Meridian

Die Kunst ... bildet ... den Gegenstand einer Unterhaltung, die in einem Zimmer, also nicht in der Conciergerie stattfindet, einer Unterhaltung, die, das spüren wir, endlos fortgesetzt werden könnte, wenn nichts dazwischenkäme.

Es kommt etwas dazwischen.

Paul Celan, "Meridian"

In John Felstiner's translation:

Art forms the subject of a conversation that takes place in a room, not in the Conciergerie prison, a conversation that could go on endlessly, we feel, if nothing intervened.

Something does intervene.

Beautifully, when Celan identifies art as "the subject of a conversation," he chooses the word "Unterhaltung" and not the word "Gespräch" (which he does use later in "Meridian"). You see, "Unterhaltung" can also mean "entertainment." Celan is not usually identified as someone whose poetry one reads and thinks about for entertainment, but I have always derived the greatest possible intellectual entertainment from reading, thinking about, and discussing his work with people. It can be a harrowing experience, discussing Celan, but harrowing experiences are part of what constitutes art—as the age-old concept of tragic catharsis makes clear.

The scene Celan is referring to is in Büchner's "Danton's Death," and the conversation involves several revolutionaries (including Danton) who have been condemned to death. So what "intervenes" here is a death sentence.

There are many ways to read this intervention, but all of them involve a recognition that although art is a matter of "Unterhaltung" in the sense of both conversation and entertainment, art works provide the best material for "Unterhaltungen" when they recognize the imminence of interruption, of "intervention," of death sentences.

Poems can be "lighter than air," but at their best, their lightness points towards something unbearable, harrowing, cathartic.

Omnivore's Dilemma 2

My response to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma starts in out-of-the-way moments. The first is a reference to Basel: it turns out that Fritz Haber "died ... in a Basel hotel room in 1934." Haber is famous for three things: first, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of how to synthesize nitrogen from the air (for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind," as the Nobel committee put it). Secondly, he was the leader of Germany's efforts to use poison gas in World War I. Thirdly, he was the inventor of Zyklon B, which was used to gas Jews and others in German concentration camps during World War II. But he himself was a converted Jew who had to leave Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, and he died in Basel in 1934.

The second out-of-the-way moment that struck me involved a reference to an author I have written extensive notes about here: J. M. Coetzee. I spent the summer last year reading and re-reading his novels and essays, in anticipation of the publication of his newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and I read Pollan's book afterwards, so I was surprised and pleased to find Coetzee turning up in Pollan's book, especially as I immediately thought of Coetzee at the beginning of the paragraph that ends with a reference to him. (If Pollan had not referred to Coetzee, I would have written to Pollan to tell him about Coetzee.) Pollan's reference is to Elizabeth Costello (or, more precisely, to The Lives of Animals, which was later incorporated into EC):

Is it possible that history will someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their lives in the shadow of Treblinka? The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then "a crime of stupendous proportions" (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

The literary scholar in me wants to chastise Pollan for conflating Coetzee with Elizabeth Costello, the character he invented, but it would be too complicated, of course, for Pollan to observe the literary niceties here, and in fact, it was Coetzee who wrote that phrase, even if he put it into his character's mouth.

At first, Pollan surrenders, as it were, to the ideas expressed by Coetzee's character, as well as those of Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation (and, interestingly, a respondent when Coetzee first presented the lectures that Pollan refers to and that Coetzee later used in Elizabeth Costello). But Pollan finally concludes (referring to an organic farm he worked at for a week):

To many people even Polyface Farm is a "death camp"—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is ... To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.

As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: man is a "cow parasite."

Pollan hence finally sees Singer, Coetzee, and others who might criticize even a humanely run farm like Polyface Farm for its exploitation of animals as "sentimental" (something Coetzee has surely never before been accused of being!). Still, Pollan himself succumbs to the seductiveness of holocaust analogies when he comments that Haber's biography "recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture."

