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by Chuanfei Chin

Caravaggio's 'Boy Bitten By a Lizard' (Florence); source: Wikimedia Commons (copyright expired).

‘Without pain our life is unthinkable. With it, life is hardly to be endured’ (7). Most of us share the capacity to feel pain. We accept that having this general capacity is part of being human, yet we avoid specific experiences of pain. This is the first of our seemingly paradoxical attitudes to pain, with which Arne Johan Vetlesen, professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, opens his book. Secondly, we fear pain and condemn those who wantonly inflict it, though its forms and meanings fascinate us. It has a ‘Janus face’. Thirdly, we alone must endure the pain in our own bodies. Yet we readily observe pain in others and expect that they suffer from it as we do. What is privately suffered is assumed to be potentially shared. Such attitudes alert Vetlesen to the possibility that pain ‘contains something inherently desirable’. He is ‘prepared to be a spokesman for such an opposite view’ (10) – to decry a western culture that has developed ‘the most negative ever’ view of pain (8).

If his opening stance impresses, it has to be conceded that his defence of pain’s desirability disappoints. So far as I can tell, this is summed up later in an aside: Being susceptible to pain means being ‘sensitive’ and so ‘able to experience what is good’. It also makes us ‘want to enrich and expand ourselves through contact with the good’ and motivates us ‘to protect everything that is good’ (92). These ideas – that the capacity for suffering is constitutively and causally related to goodness – have been explored by many who wrestle with the problem of evil. Vetlesen echoes the ideas without responding to the challenges that have been posed to them.

What he offers, more intriguingly, is an eclectic study of pain. There are 12 chapters, mixing philosophical and cultural analysis. I divide them roughly into three overlapping parts. These make sense of pain as an isolating experience, a shared aspect of the human condition, and a cultural phenomenon. Part I (Chapters 1-3) probes the pain which results from torture, chronic illness, and psychological trauma. Through these, Vetlesen provides a conceptual analysis of how pain changes our normal connections to the world, including to other humans. Part II (Chapters 4-7) is a phenomenological description of how pain is experienced. From it, he draws existentialist conclusions about our responsibility and vulnerability in the world. Part III (Chapters 8-12) develops a model of how pain circulates within society and how culture transforms this pain. He uses it to interpret two aspects of western culture: its violence and valorisation of choice.

As my outline shows, Vetlesen’s concerns in this short book are varied – too varied, I believe, for him to be a natural ‘spokesman’ for any cause. He acts more like a solitary weaver. In this short book, he weaves together insights from a small but scattered group of philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and cultural critics. This can be frustrating to look at. When the weaving is too loose, it distorts the views of others and depends on careless generalisations. But, if we are alert to these dangers, we can find in Vetlesen’s tapestry some promising new patterns.

I. CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

In Part I, Vetlesen studies three intense forms of pain. Each ‘sheds light’ on ‘concealed’ aspects of pain (15). I find this method most illuminating in the first study on torture, where he shows a grasp of concrete and unusual details. There are fewer surprises in the studies on chronic illness and psychological trauma, where his conceptual analysis relies more on generalities.

Chapter 1 begins with some concepts about pain and torture from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985). As reported by Vetlesen: Pain perception is different from other psychological states because it is not ‘about’ or ‘for’ something in the world. Pain marks an ‘absolute division’ between persons because my pain ‘absolutely cannot be doubted’ while others’ pain ‘absolutely can be doubted’ (16). During torture, the victim’s pain ‘is the end, not the means’. The torturer only seeks information so as to recast his victim as an active betrayer of others, rather than a passive sufferer of pain. These conceptual claims about pain are too unnuanced to convince; it is rarely helpful to speak of the ‘absolute’ without saying what the relative would be. The claim about the torturer’s ‘pretended motive’ is implausible. Why need the torturer go to such lengths when the victim is often already cast as an agent of ideology or conspiracy – as ‘one of them’ (25)?

Vetlesen’s analysis is more compelling when he focuses on the victim and torturer’s experiences. To the victim in intense pain, the ‘world outside the body ceases to feel real’ (20). His body becomes his ‘worst enemy’ and his torturer’s ‘most effective tool’. On the other hand, the torturer is caught in a double bind. He must recognise pain in the victim, for he wants to use it against him. Yet he must deny its moral significance – part of the ‘human reality’ of pain (22). This leads to two conceptual insights. Firstly, pain undermines our ‘outward orientation’ onto the world and our unreflective control over our own bodies. Both enable us, in normal situations, to act in the world with ‘intentionality and agency’ (21). Secondly, in normal situations, we recognise pain in others automatically and respond to it sympathetically. Contra Scarry, there is often no room for doubt that others are in pain.

In Chapter 2, Vetlesen reinforces that last point. He re-interprets Scarry’s ‘absolute difference’ – between my pain and your pain – as something that is produced ‘under special conditions’ (27). For instance, during chronic illness, a patient’s intense and prolonged suffering can consume his life and diminish his solidarity with others. He will feel ‘cast out into a kind of aloneness’ and withdrawn ‘from a common human universe’ (28). Abruptly, Vetlesen infers: We are united by our common exposure to pain, but divided by our experiences of pain. ‘The pain that strikes always strikes in the form of a particular event in a particular person’s life’ (31). He also implies that this ‘experienced reality’ of pain is ‘overlooked’ by medicine and science, which assume only that similar bodies are ‘exposed to pain in a similar way’.

This analysis over-reaches in two ways. Firstly, Vetlesen neglects those painful experiences that are shared. These can bond us more tightly together: Ask anyone who has undergone tough sport or military training with others. Secondly, neither medicine nor science are as crude as he suggests. Here and elsewhere, he generalises about both with hardly a reference to the medical or scientific literature. In fact, some doctors and scientists worry when they compare painful experiences between individuals from different ethnicities and culture (Morris 2001; Lasch 2002). Others wonder about boundary cases such as human foetuses and persistently vegetative patients (Lee et al. 2005; Anand 2006; Demertzi et al. 2009): How far must their bodies be similar to ours to share painful experiences?

In Chapter 3, Vetlesen challenges a ‘classical division’ between psychic and physical pain. It does ‘more harm than good’ in understanding and treating pain (32), though it is ‘so ingrained’ that even he cannot avoid using it (50). Unfortunately, his analysis conflates two kinds of pain that are commonly labelled ‘psychological’. The first are psychosomatic pains, which do not have an obvious physical source. They are sensations that do not seem to lead from bodily injury or illness. The second are painful emotions, which need not have an obvious physical site. Fears or sorrows need not be felt in a part of the body, though they are normally expressed in sensations that are. Vetlesen protests that psychosomatic pains are sometimes dismissed as ‘second-rate’ and less than ‘real’ (32). I would add that neither psychosomatic pains nor painful emotions lack a physical basis – in this sense, they are as physical as pains which are easily sourced or sited. But these are reasons for clarifying, not abandoning, our conceptual distinctions. Such distinctions help us to study and treat different pains in their own right.

Vetlesen then makes a ‘detour to psychoanalytic thinking’ (34). He describes clearly how Anna O., a patient of Freud’s colleague, was diagnosed with psychological trauma, which she had displaced into muteness. Her case shows that the proximate cause of ‘mental sufferings’ need not be an actual event, but one fantasised by the sufferer. However, Vetlesen’s other conclusions from the case are confusing – it is not reassuring when he has to interrupt himself to say, ‘Do not let me make this more cryptic than it is’ (38). He starts with an implausibly strong metaphysical claim about our ‘primary reality’: ‘Only that which is mentally real for an individual is actually real’ (38). This is gradually weakened to: It plays the ‘decisive role’ in our lives (39). A human is ‘dependent on meaning’, as dependent on it for life as on food (42). He ends with two causal claims about suffering. One seems to me a banal comparison: that psychic pain ‘can be just as fatal’ as physical pain (43). The other draws an unsupported contrast: that the cause of psychic pain is ‘far more complex’ and involves personality and history to a ‘far greater extent’ than physical pain.

II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

Part II contains a critique of Sartre’s ‘existentialist view’ of emotions (especially painful ones), followed by an abstract account of painful experiences from Vetlesen’s ‘phenomenological perspective’. The former is based on a misreading, while the latter is misleading in parts; nevertheless, Vetlesen highlights some aspects of pain that are missing from Part I. At the end, he uses ‘existentialist philosophy’ to draw two lessons from painful experiences.

'Horror and Agony': Figure 21 from Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Source: Wikimedia Commons (copyright expired).

Chapter 4 introduces his criticisms of Sartre, though they are elaborated throughout Part II. Sartre is a ‘so-called existentialist’ philosopher, whose ‘striking individualism’ is ‘in tune with the spirit of the age’ (44). He believes that an individual’s mental reality is ‘completely’ his ‘own responsibility’. In particular, ‘feelings – like moods and mental states – are chosen and willed by the individual’. They have an intentional relation to the world and a meaning that is ‘created and maintained by the subject’ (46).

According to Vetlesen, this general theory of emotions faces two problems. Firstly, it neglects their affective dimension. Painful emotions such as shame and fear include ‘a quality of being moved, shaken, hit, touched’ (46); they are not chosen, ‘unlike some possible object for my thoughts and my will’ (47). Sartre’s theory fails to capture this ‘gut firstness of the feeling’. Secondly, it lacks a ‘clinical and therapeutic’ perspective (49). From this perspective, an advanced ability or desire to ‘lay aside’ and ‘go in and out’ of our own emotions may be a symptom of mental illness. It is a ‘warning sign’ of inauthenticity – rather than an ‘innocent theoretical point about what it means to feel something (as Sartre believes)’.

I believe that neither problem arises for Sartre, when he is properly read. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes cases in which we seem to deploy our own painful emotions. For instance, if I ‘adopt’ the attitudes appropriate to sadness, then I am able to put this sadness aside when a visitor comes. I ‘promise it an appointment for later’ after he leaves (1958, 61). This ability suggests, to Sartre, that my sadness ‘is itself a conduct’ – a ‘magical recourse’ used by my consciousness to avoid the ‘too urgent’ realities of my situation. Vetlesen recounts this case, then inflates it into a general ‘theory’ of emotions: ‘As with other emotions, “being sad means first making oneself sad”; sadness itself is a kind of behaviour that I choose’ (42 with my italics; 66). But here is what Sartre says: ‘And in this case even, should we not say that being sad means first to make oneself sad?’ (1958, 61). He offers his diagnosis as specific to some unusual cases. He explicitly adds that deploying an emotion is not the same as having it. ‘If I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad – the being of the sadness escapes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself with it.’

For Sartre, there is nothing ‘innocent’ about such cases. He presents them as examples of ‘bad faith’, which Vetlesen acknowledges (44). Later, Vetlesen points to the ‘internal and pre-reflective’ relation to one’s own feelings (66). In particular, a painful experience is marked ‘by its lack of distance, by its directness’: ‘my pain fills me’ (73). This is offered ‘in stark contrast to Sartre’s analysis’ – for he has Sartre proposing that ‘I as a subject, as consciousness, completely decide the meaning of pain’ (72). Sartre, it seems, has missed something obvious about ‘the reality of pain in human existence’. Yet, from a chapter on ‘The Body’, here are Sartre’s descriptions of how his eyes hurt when he is reading:

Pain is not considered from a reflective point of view; it is not referred back to a body-for-others. It is the eyes-as-pain or vision-as-pain…but it is not named in consciousness, for it is not known. (1958, 332-333)
The pain is neither absent nor unconscious; it simply forms a part of that distance-less existence of positional consciousness for itself. (334)

It takes reflection before we can ‘transcend the pure quality of consciousness in pain’ and treat the pain as an ‘object’ (335). And even then: ‘The facticity of a pain-consciousness…is a facticity discovered in perpetual flight’ (387). Thus Vetlesen agrees more with Sartre than he thinks.

In Chapter 5, he draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the body to offer an account of how pain is experienced. Two features of his account stand out. Firstly, it is highly abstract. Vetlesen begins by connecting, ‘at a basic level’, pain and feeling: ‘to be exposed to pain is the same as being able to feel pain’ (50). This connection applies to both painful sensations and emotions. Next, Vetlesen claims that the feeling of pain ‘cannot be separated from conscious understanding’ (51). He is ambiguous in specifying this cognitive dimension: ‘the principle characteristic…is precisely the feeling of something causing pain’ (51), though ‘hurting is what the feeling is quintessentially about’ (52).

Sometimes Vetlesen uses metaphors to amplify his abstract claims. Pain is an ‘uninvited guest’ or ‘intruder’, who ‘does not go away even though I might wish for it’ (52). It has an ‘utterly sovereign’ power that ‘heaves the ego down from the pedestal’ by challenging our power over everything in life. Pain turns into a ‘magnet’ that attracts all attention or a ‘tyrant’ who mercilessly dictates all meaning (56). Such metaphors can be provocative. At their best, they highlight aspects of some painful experiences which are theoretically neglected – in this case, a patient’s loss of power.

