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.

    Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:

    Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.

    This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night,  in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.

    A Monk Manqué

    Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”

    I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.

    Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.

    There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.

    A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”

    I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!

    When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.

    Early Days in RTE.

    Born in the Pale

    These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.

    For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.

    My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.

    But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.

    There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.

    Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.

    The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).

    When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.

    How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.

    Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.

    Last Day in RTE: “I have come to kill you”

    ‘Yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’

    On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”

    My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.

    The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.

    The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.

    Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.

    What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.

    Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story?  But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.

    Kurt Vonnegut

    As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.

    The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.

    I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.

    I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?

    Enjoy further episodes from Bob Quinn’s A Monk Manqué on Cassandra Voices

  • Jack B. Yeats: Painting and Memory

    Often overshadowed by his elder, Nobel laureate, brother W.B., Jack Butler Yeats occupies an exalted position among Irish painters. ‘Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’ is a new exhibition in the National Gallery commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s birth, and exploring a stylistic evolution that draws on both Irish and British scenes.

    Jack was born on August 29th, 1871 into a marriage of two Irish Protestant families, the Yeatses and the Pollexfens. Whereas the Dublin Yeatses embodied a faded aristocracy, priding themselves on genealogically questionable claims of descent from the Dukes of Ormonde, the Pollexfens were of a more recent vintage, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, finding prosperity through their shipping interests.

    Each of the surviving children of moderately successful portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen made significant marks in their respective fields, perhaps compensating for their father’s relative obscurity, and profligacy.

    W.B. emerged as an illustrious poet, anointed by John O’Leary to lead the Celtic Revival, while Jack B. became a successful illustrator and painter from his early twenties, while their sisters, Lilly and Lolly,  set up the Cuala Press and were leading lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. All must be counted as important figures in what was an Irish Renaissance of sorts that sought, partly to distinguish and partly to create, an Irish cultural identity distinct from that of England’s.

    Jack’s career sailed independently of his siblings, a state of affairs conditioned by his childhood. The historian R.F. Foster writes that Yeats’s ‘childhood was disrupted by his removal for eight years to Sligo, where he was brought up in close proximity to his grandparents. This probably conditioned his artistic development; it also conferred a certain distance from the rest of the family, particularly his brother.’ (R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, p. 14).

    Later in life, Jack diverged sharply from his brother’s political opinions, holding to an anti-Treaty stance in the Civil War, in contrast to W.B. ‘s support of the 1922 Treaty, and later service to the state as a Senator.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), A Summer Evening, Rosses Point, 1922. Oil on canvas, 23 x 35.5 cm
    Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    Exhibition

    There is already a room devoted to Jack B. Yeats in the Milltown wing of the National Gallery, available to view with a free general admission ticket. Here, twenty of his paintings are on permanent display.

    The new exhibition features a much larger selection of eighty-four paintings, many of which are on loan from private collections or galleries overseas. As such, it offers a rare chance to view many works that have not been on display in Ireland for some time.

    I had the opportunity to speak with Donal Maguire, co-curator (along with Brendan Rooney) of the exhibition. Donal revealed the rationale for the exhibition’s lay out, including the decision to focus exclusively on his oil paintings, and Jack B. Yeats’s role in forging a national Irish identity in the early twentieth century.

    After rejoining his family as a young adult, Jack enrolled in a number of art schools. The skills he acquired as a draughtsman, allied to natural ability, earned him a decent living through contributions to a number of London magazines.

    At this time the majority of his output was in drawing and watercolour, often depicting the colourful side of everyday life. Country races, market fairs, and circuses feature, depicted predominantly in a realist style. His first exhibition in 1897 won him immediate acclaim from sketches and watercolours, depicting bucolic ‘scenes of racing, boxing, fairgrounds, cider-making, children, and animals.’ (Bruce Arnold, Yeats, Jack Butler, Dictionary of Irish Biography).