While preparing these comments, I took a break and chanced to be reading "On a Weekend Break in a Political Vacuum," a poem by Alan Gillis, from his book Hawks and Doves, which includes the following stanza:

She accuses herself, as it is with the food
that awaits her, served with speed in a bright
labelled box (always that first bite's stomach-
melting dream chews to cardboard and carcass,
like a drunken one-night stand's aftermath
rising to a seasickness which empties,
utterly empties, so that she winds up
seeking the comfort of warm, easy things—
the chilled blues and brightly-boxed food
that awaits her), so it is with her mind.

How perfectly Gillis captures the seductiveness of fast food: the "melting dream" that produces a dissatisfaction that, through twists and turns, leads one back to the "brightly-boxed food" even when (or perhaps precisely because) it "chews to cardboard and carcass." "She accuses herself," writes Gillis, as many of us perhaps accuse ourselves, but without changing, even if, with Pollan, we remind ourselves what "unsustainable" means: "Sooner or later it must collapse."

When I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, I began to shop differently. Did I go vegan? No. Did I go vegetarian? No. Did I start buying only organic food? No. Did I start buying only local food? No. But I began to compare things more carefully: is it organic? If so, where is it from? How much does it cost compared to the non-organic product? (It is surprising how many organic products are not more expensive than their non-organic counterparts, and how many more are only slightly more so.) I began to try to apply Pollan's conclusion:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, simply as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

The Master of Petersburg 3

As I mentioned in the comments to my first post on Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, JMC's Dostoevsky is not as forgiving of his stepson's story as he suggests in the passage I quoted in that post. Here's what comes up later in the book:

"There was more real life in the filthy, waddling old bear in his story — what was his name? Karamzin? — than in the priggish hero he so painfully constructed."

Here, JMC's Dostoevsky is clearly "at a distance and jeering" rather than "giving himself up" to the story at hand.

Later, he argues with Pavel's anarchist friend Nechaev, who appeals to the writer's own work to make a point:

"'We are on the brink of a new age where we are free to think any thought. There is nothing we can't think! Surely you know that. You must know it — it's what Raskolnikov said in your own book before he fell ill!' / 'You are mad, you don't know how to read,' he mutters."

Again, JMC's Dostoevsky claims that another character does not "know how to read," but the combination of these two passages with his own "reading" of his stepson's story make clear that these statements about "how to read" are ironized by the complete context of JMC's book.

So as so often in his work, ideas are argued about, but it becomes nearly impossible to pin them down as having any validity as generalizations. As in Kundera, the ideas are as much "thought experiments" as anything else: what kind of person would have such ideas? And how would that person use these ideas in argument to persuade others? What kind of life might be connected to those ideas?

For the ultimate example of such a book, I just reread Notes from Underground for the first time since the spring of 1983 (freshman year at Stanford). I thought about posting some comments, but everything in the book is so unstable because of the narrator's claim to extreme unreliability that the only way to comment on it is to write a long essay about it! Little tidbit observations like my JMC comments over the past few weeks just don't feel right.

So here's one last tidbit from The Master of Petersburg:

"He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creation lies open at his feet, the moment he loosens his grip and begins to fall. / It is a moment of which he is becoming a connoisseur, a voluptuary. For which he will be damned."

One last moment of "holding himself back", here not as reader but as writer, only to then "give himself up" to the writing, as he asked Maximov to do when reading. What comes out, in JMC's version of Petersburg, is Dostoevsky's Demons, but what strikes me here is the sensuality and physicality of the act of writing itself, of becoming lost in it, of being able to write what "has no place in the world" not because it is something transgressive but because you are creating the place for it through what you write.

Gilbert Sorrentino

I only just heard about the death of Gilbert Sorrentino (on May 18). I had limited contact with him during my Stanford days, but the contact was very important to me: he was the second reader of my honors thesis on Milan Kundera. I only talked with him a few times about Kundera and my thesis, and I do not remember any details of the conversations, but I do remember his warmth and his appreciation of my first truly serious efforts in literary criticism. And of course I appreciated his comments on the thesis when it was finished: the memorable element was that he wrote that he had never taken Kundera seriously before, but that I had made him do so.