R. F. Kuang, _Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution_

TURNS OUT THAT while American speakers (I am one) pronounce the title of this novel to rhyme with "rabble," British speakers pronounce it to rhyme with "table." Hmm. 

I would not have picked this one up had it not been chosen by our book club, but it was an enjoyable enough read. If Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and the Harry Potter series had a child, and that child was raised by Edward Said's Orientalism and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, that child would be this book.

Like the first half of Brideshead Revisited, most of Babel is set in Oxford, and POV character Robin Swift is as in love with the place as Waugh's Charles Ryder was: the Gothic architecture, the swish of the academic gowns, the ancient traditions, the feeling that one is at the center of the intellectual universe.

As in the Harry Potter series, we spend most of our time with a group of students who became close friends, even a kind of chosen family, and their studies involve a kind of magic. The England of Babel is mostly the actual England of the 1830s, except that silver ingots are capable of taking what is "lost in translation" between words in two different languages and manifesting that difference as some kind of energy or other phenomenon. In the novel, it is mastery of silver's potential that has made England a wealthy imperial power. This capacity of silver also has the effect of placing the humanities, especially at Oxford, at the heart of power. 

In the novel, then, linguistic knowledge is not pursued for its own sake, but for the sake of the power it generates. This is where Edward Said comes in. The English pursuit of knowledge about India, China, Islam, etc., was never disinterested, Said argued--it was always conjoint with the ends of empire, always about power. And so it is in Babel.

What will it take to overthrow this empire? One could try to reason with empire, persuade it to give up power in the name of justice, morality, and human dignity. Kuang seems not to expect that to happen, hence the alternate title "the Necessity of Violence," which I will note does not appear on  the cover of the paperback edition I bought. Again, hmm. Why not? Anyway, like Fanon, Kuang's revolutionary translators decide persuasion will not suffice. The empire can only be overcome by force.

I wonder whether the film rights have been sold. The movie's end could be spectacular.

Rebecca Solnit, _Whose Story IsThis?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters_

THIS COMPACT VOLUME from Haymarket Books collects eighteen of Solnit's shorter pieces, published for the most part in the Guardian or Literary Hub, from 2017 to 2019--the pre-COVID years of the first Trump Administration.

I had read several of them essays before, but in the weeks before the election they seemed worth revisiting, as a reminder of how important it was to keep Trump out of the White  House...and then Trump was reëlected, and they served as a grim forecast of what we may be in for again (if not even worse).

Those years were also the high tide of #MeToo, though, so along with the nightmares the collection induced me to re-live, there were reminders that other stories do sometimes manage to get told, the truth does now and then prevail.

All in all, I'm mainly just glad Solnit is out there writing, keeping a torch lit for sanity, lucidity, and justice.

Kim Stanley Robinson, _The Ministry of the Future_

 I DID NOT much like this novel, I may as well say. I do not usually enjoy science fiction (although this is not much like typical science fiction except for being set in the future, roughly 2020-2050). But Ministry for the Future is about clearly important matters--climate change and what it will  take to address the problems we are already facing. 

In a way, it this moment's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even though Harriet Beecher Stowe was not among the greatest novelists of her time, you really did need to read that novel; it vividly represented the most urgent question facing American society at that time. Robinson does that for us. Ministry for the Future is not a great novel, but it is still a must-read.

As a novel, it's a grab bag. There are two main characters. Frank, who works for an  international aid organization, is the sole survivor when a heat wave hits a village in India where he is working. Traumatized, he is anxious to do something, anything, to address the climate crisis, but as an individual he has painfully limited options--so he attempts to (in a way) kidnap Mary, the other main character. 

Mary is the director of the (fictional) UN agency named in the novel's title, which has the job of working to make sure the earth has a future. Compared to Frank, she has a lot of influence, a lot of institutional heft behind her, but she can't actually make anything happen, either. She can get meetings with people, make proposals, speak to the media...but she can't order the world to stop using fossil fuels.

Frank eventually goes to prison for not-exactly-kidnapping Mary, but she visits him, and they develop a relationship, both being vitally interested in the climate crisis. Their conversations make up a good chunk of the book. I never warmed up all that much to either Frank or Mary, but I learned a lot from their conversations.