    Near the turn of the century, Jack married Mary Cottenham White, who he had met while at art school. The young couple eventually chose to settled down in Ireland. Unfortunately, depictions of equivalent scenes from Irish rural life did not meet with similar success. It was not until the 1920s, after Ireland’s independence brought a greater appetite for articulations of Irish life and characters, that Jack’s career took off.

    Jack began to take a serious interest in oils only after settling down in Ireland. After adopting the medium, however, it became his dominant artistic language. From the 1920s onward, his manner of painting became increasingly tactile and expressionistic, inspired by the Modernist movement. By the end of his life, he was producing vast canvases in oil in a highly idiosyncratic style, with increasing recourse to esoteric subjects from folklore and mythology.

    With such a clearly definable narrative arc to his career, it is common for Jack B. Yeats’s work to be exhibited in a manner that emphasises his development from sketches, to watercolours, through to increasingly expressionist oil paintings. With this exhibition, however, Maguire and Rooney saw an opportunity to take a different tack

    “We decided very early on that the show wouldn’t be hung chronologically”, Donal Maguire informed me. “Exhibitions give you the opportunity to look across a practice and see connections that are twenty, thirty, or forty years apart,” he said.

    The theme of memory was chosen as the central focus of the exhibition. Oil was the material Jack B. Yeats painted with during the final half of his career, and paintings commonly feature scenes drawn from earlier periods in his life, particularly the experience of growing up in Sligo.

    A non-chronological approach to laying out the paintings serves to emphasise the associative, non-linear quality of memory.

    “Memory isn’t a linear thing,” Maguire observed. “It’s relational. You connect things from across different periods of your life. Certain things pop out, or are remembered more strongly than others.”

    In each of the five rooms of the exhibition, works from different decades of Yeats’s life engage in a fascinating conversation with one another. The most striking example is the sequencing of ‘The Barrel Man’ (1912) and ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ (1946). Without the earlier, realist depiction of a rural festivity, involving a man fighting off sticks being aimed at him from the safety of a barrel, the origin of the expressionistic painting of the 1940s, with the headscratcher of a title, would be difficult to fathom.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), The Public Letter Writer, 1953 Oil on board, 35.5 x 53 cm. Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    The remarkable ‘The Public Letter Writer’(1953) appears to be an example of what Maguire means by certain memories standing out more than others . He notes that this painting was “painted from a memory fifty years earlier that he never sketched. It was a memory of seeing this person on the street in New York, and fifty years later he decided to return to it.”

    The vagueness of memory is conveyed by the hazy, almost hallucinatory character of the painting. The figure is less a real person than a character from a nightmare. Whereas the expressive depiction of the figure in ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ suggests a memory that has been mulled over beyond the point of reason – overloaded with metaphorical possibilities – the manner of ‘The Public Letter Writer’ is for Maguire suggestive of “a memory which isn’t fully formed.”

    This is achieved through a particular technique according to Maguire:

    He painted with thick paint, but also with very thin paint. It’s the contrast of the two that gives it this interesting effect. You have very thin brushstrokes, or dry brushstrokes, and then suddenly a very thickly applied stroke over it. There’s interesting layers of paint there, that seem very fragile at times, or without much structure, but they’re all held together by an overall picture.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Pilot Sligo River, 1927. Oil on canvas, Unframed: 45.72 x 60.96cm
    Credit Line: Private collection, image courtesy Whytes.com © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Whytes.com

    Irishness

    Exhibitions of this sort require years of preparation. Ideally, Maguire told me, a three year lead in is required. It is thus difficult to read topical applications into its staging.

    Before the interview, I had wondered if the exhibition of a quitessentially Irish artist was related to a  drop off in foreign visitors to Dublin since the COVID-19 pandemic. As it happens, it is fortuitous that the National Gallery is giving Irish people a chance for introspection.

    While the theme of memory reflects the preoccupation of the subject in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, it also provokes us to interrogate what role the painter occupies in our cultural memory.

    Jack, B. Yeats now occupies a rarefied position in Irish culture. His works are on the Leaving Cert Art curriculum, just as you’ll find his brother on the English curriculum. This stature was not self-evident in his own lifetime, however.