Secondly, his account is highly general. ‘Generally speaking, pain is what makes the body a particularly important concern for the individual’ (54). To support this claim, he cites Merleau-Ponty’s insight that we normally act with our bodies. The body is the ‘self-evident, unreflected and unnoticed centre’ of experiences. So, ‘it is because of pain (illness, injury, dysfunction) that I become aware of my body at all.’ Vetlesen is careful to note exceptions to this rule, such as our heightened awareness during sexual experiences. But he does not address the risk that he is conflating significantly different phenomena. ‘Injury, illness, dysfunction’: his account does not distinguish how these, in different ways, bring awareness to our bodies.

Instead he offers a rhapsody:

Pain steals the focus. Pain commands my total attention, it drains me of energy….Pain is voracious: it wants to consume me, have all of me, not share my consciousness….Pain is intensely jealous: it eliminates all rivals of my attention and energies as soon as they emerge, so that finally all that is left is pain, as the all-consuming and all-penetrating centre of my life. I am pain, the pain is me, there is nothing else, nothing outside. (54-55)

Earlier Vetlesen contrasts his phenomenological perspective with other more ‘theoretical’ ones: it is ‘pain as something experienced that interests us’ (52). But his analysis shows us that phenomenology can also be too theoretical – too effortlessly afloat the concrete detail of ‘something experienced’. As long as it remains at an abstract and general level, there are limits to what he can discover about complex experiences of pain.

In Chapter 6, Vetlesen does narrow his focus to ‘Anxiety and Depression’. This title is misleading since he does not seriously discuss either as medical problems. Instead, he discusses Angst – a state of anxiety which has no ‘particular object in the world’ and where the ‘cause is unknown to the person’ (58). Vetlesen compares this anxiety to ‘my enemy, the stranger in my midst who knocks me down, who springs up without my being able to prevent or control it’ (60). For the sufferer, it drains the outside world of meaning and paralyses him from acting in it. But Vetlesen, following Heidegger, believes that this anxiety has a ‘positive nature’ (61). It can ‘rouse’ an individual to take ‘responsibility for his own life and own choices’, and to abandon ‘conformist or rigid ways’ (65). It is thus ‘a springboard for existentialist choices’ (67).

Chapter 7 qualifies this existentialist interpretation. Although painful experiences can motivate us to confront choices, they also point us towards ‘the given’­ – those aspects of life which are not governed by choice. Our susceptibility to pain is one such ‘non-choosable’, ‘unalterable’ and ‘fundamental’ condition of existence (69). Vetlesen lists a few others: ‘Dependence, vulnerability, mortality, the fragility of relations and existential loneliness’. Our choices are made within a ‘framework’ of these fundamental conditions (70). What happens when we forget this framework? At the end of the next Part, Vetlesen identifies a danger for those who fail to acknowledge the vulnerability that limits our responsibility.

III. CULTURAL ANALYSIS

Part III takes up more than half of Vetlesen’s book. He creates a model to describe, abstractly, the circulation of pain in society. Then, in two long chapters, he uses it to analyse two cultural phenomena: ‘Violence in Culture’ and ‘Compulsive Choice in a Multi-option Society’. Vetlesen’s model is based on theoretical ideas from a few psychologists and psychiatrists, while his analysis includes a range of hit-and-miss cultural references. The connections between these ideas and references are not always clear; in what follows, I reconstruct some of them after having reread the chapters several times.

According to his model, pain creates psychic pressure on an individual – a ‘pressure that seeks release’ (88). This release comes via two social processes: pain is either transported from that individual to another or transformed through their culture. Chapter 8 focuses on transportation. Pain is relieved by shifting it onto others: ‘You bear it instead of my doing so’ (75). This may be a ‘primitive, even infantile’ attitude, but it is ‘fundamental for all of us’. It is most salient in psychopaths. Vetlesen cites research by the psychiatrist Otto Kernberg and the psychologist Alice Miller. Kernberg argues that some psychopaths hurt others because they are themselves hurt. Their pain stems from a sense of vulnerability; for them, ‘to be vulnerable is to be hurt’ (76). Miller makes a broader generalisation from her case studies: ‘Every abuser has once been a victim of abuse’ (80).

Vetlesen concedes that the latter claim is a ‘considerable exaggeration’. There are exceptions, such as ‘first movers’ who abuse others without having been abused (80). Moreover, some abused youngsters turn into empathetic adults who take on the ‘self-effacing giver role’ (81), thereby breaking the ‘evil circle’. Nonetheless, Vetlesen proposes that most of us share the impulse to transport pain. He seeks our acknowledgement of this: ‘What we see fully developed in the psychopath are traits all of us can…recognize in ourselves’ (77).

If this impulse is ‘universally human’, then it risks being explanatorily idle. So how is it significant? Firstly, I think it draws a surprising theoretical connection between some psychological forces. They are all vehicles for transporting pain. Vetlesen mentions at least three in Chapters 8 and 10: envy when another person embodies ‘what it pains me most that I lack’ (84), which makes me punish him; projection of my own ‘inner conflicts’ onto others, so that they can be attacked there (82, 96); and sadism which tries to ‘create and control’ suffering in others, so as to avoid experiencing it myself (100, 102). Secondly, for Vetlesen, this impulse is part of the ‘interpersonal dynamics’ which causes pain (77). Such dynamics are neglected when the ‘public health sector and ‘public debate’ focus on ‘biological and genetic causes’. He implies that this may collude with those who would blame the suffering victim (78).

Chapter 9 describes a more ‘mature’ and ‘non-destructive’ way to relieve pain: its transformation through culture. Culture provides ‘symbolic forms’, which we can use to ‘convert and process’ our painful experiences (88). Vetlesen cites Edvard Munch’s paintings as examples. Their depiction of pain expands the ‘symbolic space’ in which we can ‘open up to the pain we carry around with us’ (90). He concedes that this may seem a ‘highly banal’ interpretation of Munch’s art, though he clarifies that his ‘humanist’ interpretation does not exclude other artistic meanings and effects. In Chapter 10, Vetlesen compares these transformational products of culture with transitional objects in psychotherapy. He borrows a concept developed by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: A teddy bear is a ‘transitional object’ when it acts as a ‘stand-in’ for the mother (106). An angry child might bash the bear instead of his mother – the ‘real object’ of his rage. Similarly, cultural products can be ‘symbolic substitutes’ that reduce our need to ‘force pain out onto others’.

Assessing his overall model, Vetlesen cites its ‘advantage’ in highlighting some ‘dynamic processes’ that cause pain (92). What about its disadvantages? I shall briefly mention three limitations in its ‘social perspective’ on pain. Firstly, the model focuses on pain’s circulation, rather than its creation or distribution. Vetlesen does not discuss how different societies create different kinds of suffering, and how unjust arrangements distribute suffering unfairly. Instead, his model assumes that society begins with a fixed distribution of pain, which is then transported or transformed. This assumption is reinforced when he abruptly switches from talking about ‘experienced pain’ to ‘existential pain’ (89-90). The latter is defined, variously, as the pain of ‘being human’ – of ‘not being perfect’ (100) and ‘still being vulnerable to the reality of pain’ (159). It is common to all humans and, thus, not dependent on their arrangements.

Secondly, the model is centred on individuals, rather than institutions. It explains pain’s circulation by appealing to individuals’ impulses and interactions. For Vetlesen, the ‘most violent’ sources are ‘inside us’: we are ‘driven’ by ‘inner forces we have not chosen to be there’ (97). His model does not include the social structures that surround these ‘inner forces’. Culture appears only as the ‘symbolic resources society places at the disposal of its members’ (89). Not surprisingly, his solution to suffering stresses individual responsibility. There is ‘a task for each and every one of us’ – to transform pain, to use the symbolic resources to heal our ‘wounds’ of suffering (93).

Thirdly, the model focuses on the substitution effects of transformation. Vetlesen is concerned with how cultural products can substitute for human targets. He does not describe their different meanings. What matters, to his model, is that low culture can be ‘existentially just as resilient, just as symbolically saturated’ as high culture (126). Thus he offers only a few criteria for evaluating their potential to transform pain. Cultural products cannot be ‘too concrete’ in representing ‘aggression and destructiveness’; the hurtful needs to be portrayed in an ‘abstract and thereby processed’ form (94). Engaging with ‘richer and more elastic’ images of destructiveness will reduce the urge to destroy ‘real people’. Symbols trap this urge ‘within a world of fantasy and imagination’ (96). So the ‘more impoverished’ a set of symbols, the shorter ‘the path to bodily action’.

Such weak criteria contributes little that is new to cultural criticism. In Chapter 11, Vetlesen applies the criteria to analyse the products of popular culture. Full of violence, these products are ‘too similar to the hurtful and evil’. Their images and stories are ‘too little abstract’. So they cannot fulfil their ‘alleviative and stand-in functions’ to transform an audience’s pain (108). He mentions three of the usual suspects: violent films that end up ‘quite simply as user manuals’ (109); reality television with a ‘vulgar-Darwinist premise’ that weeds out the weakest; and computer games that prize killing, which make aggression seem like the ‘natural’ reaction to frustration (112). His criticisms are too familiar. They draw no surprising connections between these phenomena.

Moreover, they are undermined when he mischaracterises some of the phenomena. Two examples: The vampire is not – as Vetlesen claims – the ‘image of evil’ in popular culture (108). He is not always an ‘evil misdoer’ who discourages us from showing ‘vulnerability and dependency’ (109); in books and films, he is now often the romantic and tormented anti-hero. Reality television is not ‘without mediation’ (111). Far from being ‘directly transmitted directness’, it is full of manipulated scenarios and exaggerated reactions. These are put on screen by producers and participants to boost ratings.

Despite these problems, Vetlesen’s model leads to two insights when he adds a social dimension to his cultural criticism. Firstly, when a society suffers from ‘symbolic impoverishment’, its members stop processing their pain on the ‘inside’. Instead, they transport it automatically to the ‘outside’. Violence towards others becomes the ‘favoured answer’ to pain: it is ‘handed down from generation to generation’ as a social norm (115). The result, as observed by others, is a wider ‘culture of callousness’ (117). Secondly, it is not enough for a society to produce ‘good symbolic resources’ which can be used to transform pain. These resources must be distributed to reach those ‘groups’ which need them ‘most of all’ (125).

But, as I noted above, his model remains too centred on individuals to account for social structures which support this ‘symbolic impoverishment’. It fails to explain how these structures contribute to social norms about violence and how they ought to distribute symbolic resources. To be fair, Vetlesen does not ignore these issues. He mentions: too few ‘opportunities for development’ in young people (121); too much permissibility and individualism, which urge ‘one’s own satisfaction at any price’ (122); too many challenges to both the parental authority to ‘pass on moral values’ and the adult responsibility to ‘communicate standards of right and wrong to other people’s children’ (122); and too much ‘relativism’ with its ‘plurality of life-views and lifestyles’ (123). These criticisms are, again, familiar from some conservative critiques of modernity. Vetlesen casts no new light on them, for they are not related systematically to his model.

I suspect that Vetlesen is aware of his model’s limitations. Chapter 12 – the longest in the book – breaks out from these limitations to describe the creation of some painful pathologies and their connection to our social structures. He diagnoses the ‘pathologies’ of surviving in a ‘multi-option’ society. In western society, choice has become ‘compulsory’ because we see it as the mark of freedom (128). To choose is to express our ‘creativity and individuality’. This extends even to our identities: we claim ‘a newly won “freedom” to constantly recreate’ ourselves (129). At the same time, choice has become more difficult. Modern culture has a ‘radical openness’. It offers more options than ‘answers and yardsticks’. There are ‘fewer sheet anchors, less clarity, less unambiguity and objectivity’ (134). What results from being compelled to choose in this culture?

Vetlesen interprets various pathologies – burn-out, action paralysis, anxiety and depression – as ‘unintentional consequences’ of these ‘social conditions’ (128). A sample of his diagnoses: The increasing freedom to choose develops into a ‘fear of taking a wrong turning’ (145). Firstly, this fear makes one constantly ‘assess and re-assess’ choices. Life becomes an ‘uninterrupted exam’, creating stress and exhaustion (149-150). Secondly, one is more easily ‘paralysed by possibilities and unable to act’ (146). This paralysis can build into depression. Vetlesen quotes the French psychiatrist Alain Ehrenberg, who believes that depression is ‘melancholy in a society where everyone is equal and free’. So far, so familiar: the link between excessive choice, paralysis and depression has been explored by other critics of free-market liberalism (Lane 2001; Schwartz 1994, 2004).