But a lot of the book, more than half I'd guess, is a variety of other things. Riddle chapters, in which you have to guess the identity of the speaker, who turns out to be (e.g.) carbon, or money, or capitalism. Chapters that are the minutes of Mary's group's meetings. Chapters that are vignettes of people doing something to address the crisis: restoring the ice cap, or sequestering carbon, or figuring out how to make a "commons" work. There are more dramatic events--bombings, assassinations, economic crashes--but these occur offstage. They are reported rather than narrated.

Eventually, by the time we are 450 pages or so along, progress is made--an actual reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere is achieved. It feels good. 

The novel is mainly about how hard it will be to reverse the damage already done to our world, but it does leave you with a vague sense that maybe we can do it.

Sam Riviere, _Kim Kardashian's Marriage_

 THIS IS RIVIERE'S second book of poems, from 2015. It follows a very regular organizational plan.

 Suppose we have a "List A" with the following nine words or phrases: american, beautiful, girlfriend, grave, ice cream, infinity, spooky, the new, and thirty-three. Now suppose we have a "List B" with the following eight words: berries, dust, heaven, pool, sincerity, sunglasses, sunsets, and weather. Now take a word from List A and pair it with a word from List B: "girlfriend berries," or "spooky sunglasses," or "the new heaven." Make each possible pairing the title of the poem, and you will have 9 x 8 or 72 titles--the 72 titles of the 72 poems contained in Kim Kardashian's Marriage, a number arrived at because her marriage to Kris Humphries lasted 72 days. 

The 72 poems are arranged in eight sections of nine poems apiece, the sections bearing titles--"Primer," "Contour," "Highlight"--taken from the stages of Kim Kardashian's makeup routine.

In other words, we have a mathematically-generated structure as rigorous as that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, with all its threes and sevens and nines, but instead of being based on the harmony of the cosmos it is based on numbers arbitrarily chosen from aspects of the career of a celebrity who is a byword for superficiality. 

The poems themselves are composed with techniques that in the USA are called "flarf." In the words of the jacket copy, the poems "have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part improvisation." For instance, the poem titled "the new hardcore" begins with this couplet:

This is an all-out onslaught
that very much lives up to the  tech spec.

The poems are not exactly expressive, then--they do not proceed from  the observations, ideas, and emotions of the poet--but they can be read as though they are, I'd say, and are even very effective read that way, funny, surprising, even fresh, despite none of the language having actually popped up spontaneously in Riviere's imagination.

These are poems that don't want to be Poems--that want to leave far behind everything that Heidegger waxed lyrical about in "The Origin of the Work Art." And maybe that's healthy, given how things unspooled with Heidegger. Or is it an abdication? Or a renunciation? I'm not sure I like it, but it may be important, I have to admit, a poetry for after the demise of Poetry, a poetry that is important for its renunciation of Importance.

Sam Riviere, _81 Austerities_

 I LIKED RIVIERE'S novel, Dead Souls, so much that I decided to try his poetry, which turns out to be "interesting," as we say when we think something might be important but don't want to risk declaring that we like it.

81 Austerities contains, as you might have guessed, eighty-one poems, all originally published on Riviere's blog in 2011, at a moment when the British government was adopting "austerity measures," that is, raising taxes and cutting public services.

The eighty-one poems leave the impression of practicing certain austerities themselves, as they are generally brief (only a few require more than one page) and largely do without upper-case letters and punctuation marks.

The no-caps, no-punctuation style, the brevity, and the syntactic plainness of the poems ("I was watching TV / with the windows open / it was a warm night"), combined with their first appearing in a digital medium makes a reader think of Instagram poetry, but in many a wink to the reader Riviere reveals he is cannier than that. For instance, there is a poem at the very end titled "81 Austerities" that seems to consist of quick comments on the other poems in the volume.

I found myself thinking instead of Chelsey Minnis (see posts of March 17, 2019; October 13, 2019; and January 22, 2020). Minnis's poems, too, seem superficially like the kind of poem you would find in an intelligent but anxious teen's journal or social media account. Often enough, though, they seem to be deliberately trying to sound like that, a poetic knuckleball wobbling its way past you for a strike. Is this poem the pathetic little squib it looks like at first glance or is it...important? 

But what in the world makes a poem important? Should we refrain thinking of importance, however defined, as the right goal for a poem?

I am also reading Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin currently, and I wonder if Riviere and Minnis are programmatically renouncing ambition. 