    Bruce Arnold writes bluntly of Yeats’s career in the 1910s: ‘His work did not sell. From a professional point of view his and Cottie’s decision to settle in Ireland had not been a success.’ Even after critical acclaim in the 1920s, ‘the resources to buy [artwork] were thinly spread in Irish society at the time, particularly those interested in modernism, and Yeats’s work did not sell at all well. His output, substantial during the 1920s, fell off in the following decade, and in a mood of self-doubt he turned to writing.’

    It wasn’t until a successful 1942 exhibition that he came to be regarded as a great Irish artist. Even then, his reputation declined after his death in 1957, until it was revived by a significant National Gallery exhibition in 1971.

    Fifty years on, the artist is still celebrated, but for perhaps different reasons than in the 1940s. We may still appreciate his ground-breaking work that reacted against sentimental nineteenth century depictions of rural life. But attention to curiosities of rural life might still be considered distasteful, even kitsch. Therefore, rather than being charmed by what may now be considered benignly nationalistic, it is the ambiguities within the oeuvre that still speak to us. Here we find the hallucinogenic letter writers; the sinister boatmen who stare the viewer down; the master of ceremonies chalky in the spotlight; an odd cast of characters that seem to stand with one foot in the thick of everyday life, and one foot in the most whimsical of dreams. Insofar as they are alien to us, these figures still have something to say.

    Maguire explains Yeats’s enduring appeal to contemporary Ireland: “People enjoy the expression and experimentation and risk taking that’s in it.”

    It might be this numinous quality that will ensure their longevity. “Yeats allows you to develop your own interpretation, through your own imagination, of what these pictures are about.” Maguire comments.

    In many of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, “He doesn’t give you a lot of information,” Maguire said, providing only enough information to pique your curiosity. Although “there are little clues to lead you in a particular direction, like with the title, a particular figure, or element in the picture. But there always seems to be some sort of secret there, or something that’s not being fully revealed.”

    Jack B. Yeats, The Master of Ceremonies. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: On loan from the Hunt Museum, Limerick. Photo © Hunt Museum
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

    Call to Action

    Even among those of us with visual cortexes fried by twenty-first century technologies, Jack B. Yeats’ works allow access to powerful imaginative vistas.

    The use of colour at times astonishes, the character studies are fascinating, and the focus on everyday scenes allows for surprisingly personal moments of connection.

    Maguire urges anyone going to avoid getting:

    too distracted by the imagery of what he’s making, but allow yourself to appreciate how the painting is made as well. Not to be frustrated by, but to enjoy the technique and the brushwork, and the experimentation with the medium. How fragile it can seem, but at the same time very bold and expressive. It’s that material quality that people should really take time to enjoy in his work, because you can really lose yourself in it.

    The exhibition runs until February 6th, 2022. Tickets range in price from €5 up to €17 for an adult weekend ticket. Discounted prices are available for students, jobseekers and pensioners. Tickets are significantly cheaper during the week than on weekends, and there’s even a chance to see the exhibition for free on Mondays between 11am and 2pm, if you can manage to book a slot during that period.

    Featured Image: Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Singing Under the Canopy of Heaven, 1950. Oil on board, Unframed: 22.86 x 35.56cm. Credit Line: Private Collection © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021. Image courtesy Whytes.com.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Leaving the Far Point, 1946. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: The Niland Collection. Donated by the artist, 1954. Courtesy of The Model, Home of the Niland Collection. © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

  • David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

    I have a mild neurosis, situated in Utopian wish-fulfillment, of the ideal that I often step in a prelapsarian coppice with slats of warm-light breaking the gentle canopy and then filtering on down through the trees to come to a swirling perceptible rest and thus luxuriating golden on the forest floor.

    The morning fontanelle, in its softwarm glade, peeping out, making way for noontide, and the ossified skull pivots towards Jupiter; my dumb-wondering skull swinging gallantly to the heavens, and then back again to the social world, where the overtly self-conscious auteur can record the very thing itself, Kantian logic. Which, is, seemingly, scant upon the ground these post-modern, non-ideological – apart from vast consumerism and neo-liberalist agenda(s) – days.