What is new in Vetlesen’s analysis arises elsewhere. He reminds us that ‘neo-liberal’ ideology often conflicts with reality. It prizes freedom in the form of choice and individuality, but both are compromised in a modern economy. Some choices are open only to individuals with ‘material resources’. Yet these resources ‘tend to be distributed along lines of class’ (130). In an era of individualism, ‘conformism…is tightening its grip’ (138). As workers, individuals must make themselves ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ to suit corporate needs. As consumers, ‘all needs, all aims, all fantasies’ are shaped by markets so that they can be satisfied by commodities (139). The fashion industry, for instance, claims to value individuality, but relies on ‘iconic figures’ and celebrities to influence consumer tastes (153).

Amidst these conflicts, Vetlesen uncovers two new forms of pain. Firstly, individuals suffer from shame when they cannot realise the freedom promoted by neo-liberalism. Their shame is ‘fuelled by a sense of sub-optimal performance’ – of ‘not realising enough of one’s presumed potential’ (135). It leads to self-disgust, which encourages the individual to enforce ‘strict self-control regimes’ (135). For Vetlesen, this becomes a common cause behind three separate phenomena: eating disorders; sadomasochistic sex; piercing and other forms of self-injury. He adds a provocative parallel between the self-injuring teenager with the businessman ‘who walks slightly faster, almost breaks into a run, checks his watch for the umpteenth time’ (140). Both are ‘exploiting themselves’ and ‘pushing themselves’ to ‘withstand more and more’.

Secondly, individuals suffer from pain that has been shaped by ‘pressure from the market’ (152). Vetlesen brings up the industries in cosmetic surgery, pharmaceuticals and fashion. Each thrives by ‘putting pressure on people’s self-esteem’, ‘making us detest our bodies and dissatisfied with our looks’ (153). Their products change our standards of physical beauty and psychological orderliness. As more customers use the products, others face increasing ‘social pressure’ to meet those standards. A vicious cycle of pain may result, in which efforts to ‘master pain’ create so much stress that life ‘becomes more painful’ (155). Vetlesen connects this possibility to our failure at acknowledging human limits. Believing that every limit can be transformed into a choice – a choice to transcend that limit with technology: this is a modern ‘hubris’ (154). It is another way to overlook those aspects of life which are not open to choice. Here his cultural and phenomenological analyses reinforce each other. Both Parts II and III end by highlighting the unchosen vulnerability that underlies our freedom to choose.

Let me conclude by considering Vetlesen’s title, A Philosophy of Pain. This may be a translator’s gift – the original in Norwegian is more simply, perhaps more ambitiously, Pain. What are this book’s weaknesses and strengths as ‘a philosophy’? Its first weakness: Vetlesen neglects a substantial philosophical literature on pain. Since the 1960s, analytic philosophers have built perceptual and representational models of pain (Aydede ed. 2006). These offer conceptual resources which could help him to contest Scarry’s reported claim that pain is not ‘about’ the world. Other philosophical writings – such as Wittgenstein (1953) and Ryle (1968) – challenge her ‘absolute division’ between my pain and others’ pain. I see them as missed opportunities for a dialogue, since the analytic models could also gain from his phenomenological insights. Secondly, when he mentions other philosophers and their views, he can be careless. I have spelled out how he sets up a straw-Sartre. Elsewhere, without warrant, he states that ‘all of moral philosophy rests’ on the claim that ‘human beings naturally…strive for what they regard as good, or what seems to promise pleasure’. Then he proposes that the ‘connection’ in this descriptive truism ‘can be expressed most directly’ by the normative – and far from common – claim that ‘something is good because we connect it with pleasure’ (10).

There are two main strengths. Firstly, Vetlesen combines three approaches to illuminate different aspects of pain. I have shown, for instance, that his conceptual analysis of how pain changes a person’s relationship to the world is broadened by his phenomenological attention to the experience of pain. His existentialist interpretation of what pain says about life supports his cultural diagnosis of new forms of pain. Secondly, Vetlesen’s cultural analysis leads us to new patterns in pain-related phenomena. Some of his arguments are avowedly selective and provocative; they depend on the risky interpretation of ‘signs’ (132) and ‘warning signals’ (142). But, through them, we can weave our way to some unexpected meanings of pain.

Arne Johan Vetlesen: A Philosophy of Pain
Translated by John Irons.
Reaktion Books, London 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-1-86189-5417.
Softcover, 167 pages, US$27.95

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Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, B. 1994. The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. New York: Norton.
Schwartz, B. 2004. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. New York: Harper Collins.
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations (3rd edition). Translated by GEM Anscombe. London: Blackwell Publishing.

Chuanfei Chin is  doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Senior Tutor in the Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore. 

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank Alexandra Serrenti and Gavin Maughfling for discussion.

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by Katrina Gulliver

Amitav Ghosh (Photo by David Shankbone, released under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence/Wikimedia)

River of Smoke follows Sea of Poppies, as the second instalment of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. We arrive on the eve of the Opium Wars in a story that began not in Canton, but in India, where the poppies were grown. Sea of Poppies showed us the world of the growers in Bengal, and the social order built upon its profits. Local landowners profited by keeping the growers in a state of indebtedness, and the British traders ran factories and shipped the drug to China.

Ghosh illustrated the rich details of opium production, from its harvest to its packaging in earthenware balls for shipment. The sailors transporting it introduced us to life at sea, and to their other cargo: the people who had been sold (or offered themselves into) indentured servitude. The characters were all connected by the ship Ibis, having been on board during its voyage from Calcutta to Mauritius—as crew, indentured servants, or in the case of two characters: as convicts being transported.

River of Smoke begins perhaps fifty years later, then backtracks to take up where Sea of Poppies left off. Two of the primaries in the first novel, Deeti and Zachary, are barely mentioned in this book: I hope they return in the third (and there are hints that they will). In this volume, Neel, the deposed-raja-turned-convict of Sea of Poppies, comes to the fore, along with a new character—a Parsi trader from Bombay. But the maelstrom of characters means that there is no single protagonist.

This second book follows the path of the opium to its trade in Canton. The heterogeneous world of the Indian Ocean trading community is again clearly illustrated, with discursions into botany, painting, and the varied food available in each port. The subaltern can indeed speak in these books: characters who are of the “elite” are not the focus, rather those lower on the ladder, more directly affected by all aspects of the drug trade.

In River of Smoke, Ghosh’s style is varied, with some of the narrative in epistolary form. These changes of register are a little odd at times, and seeing only one half of a correspondence (for reasons that are explained in the narrative), still leaves the recipient, Paulette (a major figure in Sea of Poppies) little more than a cipher here. (With the changes of viewpoint and language, I was reminded of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas).

“]

Opium smokers in China, c. 1900. Illustration from Mrs. Archibald Little (=Alicia Bewicke): The Land of the Blue Gown, London 1902. Reproduction: Wikimedia/public domain.

In Canton, we see the politicking of the traders on the brink of the First Opium War, in which some of them come off as unapologetic drug pushers, like those on The Wire. (They even talk the same way as those dealers, with at one point, a character saying “It’s all in the game”). In the previous sixty years, demand for opium had skyrocketed in China, indeed doubling just between 1800 and 1820. In the late 1830s, the Chinese authorities decided to start enforcing the laws against opium trade in the country, and banning its importation. Faced with their trade being shut down, the traders included men of conscience willing to abandon the trade as well as blatant profiteers. Caught in the middle were the smaller traders, who —whatever their misgivings—were bound to their investors and would be ruined if unable to sell their narcotic cargo.

Ghosh also highlights the (suggested) homosexuality of the male-only world of foreign traders in Canton (since foreign women are not permitted into the city). The men dance together at parties, and gay relationships seem to be acknowledged if not widely accepted. Of course, these men also form relationships with local women, or flower-boat girls. Long-distance trade that could keep men away from home for months at a time also resulted in more serious liaisons than prostitution: a mistress and children in one city with a wife and family in another seems to have been a common arrangement.

In Sea of Poppies, the fate of almost all the women seemed to involve sexual violence or enslavement, and scenes of cruelty were particularly affecting. The sadistic exploitation of the disempowered was perhaps a parallel of the exploitation of the opium trade and colonial system as a whole. In the second book, female characters are less prominent, and we see fewer examples of brutality, which was something of a relief.

We do encounter the details of opium intoxication, which seems to be indulged, furtively or openly, by members of all races and classes. Indeed, people at all stages of the trade seem to be enslaved to the drug. Opium had developed its own culture, its rituals—the fancy pipes, the varieties of opium, the techniques of ingestion. As Julia Lowell, in her new book The Opium War, (Pan MacMillan, 2011), comments, “A way of burning money, smoking was the perfect act of conspicuous consumption” (p.23).

As Lowell points out, the rulers of British India, through their monopoly on the production of opium in Bengal, had enforced quality control: consumers were getting a pure product. A product that was fashionably illicit. By the time of River of Smoke, opium use had shifted from being an elite pastime to one reaching all layers of society.

In an accurate depiction of the cosmopolitan diversity of colonial ports at this time, the white characters are much in the minority. Paulette Lambert the only “European” of the principals in this book, and she is somewhat unusual. She represents the cultural go-between position of the European child raised in India, speaking as her first language the Bengali of her wet-nurse. She—and her childhood friend, Robin, who appears in this novel—are members of a kind of empire culture that was fading by the 1830s. That period, which was described in William Dalrymple’s White Mughals (Viking, 2003), was marked by cultural assimilation, with some European men (whether colonial officials or private traders) adopting local costume, and taking local wives.

This changed, however, with the “arrival of the Memsahibs”—when white women started arriving in significant numbers in colonial Asia. Once the British men started taking their white wives and families to live in their colonial postings, the goal was to maintain an image of respectability, and a European life-style. The idea of “going native” was regarded with disdain. The British started dressing as they would in England, and more crucially abandoning the local wives/mistresses that had been tolerated by the East India Company. But that could not erase the Eurasian community that had developed, and the liminal position of such individuals is a recurrent theme among Ghosh’s characters.

As in Sea of Poppies, much of the dialogue is in various dialects—in this novel the pidgin of the Canton trading port. A glossary was provided at the back of the first novel, which may still be required to understand much of the what is said. (I would also have appreciated a list of dramatis personae to keep track of some of the more peripheral figures). But even without fully understanding them, the rhythms of the language evoke the whirl of life in a trade port. The narrative is so absorbing, that here Ghosh builds too on the hints at the supernatural that first appeared in Sea of Poppies: these characters are all linked socially, by blood, or by an apparent psychic force. They experience reincarnation—literal and metaphorical—as they take on each other’s roles in the social hierarchy.

Some of the coincidences add to the almost fairy tale element of this novel. Two characters wind up explaining the Canton trade to Napoleon, when their vessel happens to pass St Helena and they are granted an audience with the exiled emperor. Paths cross and lives are entwined, just as romantic encounters seem to take place when characters get tangled in unfurled turbans or saris.

The many descriptions of sumptuous clothing had me reaching for an encyclopedia to identify the various garments:

‘In Zadig’s case, these consisted of a sumptuous burumcuk caftan, trimmed with ermine, and an embroidered Yerevan waistcoat; for Bahram they were a silver-grey ‘Mughalai’ pyjama with an ornamental izarband drawstring; it was worn with a knee-length outer garment, worn in the fashion of a coat—a choga of blue silk, with a raised collar made of strips of golden kinkhab ribbon.’

Through their clothing, Ghosh tells us much about these figures and their lives, which is not explained in the narrative. We come to know them by their costumes, and what these costumes mean, socially and culturally.

At two volumes, each of 500 pages, this trilogy will indeed be an epic. I do not know if the intention with the final volume is to focus on opium’s end consumers, but I look forward to seeing how these intertwined lives are resolved.

Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2011.
ISBN-13: 9780719568985
Hardcover, 528 pages, US$28.00 

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

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by Hans-Dieter Gelfert

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Adam and Eve in Paradise, Gemäldegalerie Berlin (Image: public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

Love and Evil are the driving forces of most, if not all, plots of dramatic and fictional literature. For a binary opposite of Evil one would expect the Good instead of Love – but Goodness, as every reader knows from experience, does not yield much aesthetic gratification. Aesthetics is concerned with the pleasure and displeasure of sensuous perception, which depends on the rise and fall of our level of arousal; expectancy and gratification, therefore, are the two basic sources of psychic pleasure. It is easy to see that goodness, no matter how much and in what shape, will not arouse much expectancy, because there is little point in desiring with our senses what our conscience forces us to demand, and any gratification it yields when it actually happens is only a confirmation of our trust in the moral order of the world. With evil, things are different. Whether we desire it against our conscience, or genuinely fear its imminence, it will arouse us to a high level, and when it actually happens the gratification will be either perverse pleasure or a cathartic upheaval of our moral beliefs. In both cases, in a fictional context, we are able to enjoy evil, either openly, in defiance of morality, or secretly, knowing that we are on safe ground. Therefore, the evildoer and the moral sufferer, the dragon and its slayer, the devil and the martyr are inexhaustible sources of aesthetic pleasure, provided they stay in the realm of fiction and make us only gather our moral forces without compelling us to give the signal for attack.