Holderlin lies behind Heidegger's exalted idea of poetry as the Un-Concealing of Being, as the basis of all art, as the basis of history...you name it. For Heidegger, poetry is where the big meanings are. But what if going for the Big Meanings opens the door to the political commitments for which Heidegger is so (rightly) notorious? Is ambitious poetry complicit with horror? (Pound, for instance).

This in turns reminds me of a passage in "A Sunset," which Robert Hass recently published in the New Yorker.

This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Ashbery steers as far as he can from sounding like a vates, to be sure. Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett also could be said to be trying to tack as hard as they could away from the poetic course celebrated by Heidegger. So I wonder if  Riviere and Minnis are looking for ways  to write poetry without being Poets. 

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (4)

 HERE WE ARE, the day after. I guess our level of anxiety about fascism will have to remain in the red for at least another four years.

A few people have objected that Bataille's analysis of fascism itself smacks of fascism. Richard Wolin's chapter on Bataille in his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism is a handy example.

Wolin, I am guessing, aligns with Jürgen Habermas in identifying left politics as part of an Enlightenment legacy, relying on reason, evidence, and public discourse as the best instruments for shaping the polity, rather than tradition, revealed religion, mystical notions of race, and so on. From that perspective, Bataille's suggestion that we dip into the heterogeneous to find ways to resist fascism seems to be saying, let's use right wing instruments to combat the right wing! But the moment we start using right wing instruments, don't we become right wingers? I'm probably over-simplifying, but that seems to be Wolin's objection.

This may put us in mind--today especially--of Trump, who has been eager to draw on various dark energies  to fuel his successful campaign: white supremacy, male supremacy, fear of the other, and other charged varieties of unreason. Could the left draw on some kind of dark energy of its own without ceasing to be the left? Does the left even have dark energies to draw on? 

The closest the left comes to the adrenalin-amping of fascism may be religiously-inspired movements like abolition or some phases of the civil rights or anti-war movements of the 1060s. Not that religion is a dark energy, exactly, but it carries more an emotional appeal than a rational one. And it can be effective--I think it made a difference when mainline Protestants swung into line on same-sex marriage, for instance. Most leftists I know are chary of making God-based appeals, though. And if Wolin is right, they should be. 

And is Wolin right? I don't know. 

It's been a long day.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (3)

 STILL WITH ME? Okay. According to Bataille, the homogeneous, when it feels threatened, will resort to the heterogeneous to put down the heterogeneous.

To expand that a bit: Capital, which tends to represent itself as Good Decent Ordinary People, will resort to certain kinds of old weirdness, such as tribal loyalties and would-be übermenschen who have no investment at all in enlightenment notions like rule of law or representative democracy, if it fears that the unruly working class can use the rule of law and representative democracy to take control. Capitalism was married to representative democracy and rule of law for a long time, but if its survival requires throwing them aboard...over they will go, and capitalism will gladly marry authoritarianism.

In its bones, this looks a lot like the classic marxist analysis of fascism. Bataille has woven into it, though, a lot of new ingredients, since his idea of the heterogeneous includes not just the classic proletariat, but also a variety of unassimilable and even alarming folks--all kinds of folks who are not exactly Good Decent Ordinary People. This is an interesting development, I'd say.

Bataille took a lot of criticism, though, for suggesting that the workers' movement could learn a trick or two from the fascists--by which he meant, I think, trafficking in the heterogeneous. He writes (in  the Lovitt translation): 

Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible  to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims.

Fascism is not just a simple  revival of the ancien régime--it has added some powerful updates; it is juiced up with some powerful heterogeneous mojo.  But why couldn't the workers' movement work in its own new mojo, creating new and powerful "forms of attraction"? 

He gives no examples, just as Walter Benjamin (writing a couple of years after Bataille) gives no examples when he calls for communism to politicize art in response to fascism's aestheticization of politics. Presumably Bataille did not have in mind drum circles at union meetings, just as Benjamin presumably did not have in mind WPA-style Post Office murals. But what did Bataille have in mind?

Whatever he had in mind, there may be a problem, as Richard Wolin discussed long ago. I'll try to sort that out tomorrow.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (2)

 “TODAY WE KNOW,” writes Michel Foucault in his 1970 introduction to Bataille’s collected works, “Bataille is one of the most important writers of his century” (“On le sait aujourd’hui: Bataille est un des écrivains les plus importants de son siècle”). Not sure how well that statement holds up fifty years on, even coming from Foucault, but “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” is original and interesting and maybe even true, in spots.

Bataille draws on Marxism—as I mentioned earlier, the piece first appeared in a French journal that was Marxist but anti-Stalinist—but also on Freud, and quite a bit on anthropology. For a time in those days Bataille was running with the Surrealists, and he also attended Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. The man got around.

The crucial distinction in Bataille’s analysis of fascism is between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The homogeneous are the Good Decent People of the World, who largely agree on all important questions and are the bedrock of society, etc. The heterogeneous are everyone and everything that does not fit into the homogeneous. This has two zones, shall we say. One zone holds all the abject and despised: “trash, vermin, etc.,” “dreams or neuroses,” “mobs,” “impoverished classes,” “madmen” and “poets.” The heterogeneous needs to be kept out of sight, repressed, cleaned up, stuffed away somewhere. But—a big but—the heterogeneous also includes everything that transcends the normal, as well as that which fails to attain the normal. That is, the pure, the sacred, the noble, the exalted. In short, the revered and the despised have a kind of secret kinship (here we see  the anthropological dimension of the argument).

We’re not done, though. The heterogeneous also includes the working class, which homogeneous society (a) requites for its labor but (b) would rather not acknowledge as a reality or share power with. 

And this is where Freud comes in. “The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego.” This helps account for why a certain cruelty and remorselessness will enter into the efforts of the homogeneous to extirpate the traces of  the heterogeneous. Bataille is willing to call this “sadistic”—sadique.

Bataille asserts that “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence”—that is, part of the elite, exalted zone of heterogeneity, the realm of the pure, the forceful, the disciplined, the elite. The homogeneous is not itself the elite—it’s Good Decent Normal People, remember. However, the Good Decent Normal People may feel the need of the forceful and disciplined to keep the dodgy end of the heterogeneous—the vermin, the diseased,, the queer, the alien—under inescapable control. 

…Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.Whatever emotions their actual existence as political agents of evolution provokes, it is impossible to ignore the force that situates them above men, parties, and even laws: a force that disrupts the regular course of things, the peaceful but fastidious homogeneity powerless to maintain itself (the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action),

This is starting to sound a little like Trump, no? His base does not mind that he breaks the rules or crosses lines or violates the Constitution. The important thing is to have the sheer brutality needed to put the heterogeneous back into the outer darkness. Then all we Good Decent Normal People will be safe again.

Gregor von Rezzori, _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories_, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

 FIVE RELATIVELY FREE-STANDING novellas (the stories tend to be sixty-some pages), all with the same narrator at different ages, and all of them seemingly drawn from Rezzori’s own experience, so these days “fictionalized memoir” or “autofiction” might be the handier descriptor, but the book was published in German almost fifty years ago, so, sure, “novel,” why not? It’s an interesting book, however we categorize it.

Rezzori’s family was part of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with holdings in Romania, but Rezzori was born in 1914, just five years before the Treaty of Versailles did away with the Austro-Hungarian empire and (as a side effect) his family’s place in the world. His parents and grandparents never quite leave that vanished world, with its dueling scars and hunting in the Carpathians, but Rezzori has to figure out how to live in post-war world with not much beyond charm and upper-class manners. 

The first four stories track him from boyhood in the 1920s to young manhood in the late 1930s, with a final chapter on his life after World War II. The settings shift, as do his circumstances, but a unifying element is, as the subtitle indicates, the narrator’s anti-semitism. He is not an ideological anti-semite, not at all fanatical about it, but it’s how he was raised, and it seems perfectly natural and understandable to him, persisting even as he has friendships and even love affairs with Jews.

And then, after the Anschluss, with Austria now bound to Nazi Germany, anti-semitism is state policy. The narrator isn’t a Nazi, does not exactly approve of the Nazis, but he’s no dissident, and on some level the policy seems not exactly wrong to him if a little exaggerated. 

In this way the book is a subtle and perceptive study of how our own unexamined assumptions, given a little family and social encouragement, can lead us to acquiesce in evil. 

The prose has a somewhat over-stuffed, Victorian-Beidermeier style at times, but the whiff of the 19th century novel in the languor of the descriptions seems deliberate and ironic, given the 20th century horrors hovering unstated in the background.