    Recently, I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and reached for David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel, Infinite Jest (1996); I figured that while sedate prose is at the behest of book sellers, and publishers, means – and modes of production for the masses – I thought “To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.” So employing a reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side.  And it is shtick all the way.

    Sigmund Freud.

    Civilized Sexuality

    In section two of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) on ‘Civilized’ Sexuality Morality and Modern Nervous Illness he opens up by drawing a distinction between the ‘natural’ – rampant? –  sexuality in the human, and the subservient, moral sexual behaviour in ‘civilized society,’ which delineates into sublimation, leading to one’s efforts being thrown wholly into Art and cultural activity.

    One could assert that David Foster Wallace, straddled the tumescent, guilt-ridden world of the former and then found his comfort, and solace, in the latter, where the rotating, tangible Gods are more within one’s reach if they exert themselves and actually get down to it and, libidinal energies aside, write.

    On social media, namely Twitter, a few people remarked that they had undertaken the David versus Goliath battle with Infinite Jest and retreated to safe passage, beaten some two hundred pages in. I suppose this may be permissible in others but not for anyone prepared to leave their comfort zone. So, with a slingshot in hand, I strapped on my leather sandals and headed out to the dusty milieu to grapple with the colossal swinging giant.

    The plot is tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in flux. In fact it is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself, and the pre-frontal cortex mythology which he conspires to create and then exudes, seemingly, so effortlessly.

    Did Foster Wallace write a capable work? That is down to the moral subjectivity of the reader, and relative comprehension of what literature is, and how far they are willing to travel to meet such a work.

    This is not a linear prose tale as we know it. What I deduced, and I have to be honest here, I skim-read some of the work, but what I was able to perceive was that a protean plot; a Joycean attempt at a quotidian epic; an idea enough to shake anyone in their cotton socks and rubber-soled plimsolls.

    David Foster Wallace.

    Nomenclature

    Foster Wallace’s reliance on nomenclature and acronyms are, well, trifling when you forget all the organisations he coins; we do know, for example, that O.N.A.N stands for Organization of North American Nations, a kind of dystopian superstate which is comprised of Mexico, the United States and Canada; and that the novel takes place during ‘The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ Y.D.A.U.

    It opens with tennis. Wallace was a court man, he liked to court tennis, and he schlongs his racket into being more often than enough into this work.

    Primary locations include the Enfield Tennis Academy (‘ETA), Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House  and a mountain location outside of Tucson, Arizona.

    Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or else staff at the halfway house; there is a multi-part, philosophical conversation between a Quebec separatist and his US government contact, which occurs at the Arizona location.

    The claustrophobic, proposed cannabis-deal waiting scene, near the start of the novel, is very telling about Wallace’s, one assumes, own neurosis’s about the partaking of cannabis, and the whole surrounding miasma of paranoia; the distinctive middle class, sweaty-palmed, heart-thumping moment-by-moment judgements formulated in the expectant mind of what is going on there in the less-than-fictional, delusionary, environmental ‘transaction.’

    We find ourselves in his fastidiously tidy, and small, apartment with the narrator, the best kind of writing which Foster Wallace is known for, where he is at home with the foetal type of self-hatred and mild-drug use which enveloped his almost Jacobean, rebellious nature.

    As regards technology, he talks about ‘cartridges’, film and the goal of the Americanised society; a cartridge, the end game; senseless cartridge which when one watches they become a stupefied, quivering wreck in front of the flickering images never to rise again – a kind of reverse Lazarus  – dead-eyed and owned.

    In terms of characterisation, there is the guy who is mad about tennis and optics, who sticks his head in a microwave, only to be superseded by his prodigal, talented son. Then there is Orin Junior. Mental Health sufferer; Kate Gompert – whom I believe is Foster Wallace spliced with Orin; Demerol aficionado Don Gately; and the whole Incandenza family clan.