Having said that much, one can only wonder why the aesthetics of evil has attracted so little attention from literary scholars. Peter André Alt, professor of German literature at the Free University of Berlin, whose president he became in 2009, is not the first to break this ground, but he is the one who did so most thoroughly, by harvesting from widely dispersed fields of scholarship and shaping his material into a compendium of breath-taking erudition. 160 of the 712 pages of his book are taken up by notes and a bibliography of intimidating scope and completeness. The main part of the book is divided in seven chapters, the titles of which give an idea of the range and philosophical depth of his study. Chapter One echoes Nietzsche’s book on the birth of tragedy in its title “Prelude in myth: The origin of evil from the spirit of literary fiction”. In this chapter, Alt starts from Genesis and moves on to discuss the biblical sources of Lucifer’s and Adam’s fall and the theological debate about evil from Augustine to Kierkegaard.

Chapter Two is entitled “Enlightenment and psychology: New arts of the devil”. It is here that Alt comes into his own, since the first half of the chapter deals with German authors such as Georg Friedrich Meier, Jean Paul, Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, while the second half gives a lucid discussion of Freud and Jung in the context of the early history of psychoanalysis. Chapter Three, “The Shift towards introspection: Evil as seen from the inside”, begins with ‘black poetics’ in Schlegel and Rosencrantz, goes on to the ‘archaeology of the evil soul’ in Schiller and Jean Paul, dedicates over 20 pages to Kleist’s “muddled circumstances and soiled concepts” and ends with a discussion of Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Stefan George und Thomas Mann under the heading “From imagination to de-differentiation”.

9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center, New York City. (Image remixed and released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter Four bears the title “Repetition as the literary manifestion of evil”. In this chapter, what is commonly associated with black romanticism comes most prominently to the fore. The subtitles give an idea of the subject matter: “The myth of hell and the phantasma of eternal punishment (Blake, Barlach, Sartre, Mann)”, “The rhythm of the orgy (de Sade, Mirbeau, Suesskind)”, “Satanic masses (Huysman)” and “Monotony and aestheticism (Sacher-Masoch, Wilde)”. A second structural feature of evil is added in Chapter Five under the title “The aesthetic pleasure of transgression: Extreme figures and deviating behaviour”. Here, too, the subtitles provide a guideline through the chapter: “Androids and vampyres (Shelly, Bram Stoker)”, “Crime in the spirit of the perverse (Poe, Stevenson)”, “Criminological case-studies (Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, Gross)”, “The poetry of madness (Przbyszewski, Heym, Benn)” and “An invented sex (Wedekind, Weininger, Ewers)”. In Chapter Six, “Snapshots of excess: On conjuring up the monstrous”, Alt zooms in on the very centre of transgression. The chapter begins with “The killing of God as a rhetorical feast (Nietzsche)”, then goes on to the concept of ‘Holy pornography’ by Bataille, Genet and Foucault, turns to Kafka and the little known German writer Robert Mueller (who seems to deserve a rediscovery) and ends with “Narrated war experiments of violence (Ernst Juenger, Malaparte)”. The final Chapter Seven, at last, raises the question the reader would have asked right at the beginning: “Moral implications of immoral literature”. Here, the theoretical discussion of the views of Baudrillard, Wolfgang Iser, Karl Heinz Bohrer and Niklas Luhmann frames a detailed analysis of two contemporary novels: Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillants and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

Dennis Oppenheim: 'Device to Root Out Evil', sculpture, Vancouver, Canada. (Image released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License; source: Wikimedia Commons)

The summary of the contents gives the reader an idea of what Alt has to offer, but it also reveals what he fails to deliver. In theological, philosophical and psychoanalytical terms he has a firm grasp of his subject, even more so, of course, when it comes to the phenomenology of evil in art, since this is what his study is about. One cannot blame a book on the aesthetics of evil for excluding the ethical aspects, but ignoring the social dimension is a different matter. Evil is something the evildoer does to a victim. This is a social relation and, therefore, must be dealt with as a material aspect of evil irrespective of its ethical evaluation. The other conspicuous gap in Alt’s book – in fact, the missing link in his chain of argument – is the total absence of that period in European literature where evil for the first time literally took to the stage, i. e. Elizabethan and, more precisely, Jacobean drama. From Marlowe through Shakespeare to Webster, Tourneur and all the other writers of ‘sex and crime’ plays in the Jacobean age, evil became such a central driving force that one can hardly understand why Alt mentions Marlowe and Shakespeare only in passing and leaves the others unnoticed. From Adam’s Fall to the end of the Middle Ages, evil had been a question of sin, which presupposed a hierarchical relation between God and the devil. But with the early rise of a middle-class society in England the medieval hierarchy underwent a slow and steady process of horizontalization, which transformed the theological concept of sin into the social concept of crime. Henceforth, evil was no longer something the pious man looked down upon deep in hell, but something he was confronted with at eye-level. The Elisabethan and Jacobean age was the first literary period in which the villain achieved the status of a hero, though a negative one. (If further proof is needed for the eye-level view of evil in a ‘horizontalized’ society, think of the United States, a society that likes to think of itself as having overcome traditional hierarchies, yet which at the same time is the most obsessed with evil).

The omission of the Jacobean drama is the gravest flaw of Alt’s book. This flaw, however, does not come unexpected in a book whose ‘Introduction’ begins with a quotation from Hegel. Alt’s method resembles more that of medieval scholasticism than that of scientific scholarship. Instead of referring to observations grounded in empirical data, he defers to authority figures such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Foucault, Baudrillard and Luhmann. This will leave readers with a more bottom-up approach to literature irritated and frustrated. On the one hand, one cannot help admiring Alt’s erudition, his power of penetration and the often lucid analyses of literary works, on the other hand one waits in vain for answers to questions so obvious that one can hardly understand why they are not raised. First: How is the fictional experience of evil transformed into aesthetic pleasure? Second: Under what social conditions is the public most likely disposed to crave for such pleasure? and Third: Where is the dividing line between the aesthetic and the ethical that must not be transgressed? Only this last question is addressed by Alt, but it comes like an afterthought and not as a target aimed at from the beginning.

Although Alt starts from the myth of Adam and Eve and works his way up to the very real horrors of Auschwitz and beyond, the whole book lacks a sense of the gravity of social history. Furthermore, it shares with much of German literary scholarship an undeniable touch of national – or, to be more precise, Continental – parochialism. No one in his right mind would underrate the impact of the French Revolution nor that of Kant and Hegel on the intellectual tradition of Europe, but these names and events stand for the climax of a development that had begun much earlier – to a large extent in England. Alt, like most of his German colleagues, tends to give Schlegel more credit as an innovator than he deserves. Although he does not explicitly date the “Shift towards introspection” (Chapter Three) around 1800, he at the very least makes his readers think so. But the founding fathers of introspection and the psychological interest in literature were the English puritans of the 17th century. They triggered what, via Shaftesbury, Richardson, the sentimentalists and the Gothic novelists, eventually made its way to Germany. Readers well-versed in fact-free Theory may feel elated by Alt’s brilliant command of what is en vogue in contemporary German and French literary debate, but those who crave for empirical insight will feel somewhat disappointed – and may well conclude that a writer of such acumen should have produced more solid enlightenment and fewer sparkling lights.

Peter-André Alt: Ästhetik des Bösen
C.H. Beck, Munich 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-3406605031
Hardcover, 714 pages, EUR 34.00 

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin until 2000, and was described by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as ‘one of the most prolific and most widely read Anglicists in Germany’. His most recent book, a major new biography of Charles Dickens, is published this month by C.H. Beck (Munich).

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by Mohammed Khallouk

The place of Islam in the European public sphere

Nilüfer Göle (source: EHESS, original photo: IHS; thumbnail image is considered 'fair use').

The  Turkish-born sociologist Nilüfer Göle, currently director of studies at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris is the author of a number of books in Turkish, German and French, in which she investigates the identity conflicts of young Muslims, especially women, in European society. Several of her books have since been translated into English. Her latest book, an essay with the original French title “Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe”, first published in 2005, was issued in an English version last year by Markus Wiener Publishers; as the title for the English edition, translator Steven Rendall and the publisher chose the phrase “Islam in Europe: The  Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism”. In a somewhat fragmentary way, the author claims for young educated Muslims in Europe to be a part of this continent, although – or maybe because –  Islam with its own value system is a basic element of their identity. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent debate were a decisive turning point in the consciousness of Muslims, who realized that they had to find a workable arrangement with Western modernity. The word “Interpénétrations” in the original title was meant to show the non-Muslim majority in the most important European countries that they could no longer continue to ignore the fact that Islam had become part of their civil societies and that, instead, they would have to come to an arrangement with Muslims living among them. Moreover, they would have to accept Muslims as European citizens with their own values and opinions that differ  from those shaped by Christianity as well as those of secular-minded Europeans.

Turkey’s “Third Way” between Islam and European Modernity

A main theme of Göle’s essay is the difficulty for Europeans to define themselves and the European Union as a pluralistic project that includes Islam in a modern interpretation. Europeans need to rid themselves of the thought, promoted by Samuel Huntington’s theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’, that Islamic civilization is a hostile opponent to their own civilization. What is needed is the realization that one can be member of the same civilization, even if one holds on to divergent religious beliefs and value categories. For Göle, the young veil-wearing Muslim women of the third immigrant generation in European cities like Paris or Berlin constitute evidence for her thesis. On the one hand, these women identify with a conservative female role as well as with traditional ethical codes  and sexual morals. On the other hand, they opt for a career of their own and pursue university diplomas and academic positions. As Göle sees it,  Islam, for a whole generation of young women in Central Europe, as well as in Turkey, is a means of becoming part of modernity and of finding their individual way of life in the world of modern Europe. They confront both the non-Muslim majority in Europe and the traditional Kemalist elites in Turkey with a new understanding of secularization – one that does not intend to hide religious symbols, but instead bring them out into the open, without thereby forcing others to submit to them.

In this context, both the ongoing tension between a (self-professed) Islamic-oriented government and the Kemalist elite in Turkey and the European debate about Turkey’s application to join the EU, in Göle’s eyes are equally significant. Indeed, with the help of Göle’s concept of “Interpénétrations”, a ‘Third Way’ between Political Islam and Secularism may be within reach, as may be a Turkey that is a member of a truly multireligious European Union, in which Islam has long been  represented by Muslim immigrants in Western European countries, where they share the public sphere with non-Muslim natives.

Cosmopolitanism as an alternative to radical Islamism and intellectual Islamophobia  

For Göle, the movie “Auf der anderen Seite” (English title: The Edge of Heaven, 2007) by Fatih Akin, a son of Turkish immigrants in Germany, illustrates how the envisaged interpenetration of Turkish Muslim culture with Western European urban culture can work in practice, and how classic European attitudes can likewise become part of the Turkish value system. However, the best example of a  modern European Islam, interpreted as a foundation for a new symbiosis of Islam and Europe, are the young Muslim women mentioned earlier. Although they believe in conservative Islamic values, with many of them wearing a headscarf  and adhering to traditional sexual morals, these women, according to Göle, pose the  most formidable challenge to radical Islamists, since their way of life is evidence of the fusion of the West and Islam – that is, of their own female individuality and religious spirituality, as well as of Oriental tradition and European modernity. Islamist terrorists are their enemies because the latter deny any possibility of finding an arrangement within Western modernity that does not require giving up  their own (“non-Western”) religion.

In summary, one can state that Göle’s essay shows, at many levels, what cosmopolitanism amounts to and in which direction lies the future of a Europe where Islam is a basic ingredient. The book is a stimulating read and presents a wealth of new aspects in the debate about the integration of Muslims into European society with its Christian roots and its basis in secularism. What is missing, unfortunately, is a common thread that would connect the various theses discussed – one that would offer a coherent answer to the question of how all these different aspects might be integrated. Nevertheless, Göle’s essay is recommended reading for anyone in search of a dissenting voice to the image of Islam and Muslim immigrants conveyed by such authors as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, and, most recently, the former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. Göle’s essay in no way glorifies Islam – least of all of political Islam, which she characterises as a very real danger; instead, she offers the prospect of an Islam that has arrived in the modern world: an Islam that is compatible with European democratic pluralism.

Nilüfer Göle: Islam in Europe. The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism.
Translated by Steven Rendall
Markus Wiener, Princeton 2011.
ISBN-13: 9781558765269
Paperback, 320 pages, US$26.95

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg and the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, which was the topic of his doctoral work. Another research theme of his is the history of the Jewish community in Morocco, which he is writing his Habilitation thesis on. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Bruce Fleming

Two newspaper-headline-grabbing incidents from early 2011 involving words created storms of protest from the political left, which in the last few decades has emerged as more interested than the American right in policing public speech. One incident was criticism after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings of Jan. 8, 2011 (in which Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured) of Sarah Palin’s earlier use of gun language and cross-hair imagery to speak of politics. The other was Capt. O.P. Honors’s shipboard movie about sexual issues using terms and images the press called “lewd” that led to his removal, on Jan. 4, 2011, as skipper of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Screenshot of controversial crosshairs map on Sarah Palin's website (Source: Wikimedia/fair use).

