Criticism's cruelty

Our own Jodi Dean has produced some fascinating ruminations on cruelty, to which I only want to add a brief speculative note. So far, Jodi has described cruelty as a displacement onto others of the vulnerability one feels in oneself; i.e., I am strong, I am pure; but the [blacks-Jews-terrorists-Arabs-poor-ad infinitum] are weak and dirty and deserve to be scourged. I agree with this definition, and wonder how it accommodates the oft-noted connection between aestheticism and cruelty, a frequent subject both of literature and of literary criticism that purports to be moral (and that generally, with varying degrees of subtlety, occupies a political space at the convergence of traditional liberal ethics and neoliberal or neoconservative ideology).

James’s Gilbert Osmond, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert act with something of the cruelty of young children. Now children are proverbially cruel very much in Jodi’s sense—they fear that someone will notice their own peculiarities, so they strike out at whatever target for mockery suggests itself in another. But this is grade school stuff; I’m interested in the callousness of the very young, the three, four and five-year-old insensitivity arising from curiosity. I vividly remember, when I was about four, stepping on another child’s hand simply to see what the result would be. This kind of experimentation is a species of aestheticism, and perhaps of science as well, and maybe it gives us a hint of how aesthetics and science are related in their commitment to the constant observation and testing of the world, the mixing and remixing of its constituents. Very young children are still strangers to the world; they don’t quite know how it works and haven’t yet the capacity to build up a nexus of attachments that would on their own terms commit them to some behaviors and prohibit others.

This position of strangeness is reserved in society for the artist; he or she looks at the world through other eyes, shows it to us as if new, defamiliarizes it. So one story goes, but the story the moralizing critics tell extrapolates from this: they say that the lesson we learn from James or Nabokov is that cruelty arises from a failure of this strangeness, this curiosity. Cruelty is what happens when you feel too at home in your world and can’t estrange yourself enough to see how you would feel if you were Dolores Haze or Verena Tarrant or whoever. Aestheticism is at once the problem—a Humbert is preoccupied with the beauty of his obsession, his desire and its fulfillment—and the solution—if only this power to notice and reproduce beauty could be redirected so that the object of desire becomes a subject in the observer’s eyes. This is a position I myself have put forward and it is, I think, naïve (and also probably a naïve reading of James or Nabokov, but let’s leave that). It makes too much and too little of curiosity, of strangeness. There is no moral guarantee in a free investigation. If I step on his hand, it might hurt him, but that’s a chance I’ll have to take in the interests of finding out how these things work, or with what intricacy and complication they work. This is precisely an experiment with his subjectivity, just as Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay is an experiment in subjectivity, a curiosity about how other people feel. This is not a point that would be lost on at least James if not Nabokov (a writer I don’t quite trust), and when self-styled liberal critics start talking about necessary connections between free inquiry and empathy, or even between empathy and kindness, I start to understand the frequent complaint about non-artists who talk about art and also the too-infrequent complaint about the sheltered who are always calling down bombs on the invisible unsheltered a world away in the name of freedom—and that’s a point not even Orwell missed. I mean this as much as a rebuke to my past self as to anyone else. Torture is science and it is art, whether perverted or true I can’t say now. But it’s also the cruelty that Jodi has defined for us, for what is the strangeness of the observer of the world but a denial of his or her own relation to it?

I’m aware of how close that is to what the moralizing critics have already said and what I am trying to deny. I’m not trying to do away with empathy or curiosity and I don’t yet believe, if ever I will, that the face is the ultimate ethical trap. The neoliberal strain in literary criticism (Wood, Amis, Hitchens, et al) must be repudiated carefully, so as not to damage the tools, which are not necessarily the problem. The use made of them is the problem. Maybe this too is unbearable naiveté, an inauspicious beginning for my part in this long Sunday. But if Monday truly recedes infinitely, then we can only imagine it through Sunday’s eyes.

Comments

[Alphonsevanworden]

(I don't trust Nabokov either. The most flagrant example of the reification and property-ification of humanity whose self-justification, the delivery of which is the central, really the only apparent theme and motive of the works, is that giftedness in the production of capital L literature needs no justification. Way too in love with this word: "my.")

"Nature must be tortured to reveal her secrets." - Francis Bacon

In her ongoing discussion of cruelty, Jodi proposed that the individual subject is constructed principally by cruelty as a social relation: we accept what is basically a torturer model of selfhood, which I think coalesceses neatly with the New Criticism's torturer model of reader, he who posits the text as an organism and who dissects the body/text while it is still alive, and learns to prod here, or here, to produce certain effects, certain meaning-deliveries; his partner and inescapable twin is the moralist and guardian of the organism, the great pompous histrionic upholder of the dignity of Literature (VN), the member of the Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Text. "Kind ladies of the jury!" Qualification as a member of the Organic species of Text, of Literature, is determined precisely by the object's responses under specific methods of reading/torture. Henry James delivers to the expert reader bodies with multiple super sensitive points accompanied by built in specs, conjuring the manifestation of just this reader-torturer whose praxis on the ersatz body is both ritual and rehearsal.

[I say this I know too often but I think Klaus Theweleit (Male Fantasies, Book of Kings)most persuasively traces art-production to the cruel roots of exploitation and enclosure, which begin with the parcellization and alienation - the cultural dismemberment and torture - of the body.]

(Its a stretch but in this vein of thinking one could view Derrida's habits of reading as the paintstaking salving of wounds.)

[Matt]

That's a tempting description, Alphonse, if maybe Derrida is concerned with something (entirely) other than an habitual or utopian avoidance of the cruelty of pegging, but rather with the WAY in which such pegging takes place, i.e. what motivates, conditions and assuages it.

Whether such meta-comments and facile categorizations* remain ultimately indulgent and falling short, devoid of engagement with his actual texts, is something we may still disagree on..

*often circular and something of a fad to be sure, in a time when certain (non-analytic) philosophy is often relegated to a pop-appeal market, ("on" __ rather than "with", "through" or "against"?)

http://www.inwriting.org/weblog/archives/000163.html

[Andrew Pozkow]

MODERATOR: this comment is from a gutless troll posting from 82.212.56.66 (which works out to HSI-KBW-082-212-056-066.hsi.kabelbw.de) using the highly dubious email address "9@aol.com":

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Like many academics you error in reading Lolita in psychological or even moralist terms, when it's satire more of the voltairean type. The target of Humbert's cruelty (and of Nabakov's) is directed more towards the glittering consumer-driven mall-o-cracy of the US, and against arrogant, narcissistic cows such as Charlotte Haze, spawned from that mallocracy (which is also quite a protestant mallocracy). Lolita herself is as much a metonym for the bubblegummy spectacle of postWII Yankeedom as she is the alluring prepubescent sexpot: and Humbert's cruelty pales in regards to Quilty's. N. perhaps is saying--if you will excuse my somewhat petite-bourgeois logocentric tendency--that Humbert and his melancholic, old world manners are a better course of fare for Lolita (and Lolita-America) than is the harsh and sadistic Quilty or any American hick (and hick ideology) whom she may eventually have to serve. (And where is it written that we must refrain from all acts of cruelty or sadism, either metaphoric or corporal .......). Humbert's selfish and hedonistic "desire", to use your terms, may be somewhat reprehensible, but the Lolita object-of-desire will be made use of, regardless if it's Humbert or Quilty or a garage mechanic, now or later.

Sartre, with all his monumental faults and egotism, also perceived that various forms of S and M lay at the root of most interactions, personal or political. Nabakov is aware of the endless power struggles--male-female, youth-age, europe-America, plebe-aristo--but one detects more of a tragic sensibility in Humbert than in the usual cafe-existential or beat sadist. Humbert does phuck the pre-teen, breaks the taboo, violates the American dream, but at the same time feels he is rescuing her (which he course fails to do).

[Matt]

Yes, Nabokov's semi-nostalgic dream of America is tempered by his genuine nostalgia for something of a mythic 'old Russia.' So the dream is already dead, or always dying. Which is certainly one of the ways in which the 'live' metaphor (to use Ricoeur's term) of necrophilia extends beyond Lolita herself. But today the distinct, quaint towns of Humbert's Conradian voyage are all Walmarts and Starbucks. Well, almost all.

[Alphonsevanworden]

It's a given: "Kind ladies of the jury, any one of who yawns or glances at her fingernails during my excoriation of the vapidity of shopping mall culture must be a Philistine and secret puritan plotting the burning of books of Genius."

I'm not saying that's not a pretty good trick, but, as content its a little on the thin side.

[Alphonsevanworden]

The dispossessed propietor of Old Russia;s castration, the romance of decaptitated "I" ardently seeking to recover "mine," is even more edxhaustively bewailed in Ada.

[Andrew Pezcow]

MODERATOR: this comment is from a gutless troll posting from 82.212.56.66 (which works out to HSI-KBW-082-212-056-066.hsi.kabelbw.de) using the highly dubious email address "8@aol.com":

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What should be the critical guidepost then when reading Loitat? It moves like a Charlie Parker solo (perhaps orchestrated by Stravinsky); and is essentially solipsistic and postmodern: old russia has been demolished by bolshevik cossacks; and nazis, heirs of those alpine architectures of Kant or Hegel (or maybe only Werner Von Braun) pretty much wiped out the remnants of Xtianity or one might say Reason itself. So a solispist Humbert is as a decent and elegant a ubermensch as one could want, aghast at American self-absorption but also not incapable of a somewhat Whitman-like awe during his road trip-sexcapade.

Nabakov, like msot great satirists defies the critic, whether marxist or phenomenological.

[Alphonsevanworden]

The merely insistently reiterated instruction to "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" is though kind of lame in the way of defiance. As ideology, the novels are terrifically transparent, being hymns to the sanctity and mysticism of the possessive; the defiance of criticism amounts to offering readers tremendously deft style as lightshbow and literally confining any further response to only two choices: worship at the temple of Littracha or priggish pig-headed slander. Rather stodgy antiquarian nostalgic - these muck-minded Sartreans and Freudians wouldn't know Aaaht if it bit them in the arse, they sure don't write Vita Nuovas anymore! - than postmodern I think.

[Alphonsevanworden]

I see Lolita as old-fashioned anti-modern, and more specifically, the anti-Nausea.

[Alphonsevanworden]

Ada is pomo, though, if eccentrically earnest and pettish.

[Matt]

Poz/Pezcow/kow,
A vigorous antipathy toward "vulgar" Marx or Freud rather betrays a fundamental tension in N, methinks. An attempt to conjure them away, if you will. Which is not to take sides on anything so humdrum as "he's bourgeois" or "no he's not" but only to suggest that he maybe doesn't "defy" quite as well as he thought, or proclaimed he did.

Happy to let John defend an excellent post, and provocative suggestion re: "the neoliberal stain" for himself however.

[Andrew Pezcow]

MODERATOR: this comment is from a gutless troll posting from 82.212.56.66 (which works out to HSI-KBW-082-212-056-066.hsi.kabelbw.de) using the highly dubious email address "9@aol.com":

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Neither a Sartrean or Freudean be, but interpreting Lolita (and other N works) via Civilization and Its Discontents would not be entirely improper. IF you are speaking of desire and motivations and imposing power (including some type of individual hegemony), eros and thanatos are not such a bad unordered pair to have near. I dont care for Riceour (who appears to be another phenomenologist-closetcase theist) but the novel does in some sense hint at the necrophilia theme mentioned above--the various men in Lolita are not incapable of raping the girl then taking her to some landfill to off her; the cow-mommy figure of Charlotte Haze seems aware of Humberts' real inclinations but is not so concerned, or at least suburbanly blithe...

Additionally the play of Nabakovian syntax seems not far from the ideas of a certain mad austrian. It could be read more from a linguistic POV and value-free: a pleasing, innovative display of bop syntax, informed by Joyce and Conrad, the french realists, etc.

[Alphonsevanworden]

"Humbert's cruelty pales in regards to Quilty's."

But such a statement implies a psychological novel and a psychologizing criticism, with some kind of mimetic faux human personnages involved, which it is agreed is not the case with Lolita, or VN generally. Neither "Humbert" nor "Quilty" have either cruelty or kindness - attributes of humanity, an ersatz version of which is implied by certain texts vis a vis a certain kind of fictional character - they have this prose or that prose. It is indeed fruitless to approach these books either "in psychological or moralist terms;" they are highly distilled ideological gestures. In the 'memwars,' one can see how very adamant and passionate the pitch is in this regard, and there what Matt sees as 'conjuring away' in the blithe, facile derision of the novels is present as an unequivocal, impassioned, furious, outraged harrangue. The stock broker ruined in the crash (vulgar imbecile)must not dare compare his loss to that of the exiled author, for what he has lost is unearthly, supernatural (possessorship, the integrity of the sacred transcendant couple, the mystical twin sister "mine" her/itself).

[Pezcow]

MODERATOR: this comment is from a gutless troll posting from 82.212.56.66 (which works out to HSI-KBW-082-212-056-066.hsi.kabelbw.de) using the highly dubious email address "8@aol.com":

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Yes, sir, that seems to be the post.mod. line, and as indicated above I would agree the the syntactic-semantic aspects of Nabakov's writing are virtuoso-like (at least to my vull-garr perspective), but I do think many 19th and 20th century novels can be read as providing evidence of psychopathology on the individual and social level.

That may convert much of fiction into data or even case studies rather than art, but it's not an entirely bogus tradition. {Perhaps you've heard of Dostoyevsky).

Whatever "ideology" is, shouldn't it be informed by realistic views of human psychology and character? Or perhaps this discussion should be, if Marx is wrong or at least mostly misguided (in terms of providing reliable psychology and aesthetics as well as economics) then what sort of interpretation should occur. I'd say one informed by a material and dare we say Darwinian perspective on psychology is as valid (more so really) as the superficially linguistic or post.mod. (Or is this really not about lit., but about specifying an ethical obligation, an issue which post.mod or marxist-leftists tend to avoid.)

[Alphonsevanworden]

Only meant to say, that in the novels of Nabokov, things like "Humbert" and "Quilty" and "Dolorous Haze" are not the niches into which "realistic views of human psychology" are packed, unlike in so many other texts of similar length marketed in similar fashion and found in same section of bookstore. Which is not to say the novels do not contain arguments regarding human psychology - rather aggressive arguments. But the dramatis personae aren't demonstration models of said arguments.

[Alphonsevanworden]

For me the discussion beginning, "if Marx is wrong or at least mostly misguided" is going to be very short.

[John]

An interesting book in this regard, though it doesn't go far enough, is Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Wood takes our unease with Nabokov for granted--as I'm quite sure it's written somewhere that we ought to avoid cruelty--and then proceeds to read N's English books Said-style, ignoring their self-proclaimed hermeticism in favor of discerning in them the worldly, the history of pain (a line from Pnin), or the multiple dislocations of the twentieth century, from the Nazi regime that killed Pnin's old girlfriend to the post-war American ideology of femininity that, with her parents' complicity, drove Hazel Shade to suicide.

What's missing in Wood's analysis is just what Alphonse points out: N's history of pain is a particular one, the history of the dispossessed possessor whose rage at the American middle-class is of the aristocratic variety. You certainly can't moralize the books away, but neither can they aestheticize away the animating outrage. Nabokov's student, Pynchon, transforms this outrage into the properly aristocratic-proletarian so that it almost becomes its ideological opposite: in CL49, our outrage is what it should be, at all of humanity's dispossession.

The neoliberal stain? Well, I'm still thinking about it. There's something there that I'm reluctant to let go of; you know, long after I stopped reading Hitchens's political writing because of his systematic mendacity and useful idiocy, I still read his literary essays. I still read James Wood. God help me, I'll probably read Reading Lolita in Teheran. I haven't managed to put my finger on it yet, but there's something that I'm unwilling to cede to them, like I'm unwilling to cede freedom to the neoliberals/neocons (can we speak of a difference anymore?). Alphonse, I invite you to kick this sentimentality out of me!

[Alphonsevanworden]

"Alphonse, I invite you to kick this sentimentality out of me!"

+Moi?+ But I am terribly sentimental. Call me Contessa Svenevolezza or Frau Schmaltz. By far the most sentimental contributor to this blog. My fictional crush is Cavaradossi; you're the one who goes for the vengeful, bitter, moralizing, judgmental Jane Eyre!

[A Disgruntled Postal Worker]

Anybody who stipulates that Marx is "mostly wrong" isn't worth the fucking bandwidth or disk space.

Troll somewhere else, asswipe.

[Pezcow]

MODERATOR: this comment is from a gutless troll posting from 82.212.56.66 (which works out to HSI-KBW-082-212-056-066.hsi.kabelbw.de) using the highly dubious email address "8@aol.com":

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What is really amusing about this spat is that academic marxists and their more post. mod. descendents continually glom onto fiction and their belle-lettrist heroes such as Pynchon or Nabakov (tho VN could not stand the bolsheviks and I suspect he would not have approved of Derrida and Co., or Said, another of those great Crusaders for Truth which is not Truth) as if fiction somehow held the key to ideology and political psychology. This is quite opposed to Marx himself who indicates in numerous passages his disdain for literature and "belle-lettres", be it the romantic, lib-reform, or tory variety.

The product of a Nabakov or Pynchion however marvelously complex and insightful is as much a commodity as a hamburger, and the great error (and a sentimental one at that) is to read fiction as somehow above say history or empirical-based psychology (anyone remember Stanley Milgram?).

But the American post-mod. insider doesn't think in terms of data or hypotheses or verifiable concepts or claims: he's following the par-tay line, and cafe lefty-lit is regarded as above mere analysis and research (a Pynchon is praised, whereas a Keynes is trashed), a stance which is far more bourgeois and sentimental-ethical than, say, the typical biologist's or economist's approach to political problems. The usual sunday- school like generalizations and ad homs-- i.e. "neo-liberal= bad" or "psychology-> structuralism = bad"--demonstrate this leftist bumper-sticker mentality, which is as nausesating as the rightist version.

[Alphonsevanworden]

I feel the relief of first soiling of new Clegeries.

May I suggest that this sort of thing: "So it's another marxist blog in which no one ever dares question the marxist-dogma premises" is the inescapable result of a too credulous and unguarded consumption of the novels of Vladmir Nabokov. The books are positively dangerous to rationality and good faith.

[Jodi]

Wow--people take their literature really seriously. I should read more. And probably better. Shoot, I was seduced by Lolita--does this make me HH or Lolita or, perhaps more unfortunately, Shelly Winters or Melanie Griffith from the film versions?

Anyway, what I was really taken by was the powerful claim, "There is no moral guarantee in a free investigation." This key insight seems so easily lost these days, at least in American political rhetoric.

[John]

PizKo: You're right about me and Toni Morrison; I'll take her over even Pynchon (though I think she professed her love for him somewhere or other; a Salon.com interview?). Anyway, and I say this in good faith, don't come at me with this KGB shit; I'm the one sitting here trying to save something, anything, from the multifarious dishonesties and evasions of Christopher Hitchens and James Wood. If you want to talk about a party line and not having any use for facts, then I would look upon this picture and upon that: see what the apologists say and then explore actually existing capitalism. Maybe you can't see the problem, but in that case you might just be the poster-child for the necessity of an analysis of ideology. Perhaps I would make more time for the good faith of biologists and economists if they weren't always delivering up another theory about the deserving poor or the inferiority of women. Here's the thing: there are facts. I would never argue otherwise. But facts don't speak for themselves and you have to beware some of the people who would speak for facts. Anyway, that's proof enough for you that I'm hopelessly corrupt, I suspect, but your fact-loving self had best consider whose interpretation of the current geopolitical situation best accords with what's going on.

Alphonse: You've got me there! In fact, I am probably the most moralizing (and possibly judgmental, bitter and vengeful) contributor to this blog. I am more sentimental in real life, and in my fiction; the world will know when they read the tender necrophiliac sex scene in my novel. Nevertheless, if you think my enterprise is doomed, speak up!

[Alphonsevanworden]

"speak up!"

Oh, I couldn't. Way too shy.

[Alphonsevanworden]

May I...just...say....Oh please take the bells of the troll! I for one rather like Troll Theatre.