    Main Plot Themes

    There are four main plot themes to be mindful of: First, a fringe group of Quebecois radicals, the AFR, which plans a violent geopolitical coup, and is opposed by high-level US operatives. Next, various residents of the Boston area who reach ‘rock bottom’ with their substance abuse problems, and enter a residential drug and alcohol recovery program, where they progress in recovery through AA and NA. We also find students training and studying at an elite tennis academy run by James and Avril Incandenza, and Avril’s adopted brother Charles Tavis. Finally, the history of the Incandenza family unfolds, focusing on the youngest son, Hal.

    More peripherally we have the minutiae of Foster Wallace’s comprehension of U.S pharmacology drugs, available for those requiring a hit. The theme of Québecois separatism. The City-scapes, wherein the psychogeography of the narrative feels sterile, offering a mish-mash of flimsy, dilapidated rooms in recovery house, Ennet House and the Tennis Academy, Enfield. We also find a transvestite junkie, in the toilet squirting and paranoid about voiding of the bowels.

    Not an Easy Read

    Infinite Jest is not an easy novel to read. It is a half-empty, farmhouse grain-store of nine hundred and eighty-one pages, with additional footnotes, which Wallace could not crow-bar into the main text; you have to do a lot of the work yourself, which for the unattended, ephemeral mentality of the nowadays impatient-person may be a difficult concept to grasp.

    This is a work that should come with a complimentary Dictionary and Thesaurus. One assumes that to write this David Foster Wallace swept out The Urals with a dustpan and hand brush. The event itself is not too masterful but the brushstrokes of ingenuity and dedication to his Art, were – are.

    David Foster Wallace was a deck-side sailor who learned to bind his ropes tightly, then lash the rigging onto his work and raise it, creaking, up from the plumy depths, on up far into the azure, heady swirling heights, and this has to be applauded, the meridian of achievement in the literary field, for what Foster Wallace implemented was no easy feat – the writer, and the unyielding precipice of the empty page –  and then to storm in and fill it with some, any, kind of syllogistic meaning, wow, just wow.

    Is Infinite Jest a supercilious comment on American society? Of course, it is.

  • Where is Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World?

    For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People (2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised.

    Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.

    Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial.

    All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her.

    After laying Normal People aside, my girlfriend read it. After finishing it, she expressed the opinion that it was a good read, but nothing special in literary terms. Then she read reviews of it in well-respected publications, and began to experience a cognitive dissonance so severe I worried about her mental health.

    “What is it I’m not seeing? Why is everybody praising it so highly? Am I not seeing something here?” she beseeched.

    I tried to comfort her. “It’s the world that’s gone mad.” I said, “Your judgement was correct.”

    “But everyone is saying it’s great!”

    “It’s all just marketing! The whole industry is a sham!”.

    Alas, my words offered scant comfort. It wasn’t until she saw some negative reviews in major magazines that she felt consoled.

    ‘A lot of press attention surrounded the publication,’ says a novelist character in Rooney’s new novel, ‘mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.’

    For my girlfriend and me, the negativity was a justification. Maybe our generation’s aesthetic sense hadn’t atrophied after all. There was still hope.

    “Why do you need other people to say something is bad before you can trust in your own judgement?” I asked.

    “Let’s stop talking about this.” she replied.

    After my girlfriend’s near loss of sanity, I resolved to maintain a safe distance from Sally Rooney. The best minds I knew assured me that Sally Rooney’s popularity was a product of marketing, and that her writing was nothing special.

    A New Assignment

    My life went on peacefully, untroubled by the exorcised spirit of Rooney, until two years later an editor challenged me to review Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).

    “I’m afraid to say I’m not a big fan of Sally Rooney”, I said.

    “All the better!” he replied, “She will get enough positive reviews as it is. Write what you really think!”

    I left the office elated at first, but then an inner contrarian bristled. That’s right, I’m a contrarian even among other contrarians. If asked to criticise a mainstream work, I’m inclined to defend it.