The criticism in both cases was that the language or images used had so a close connection to reality that their use constituted a punishable, or at least reprehensible, action. Speaking of Congressional seats or Congress(wo)men as “targets,” as Palin did, and issuing her famous “Don’t retreat, RELOAD!” Tweet seemed to critics connected to the subsequent shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who had earlier warned that those who use images of crosshairs “have to realize that there are consequences to that action.” Palin, in many people’s estimation, then made things worse: she labeled the suggestion her language was in any way involved with the Tucson shootings a “blood libel,” a phrase used for the malicious fiction that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to make Passover matzos. Palin’s camp seemed to find ridiculous the idea that words could be causal: criticism of this later phrase was rejected as “obscene” by an aide.

News reports about Capt. Honors’s videos (made from 2005-2007 for shipboard use when he was the second-in-command) found offensive the fact that the word “fag” was used, as was the euphemism “f-bomb,” and that the word it replaces appeared on the screen. Further, there were scenes of people (undoubtedly real sailors, but for the purposes of these videos, actors) pretending to be same-sex pairs interested in staying in the shower longer than necessary for necessary for hygiene alone.

Capt. Honors, as a military officer, was prohibited from making a response to the criticism, but in an op-ed for the Washington Post (“Capt Honors and the crude videos the Navy needed,” Jan. 11, 2011), I argued that such theatrical and between-quotation-marks use of terms was not the same as using them as part of social interaction, and that the context of a movie offered a useful way of addressing hot topics that everyone was thinking about but were afraid to articulate.

In brief, the relationship between these words and the world was more complex than that implied by correctly noting that Honors or Palin said X or showed image Y. Proposing anal sex to someone, for example, is not the same as using the words “anal sex” in a classroom discussion as one topic of publicly unacceptable jokes—such as I did in my classroom at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I’ve taught for more than two decades. I was “counseled” by our Division Director Marine Colonel for uttering these words and warned to avoid a “hostile working environment” Later I was told I could not explain the medical details of a sex-change operation in response to a student question as this had the same effect. (I had proposed that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who is clearly unhappy being a woman, might have fewer problems if she were a man: discuss.)

How do words relate to the world? What’s characterized the political left in recent decades is a general acceptance of the stance of linguistic  idealism: at its extreme, this view— formed by analogy with the philosophical position of idealism that holds our minds make the world rather than existing in it—means that words are the world.  This in turn has led to the insistence on what we call “political correctness,” associated with the political left, with its emphasis on what is said rather than what is thought or done. If words are the world, it’s of utmost importance to police them.

Sarah Palin, then Governor of Alaska, at Fort Richardson in August 2008. (Photo by Capt. Guy Hayes, Alaska National Guard Public Affairs; released into public domain by U.S. Army)

The right, by contrast, tends to see a distinction between what you say and what you do—words are just words. For the right, the world exists independently of our minds, and we, as individual actors, exist in the world. The greatest interest of Palin’s defense of her gun language is her denial of linguistic idealism—even if she doesn’t put it like that—in favor of an underlying view that professional philosophers would call “naïve realism.” This holds that people are agents that act with each other and an independent world using words. Why criticize words? They’re just words.

In Order of Things, Michel Foucault dates the modern age to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The defining characteristic of this modern age for my purposes is its general acceptance of the primacy of the mind over that of the world, its common thread of idealism. At least this is true of the educated classes, which, as a result, separated from people who didn’t have the luxury of believing this idealistic dogma, but were stuck with the day to day grind of realism. So the left-right divide is merely one single, political, instantiation of a much larger phenomenon, a separation of sophisticated/educated from the rest that, ironically, mirrors that of the ancien régime that the Modern Age overthrew.

Linguistic idealism as an ideology of the educated classes took off with Romantic artists, usually seen as rebelling against the Industrial Revolution and all the upheavals that characterized their time: for this reason Romanticism was addicted to the myth of a golden pre-Industrial past, the Medieval world.  Romanticism is a rejection of the world as it had become. How could the Romantic artists, such as Baudelaire, be surprised when non-artists interested in making money through industrialization (his hated “bourgeoisie”) hated artists back? The artists of two centuries have found valorization in just how misunderstood they were. And the common-sense men of action, as they increasingly saw themselves in contrast, preened themselves on just how little they were like these effete artists.

According to the Romantic poets, words make the world; poets make words; ergo poets make the world.  Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” held that the language in the “youth of the world” is “vitally metaphorical”; now, however, that we are no longer in this youthful phase of the pre-historic past, language is “dead.”  That, according to Shelley, is why we need poets, who “create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized”; poets thus remake not only language but the world and thus are the “unacknowledged legislators” of that world. “Poetry . . . makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This insistence that we need language to (re-)create the world was a primary tenet of the Russian Formalist movement almost a century later, as it is to virtually all post-Romantic theory, even today: according to Victor Shklovsky, the movement’s most skilled polemicist, “art makes the stone stony.” Without art, there would be no perception of the world; the world is made of art. It’s hardly coincidental that this doctrine comes from artists. Do butchers believe the world is made of slabs of animal flesh, which they produce? Perhaps, but they produce meat, not words, so no one is aware of this belief.

The notion of artists that they are essential to the very existence of the world for non-artists is, of course, ludicrous. To believe it, you have to accept the premise of linguistic idealism, that words create the world, or at least that without artists, the world ceases to exist, or to be perceived (Shklovsky held just this). Most people think the world gets along just fine without artists. This fact is the source of the split between “high” and “low” arts after Modernism. “High” arts after Romanticism emphasize medium rather than the message. And for this reason most people have abandoned them in favor of popular music and People magazine.

Modernism is learned, esoteric art: hardly anybody reads Joyce’s Ulysses outside of a college class and few people “get” academic cubism without the critical apparatus. Modernist painting departs from the realization that a painting is a flat surface with square corners and then realized that anything the artist did was art: art is its own end. The average footsore tourist hates the result, as well they might: Modernist art is something done, rather than something to be seen. Many will have encountered holiday-makers who take the time to stroll through the contemporary art museum in the metropolis, only to dismiss its contents with the flip assertion that “my dog/three-year-old could do that.” The educated classes roll their eyes at this: what philistinism!

But the tourists have a point. What they say isn’t correct, of course: the dog may be capable of swishing the canvas with a paint-laden tail, but it wouldn’t put the result in a museum, and this is the definition of contemporary art: art relates to other art. Contemporary art gets its point not from something the uninitiated can see about its relation to a common world—the foundation of the popularity of nineteenth-century  representative arts—but by the historical trail of references to other artworks it drags behind it. The artwork is a relational thing, not something to be perceived head-on. This is sometimes called the “dematerialization of the work of art”: art is gesture, not thing.

As twentieth century painting became abstract, about shapes and forms that expressed the artist’s sensibility, so too twentieth century literary criticism insisted that books were about books, not a world of breathing people. In literary theory there was first  Jacques Derrida (“there is nothing outside the text”) and then Foucault, with his insistence, echoing Nietzsche, that there was no such thing as objective use of language, and that any consideration by a more powerful entity of a less powerful one was an act of domination.

Foucault, in books such as Madness and Civilization, famously set the stage for the conviction of virtually all recent academics in the humanities and social sciences, popularized by Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, that any consideration by the rich West of the relatively penurious and formerly colonized East (or indeed, by extension, any non-Western country) was intrinsically an act of domination.  Words were themselves oppressive; objective consideration was impossible.  What was presented as the enlightened attempt to cure madness in the early nineteenth century was in fact malign, founded on an act of domination: the rounding up of formerly free “village idiots” and incarcerating them under the label of “the insane.” Naming controls, held Foucault. Note, once again, that this is a theory of writers, not soldiers. Soldiers might sooner accept Mao’s “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

According to the educated, therefore, who generalized the dogmas of Romantic poetry, language makes the world, is the world. This is the class-based linguistic idealism of our day. But it is the reason that the educated go ballistic at the use of words they don’t approve of. And it’s the reason why Palin (see below) rails so shrilly against the educated and powerful, and seems to think that she can speak of “blood libel” without anyone taking offense.

The left-right political split is an instantiation of the split between idealism and realism, that has coalesced into a contrast—a false, absolute, contrast, as I insist— between thought and action. The left insists that individuals are part of a more complex fabric, the right that individuals are the foreground and the primary actors.  Words don’t kill people, Palin might say, people do—and the gun lobby’s insistence that it’s not guns either that do so, but rather people, is yet another working-out of this world-view.

Linguistic idealism leaves me cold. It’s a self-aggrandizing dogma of wordsmiths, which is to say professional thinkers, rather than non-intellectuals, people who work with their hands. Elsewhere [1] I have argued that this focus on a world of texts taught as if they composed an objective manifold like the physical world has destroyed the literature classroom too. We’ve substituted the professor for the literature, with his or her narrow view that got him or her the position and then tenure. And most professors are less interesting than the novels that have become the raw material for their own act of domination in the classroom. Students have noticed, especially the men, who have abandoned it in droves. Besides, critics are less interesting than writers; yet Gerald Graff suggested famously that literature professors “teach the conflicts” rather than the works—which is to say, the critical tail produced by professors quarreling about the work, rather than the work itself.

Politics, according to Foucault, is really most fundamentally textual, words. The dominant theme in twentieth century philosophy was, similarly, its medium: language, taking its impetus from first the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus with his (later abandoned) “picture theory of meaning” and then later from his notion, expressed in the Philosophical Investigations, that meaning was found in use.  Whichever tack we took, the assumption was that if we could just understand language, we’d understand the fundamental issues. It isn’t true, of course: however we say language “means” it’s going to go on doing that, as it has for millennia. If it’s this fundamental, we don’t have to figure it out.

Wittgenstein’s legacy, therefore, was less his specific doctrines than the conviction he articulated that words exist at the intersection with the world. This was true both in his early insistence that words somehow show their meaning –which left a problem for the many words and propositions for which this was not the case, a problem he solved by calling them “meaningless”—and also in his later notion that words were actions that constituted the world of the mind. Intention, for example, isn’t an internal thing but a social one, expressed in words, which are at the social nexus—there is no such thing, according to Wittgenstein, as private languages; mental states are their linguistic expressions. Mental and physical fuse for Wittgenstein, as they do for the parallel twentieth century school of phenomenology: Heidegger, for example, insisted that we live in motion, what he called “thrownness”—rather than sit on the sidelines and think about it. For the whole twentieth century of academic philosophy, words reach out and fuse with the world—albeit in a variety of ways.

John Searle at Berkeley, December 2005 (Photo by Matthew Breindel, released under the GNU Free Documentation License; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

One thinker who inherited this legacy of Wittgenstein, a man who focuses most clearly on the place where words and actions fuse and hence expresses the linguistic idealism of our day in an interesting way, is John Searle. Thus his thought is susceptible to the same problem that beset the early Wittgenstein: what he’s focusing on is quite a small subset of language, and even there it’s not so clearly the case as he thinks. In his early work Speech Acts, Searle, following J.L. Austin, focuses on cases of what he calls “illocutionary acts,” words become actions of which the strongest example are things the “I do” that, in  his view, gets you married or the “I will” that binds you to an oath. (In fact, it’s not the words alone that do this: you could say these words but in so odd a way the judge would stop the proceedings.)

Searle’s most recent application of his underlying this interest, based on the claim that institutions are created by minds through words, is Making the Social World. Words create the world: linguistic idealism rather than a realism that holds that words mirror, express, or at least exist in the world rather than being identical, or are just things people say. Gentler but related theorists like George Lakoff point out that we become prisoners of our own metaphors (Metaphors We Live By) and that they can control us: Lakoff sees himself as elucidating psychological discoveries about the mind and how it functions to create the categories that determine our world.

Postmodernism, now all but dead, expresses this linguistic idealism with a vengeance. Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint,  Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear.  Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.

There’s no way out of postmodernism in words because it uses words to guard the exits. Still, though we have to cut the Gordian knot to get out, we can exit. This may be easier to do nowadays because the financial bases of the world that allowed a dogma of outsider Romantic poets to spread among the educated classes in general (much as abstract art is the language of the Upper East Side in the twentieth century) have been so shaken by the crash of 2008. Waking up after the party holding our heads, we may be able to accept the possibility of an alternative.

The alternative involves action, rather than talk. Not action as an absolute contrast, but as part of a symbiotic whole with talk: we use words to articulate actions, and actions to carry out words. Unfortunately, nowadays when the right wants to criticise the linguistic idealism of the left, it goes too far. Blind action is opposed by the right to the too-great involution of the dogma of linguistic idealism of the left. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her boss, George W. Bush, famously inept with words, as being a “man of action.” What he did wasn’t important, the important thing was that he was acting. Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, who generally disapprove of ‘liberals’ (in the peculiar American sense of the word),  love a speech by Theodore Roosevelt usually called “The Man in the Arena” that contains this much-quoted passage: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Words are nothing, action is all.

As an English professor at a military institution, I insist that we can use thought to justify action, that brain and brawn must work together. And that is my position here: that words are not identical with actions in the world, but rather exist in varying distances from it, and that we cannot privilege either words or actions but must be successful in interweaving the two. There are many possible connections of words to world, a whole panoply of relations exploited by art—tellingly, ignored by both the left and the right wing, in their maddeningly absolutist stance, a black/white either/or vision of words either being the world, or being nothing compared to action. The whole realm of metaphoric language, of art and fiction, lies in this middle area that has been turned into a No Man’s Land between the trenches of left and right that ravage it daily. Sarah Palin’s utterances as well as the Capt Honors videos are far less literal than they have been held to be—as indeed most language is. Lighten up, I say to both sides. Art has a purpose, a place in the world that is not merely that of rejecting it—though this is the way it’s typically been perceived since the Romantics.

As I’ve argued in Art and Argument: What Words Can Do and What They Can’t, art is based on literal truth (the sky is up and people eat with knives and forks in both novels and the world). So too metaphoric or poetic language has a literal component: if we speak of a Congressional seat being a “target” we mean we aim (metaphor) at “hitting” (both). But this also means that metaphors have other qualities we don’t mean to emphasize, and that can later be emphasized (targets = guns). And metaphor is all around us: “all around us,” for example, is yet another. Thus there are many degrees of language use between the stonily literal and the purely incendiary. We have to be supple in negotiating between them, something the polarization of the current world into the left and right has made extremely difficult. Both left and right wing are famously intolerant of art, as it fails to advance either agenda. The critics of Palin’s gun language and Honors’s movies are left-wing critics, apparently holding that words make the world, and so need to be rigorously controlled: metaphoric or figurative language that can be understood in a way that someone can find offensive must be eliminated.

Palin is right – if we can attribute such a view to her – that linguistic idealism the dominant ideology of the ruling class, that it’s taken as an unquestioned dogma. What’s unfortunate about Palin, however, is that she couches her criticism the only way she logically can, having aligned herself with the naïve realists rather than with the linguistic idealists: as an attack on groups of people, rather than on their words or ideas. This is what makes her recent screed America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Flag so full of bile. Nobody but she and her supporters qualifies as person at all, much less a patriotic American, and what characterizes her supporters is lack of power. The “meaning of America” has been forgotten “by the people who make the big laws, run the big corporations, write for the big newspapers and make the big movies.” These, of course are the educated elite, the “inside the Beltway” types Palin heaps scorn on. To this are contrasted “real people,” the Americans who “grow our food, teach our children, run our small businesses, help out the less fortunate, and fight our wars.”

Of course, the problem of the “government is the problem” right wing that campaigns against “inside the Beltway politicos” is that these are just the people the right wing hopes to become. Once they’ve assumed power, presumably, they’ll hand power back to the powerless (which sounds contradictory) and the state will wither away. It didn’t work for Marx, and it won’t work for Palin.

Reject the dogma, by all means. Please. But don’t do it by attacking the people who hold it. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Palin has presumably heard that one before.

Sarah Palin: America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag
Harper, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0062010964
Hardcover, 304 pages, US$25.99

John Searle: Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization
Oxford University Press, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0195396171
Hardcover, 224 pages, US$24.95

Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, having previously held teaching positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Freiburg, and the National University of Rwanda. His most recent books are Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 2010) and Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide (Fairfax, Virginia: Potomac Books). In addition to his scholarly work, he has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, Wahington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books. 

by Katrina Gulliver

Crawford Market, Mumbai. (Photo by Greg Younger, used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

In this book, Gyan Prakash offers not a traditional history of a city, but rather a portrait of the city’s culture and image. By using its popular culture, he reflects the kaleidoscope of this multiethnic community. From the grand colonial architecture to more recent land reclamation projects, he traces the spatial dimensions of the city and their cultural meanings. In so doing, he emphasises the ways in which history, particularly urban history of a still-changing community, is made up of the myths we choose to remember, or the fables of his title. Like all great cities, Mumbai has more than one fable in its story. As he describes:

“The nostalgic ‘tropical Camelot’ and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai’s story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay-to-Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable.” (p. 23)

The Bombay Chronicle, January 26th, 1931. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain)

Prakash links the real city to its many depictions in popular culture. Bombay’s rapid growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and diversity of religion and language, meant it developed a multiplicity of communities within the city. Prakash argues that the act of reading the newspaper served as the secular version of morning prayer, and in this multicultural society, newspapers could serve to link readers together. However, as he points out, this world — in the mid twentieth century – was still largely limited to those who could read English. Nonetheless, popular culture in the form of tabloid press, such as Blitz newspaper, which offered a downmarket popular option in the English-language press. Through such media, celebrity scandals and other tales of the city were promulgated. As Prakash describes, the cues Blitz offered about the lives of the rich and (in)famous informed the residents of the rest of the city about how the other half lived, and bound many readers in fascination with their lurid stories.

Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is particularly drawn to the creators (writers and film makers) who made Bombay their home in the twentieth century and the ways they presented the city’s many layers in their work. In demonstrating this, he expends many pages summarising the plots of short stories and films created in or about Bombay – the creation of these “fables” becoming part of the city’s narrative.

Eros Movie Theatre, Mumbai. Opened in 1938, exemplifying the late Art deco style. (Photo: Colin Rose. Used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

From the creative to the theoretical, Prakash uses the analyses of Henri Lefebvre and other urban theorists to discuss the use of space, and the ways that urban planning, with its focus on abstract “efficiency” failed. He also acknowledges the effect of political corruption, with the assignment of land and contracts for new development schemes. He also discusses at length the architectural style of Art Deco, which flourished in Bombay in the interwar period. Its acquistive, eclectic nature — taking on motifs from other styles — meant it offered a bridge to modernity in the machine age. The glamour of this period is clearly part of Mumbai’s visual heritage, as well as being the point — before independence and partition — when the city shone for many of its nostalgic fans.

But for all the glitz of the Marine Drive denizens, the situation of shanty-town dwellers is not overlooked here. As he describes the cycle, poor people arrive in the city, and build their own makeshift housing. Although the settlement is illegal, the municipal authorities are forced to provide some civic facilities. But once the land has thus become habitable, it is valuable, and the residents will be evicted so the land can be sold for development. (p. 310) Prakash draws on the plot of the comic book Doga, a hero of the slums, to illustrate these issues and their popular presentation. (While this is interesting, spending over 30 pages on the plotline of a comic book seems perhaps a little indulgent.)

The book contains some unfortunate repetitive phrasing (which looks like some cut and paste) and some rather infelicitous colloquialisms — people “get on like a house on fire”, noses are “thrown out of joint” — which are somewhat jarring in the context. There is also a small glitch in his passing account of the Sassoon family tree (p. 41), as part of his discussion of David Sassoon, one of a number of merchants who were influential in the city’s industrial development.

Mumbai Fables is an engaging narrative, and offers a different way for urban historians to write the biography of a city. But it will have more to offer for those familiar with the city, for whom the gleam of recognition will be a benefit.

Gyan Prakash: Mumbai Fables. A History of an Enchanted City
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780691153179
Paper, 424 pages, US$19.95

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

by Kristóf Fenyvesi

(PR material, Chicago UP)

I was much looking forward to reading Robert Pippin’s new book: The clear and well-designed appearance of the work and its surprising brevity — the volume comprises just 139 pages—suggest graceful elegance combined with explicit restraint. The mild anxiety that should overcome any reader who is somewhat familiar with contemporary Nietzsche studies quickly turns into zealous interest by the first impressions the book evokes. By giving the book its descriptive title, Pippin promises to offer helpful orientation for readers attempting to navigate the complex relationship between “Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy”. The lack of any limitation or subtitle that would define a thematic focus, of course, means that Pippin is setting himself a formidable task. Not only does he have to face several crucial questions in the Nietzschean oeuvre, but he also needs to introduce his readers to an issue that is crucial for Nietzsche studies, or, if one prefers a simplistic label, to the “Nietzsche problem.” He needs to guide his readers through a discourse that was among the first to emerge in international Nietzsche scholarship and has been at the forefront ever since – and he still has to come up with an original view. The endeavour to meet a grand challenge like this in a mere 139 pages book (plus roughly four and a half pages of introductory remarks) is worthy of a truly “free spirit”, an aristocratic gesture in the Nietzschean sense, which I cannot but applaud.

My high spirits rose even higher when I studied the table of contents. Chapter 1: “Psychology as ‘the Queen of Sciences’” (22 pages), Chapter 2: “What is a Gay Science?” (21 pages), Chapter 3: “Modernity as a Psychological Problem” (21 pages), Chapter 4: “The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun ist alles]” (17 pages), Chapter 5: “The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception” (19 pages), Chapter 6: “How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal” (16 pages), “Concluding Remarks” (4 pages). The items in the table of contents initially led me to expect that the book would actually present the most important psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s works, following a clearly structured, original train of thought. The page numbers assigned to them suggested that Pippin would deal with all of these grand issues with impressive brevity, perhaps even with the Horatian economy of expression that Nietzsche valued so highly. However, my initial enthusiasm soon diminished irrevocably when I begin to delve into the book. Pippin  doesn’t seem to be aware of the diversity and the comprehensive nature of the problems that he implicitly took upon himself when he chose such a bold title. I grew increasingly convinced that the brevity of the book was mostly due to the scarce amount of substance rather than to his following the Horatian or Nietzschean stylistic radicalism.

Pippin dedicates his own work to the memory of Bernard Williams. The acknowledgements at the beginning of the book indicate that the first four chapters are identical to the edited version of a series of lectures delivered by Pippin in the fall of 2004 at the College de France in Paris and published in 2006 as Nietzsche, moraliste francais: La conception nietzschéen d’une psychologie philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006). The dedication of the book to Williams and the summary of the book in the introduction refer back to Pippin’s previous paper on Williams’s Nietzsche interpretation, which appeared in 2005 under the title Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and the French Moralist Tradition (in Volker Gerhardt & Renate Reschke, eds., Bildung – Humanitas – Zukunft bei Nietzsche [= Nietzscheforschung Vol. 12], Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005).Yet, surprisingly, there is not a single reference to it in Pippin’s present book, although that paper and the present book have a lot in common, even literally – in addition to the fact that both follow Williams’s reasoning. Just as in his earlier paper, in his new book Pippin provides a summary (pp. xiv-xvii) of Williams’ paper Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology (first published in European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993) pp. 4-14), thus prompting the reader who knows the Williams paper to entertain the uncanny idea that Pippin’s book should perhaps be seen as simply a rather lengthy commentary on Williams’s fascinatingly dense paper, which is full of innovative and original ideas. Unfortunately, Pippin has included no caveats regarding the commentary-like nature of his book, nor does he offer any instruction that would assist the book being received in this spirit. The “in memoriam” dedication of the book can hardly be considered adequate in this sense, nor can the closing section of the acknowledgements (p. XII) where Pippin mentions Williams as one of the main sources of inspiration and a stylistic model.

In particular, Pippin builds his book on Williams’s basic assumption that Nietzsche, like Wittgenstein, cannot be the source of any philosophical theory in a traditional sense, since his texts are based mostly on the operation of textual “booby traps” that protect his thoughts from theorization and systematization. This does not mean, of course, that whoever tries to interpret Nietzsche should avoid philosophical theories when attempting to analyze, first and foremost, the minimalist features of the Nietzschean moral philosophy and the consequences that result from the resistance of minimalist moral philosophy to theories and systems. These issues involve the Nietzschean critique of classical naturalism and, also, the Nietzschean need for the naturalization of moral philosophy, the disclosure of the illusory nature of ego and self, as well as the observation of the psychological importance of the epistemological fallacy that stems from the separation of active subject and action, especially with respect to free will and its subordination to causal thinking.

The first chapter of Pippin’s book, “Psychology as ‘the Queen of Sciences’”, with reference to the notable section of Beyond Good and Evil – the 23rd aphorism, which no book on Nietzsche’s psychological stance can afford to ignore – is mainly concerned with the role Nietzsche assigns to psychology and the provision that although the theory of philosophical psychology cannot be created (p. 2), it can still become “first philosophy,” and psychology in the Nietzschean sense can alter, or even supersede, metaphysical thinking. In this context, Nietzsche sees himself as a late successor to the French moralists – primarily, in Pippin’s view, to Montaigne (p. 8 ) – and it is mainly his views on the will that connect psychology and moral philosophy in his work (p. 4), in addition to keeping together the far-reaching research on Nietzsche. The statement on psychology as the queen of sciences is linked by Pippin, with due sensitivity, to the Nietzschean remarks in Section 3 of the introduction to Beyond Good and Evil, which emphasize the feminine nature of truth (p. 13) and wisdom (p. 15). What follows from this is a brief analysis by Pippin (pp. 13-21) on the psychological aspects of the tradition of “philosophical eroticism” (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung, Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen, 23) and the Nietzschean amor fati.

The second chapter, “What is a Gay Science?”, raises the issue of “first philosophy” addressed in the first chapter in relation to intentionalism (p. 25), where the discussion on philosophical eroticism which began in the first chapter is expanded by the analysis of the diverse problem of commitment, whichcan be addressed both from a psychological and from an intentional standpoint (pp. 26-28). The aspect of corporeality emerges several times in the course of Pippin’s analysis (p. 28, 36, 38, 43); however, Pippin assumes Nietzsche has much less corporeal reflexivity than what could, for example, be derived from several passages in The Gay Science, which is at the heart of this chapter.  

Chapter Three, “Modernity as a Psychological Problem”, starts out with Nietzsche’s pictorial, figurative language (p. 45), examining topoi such as the “mad man”, who makes his appearance in aphorism 125 of The Gay Science and announces the death of God. Here Pippin makes an explicit distinction between his arguments and those of more literary-oriented analyses, such as those by Sarah Kofman. Pippin discusses the death of God in connection with the moral psychological aspects of nihilism and evaluation, and the problem of intentionality introduced earlier is further discussed in regard to faith (p. 52).

Chapter Four, “The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun is alles]”, presents the process of unravelling certain aspects of the problem of agency that, in Nietzsche’s view, are important to the topic of intentionality. Although this chapter includes nothing novel with respect to Pippin’s earlier comments on the Nietzsche discourse, it can be regarded as the culmination of the book. Continuing with the analysis of the metaphors discussed earlier (p. 60-70), the centre of the discussion presented by Pippin is  Nietzsche’s famous analogy on the mistakenly assumed separability of lighting and the flash or doer and deed (p. 71-72). In addition to Nietzsche’s criticism of subject, causality, and naturalism, there are references to how Nietzsche’s concept of agent is reflected in its position with respect to Christian ethics (p. 79-82), and how all this influences the Nietzschean constellations of promise, commitment, and responsibility (p. 82-84). My only critical remark on this chapter is that it might be read as a creatively rewritten version of a noteoworthy paper of Pippin’s, which has already been published twice, in two important volumes in 2004 and 2006 [see references below], yet Pippin makes is no reference to these earlier versions in either the text, the footnotes, or the bibliography.

In Chapter Five, “The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception”, the main question discussed is how psychology as first philosophy can be captured in a philosophical sense (p. 85). This analysis includes issues regarding the relationship between consciousness and instincts (p. 86), intentionality and corporeality (p. 87), the Nietzschean avoidance to postulate extra-psychological phenomena (p. 94), and the connection of all these to the main issues in the previous chapters. This chapter conveys the impression that the ground has been prepared for, at last, making good on the promise contained in the title of the book, and suggests that now is the time to develop an extremely original, far-reaching interpretation of Nietzsche’s psychology and first philosophy, using the tools that were developed in previous chapters in the course of expanding the disturbingly narrow initial focus of the book, as suggested by its title. However, it is a serious reason for concern that, at this point, Pippin is fast approaching the end of his book, and the only remanining part, the short 16-page closing chapter, can hardly be expected to fulfill the reader’s expectations.

In Chapter Six, “How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal”, which is the book’s final chapter, Pippin’s deals with the question of how the Nietzschean positions regarding agency, self-knowledge, value and erotic desire in the philosophical sense can be connected to the complex problems of modernism. In particular, he inquires into whether Nietzsche cares about the individual’s freedom in any classical sense of the philosophical tradition, and how this issue can be seen in terms of self-knowledge, spontaneity, self-fulfilment, autonomy, independence from external obligations, morality, rational action, authenticity, identification with the actions of other people (without “alienation”), and from the point of view of power. Finally, combining the Nietzschean requirement of going beyond one’s own self – the ‘will to power’ – and returning to Nietzsche as a kind of late “French moralist”, Pippin claims that Nietzsche was never able to achieve a sort of cheerfulness (Heiterkeit) and balance that characterized Montaigne’s works. Nietzsche failed to do so precisely because his desire to discover the results from a total distrust of philosophical theories, also noted by Williams, led him to address issues that Pippin’s book presents. Such topics would no longer be grounded in a causally independent subject, constantly transparent to his own self and possessing his own intentions and thoughts. Rather, they turn into ‘anti-theories’ that would unfold from images, metaphors and analogies, creating a mirror image of philosophical theories; as such, however, they are unable to break out of the conundrum created by the author’s systematizing ambition (p.121).

If there were only few analyses on Nietzsche and psychology, and if Pippin had not previously published nearly every important thought contained in this book, then this little volume would certainly have the charm of novelty – in accordance with the author’s intent to create a synthesis. However, the issue of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is one of the questions that, early on, found their way into the international Nietzsche discourse. 116 years before Pippin’s lectures in Paris, the Danish literary historian Georg Brandes put due emphasis on this issue in his 1888 Nietzsche lectures – whose topics were received with enthusiasm even by Nietzsche himself – and he did so again in a 1889 essay on “Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism.” In his correspondence with Nietzsche, Brandes identified psychology as an especially effective and crucially important tool of philosophical investigation in the Nietzschean oeuvre, and – with Nietzsche’s personal agreement – localized its roots within a stimulating interdisciplinary and interartistic environment. In particular, when Brandes portrayed Nietzsche’s  personal psychological stance, he foregrounded Nietzsche’s Dostoevsky interpretation and Ibsen, Strindberg and Kierkegaard’s “psychological problems”, in addition to the influence of French moralists and early psychologists. Thus, Brandes and Nietzsche explicitly referred to several crucial psychological sources that Pippin does not even begin to touch upon in his book.

The “psychologist Nietzsche” has been in the centre of interest ever since Nietzsche’s days; in nearly every decade since can we find at least three or four works that are relevant to the Nietzsche discourse at large and whose title includes ‘psychology’ or some cognate concept. During the triumphant years of psychoanalysis this number increased by several orders of magnitude. Among the great, “national” (i.e., German, French, North-American, Spanish, etc.) Nietzsche discourses that have proved to be crucial for the whole of philosophical thinking, it is the North-American Nietzsche discourse, e.g. that of Pippin’s, whose main pillar, Walter Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) also presents the Nietzschean oeuvre in explicit psychological context. This does not mean that it would necessarily be difficult or impossible to say something novel and substantial in this matter. Not even Pippin’s book can make us forget how modestly contemporary philosophy utilizes psychology in the Nietzsche research, how scarcely Nietzsche scholarship is exploited in contemporary psychology, and how difficult contemporary forward-thinking representatives of psychology find it to deal with Nietzsche. This is extremely unfortunate because Nietzsche discusses many issues that should be addressed in the framework of contemporary psychology, a discourse in which moral issues are constantly being “rediscovered”. Philosophers should also take a larger share in building a bridge between philosophy and psychology. Significant attempts to build this bridge, however, are yet to come, as is unintentionally demonstrated by Pippin’s book.

References

Robert B. Pippin: Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (GM I:6-17). In: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Christa Davis Acampora, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), pp. 131-146.

Robert Pippin: Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (I 6–17). In: Friedrich Nietzsche: Genealogie der Moral. Otfried Höffe, ed. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004), pp. 47-63.

Robert B. Pippin: Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and the French Moralist Tradition. In: Bildung – Humanitas – Zukunft bei Nietzsche (=Nietzscheforschung. Jahrbuch der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, Vol. 12). Volker Gerhardt & Renate Reschke eds. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005.), pp. 313-331.

Bernard Williams: Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology. In: Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Richard Schacht, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.), pp. 237-247. (First published in European Journal of Philosophy, 1993, 1 (1): pp. 4-14.)

Robert B. Pippin: Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780226669755
Cloth, XVII + 139 pages, US$29.00.

Kristóf Fenyvesi is completing a PhD in the Department of Humanities, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where he recently (2010) organized the 2nd International Nietzsche Symposium.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books

by Axel Vieregg

Günter Eich (Photo by Hilde Zemann; used with kind permission of the copyright holder, H. Mulzer)

At last a major portion of the poetry of Günter Eich (1907 – 1972) has been made accessible to an English-speaking readership in a new translation. Angina Days is the title that Michael Hofmann, the translator and himself an acclaimed poet, gave to his selection, quoting a line from one of Eich’s poems. Eich would have enjoyed the ambiguity: “Angina”, in German, is a harmless tonsillitis, and so it is in the poem, while in English it is a critical heart disease. On another  level, the difficulty any translator of poetry has with rendering not just words but also meaning is, in this instance, resolved: “Angina” is a cognate of “Angst” – and that is a feeling which pervades much of Eich’s work.

In an interview of 1964 Eich stated that his main concern had been to “make suffering visible”, to prevent it from being overlooked. He had had high hopes after the end of the war in 1945 that a better world would rise from the ashes. His famous Inventur (Inventory), written when he was still in an American P.O.W. camp on the banks of the Rhine ranks as one of the most striking examples of that spirit of “Zero Hour”, which saw in a radical break with tradition the precondition of a new beginning. Defiantly, the poem lists the writer’s building blocks, his most basic possessions:

This is my cap,
my coat,
my shaving kit
in the burlap bag.

This tin can:
my plate and my cup.
I scratched my name
in the soft metal.

Scratched it
with this precious nail,
which I keep out of sight
of thieving eyes. [...]

The pencil lead
is my favourite:
by day it writes out lines
that come to me at night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
my towel,
my thread.

Language is here pared back to the minimum, rhyme and conventional poetic vocabulary have disappeared. The poem culminates in the utensils of the craft of the writer, “pencil lead” and “notebook” as if to say: Mind will triumph over matter. The pen will be mightier than the sword.

Michael Hofmann’s judicious selection allows the reader to follow Eich’s development as a poet in detail. It is a journey which accompanies and reflects upon the personal, political and social issues of his time, the Cold War, rearmament, the German “Economic Miracle”, the  Vietnam War, the suffering of the poor and oppressed. It is also an inner journey which was going to lead Eich far away from his earlier beginnings. Needless to say that the optimism expressed in Inventur was not going to last.

In his poetry Eich hardly ever addresses issues directly. Rather, they seem to loom behind his texts, affecting imagery, mood and tone – one of the characteristics that make Eich’s later texts seemingly enigmatic. That is a challenge, and in most cases Michael Hofmann has met it admirably. Fluid and succinct, his translations catch Eich’s dry and laconic sound extremely well. Problems, however, arise when subtleties are overlooked, or when the nature of the text is such that an adequate rendering into readable English is well-nigh impossible.    

What follows here is therefore not intended as a critique, but as annotations and footnotes  meant to clarify some of Eich’s major concerns. Too awkward in a handsome volume of poetry, they seem to me nevertheless required in order to shed additional light on the work of one of the leading poets of post-war Germany, who has been “unjustly neglected in English”, as Hofmann rightly says.

Older Germans will remember the hours they spent listening to their valve radios when a new radio play by Günter Eich was broadcast at primetime. In the 1950s, television, in both East and West Germany, was still a novelty and few people owned a set. Radio plays provided the sounds that entered the mind more deeply and affected it more personally than any TV image ever could. Voices became inner voices, dramatic conflicts became inner conflicts. The medium suited Eich ideally: “I perceive the world through the ear rather than through the eye”, he once said, and his probing, questioning and searching enquiry into ever elusive certainties and realities made for an enthralling radio experience.

Eich’s approach was also ideally suited for the early post-war period. There was in Germany, at a time when the  Cold War was looming and before the  “economic miracle” began  benefiting the individual, an all-pervading sense of unease, of Angst  (Eich uses the word repeatedly). There was an awareness of loss: the loss of lives, of property, of beliefs and old certainties, even of self-worth. There was also an underlying feeling of guilt, mostly unacknowledged and hidden under self-pity, complacency and – almost frenzied – efforts to rebuild one’s own life, home, and self-respect. Eich saw through such efforts, exposed the unease and underlying guilt, but, first and foremost, he called for vigilance to avoid a relapse into an unfeeling barbarism.

The point of departure – and often it is an actual departure – of his “classic radio plays (1950 – 1958) is the sudden loss of the security of empirical reality. Träume – “Dreams”- is the characteristic title of the first of his great post-war radio-plays (1950). It hit the German radio audience like a bombshell and drew furious responses from many listeners who wanted to be entertained rather than disconcerted.

In “Dreams” Eich describes our waking state as a sleep “into which we have all been lulled” while to dream means in fact to awaken in the true reality. The listener is confronted with five endgames, each located in a different continent and hence universal. They are parables of man’s bleak existential situation, recognised with terror in the dream, but immediately forgotten on awakening. The play ends with the ever louder gnawing sound of termites and the crumbling to dust of a world where “the ground on which we stand is just a thin skin, everything is hollow inside.”

Eich then adds a coda which became famous as a poem in its own right (translation Hofmann, my own closer reading in square brackets):

Wake up, your dreams are bad! Stay awake, the nightmarishness [horror] is coming nearer.
To you it is coming, though you live far from the places of bloodshed. [...]
No, don’t sleep while the governors of the world are busy!
Be suspicious of the power they claim to have to acquire on your behalf!
[...]
Do what is unhelpful [what cannot be used], sing songs from out of your mouths that go against expectation [those songs they don’t expect to hear from your mouths]!
Be ornery [Be obstreperous], be as sand, not oil in the thirsty machinery of the world!

Or: “Gum up the works” as Hofmann himself suggests, in his introduction, as an alternative rendering of Eich’s ringing appeal: “seid Sand, nicht Öl im Getriebe der Welt!” – “be the spanner in the works” would be the closest idiomatic equivalent of the German saying. A clear understanding of these lines is important. Because it is from here that Eich’s concerns, his motives and motifs, as well as his imagery can best be traced.

Few people recognised at the time to what extent the appeal owed its intensity to Eich’s very own and very personal feelings of guilt. Not until the 1980s, through the investigations of Glenn R. Cuomo in the United States and those by Hans Dieter Schäfer and Wolfram Wessels in Germany, did it become apparent that Eich had indeed been “oil in the machinery” of Hitler’s Third Reich. The 1991 edition of his Collected Works, as well his correspondence which had by then become accessible, could confirm that, with over 160 contributions to the Nazi broadcasting system, which culminated in the 1940 anti-British propaganda play Die Rebellion in der Goldstadt, Eich had been one of the most prolific and popular radio authors of the Third Reich. He was no follower of the regime, but, as the title of Cuomo’s investigation Career at the Cost of Compromise suggests and his investigation then shows, had certainly not sung songs “which go against expectations”. His ”songs” had met them rather: numerous pieces of light, folksy entertainment, as demanded by the authorities, precisely to “lull” the German audience “asleep”. His assertion, in his CV of 1946 or 47, which Hofmann quotes, that in the previous “ten years I did not write a line” (i.e. of poetry, but that, too, is not strictly correct) rings hollow.   

While Eich never revealed his involvement in Third Reich broadcasting openly and in plain prose, much of his post-war production reflects his attempt to come to terms with the past, to distance himself from it, to warn against gullibility and to draw the moral and aesthetic consequences. Fallibility and awakening, guilt and atonement, the appeal to recognise and to mitigate suffering, self-sacrifice in the service of others – these then become the dominant themes. Despair that so little has been learnt, indeed that Creation itself is deeply flawed, characterises the work of his final years.

A poem written in 1961 and dedicated to the Jewish (!) poet and Nobel-Prize winner Nelly Sachs comes closest to a confession. It also clearly develops Eich’s aims as a writer:

Game Paths

for Nelly Sachs

Don’t mention the hunters!
I sat by their fires,
I understood their language.
They know the world from the beginning
and do not question the woods.
You nod to their answers,
the smoke of their fires, too, affirms them,
and they are practiced
not to hear the scream
which annuls all world orders.

No, we want to be alien
and be astounded at death,
collect the breaths of the uncomforted,
cut across the tracks
and deflect the barrels of the rifles.

(translation A.V.)

It is hardly necessary to consult Nelly Sachs’ poetry for the numerous inter-textual references Eich makes to recognise what is meant by the hunters, their game, their fires, by the smoke. Michael Hofmann, in his introduction, talks about Eich’s many “gestures of refusal”: “Eich affirms one of the most ancient human freedoms, that of saying ‘no’”. This poem, which Hofmann does not include, could have served as an illustration.

There are other, oblique references which Eich makes to his past. The shortest is a three-line poem where the “gesture of refusal”, the rejection of any demands made on him is dialectically linked to his early entrapment. Unfortunately, due to the impossibility of rendering the ambiguity in English, the reference is lost. Michael Hofmann translates:

Thank you, but leave us.
We have already been to the caves
of the rat catchers.

Whereas Eich really says: “Long ago we had already been inside the caves / of the Pied Pipers”, (“in den Höhlen der Rattenfänger“). It is a “Once bitten twice shy”, or, as the equivalent German saying goes: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”, a burnt child shies away from the fire. That is the meaning of “the burnt children” – “die gebrannten Kinder” – in the poem Brothers Grimm, an allusion which the literal translation in Angina Days also cannot convey. German 20^th ct. history is indeed a Grim(m) fairy tale!

Increasingly, Eich developed a cryptic, hieroglyphic style of writing. “Templates for meditation” he called his late texts. The reader is sent on a quest for meaning – through empathy, through following cross references and deciphering key words, through unravelling plays on words. This presents a daunting challenge to any translator. Michael Hofmann translates the last lines of Bestellung (Order) as follows:

hurry up and serve the dishes
that don’t exist,
and uncork the marvels!

Then we won’t mind
opening our mouths
and paying what we owe.

Lost in this translation is Eich’s play on words in the last line, and lost with it is the theme of the poem: “was wir schuldig sind” translates not just as “what we owe” but as “for what we are guilty of”. Currency is the obolus for Charon: “the penny under the tongue”. An early draft of the poem underscores the context of guilt and atonement. One of the “marvels” the speaker wants “uncorked” is a “brandy distilled from tears”.  A similar constellation occurs in the earlier poem Andenken, (Memorial). While the fires are out, their smoke still lingers: “The wind is full of black dust. / It scours the names off the gravestones / and etches in ours / on this day today” – and not “etches this day into us” as Michael Hofmann translates.

Eich’s “gestures of refusal” focus on the opposition to all forms of “Einverständnis”, i.e. agreement, acceptance, assent and affirmation. In Dreams and in its coda, or in Wildwechsel, the emphatic “no” can be understood as a largely political and social protest. Gradually, however, Eich’s rejection of any “establishment” widens into an all-embracing existential revolt, a revolt against God: “I am mad at the establishment, not just the political, but the establishment of Creation”, he said in 1970 in an interview with students from a Berlin High School. Or again in 1971, a year before his death: “Today I no longer accept nature: even although it is unalterable. I am against acceptance [das Einverständnis] of things in Creation. It is always the same thought process: acceptance no longer [das Nichtmehr-einverstandensein].”

Such a rejection of consent calls for persistent questioning, for a rejection of “answers” to which one simply “nods”, as in Wildwechsel.  “With my verse I raise questions. My faith in answers is minimal, my agreement [Einverständnis] is lacking.” The ultimate question for Eich is that which, with the black humour so characteristic of his late work, he calls the “Schlupfwespenfrage (I, 341), i.e. the “ichneumon-question”. It is, of course, the age-old philosophical problem of theodicy, the question why God allows evil and suffering to exist. A passage from the project of a requiem (1957) which remained unpublished during Eich’s lifetime illustrates what is meant:

[...] you can add Creation,
tally-ho and feast of slaughter,
the mouse between the teeth of the cat,
eggs of the ichneumon
in the paralysed body of the caterpillar,
the harmony of horror…

The ichneumon-fly with its sting paralyses the caterpillar, lays its eggs into its body, which is then eaten alive by the larvae. That, for Eich, made Creation a scandal. Such is the scandal that it makes even the dead stir in protest: “the shaking of the gravestones / when the caterpillar arches under the paralysing sting” (Two in the Afternoon). But this is not what the reader finds in Angina Days. Michael Hofmann’s translation fails to evoke the significance of this central concept of Eich’s, and so the line reads instead: “the crippled caterpillar wriggles” – which eliminates the sting, and with it the ichneumon-fly.

Such a scandalous state of the world convinced Eich that any seeming harmony and beauty in nature were just a thin veneer, a ploy even, to make us acquiesce, so as to obtain our “Einverständnis” with the world as it is: “In the evenings / the sunsets are intended to reassure you”, he wrote already in 1955. In his late subversive prose pieces, the Maulwürfe (“moles”, because they undermine all accepted tenets), Eich revisits his themes in a self-mocking theatre of the absurd. In Hausgenossen (“Flat Mates”) “Mother Nature” enters, her mouth smeared with blood, and proudly displays her latest model: “Here, the praying mantis. While his abdomen copulates with her, she gobbles up his thorax. Yuck, mama, I say, you are unappetising. But the sunsets, she giggles.”

In Michael Hofmann’s selection all these aspects are present, but, unfortunately, his translations frequently obscure or ignore them. In Poor Sunday he gives a splendid English rendering of Eich’s mocking picture of the good citizens, all dressed up for their Sunday outing: “it’s hoist all sails and nipples / erect and health here we come.” Basking in self-satisfaction it is their hour: “hour of the magnificent” (“Stunde der Prächtigen”), and one might well hear an echo of “Lorenzo der Prächtige”, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Medici banker. (Before the advent of leisure-wear, conservative Germans used to don their “Sunday Best” – “hoist all sails” – for a stroll through the park; that was then to become designer sportswear.) These are the yes-men, those who have all the answers. But Hofmann translates the line as “hour of splendor” and so the people and the allusions disappear. For Eich, after all, it is but a “poor Sunday”. He mocks the show of wealth and jollity which cannot hide the existential void, nor can the beauty of nature, in this case that of the “sycamore glades”. Their “abgekartete Schönheit” does not translate as “hand-me-down beauties”, as Hofmann has it, but as a beauty “rigged”, a beauty “connived”. Consequently, a useless reject, it can now be consigned to “the museum of consolations” [where] “the drooling sun / points at the merry dust.” Dust to dust – it is a poem about the vanity of all things, a mockery of all solace.

There is a similar derision in Ohne Unterschrift where Eich does list “The answers: caterpillars under the bark / of felled poplars [...] // A world order of cut flowers / and the pleasing line of forest edges. [...] // no more questions now, assent [Einverständnis]…” But, with the caterpillars, the ichneumon is not far. These answers are not his answers: he refuses to subscribe to such cheap and naive satisfaction. The title translates as Unsigned. Rather, these answers are those of “my enemies / with their assent”, as he says in Zwei [Two]: “die Feinde / mit ihrem Einverständnis.” Here, however, Michael Hofmann translates: “with their common purpose”. Consistency is lost and with it a central element of Eich’s thinking.  

Eich’s late work is steeped in utter pessimism: “Vain the cruel hope / that the screams of the tortured / might pave the way for a brighter future” (Topography of a Better World). Vain also – Eich had come to realise – was any hope that his writing, intended “to make suffering visible”, could have any consequences. The optimism expressed in the Inventory of 1945 is refuted in a poem from 1966, not included by Hofmann. The similarity of its minimalism makes it almost look like a companion piece, but this time it is a balance sheet – with nothing under the bottom line:

Less

Fewer goals
and smaller,
rice-grain sized.

Not lavish,
most things
in meditations.

Already suited
for poverty and
toothlessness.

Brief screams still
across the tarmac,
unnoticed.

Told or
untold,
and rice-grain sized.

(Translation A.V.)

The “screams” of the suffering which Eich wanted his readers to hear in so many of his texts (cf. Game Paths) still re-echo, but whether “told or untold”, it makes no difference. By now, Eich had reached his ultimate position: that of the Oriental sage, withdrawn into his “rock garden”, meditating over a grain of rice: “I have been here / and here / I could have / gone there too, or stayed at home. / You can understand the world / without leaving home. / I encountered Lao Tse / before I met Marx.[...]”. (Delayed, from Occasions and Rock Gardens) Eich had indeed studied Sinology.

The “meditations” are reflected and passed on in what became Eich’s final literary triumph, the anarchic short prose texts of his “Moles”, “Maulwürfe”, most of them still waiting to be translated into English. They are cackling deconstructions of any form of “Einverständnis”, of acceptance, including that of logic and grammar, a rejection of and reduction to absurdity of a world gone awry. A poem written shortly before Eich´s death, and definitively rendered by Michael Hofmannn, points the way:

AND

Fog fog fog,
hair
in my ears, a
noncommittal
friendliness
and
and
and Raissa’s sweet laugh.

Experience tells
what belongs with what
what belongs with and,
only with and.
No rationale.

It will last
as long as the and doesn’t
slip my mind like the other words.
It’s enough, thanks, it’s plenty.

Günter Eich: Angina Days. Selected Poems
Translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-3434-1
Cloth, 216 pages, US$24.95

Axel Vieregg has written extensively on  Günter Eich and edited Vols. I and IV of his Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), 1991. He lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand, where he was a professor of German literature at Massey University.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.