    Buying the book in Chapters, I felt immensely self-conscious at the bestsellers shelf. I scanned the shop before taking the blue paperback from the number one slot.

    “If anyone I respect asks why I’m buying it”, I thought, “I’ll tell them I’m writing a review.”

    Returning home, I sat down on the couch with the novel and a pen and notebook on hand. Upon reading the first page, I found an adjective that felt awkward, and I noted this down. On the next, I found a sentence I didn’t like, and then a character description that annoyed me. I noted these down too. Then I realised I wasn’t reading at all.

    I laid aside the notebook and returned to the beginning. Time passed. A few times, I wanted to reach for the notebook, but resisted the impulse, accepting the text for what it was. Slowly, my ego disengaged, and I started to focus on the scenes, the characters, and the structure of the story. The afternoon slipped away.

    On the second afternoon, I became even more deeply engaged. I found some of the ideas expressed by characters exciting. I laughed at parts, enjoying the romantic dynamic between different characters. When I wasn’t reading the book, I looked forward to when I would be again.

    The pace of the novel appeared to slow in the final third however. By the end, I had lost some of the enthusiasm sparked earlier. I still enjoyed it, but believe it doesn’t amount to a substantive whole.

    Summary

    The novel primarily follows two Irish women in their late twenties/early thirties. Eileen works for a low-paying literary magazine, and is terribly jealous of her friend Alice, who is a successful novelist.

    Alice lives in a beautiful house by the sea, has money and time to spare, yet never goes out of her way to visit Eileen. The novel alternates between chapters following Eillen or Alice individually, and chapters composed of email exchanges between the two friends.

    The alternating structure is used very artfully. In the narrative sections, the narrator is extremely remote and impersonal: ‘He was wearing a black zip-up, with the zip pulled right up, and occasionally he tucked his chin under the raised collar, evidently cold.’ (p.216)

    This is a very roundabout way of telling us a character is cold, but it maintains the sense of the narrator’s detachment. This technique is characteristic of Beautiful World, Where Are You. In the narrative sections, we watch the characters keenly, with an interested gaze, but we’re barred from access to their minds; nor does the narrator offer insights into the characters. Thus, for example:

    The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again. (p. 6)

    Or,

    When Felix saw Alice approaching, he stood up, greeted her, touched her waist, and asked what she would like to drink.” (p. 214)

    There’s a clinical coldness to the narrator, but while fulfilling the role of a dispassionate eye, the descriptions of actions remain vague. It lacks, therefore, a truly realist attention to detail.

    The rationale for this style seems to receive its most explicit justification around the midpoint, where the narrator says:

    Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.(p. 126)

    I am bound to ask: if a realist novel doesn’t offer readers insights into their lives then what is its purpose? Are the experiences of Dublin millennials really so profound that they can’t be explained in words?

    The coldness in the narrative chapters emphasises the emotional warmth of the email correspondence between Eileen and Alice. The end of chapter five, for example, shows us an Alice aloof and withdrawn in conversation; whereas the next chapter opens with a forthright Alice telling Eileen: ‘Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way.’

    The emails allow floodgates to open kept firmly closed through the narrative chapters. In there, Alice and Eileen share their worries, hopes, and undergraduate analyses of our current predicament.

    This is my favourite part of the book by far. Why? Because the opinions expressed by the characters show conspicuous self-awareness on Rooney’s part of her place in contemporary culture, and the role her novels play.

    The contemporary novel is irrelevant (pp. 94 – 95); the cult of the author is philosophically groundless and dangerous but is maintained by marketing hacks (p. 55); the oppressor/victim complex in online discourse is more theological than political (p. 74); beauty died in 1976 (p. 75). These are ideas we can agree on, and I am glad to hear them voiced in a mainstream novel.

    Ruthless Self-Examination

    Beautiful World, Where Are You doesn’t need to be critiqued. It does that for you. At one point, the millenial novelist Alice laments her public image:

    I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me.(p. 55)

    The ruthless self-examination offers Rooney salvation from her cultural sins. No longer do we need to critique her. She is doing it for us.

    Now, you could view this cynically in two ways. First, consider Theodor Adorno’s idea that the culture industry actually feeds off its own critics.

    Thus Punk came along and rails against Popular music, and then became the new Popular music. In a postmodern turn, the more you look into the myth of Punk, the more produced and insincere it seems.

    The Sex Pistols were a punk-look-alike band, a few handpicked chaps that fitted the image of a Punk band, not a real group of rag-tag lads from the street as in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Nirvana is a similar case. We’re sick of hair metal, let’s make music rock again, and then you’re on the front cover of Rolling Stone. The more you rebel against the industry, the more you’re playing into the angry rocker cliche. There’s no way out.

    Top of the Food Chain

    So, Sally Rooney’s novel can complain about how banal contemporary novels are, how useless and privileged its author is for spending her life writing such things, and through that self-critique, she secures her position at the top of the millennial novelist hierarchy.

    Slavoj Žižek has discussed at length the role played by guilt and self-deprecation in our current discourse, evident in its most extreme form on Twitter.

    If we are guilty of all the ills in the world, then we become, paradoxically, important. It all centres around us. Thus, Alice writes of going to a Dublin shop and thinking:

    of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And thus, this is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! (p. 17)

    She is highlighting her sense of guilt, and therefore her virtue, but it also reveals an arrogance. We are at the very top; we must be generous; we must be humble; we must be self-deprecating. Why? Because we are important.

    Žižek refers to a marketing ploy used by Starbucks to sell their coffee The chain acknowledges it is more expensive than competitors, but every 10 cent goes to starving children in a far off country.

    Therefore, to assuage your guilt about commodifying the planet to the detriment of the developing world, simply buy this particular commodity.

    Likewise, if you feel defeated by the state of the contemporary novel, read a contemporary novel that complains about this too. It may be banal, but at least it will be ‘relatable’, and can we ask for anything more?

    This is really the key issue. Rooney can articulate what is wrong with the contemporary novel, but can’t seem to write any differently for all that self-critique. The same dross is dished out, but now it’s served with a side of cringing humility.

    The aperitif of self-criticism may eliminate the lingering dull flavours, but I’d rather have eaten some good food in the first place.

    Possibly Insidious…

    I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness exhibited in this novel, especially evident in the emails sent between Eileen and Alice, articulating how I feel about the contemporary novel and the cult of Rooney in a way better than I could myself.

    These critiques are, however, ultimately unsatisfying, because they undermine rather than justify the narrative sections.

    They don’t spur Rooney on to write superior work, or even anything different. Instead, they simply undermine the banality of the narrative in a possibly insidious way.

    Why insidious? Because the critique of the mainstream fitting seamlessly into the mainstream really illustrates the failure of the critique to have any effect on the status quo. It becomes a pose, emotional venting that doesn’t amount to anything; failing to point to anywhere better, or just different.

    Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Faber & Faber (London) on September 7th.

    All Images (c) Frank Armstrong

  • Love and Literature in Numbers

    Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.

    And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.

    It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.

    Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

    It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.

    With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!

    Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.

    Rogelio de Egusquiza‘s Tristan and Isolt (Death) (1910).

    Life Moves On

    I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.

    She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.

    And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!

    Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.

    You move on.

    It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.

    The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.

    Nemesis and Trinity

    So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.

    Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.

    There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.

    What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.

    But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.

    Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!

    You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.

    And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.

    This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.

    How It Is

    Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is (1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.

    When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.

    This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.

    But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.

    Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.

    In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.

    The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.

    The Four Ages

    What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.

    Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.

    As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.

    Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.

    Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.

    Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.

    It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.

    Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.

    Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.

    The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination (1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

    Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.

    Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.

    Female Domination

    Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.

    Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.

    Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.

    There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.

    Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.

    Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.

    Set Theory

    As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.

    I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.

    Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.

    Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?

    This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.

    Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.

    What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.

    In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.

    In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

    Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme