Accidental Insights Into Reading

Manash Bhattacharjee

The new Seminar issue, ‘A Country of Our Own’ (April 2012), became an interesting prospect when I saw Nauman Naqvi’s name among the contributors. I started reading his essay the night I got the issue, but other matters intervened and I kept it for later. The next day I took the issue with me to read on my way to JNU. I opened the Nauman essay and began to read earnestly.

Before I began to read, I vaguely remembered Nauman mentioning in the beginning a “repetitive writer” named Intizar, but I had turned the first page which I had already read, and was eager to go on from the second. I read about Nauman’s summer holidays in his native village in Barabanki where he was joined by Pakistani cousins. He mentioned how as children they were invariably divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups and teams in discussions and games involving the partitioned countries. A few “Indian cousins” would support Pakistan in the cricket and hockey matches to not only stamp their displeasure against Indian Muslims being discriminated against but also from a fear of Islam being under threat in India. When it came to hockey matches, the same cousins would desire that Zafar Iqbal and Mohd. Shahid score goals for India, but that Pakistan win in the end. Nauman slowly realised, in his gradual visits to Pakistan, there being more to Partition than the Hindu–Muslim divide.

When he visited Pakistan after the Sikh riots, Nauman found Muslims having relinquished Hindustani for Punjabi, with a majoritarian refrain against the migrant Urdu speakers. Nauman then recollects how his own family was divided between the two nation-states during Partition and how the matter was more complex than children’s games. Nauman pauses to see how even those games as children were coloured in turn by what happened during Partition. With interesting tales about the difficulties of visas to Pakistan, Nauman ends by pointing to the ridiculous problems thrown up by the nation and seriously questioning its legitimacy.

I finished reading the essay, glad to know much more about Nauman’s life, and felt a little more enriched. But the moment my eyes drifted towards the next essay, I read: ‘A Secret South-Asian Meta-utopia’ by Nauman Naqvi. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. I turned back the pages to find out whose essay I had been passing off in my head as Nauman’s. The essay titled ‘Family Chronicles’ bore the name Jamal Kidwai. I had met Jamal at a party once, and knew he was from Aman Trust. But I had never read him before. I had never read even Nauman before, though I had heard his video lecture on ‘A Muslim Meditation on Violence’. Nauman, I knew, was from Karachi. So how could I have glossed over the fact that the account I was reading was of an “Indian” Muslim? How could such an error happen?

Anyway, an error is simply an error, and all I had to do was re-structure my rational sensibilities, acknowledge the Jamal story as Jamal’s, forget the associations I had made of the story with Nauman, and move ahead to read Nauman’s piece with a better hold on error-prone possibilities. I did read Nauman’s piece finally. I did not, finally, take the rational line of editing out the writing titled ‘Family Chronicles’ from the associations I had developed from it with Nauman Naqvi. In other words, I did not hold my error of reading as an error of judgement or an error of ethics. I found my error simply circumstantial and not burdened by the discourse of truth or truth-reading. I was not reading into any truth; I was reading a narrative signed by a person whose name I merely misplaced. But does that misplacement amount to an aesthetic or ethical crime regarding the author and the author’s name/signature? To my understanding, it is not, because the author, alive or dead, is a singular register only because his name is NOT another name. Nauman is NOT Jamal. At least that part of the error was, willy-nilly, “rectified”. I couldn’t do much about it, but I still wanted to read Jamal’s story with Nauman’s presence in it, as if it was Nauman’s story. And I looked for reasons about why it is possible to do so and take this erroneous reading further. I wanted to see where an error-prone road could take me. Is there anything as a wrong road in a journey where the destination wasn’t chosen in the first place? How to read the signposts then? I decided to go ahead.

Does it really matter, in the first place, if Nauman is from Karachi and Jamal from Delhi or Lucknow? The narrator of ‘Family Chronicles’ was moving in and out of India and Pakistan, having family members in both the countries, and it didn’t matter whether he was an Indian moving in and out of Pakistan or a Pakistani moving in and out of India. Jamal’s story is obviously capable of being told in reverse (with slightly different anecdotes) by a Pakistani. The story of Partition was a mix-up of lives and habitats, of lives and histories getting in the way of each other, of memories getting in the way of each other. In this scenario, why couldn’t Jamal’s story be Nauman’s and vice-versa? Jamal’s story accidentally got misread as Nauman’s, but the rational error also gained a larger perspective, as a larger and more complex sensibility got added in the process of thinking about reading, the author’s name/signature, and the relationship between the two.

The context being Partition, Jamal and Nauman are two names of Partition, partitioned names, moving in and out of two countries like a name halved into two slices of history. How much did Nauman find himself in Jamal’s story? Maybe he did find a few things, if not in common, in a familiar un-commonness. After all, Jamal was Nauman’s other half, the half who lived in India and visited Pakistan. Maybe their relatives in Pakistan met, or knew of those who met. If anyone did a field research, maybe certain meetings, if not connections, can be found in the story. And the two stories will finally connect into a larger story of partitioned people. Without my error, which mixed up Jamal’s story with Nauman’s, the essence of Partition’s story would have been missed. I had grasped the crux of the matter.

There is a term in Greek called hamartia. It refers to an injury committed in ignorance. It is a term developed by Aristotle in his Poetics. The word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark (hamartanein) and covers a broad spectrum that includes ignorant, mistaken, or accidental wrongdoing, as well as deliberate iniquity, error, or sin. My act of reading, seen through hamartia, would then try and propose such an act of missing the mark as a necessary—albeit accidental—way of re-cognising the missing-marks, the accidents, the errors and the wrongdoings of history. This hamartian reading of Jamal’s text, by replacing the name of the author, gets nearer to what the story of Partition meant to everybody who suffered it: stories which are impossible to individualise, because the subject of that story can no longer affirm his subject-hood without falling prey into the fractured subject-making discourse of the nation. The subject of Partition, in order to free his subject-hood from power, has to flee the name and look for a pseudonym, to become another, the way Manto becomes Toba Tek Singh. Toba Tek Singh helps Manto flee his own story and find refuge in the madness of his character. It is a deliberate act of fictionalising one’s subject-hood in order to re-appear as mad in the guise of another character.

But in my case, it wasn’t Jamal or Nauman who faced the possibility of madness, but myself, the reader. The accidental act of reading created a schizophrenic moment where I could not go back to the original moment of the accident and found myself split into two: much like a post-Partition subject reading on Partition. I could had to save my madness by simply rationalising the act, which I did not end up doing. I wanted to face the depth of this accident and see what strange conclusions I would find there. The first relation I could deduce from it was that just like Partition was a catastrophe, my reading was a catastrophe within that catastrophe.

The past, Nauman writes in his ‘correct’ text, is “no longer a clear and determined relation” but a “bundle of relations, whose tips come into their grasp only to slip away, and nor are they convinced of the truth of these relations”. If the clear and determined relations of the past slip away at the tip, there is no relapse into a relation-less sphere but those relations being replaced by the unclear and undetermined relations of the world. The moment the ‘truth’ of relations vanishes, the hamartia of relations begins. There is no other way to re-enter history unless through an original hamartia that catastrophically mimics the other catastrophe, history, and refuses to part with that relationship of everlasting death and remembering.

As a reader who turns interlocutor, I marked a relationship between Jamal and Nauman, which strikes at the heart of the secret South Asian meta-utopia. The secret is perhaps the error of reading itself, of finding itself error-prone in the reading of loss and its relationship with one’s past and one’s world, forever ruminating at the vanishing tip where those near leave and those afar draw near, and the variety of loss overwhelms its subjects.

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# I am indebted to my friend Rajarshi Dasgupta for insightfully adding to my direction of thought.

(The author is a political science scholar and writer, living in Delhi)

Fairly Directly to Death

Prasanta Chakravarty

Stanley Cavell’s magisterial memoir Little Did I Know, Excerpts from Memory (Stanford University Press, 2010) begins by telling us that his will be a story of the detours on the human path to death: “…accidents avoided or embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed or transfigured, malice insufficiently imposed, love inadequately acknowledged.” These he has authorization to speak of.

In a way it is a story of embracing a certain blindness—like the agnostic philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankelevitch who would not listen to German music or mention German philosophy. It is like keeping one’s eyes closed and moving through a familiar room in order to imagine what it would be like to be blind so that one is able to tiptoe back and forth between remembering and forgetting.

Forgetting and acceptance does not mean that the disagreements with the alleyways of life are now agreed with: it means finding a further life—in the practice of philosophy. Philosophy then, is often an abstraction of autobiography. So, Cavell reminds us, how Wittgenstein would habitually think and share ordinary language, not advance theses in philosophy. Philosophy, like autobiography must be for everyone and no one—as Emerson in his notebooks or Wordsworth in The Preludes allude to us.

This attitude, this discriminating posture, would seem pretentious to those who write out of a sense of a history of oppression. Not enough representative of culture or race or sex, it would seem. What then is Cavell doing as a Jew? His Jewishness—always marked a tinge sharper in America, in growing up in the East side of Atlanta and then in Sacramento, in his obligations to Semitic purity, his explorations of the subtle biases in European philosophical tradition, are not matters of cultural identity, he tells us, but “identities compacted in my existence.” As he thinks about identities and scruples of purity he simultaneously wonders about his sedation and isolated concentration of lights in the midst of a complicated recent heart procedure, and speculates, might we not all be headed for exciting interplanetary travel? And yet Cavell humbly underlines that his words can be at best excerpts from an American academic’s life—alternating between the common and the singular.

In a book peppered with dazzling encounters with some of the sharpest minds of the 20^th century, two men stand out. One is the philosopher J.L. Austin. And the other, Cavell’s father: “We see our fathers naked. We men,” Cavell would confide,  as he painstakingly details his old man’s  ruthless melancholia and acutely vulnerable Jewish relationship to a new country and what he has bequeathed to the junior—dispassion and attachment in equal measure. A bereft and incoherent professor, unsure in things he ought to be an authority on, as we espy quite early. But beneath the raw murmurings and unbridgeable rancor also lie a subtle bond of empathy, like when the unschooled, pawnshop-owner father takes the son to a manufacturer of academic robes when Cavell prepares to defend his doctoral dissertation. It was a private ceremony and the rigorous philosopher, from a distance, wonders about the requirement of such ceremonies in our lives: “Ceremony in human existence is no more measurable by its utility, though philosophers seem to sometime argue otherwise, than the possession of language is, or living in common; you might as well argue the utility of possessing a human body.”  And once, when Cavell asked his mother why she ended up marrying his father, she replied, “He is a serious man.” Her silences, Cavell tells us, when not terrifying, were often golden. At its profoundest, this journey of a book is about silences and postponement and the price we willingly, knowingly pay for these decisions. It is a mad world, my masters!

And it is these that have always driven Cavell to his readings.  The kaleidoscope of subject positions and the inexhaustible joy in trying to relate to those take Cavell to intellectual inquiries. He wonders about Thoreau acquiring wood for his new cabin by destroying the old shack and recalls a particular passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. ‘our investigation seems only to destroy everything important,’ but insists that he is ‘destroying nothing but houses of cards.’ But if the world remains, as it is, pointlessly, what counts as defense against another’s moods?

Between these bouts of inwardness, Cavell narrates some exuberant and universal teenage moments too—his awkward awe and sleeplessness at spying a local beauty, naked in a local performance rehearsal, his brave 1935 apple-green Oldsmobile coupe, high school bowling matchups—sometimes played for money, his music band and music album collection that he so treasured and then let go. There is this hilarious anecdote about his own precociousness as a kid as his teachers tested him on skipping him to the second grade a year earlier. After the teachers finished testing Cavell with a string of questions and making him do things with blocks, he shot back: “You have asked me a lot of questions. Now I am going to ask you a question. What is the difference between a hill and a pill?” To his bemused teachers who had no clue whatsoever, after a brief pause, Cavell coolly informed—“A hill goes up and pill goes down.” When he came out, he told his mother that his question was not good enough since a hill could both go up and down. There is a sense that this precociousness, and a keen sense of it, was both a source of pride and perpetual misery to him and to his close ones.

While in the hospital after a road accident he felt like Proust’s narrator describing his stages of awakenings! Are accidents, unlike events, disproportionate to causal causes, of threads forever lost? But then he wonders whether accidents, encounters, excuses and misses could at all happen after cell phones. O yes, they could indeed, “what if the cell phone melts or a goat eats it.” Things will continue to happen comically, at unripe times, in the wrong tempo. It is in these circumstances that Cavell recalls one of his rich and admired uncles who gave some worldly-wise advice: “Don’t concern yourself with what you hear about anti-Semitism. Just be three times better than your competition and you’ll be all right.”

Music is a religion, outlasting Judaism and Socialism. (There are two other religions in this book—Eros and Philosophy). But he spends a lot of time narrating his interest in the extraordinary ordinariness of music—a metaphysical world that suffuses his material conditions of living. Helps him keep his head above water. Outside of academe. But sometimes with academe. A young miner in the North of England, Cavell recalls, became enamored of classical music and would whistle snatches of it as he went to work. An old miner provided him with a further education: “You ought not to whistle Beethoven when you go to the mine. You hear the whole orchestra when you whistle. What the rest of us hear is only your whistling.”  And Ernest Bloch in Berkeley gives Cavell and his graduate classmates a glimpse of what it meant to be an intellectual and an artist at the same time. There is a touching exercise in the economy of music when Bloch tells his class and then goes on to demonstrate how conducting is just clapping when the conductor gives the clue. The rest is detailing. Years later, during the political upheavals of the sixties, Cavell remembers that the same Bloch had said to his class: “When the city of San Francisco, for my seventieth anniversary, dedicated a day to me and gave a large luncheon in my honor, I began my speech by saying: ‘This is the unhappiest day of my life.’ ” Such was the stoic power of equitable utopia in music.

Cavell sketches the impetus for his own formidable oeuvre as a part and parcel of his growing up days. The Claim of Reason, for instance, was written from a fear of inexpressiveness and over expressiveness and to discover the role of therapy in philosophy. No wonder, then, that a despairing isolation and bouts of intellectual ecstasy joust for primacy in each of Cavell’s works. One of the important personal and poignant sections of the book is Cavell’s observation of how Jewish pawn-brokers (not unlike Dickens in the blacking factory?)  like his father would often read Chapter 24 of Deuteronomy from the Torah in which laws of usury are promulgated, requiring respect from those who have borrowed along with the law against gleaning, to confess the knowledge that once that whole community was enslaved.  This taught them to take the pledge of pawning almost as a therapy. This poetry of uneasy redemption and grace are the first suggestions that lead to many others about the deeply therapeutic role of philosophy—and Cavell is not sure whether philosophy is supposed to provide you with any answers.  But it is for this spiritually divided selfhood that young Cavell got attracted to Thoreau’s Walden, as he wondered how a work so clearly and incessantly written to highlight the economic dimension of human existence is also so deeply reflective. Was the writer of Walden influenced by German idealism, then?

Pawn shops and old school salesmanship also meant a knowledge of elaborate codings and decodings, before the days of computers, and that meant a spirit of the wanderlust—driving him towards riddles and poetry in philosophy. This double vision of philosophy, sometimes competing—between moral claims and the wandering/wondering spirit—leads to a certain discomfort as Cavell encounters two books( A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language) early on,  that ‘reasonably’ claimed that moral judgment is, at its best, an expression of emotion meant to move and persuade. Is this like reporting a lost and found dog—the aim of moral philosophy? And what about wonder—how do we learn to inject desire and disturbance in reflection? Wonder means something opposite to teaching and instruction—and Cavell wonders about the point of speaking altogether. Is it worth it, to open one’s mouth? This question suffuses the opening essays of Cavell’s first book—Must We Mean What We Say? And he acknowledges his divided allegiance to moral philosophy and its uselessness at various points: “Perhaps this texture of fear and constricted knowledge, with its anticipatory echo of the endowed Chair of Aesthetics and the Theory of Value I occupied at Harvard during my last decades of teaching amounts only to some private joke certain lesser gods are reduced to telling one another.” Once his teaching assistant remarked that when logic got really interesting and powerful it left natural language quite behind, which was too hopelessly vague and ambiguous to serve as a medium of serious philosophical analysis. Cavell was disappointed. Academia is also another form of nomadism as one evolves and shifts gear, and also as one’s students get dispersed to the winds after companionable labour and nourishing conversations. Consequently, Stanley Cavell’s universe is marked by a certain restiveness (what he calls ‘random extravagance’) along with intense philosophical professionalism. So, we see someone who consistently argues for an ethical compass jumping headlong into music and performance in the black Tougaloo college in Jackson, Mississippi during the restive sixties and transfiguring Harvard philosophy classes by including Marx in the syllabus.

One comes across a few choicest anecdotes and insider stories of the Atlantic academic world during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1963, when Cavell meets Bernard Williams for the first time over dinner at Princeton, Williams informs him rather quizzically about how the cold and ‘insufferably dogmatic’ Austin pushed his Oxford graduate students and younger dons to read Cavell’s early essays, who bristled at the thought of reading philosophy from another fellow graduate student and an American at that!

Then there is the legendary music teacher at Berkeley, Marjorie Petray, who wishes to test Cavell by asking him to play for 60 seconds Liszt’s D-Flat Fantasy impromptu and at the end of it, turning to the class, remarks: ‘Isn’t it fine to hear a man’s touch at the piano?” That daring invidious compliment lead to an adolescent crush as he looks for excuses to be in the magic presence of this ‘full woman.’ He begins to think about Tannhauser’s curse—whose singing attracts the passion of women, and to each of them he comes to sing the wrong song or sings wrongly to each. Only one woman successfully intercedes for him, once for his life, once for his redemption. Marjorie Patray committed suicide, leaving two children and a rich husband.

Cavell fondly recalls how Terence Malik, whose academic major was philosophy at Harvard and who was actually immersed in Heidegger and in films, of course. Such sharpness of mind and the quick daring of considering Heidegger a philosopher at Harvard will not go down well, Cavell feared, with his external examiners. But Malik was unmoved, and began instructing his instructors instead. His grades ensured that even if he failed in the interviews, he would still graduate with the highest honours.

Or one of those stories expatriated Harvard graduates like to tell to convey to the less fortunate the unrivaled swank of Harvard that Cavell tells us with some irony. “After dinner, around the fire in an adjacent common room, George Santayana was talking with a few of us carefully but effortlessly well-dressed young men, and asked us: ‘Can you read Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, and Lucretius in Latin?’ No one claimed to be able to read all three. Santayana replied: ‘I too am very ignorant.’ And then added, ‘Not that ignorant.’

The other one is about Thomas Kuhn, who after a late night drink or two with Cavell, blurts out with a tortured look: “I know Wittgenstein uses the idea of ‘paradigm.’ But I do not see its implications in his work. How do I answer the objection that this destroys the truth of science? I deplore the idea. Yet if instruction and agreement are the essence of the matter, then Hitler could instruct me that a theory is true and get me to agree.” Cavell’s reply I cast as follows: “No he could not; he could not educate you in, convince you of, show you, its truth. Hitler could declare a theory to be true, as an edict. He could effectively threaten to kill you if you refuse to, or fail to, believe it. But all that means is that he is going to kill you; or perhaps kill you if you do not convince him, show him, that you accept and will follow the edict. I don’t say this is clear. But it is something I cannot doubt is worth doing whatever work it will take to make clear.” Kuhn’s reaction was startling. He rose almost violently from his chair, began pacing in front of the fireplace, and as Cavell narrates, muttered something like, “Yah. Yah.” What causes conviction? What, perhaps rather, may undo an unnoticed conviction?” After that night both arranged to meet for lunch and regularly discuss ideas which would later appear as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In a manner, Cavell’s book is the quintessential tale of the immigrant in America. And ruthlessly introspective, as the best of such tales have always been. He reminds us that while United States is a synonym for chauvinism, America might not be (patriotism has become a maggot in his nation’s consciousness). Has this something to do with US’s chronic skittishness about philosophy and original intellectuality? A typical example is the writings in the New Yorker which share a particular claim to sophistication among the literary and the tasteful class. And yet, Cavell tells us how he came across an essay on Emerson on his two hundredth birth anniversary by the celebrated John Updike, who was able to, and willing to, string out a list of careless and banal criticism of Emerson’s pretensions, but unwilling to explain subtly and accurately by contextualizing those very sentences. Cavell asks: Who was Updike protecting? What public service was he thereby performing? It is this cultural dispensation, of hasty and gleaming smartness, that Cavell has been cautioning us in all his works. As he sums up: “Snobbery readily presents itself as a form of tastelessness manifested by those with some real taste.”

In a brief spurt of inspired wonder at the relationship between poetry, philosophy and more practical activities, Cavell recalls Wallace Stevens’ and Santayana’s repeated claims upon philosophy and asks why The Magic Mountain might open with the question ‘What is Time?” He responds to Stevens’ claims of virility in poetry by considering Euripides’ Hippolytus, as a study of the dangers of promising and Racine’s Phedre, which is about the treacherousness of speech.  Poets have to risk both—accept the promise of poetry before they can withstand consequent prophecy/poverty and contest with monsters the right to assert their own language and imaginative cosmos. In the background is Wittgenstein’s famous tag at the end of Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must be silent,” which was in response to Nietzsche’s admonition at the beginning of his second volume of Human, All Too Human, “One should speak only where one must not be silent.” But when a culture unnoticeably learns to read and converse silently, its implications are vast.  Cavell’s own literary-artistic sensibility was largely guided by his discovery of writers of stories, like Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Bernard Malamud, Robert Warshow and the likes of Kafka and Mann. The legacy, for which he is permanently grateful, he calls non-Stalinist socialist aspirations living somehow with a commitment to high modernism. But he was often bored in literary theory and psychology classes, which seemed formless and far too uselessly abstract. In this case he had to be partisan:  “…in both psychology and literature classes, names of members of the philosophy department began to be invoked by students asking the most interesting questions…” But this reaction comes from an intense love of art, not dismissal. What he dismisses is pedantry. Without fail.  Cavell, in continuation to a rare tradition in philosophy, has always sought philosophy’s rapprochement with art, two ancient rivals: “I am not willing just to say that Shakespeare, Racine, Dickens, George Eliot, Ibsen, Proust, Kafka, and so on evidently know intuitively what philosophy responds to conceptually. These writers also evidently respond conceptually.”

Music is a constant presence and so are films. As he writes the musical score for a professional production of King Lear (songs, fanfare, tuckets, alarums, storm effects and a concluding dirge), Cavell underscores the fact that to imbibe theatre’s intellectual ambience means not only a familiarity that exceeds mere literary study but also the enlargement of scope, because a production systematically and explicitly demands the exercise of imagination, articulation, interpretation, surprises and mood. Cavell is inordinately happy when his Cities of Words gets mentioned by two reviewers in connection with the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That some of his works are long forgotten save a specialized readership and yet are referred to in relation to this film or that composition makes it still alive and pertinent. Similarly, a publication of a collection of essays Contending with Stanley Cavell, on his works, with his responses in it, makes him pleased as a peach. We observe, to our utter delight, how common our humanity is actually—with its similar worries and fears, its stubborn foibles and tribulations.

At one level the book is also about academic institutions. And at a time when institutions are being undermined and faculty humiliated by all kinds of high handedness, certain observations demand special attention. Like when he observes in general how “Large and ambitious universities are on average probably no less complex, and no subtler, at making decisions about hiring and promotion, and generally no more or less rational in evaluating and balancing talent and productiveness and promise and reputation and loyalty and simple affection, than law firms or insurance companies or sports teams. It is true that the latter have measures of winning and losing apparently more objective (cases handled successfully, policies written, league standings) than universities do. Yet one imagines universities to have the freedom to be better, at once juster and kinder and more imaginative.” At several points the book reminds us how lectures need not necessarily be displays of individual accomplishment rather than invitations to participate in professionally working things through and how graduate students ought to be regarded as participating in a common enterprise with their professors. Cavell, ever so persistent in highlighting the kind of seriousness that academic pursuit demands, is at the same time ruthlessly dismissive of academe’s false pretences. To the popular adage meant to explain the compounding decline of an academic department’s importance, or perhaps to decry a new appointment to the faculty: “Second-rate people like to be around third-rate people. First-rate people like to be around first-rate people,” Cavell has to say this: “Do first-rate people speak so—except in their fourth-rate moments?”

And a very touching, poignant episode comes late in the book that shows how this man thinks about the academe. Gilbert Ryle comes to Harvard, and among other things, gives an informal lecture in the students’ common room. As Ryle holds forth, a senior Harvard faculty, Henry Aiken, arrives volubly drunk and creates a commotion. A student host takes him out and just as Cavell was thinking the situation was well handled, the student returns and takes his place again near Ryle. When Cavell asks the student later about why he would leave Aiken to his disgrace, he said he did not wish to miss the lecture. This sets Cavell thinking about the level of refinement and prestige that moral philosophy has achieved these days. And a consequent casualness in everyday actions: “A talented teacher to whom you owe gratitude for repeated past kindnesses, and whose disgraceful conduct will be underscored by the consciousness of your rebuke, deserves better of you than being deftly turned out of doors, when the only cost to you to help him preserve a tatter of dignity is the mild disappointment of missing the end of a public conversation.” There is something quaint enough to learn from someone who refuses to recognize competitiveness (or moral stinginess) where it entails a lack of respect. The way to make winning pertinent, or rather irrelevant, is to win in such a way as to be beyond or outside evaluation.

There is an important section towards the concluding part of the book which shows how vexed and attracted this professional philosopher is towards French post-structuralist writings. On the one hand, Cavell is moved intensely by intentions of exchange and challenging claims in philosophy. The whole point of doing philosophy is a right to confront (“…a confrontation that draws blood, or stops or boils or cools or heartens it.”) and examine each other in our daily existence. This is a rational position. On the other, he is profoundly disturbed that philosophy has put a distance between itself and theology. This leads him to Lacan and Blanchot who feel that human beings are made so as to bump into each other. Philosophy ought to be the unblushing publishing of one’s guilt within the everyday. And yet that it chronically avoids the everyday is a predicament Cavell painfully confronts. His first encounter with Derrida (with Cavell’s book in hand) sums it up in manner. He can see how both of them are thinking together on the conditions of our existence and yet the ways of this French articulation he cannot fathom. The phantasmagoria of fashionable American espousal of French thought bothers him and yet he walks close to them in every manner. The result is the acknowledgement of a profound conundrum within the American humanities world itself in the last century: “American dispensation of humanities, formed in the absence, indeed the shunning, of the study of philosophy, left it incapable of evaluating claims made in the name of philosophy by philosophers from the other side, whereas professional philosophers on this side were on the whole too contemptuous of these claims to study them.”

This is a book about a way of living. This is also, to a large extent, the inside story of the American academia as it developed in the previous century. And within all this lies the story of the evolution of philosophy. What does a commitment to philosophy look like? With what right, out of what need, might or should a teacher question it? Certainly not by creating works, but by going back over one’s expressions, leaving nothing standing, or perhaps, as Emerson, one of Cavell’s heroes, puts the matter, always just approaching. To trace a path, crooked and unpredictable—that is what has been Stanley Cavell’s aim in this journey. No harm indeed in saying again, It is a mad world, my masters—I speak as a child.

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Links:

Vladmir Jankelevitch, ‘Should we Pardon Them.’ http://www.du.edu/cjs/documents/jankelevitchshouldwepardonthem.pdf

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Works http://www.rwe.org/

Richard Wagner, Tannhauser Overture, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ2WIUam7Tc

Deuteronomy, Chapter 24 http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0524.htm

Euripides, Hippolytus http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/hippolytus.html

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions http://insitu.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf

J.L. Austin, Other Minds http://www.scribd.com/jacinto1234/d/63288853-Austin-Other-Minds

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Prasanta Chakravarty teaches English at the University of Delhi.

Sheesha Ghat

Naiyar Masud

[HUG is grateful to author Anil Menon  for providing us with this version of the story]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad mauj raa ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad

Mauje keh bar-kinaar ravad az miyaan-e maa

Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore

Leaves a hundred more perturbed by its departure

—Naziri Nishapuri

And with such luck and loss

I shall content myself

Till tides of turning time may toss

Such fishers on the shelf

—George Gascoigne

After keeping me with him with the greatest of love for eight years, my foster father was finally forced to find another place for me. It was not his fault, nor was it mine. He had believed, as had I, that my stuttering would stop after a few days of relaxation with him, but neither he nor I expected that the people here would turn me into a sideshow, the way they do a madman. In the bazaars, people listened to my words with a greater curiosity than they exhibited toward others, and whether what I said was funny or not, they always laughed. Within a few days my situation worsened so drastically that when I tried to say anything at all, not only in the bazaar but even at home, the words collided with my teeth and lips and palate and bounced back the way waves retreat on touching shore. In the end, I would get so tongue-tied that the veins in my neck would swell and a terrible pressure would invade my throat and chest, leaving me breathless and threatening to suffocate me. I would pant, forced to leave my sentence incomplete, then start all over again after I had recovered my breath. At this my foster father would scold me, “You’ve said that. I heard you. Now go on.” If he ever scolded me, it was over this. But my problem was that I couldn’t begin my account from the middle.

Sometimes he would listen to me patiently and at others he would lift his hand and say, “All right, you may stop.”

But if I couldn’t begin my account from the middle, I couldn’t leave it unfinished, either. I would grow agitated. Finally he would walk away, leaving me still stuttering, talking to myself. If anyone had seen me, I’d have been thought insane. I was also fond of wandering through the bazaars, and enjoyed sitting there among the groups of people. Though I could not utter what I had to say comprehensibly, I made up for this by listening closely to what others said and repeating it in my mind. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, yet I was happy enough, because the people there didn’t dislike me, and above all my foster father held me dear and looked after my every need.

For the last few days, though, he had seemed worried. He had begun talking to me for long stretches of time, a new development. He would come up with questions to ask me that required a long answer, and then listen attentively without interrupting me. When I’d tire and begin to pant, he would wait for me to finish what I was saying, and when I resumed my account he would listen with the same concentration. I’d think he was about to scold me, and my tongue would start to tie itself in knots, but he would just gaze at me, saying nothing.

After only three days my tongue began to feel as if it were unknotting a bit. It was as if a weight were being lifted from my chest, and I began to dream of the day when I would be able to speak as others did, with ease and clarity. I began collecting in my heart all the things I had wanted to share with others. But on the fourth day, father called me over and had me sit very close to him. For a long time his talk rambled aimlessly, then he fell silent.

I waited for him to pose one of his questions, but he suddenly said, “Your new mother is arriving the day after tomorrow.” Seeing the joy begin to dawn on my face, he grew troubled, then said slowly,

“She’ll go crazy if she hears you speak. She’ll die.” The next day my luggage was all packed. Before I could ask any questions, my father took my hand and said, “Let’s go.”

***

He didn’t say a word to me during the journey. But on our way, he told a man who chanced to inquire, “Jahaz has asked for him.” Then they both started talking about Jahaz. I remembered Jahaz, too. When I had first come to live with father, Jahaz earned his bread by performing clownish imitations at fairs and bazaars. He would wear a small pink sail tied to his back—perhaps that’s why his name became Jahaz, “ship,” or perhaps he wore the sail because his name was Jahaz. The pink sail would billow when the wind blew hard and Jahaz would seem to be moving forward under its power. He could mimic to perfection a ship caught in a storm. We would be convinced that angry winds, raging waves, and fast-spinning whirlpools were bent on sinking the ship. The sounds of the wind howling, the waves slapping, the whirlpool’s ringing emptiness, even the sails fluttering, would emerge distinctly from the mimic’s mouth; finally, the “ship” would sink. This routine was very popular with the children and the older boys, but was performed only when the wind was high. If the wind halted, however, the young spectators were even more delighted, and called out: “Tobacco, tobacco!”

I had never seen anyone smoke tobacco the way Jahaz did. He usevery kind of tobacco, in every way it was possible to smoke it, and when the air was still he would perform such astounding tricks with clouds of smoke that the spectators couldn’t believe their eyes. After producing several smoke rings, he would take a step back, then twist his hands and wrists in the air as though sculpting a figure in soft clay. And sure enough, the rings would take on a shape, just like a sculpture, and stand suspended in the air for some time. Some of his mimic-routines the boys weren’t allowed to see or hear. When performing these he would hide inside a rapidly closing circle two or three spectators deep, and the only way those standing at a distance knew that Jahaz was performing his mimicry was by a glimpse of the fluttering sail and the sound of the spectators’ laughter. A year after I had come to my foster father’s, Jahaz’s voice had gone bad and he had been afflicted with a severe cough. In the course of his mimicry he had used many different voices, but now if he opened his mouth a coughing fit would seize him, and at times it took him nearly as long to finish his sentence as it would have taken me. Not only did he cease to perform his mimic-routines, he stopped coming to our village at all, and after the first year I did not see him again.

***

We passed many settlements and ghats by the Big Lake on our route. Everywhere we went, there were people who knew my father, and he would tell them that Jahaz had asked for me. I didn’t understand what this meant, but asked no questions. In my heart I was angry with him, because I wasn’t the least bit happy about the idea of living apart from him. But my father didn’t look happy either; at least he didn’t seem like someone who was about to bring home a new wife.

Finally we arrived at a grimy settlement. The people here worked glass. There were few houses, but each one had a glass-furnace; ugly chimneys belching smoke protruded from the straw thatch of the roofs. Layers of soot had settled on the walls, the lanes, the trees. The people’s clothes and the coats of stray dogs and cats were black from the smoke. Here, too, a few people were acquainted with my father. One of them bade us sit down to eat and drink. An oppressive feeling stole over me. My father looked at my face observantly, then he spoke to me for the first time on the journey.

“People don’t get old here.” I didn’t understand him. I looked at the people strolling by and, indeed, none among them was elderly. Father said, “The smoke eats them away.”

“Then why do they live here?” I wanted to ask, but the question seemed futile, so I simply stared in father’s direction.

“Jahaz knows glass-working, too,” he said after a while. “This is his home.”

I stood up with a jolt. My tongue was in many knots all at once, but I couldn’t stay silent now. Would I have to live with a smoke-belching bazaari clown like Jahaz in this settlement where a dark barbarity seemed to pour over everything? This question had to be asked, no matter how long it took to get it out.

But with a reassuring gesture father beckoned me over to sit by him, and said, “But he moved away long ago.”

I was relieved. As long as Jahaz doesn’t live here, in this settlement, I said to myself, I can live with him anywhere. Then father said: “He lives on the ghat now.” He pointed off in its direction. “On Sheesha Ghat.”

When I heard this name the oppressive feeling returned. Father must not have known that I had already heard mention of Sheesha Ghat from visitors in his house. I knew that it was the most widely known and least inhabited ghat on the Big Lake, and that a scary woman by the name of Bibi was its sole owner. She had been the lover of a notorious dacoit—or maybe he was a rebel—and later become his wife. He had in fact been betrayed when he came to see her one time, and had died on the same ghat at the hands of the government people. But then things went strangely topsy-turvy and the entire ghat was given over to Bibi’s custody.

Her huge boat lay anchored in the lake and Bibi had made it her abode. She ran some sort of business, in connection with which people were allowed to come to the ghat now and then. Otherwise it was forbidden to go near. Nor had anyone the courage. All were too frightened of Bibi. How had Jahaz come to live on Sheesha Ghat? Would I have to meet Bibi as well? Would she speak to me? Would I have to answer her questions? Would she go mad with anger on hearing me? I had grown so absorbed in these questions and their imagined answers that I didn’t even realize we had left the settlement of the glass-workers.

I was startled when I heard father’s voice in my ear: “We’re here.”

***

This was perhaps the most deserted area around the Big Lake. An expanse of muddy water began at the end of the barren plain, its far shore invisible in the distance. On our left, set back from the water, a big boat obscured the view of the lake. Perhaps at one time it had been used to transport logs. Now the same logs had been used to build many large and small rooms on the deck. The planks on the boat were all loose, and a light creaking sound issued from them, as of some giant object slowly breaking apart. On the shore of the lake a low, long retaining wall was lying face down on the ground. Near it stood four or five rickety platforms with huge cracks in them. Close to them lay a moldy length of bamboo, nearly claimed by the soil. Though there wasn’t much left here, I sensed that it must have been a bustling locale before it had fallen into this tumbledown state. It was called a ghat, but all that was left was a roofed shelter extending from a building toward the shore, the front of it overhanging a little pool of lake-water that had sloughed over into a depression in the ground. At the rear of the shelter, on a little rise, sat the shapeless building of logs and clay, which looked as though its builder had been unable to decide whether to construct it of wood or earth, and in these contemplations, the building had reached its completion. The roof,however, was all of wood. A small pink sail, perched on a projection in the center of the roof, was fluttering in the wind.

My foster father must have been here before. Grabbing my hand, he quickly walked down the slope and over to the five earthen steps beneath the shelter that led up to the doorway of the building. There was Jahaz, sitting on the floor smoking his tobacco. We, too, sat down when we went in.

“So you’re here, are you?” he asked father, and began coughing.

He seemed to have aged quite a lot in eight years. The extreme paleness of his eyes and darkness of his lips made it look as though they had been dyed in different vats. From time to time his head would move as if he were admitting something. During one of these motions he glimpsed me with his pale eyes and said, “He’s grown up!”

“It’s been eight years,” my father told him.

We sat silently for a long time. I’d have suspected that the two were talking in signals, but they weren’t looking at each other. Suddenly my father stood up. I rose with him. Jahaz raised his head, looked up at him, and asked, “Won’t you stay a little?”

“I’ve got a lot to do,” my father said. “Nothing’s ready yet.”

Jahaz nodded his head as though agreeing, and my father stepped out the door. He descended the earthen steps, then turned back, came over and took me in his arms. We stood there silently for a long time, then he said, “If you don’t like it here, tell Jahaz. I’ll come and get you.” Jahaz’s head moved in the familiar fashion, and father went down the steps. I heard Jahaz cough and turned toward him. He took a few quick drags of his tobacco, made an effort to even out his breathing, then got up, took my hand and walked out under the shelter. He just stood there quietly, running his eyes over the lake. Then he returned to the earthen steps, but stopped himself before putting his foot on the first step.

“No,” he said. “First, Bibi.”

We walked along the shore of the lake until we came to the big boat. A gangplank had been built between shore and boat by joining two boards. Carefully balancing on the planks, we reached the ladder at the other end, then climbed up onto the boat. Over the door of the small front room was a curtain of coarse cloth. In front of the curtain a two colored cat was dozing. It peered at us with half-open eyes. Jahaz halted as he neared the curtain. I halted many steps behind him. At Jahaz’s first cough the curtain slid aside and Bibi appeared.

The sight of her filled me with fear, but even more with amazement at the thought that this shapeless woman had once been someone’s lover. She looked at Jahaz, then at me.

“Your son’s here?” she asked Jahaz.

“Just got here,” Jahaz told her.

Bibi looked me up and down a few times, then said: “He looks sad.”

Jahaz didn’t say anything. Nor did I. The silence lingered for some time. I looked at Bibi and she asked me, “Do you know how to swim?”

I shook my head “no.”

“Afraid of the water?”

I just nodded, admitting it.

“A lot?”

“Yes, a lot,” I indicated.

“You should be,” she replied, as if I had said what was in her heart.

I viewed the expanse of the lake. In the still air, the muddy water seemed entirely at rest; the lake could have been mistaken for a deserted plain. I looked up at Bibi. She was still looking at me. Then she turned toward Jahaz, who was handing her the tobacco-smoking paraphernalia. For some time they smoked and talked. The conversation had something to do with finances. Meanwhile, a brown dog appeared from somewhere, sniffed at me and went away. The cat, which had been dozing all this time, raised its tail on seeing the dog, arched its back, then retreated behind the curtain. I would peek at Bibi from time to time. She was a strongly built woman and seemed bigger than her boat, but it also seemed as if she, like her boat, were very slowly disintegrating. At least, that was my impression from looking at her, and from her talk, which I couldn’t hear very well. Suddenly she stopped in the middle of what she was saying, raised her head and called loudly, “Parya!”

The sound of a girl’s laughter came toward us as though floating on water. Jahaz took my hand and led me back to the gangplank. After we had stepped onto it, I heard Bibi’s voice behind my back, “Take good care of him, Jahaz.” And she repeated, “He looks so sad.”

She said this in such a way that I myself began to think I was sad.

***

Yet there was no reason for me to be sad. When we returned from Bibi’s and Jahaz showed me my quarters, I couldn’t believe this was part of the shapeless house on the deserted ghat, between the muddy lake-water in  front and the barren plain in back. The best preparations had been made for my comfort. The rooms were lavishly decorated, mostly with glass objects. Glass was also inlaid in the doors and the vents in the walls. I was surprised that Jahaz could create a place like this. I thought he must have had help from someone, or else had been trained in the art of decoration. A lot of the items seemed to have been brought there that very day; I suspected that other things had been removed, and that before me, perhaps long ago, someone else had lived here.

After I had seen the place where I was to live, I thought I must have seen the whole of Sheesha Ghat on the first day. But on the second day I saw Parya. To this day I am amazed that during the many times people at my father’s house spoke about Sheesha Ghat, no one ever mentioned the name of Bibi’s daughter. I first heard her name the day I arrived at Sheesha Ghat, when Bibi called her from the boat. I was overwhelmed by the day’s confusion, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder who Parya was.

But the next morning, I heard the sound of someone laughing. Then a voice said, “Jahaz, let’s see your son.”

Jahaz jumped up and grabbed my hand. “Bibi’s daughter,” he told me as he led me out to the shelter.

About twenty-five yards away in the lake I saw Parya, standing perfectly erect at the far end of a narrow, slowly swaying boat. With a light shimmy of her body she advanced the boat toward the shelter. Her body gave another little twist. The boat came nearer. Advancing and stopping in this fashion, she pulled right up to the shelter.

“Him?” she asked, with a questioning glance at Jahaz.

I was as wonder-struck that this girl was Bibi’s daughter as I had been that Bibi was once someone’s lover. I tried to look at her closely, but now she was inspecting me from head to toe.

“He doesn’t look so sad,” she said to Jahaz; then to me, “You don’t look sad.”

“When did I say I looked sad?” I tried to say, feeling a little irritated, but could only stutter. Parya laughed and said, “Jahaz, he’s so …”

Then she began laughing louder and louder, until Bibi’s voice boomed from the boat, “Parya, don’t bother him.”

“Why,” Parya asked loudly, “because he’s sad?”

“Parya,” Jahaz said encouragingly, “you’ll have a good time with him.”

“Who needs a good time?” she said and began to laugh again.

I began to feel uneasy, as though trapped, but then she asked, “Have you seen your new mother?”

“No, I haven’t,” I told her with a shake of my head.

“Don’t you want to?”

I didn’t answer and looked the other way.

“You don’t want to?” she asked again.

This time my head moved in a way that could mean yes or no. It occurred to me that my new mother was to arrive at my former house today, or perhaps had already arrived. Father had said that she would go crazy if she heard me speaking. I tried to envision myself talking and her slowly going crazy. I tried to imagine how it could be possible to live with a woman who would go crazy because of me. I also reflected that at this time yesterday I was at my old house, and the memory seemed to come from the distant past. I relived my eight years there in eight seconds. Then I recalled my foster father’s embrace before leaving me in Jahaz’s custody. I believed now, even more than before, that he loved me deeply.

“Jahaz will love you deeply, too.” Parya’s voice startled me.

I had forgotten about her, but she had been watching me all this time. Then, balancing herself as she walked, she moved to the other end of the boat. With a little spin of her body, her back was toward the shelter. A light swing of her torso nudged the boat and slowly she slid away from us. I felt as if a wonder had taken place before my eyes.

“If Bibi had not called to her,” I said to myself, “I would have thought she was the spirit of the lake.”

If not the spirit of the lake, she was indeed a wonder, because she had been born underwater, and her feet had never touched the earth.

***

Bibi had received her boat from her forefathers and no one could say how long it had been in the Big Lake, Jahaz told me after Parya had left. But Bibi herself used to live far away from the lake where her husband, the same dacoit, or whatever he was, came to meet her clandestinely. When Parya was about to be born, the husband had Bibi sent to the boat along with a midwife. During the birth, Jahaz could hear Bibi’s cries of pain. Suddenly, the voices changed. The government people had arrived and were interrogating Bibi as to the whereabouts of her husband. Seeing that Bibi wouldn’t tell them anything, they started holding her underwater over and over, and in the midst of one of the longer episodes, Parya was born.

“I could clearly see bubbles coming from Bibi under the water,” Jahaz said, “then amid the bubbles Parya’s little head came out and you could hear her cry.”

At this the government people realized that Bibi wasn’t faking. They left, but continued their surveillance. And one day, Parya’s father came to the ghat, just as they had thought he would. They surrounded him on the boat. He tried to escape, but was injured, fell into the lake and drowned. Since that day Bibi had made the boat her and Parya’s abode. Bibi sometimes ventured out to other localities herself, but had never let Parya set foot on land. She would roam around the lake in her small craft, or would return to her mother on the big boat. Why was this so? Had Bibi made a vow of some kind? Was it the condition of some pact? No one knew how long Parya would be circling the lake, and whether her feetwould ever touch the earth.

***

I spent a year at Sheesha Ghat, and during that year I witnessed the passing of every season, and in each season I watched Parya’s boat roam the waters. She was my only means of diversion. The outer door of my abode opened onto the barren field, which led only to the fishing settlements at its nearest outskirts, past the smoky dwellings of the glasswallahs. I stayed away from these habitats because of the drying fish. The fishermen were always immersed in their work and were of no use to me, just as I was of no use to them. There were many ghats at the far ends of the field, including some at good-sized fishing settlements. A few ghats were lively with activity, but once or twice when I went to them I realized that the news of Jahaz’s foster son had preceded me, and the people were going to realize who I was; that is why, except for roaming the abandoned field and amusing myself with a few stray objects, I mostly sat underneath the shelter. Jahaz, too, after running here and there to complete his errands, would come and sit here with his tobacco supplies and recount to me all sorts of tales which were worth remembering, but I forgot them anyhow. However, I do remember that when a story of his failed to hold my attention, he would become agitated, even frenzied, and narrate it the way he used to perform his imitations; in the telling he would suffer a fit of coughing and ruin what little interest there had been in the story.

In the beginning, I thought that Sheesha Ghat was a place totally cut off from the world, and that this part of the lake had always been a wasteland. That was not the case, but it was true that no one could set foot there without Bibi’s consent. This is what I had heard from people at father’s house, and I had assumed that Bibi never let anyone come here.

But once at Jahaz’s I noticed that on certain special days the fishermen gathered here, bringing their nets and boats. Sometimes their numbers were so great that the scene looked like a little fair set up on the water. Sitting at my post under the shelter, I would hear the fishermen calling to each other and shouting directions. Filtering through their voices here and there came the sound of Parya’s laughter. At times they seemed to be forbidding Parya from doing something. Occasionally, the voice of one of the older fishermen would be heard scolding Parya, yet laughing heartily at the same time.

Then Bibi’s voice would come from the boat: “Parya, let them work!”Parya would laugh in reply, and the fisherman would tell Bibi not to say anything to Parya.

On those days, and other days too, Parya would come to the ghat early in the morning. Standing in her boat in front of the shelter, she’d converse with Jahaz for some time, then call me out to the shelter as well, and if Jahaz left she would talk to me. Her conversation was a bit childish. She would tell me stories about her dogs and cats, or why Bibi had scolded her the day before. Sometimes she would ask me a question so suddenly that I’d start to answer with my tongue instead of the bobbings of my head. She would laugh wildly at these attempts and get a scolding from Bibi, then she would push out to the far reaches of the lake.

In the afternoon, Bibi would call her loudly and her tiny craft would be seen advancing toward the boat. Then the sounds of Parya laughing and Bibi getting mad would emanate from the boat. Late in the afternoon, she would set out again and stop in front of the ghat. If Jahaz were not there, she would talk to me about him. She found something to laugh at in everything about Jahaz, whether his tobacco-smoking, his disorderly dress or the sail on top of his house.

As she was talking to me one day, I began to suspect, and was soon convinced, that she had never seen the clown routines Jahaz performed in the bazaars years before, and at last realized that she knew nothing about them. That day I tried to speak somewhat calmly for the first time, to tell her about Jahaz’s mimic-routines. I tried for quite some time. She listened to me very attentively, without laughing, the way my father had begun to listen to me in the end. At that moment Jahaz walked out underneath the shelter, smoking his tobacco. He relieved me of my efforts by telling Parya all that I had been trying to recount. He even performed two or three of his minor routines. To me they seemed pathetic imitations of his old ones, but Parya laughed so hard her boat began to rock. She wanted more, but Jahaz in the meantime had been overcome with a coughing fit. Parya waited for the coughing to stop, but he gestured for her to go away.

Laughing, Parya turned her boat around and said as she left, “Jahaz, Jahaz, you would make even Bibi laugh.”

The next morning she arrived at the shelter earlier than ever, but Jahaz had slipped off somewhere. She began talking to me about Jahaz and describing the mimicking as though I hadn’t seen Jahaz performing his routines the day before, indeed, as though I’d never known about them. I listened to her for a while, then tried to tell her that Jahaz used to walk through the bazaars with the sail tied on his back, and mimic sinking ships before the crowds. I could not tell her, by tongue or by gesture. Finally, I fell silent.

“Tomorrow,” I said in my heart, “somehow, I will tell you.”

I watched her as she retreated from sight.

“Tomorrow,” I said again in my heart, “somehow.”

My foster father arrived at the ghat the same evening. In one year he seemed to have aged more than Jahaz had in the eight-year period before my arrival. His step was halting and Jahaz was supporting him, almost carrying him. As soon as he saw me he drew me into his arms. Finally, Jahaz separated him from me, made him sit properly, then turned to me.

“Your new mother has died,” he told me, and the coughing overtook him again.

***

There was no conversation between my foster father and me. Shortly after he arrived, Jahaz took him off somewhere and returned late at night alone. I had just stretched out to sleep. I believe Jahaz too fell asleep after smoking his nightly tobacco. I kept pondering how my foster father could have grown so old so quickly. Then I thought of my new mother who had died without seeing me, and perhaps without going crazy. Then I started recollecting my year at Sheesha Ghat. At first I had been bored by the extended, nearly unbreakable silence there, but I now realized that the place was always full of noises. Faint calls would come from the glasswallahs, fishermen and other ghats, and water birds would call over the lake. But I had never paid attention. Now, when I tuned my ears a little, I heard the halting sound of waves coming in and turning back after touching shore, and the faint creaking of the planks of Bibi’s boat. I decided that Sheesha Ghat was the only place for me to live, and that I had been born to live at Sheesha Ghat.

“Tomorrow morning, I’ll tell Jahaz,” I told myself, and fell asleep.

In the morning my eyes opened, as usual, to the sound of Jahaz’s coughing. Then I heard Parya’s voice, too. They were talking much as on any other day. Jahaz was inside and couldn’t see Parya’s boat from where he sat, so he had to speak loudly, and was coughing again and again. I got up and went out to the shelter. There was Parya, standing in the middle of her boat. She chatted with Jahaz a little more. Part of it had to do with Bibi. Then Parya retraced her steps to the other end of the boat.

The boat made a half-circle from the light movement of her feet. Now Parya’s back was toward the shelter. For the first time I took a good look at Bibi’s daughter, and found myself more amazed than ever that a woman like Bibi could be her mother. At that instant Parya’s body twirled and the boat moved away from the shelter. Then it swayed a moment and stopped. Parya scanned the expanse of lake before her. Again the boat rocked lightly, but Parya, straightening her body, adjusted its balance. She made another barely perceptible motion with her feet. The boat made a very slow half-circle, and I gazed at Parya from head to foot as she stood in the bow. I was afraid she might not like the way I was staring at her, but she wasn’t looking in my direction. She was gazing intently at the ghat’s still water, as if seeing it for the first time.

Then, measuring her steps, she walked to the end of the boat nearer the shelter. Leaning over the water, she gazed at it once again, stood up, shook her whole body into alignment, and very calmly placed a foot on the water’s surface as one steps on dry earth. Then her other foot left the boat. She took one step forward, then another.

“She’s walking on the water!” I exclaimed to myself, my surprise tinged with fear; I turned my head toward Jahaz, who was smoking tobacco a little distance away, then looked back to the lake. Between Parya’s empty boat and the shelter there was only water, concentric circles of waves spreading on its surface. A few moments later Parya’s head emerged from the circles. She slapped the water with her palms over and over as though trying to grab onto the surface of the lake. The water splashed and I heard Jahaz’s voice: “Parya, don’t fool around with water.”

Then a noose of smoke tightened at his throat and he doubled up, coughing wildly. My eyes turned to him for an instant. He was having a fit and needed someone’s help. I looked back at the lake. New circles were spreading on the bare water.

She rose again, then began to sink. My eyes met hers and I stood up with a jolt.

“Jahaz!” I shouted, as my tongue began to knot.

I leapt toward the old man. His coughing had stopped, but his breath was gurgling. He was rubbing his chest with one hand and his eyes with the other. Dashing up the steps, I grabbed both his hands and shook him with force.

“…Parya…,” my mouth said.

He looked into my eyes with his pale irises, then lightning flashed in his eyes and I felt as though a bird of prey had escaped from my grip. Dust was dancing on the steps to the shelter and Jahaz was standing at the shore. Parya’s boat completed a full circle. Jahaz looked at the boat, then the water. Then with full force he let out a call in a strange language. I heard Bibi match his cry from her boat. Then from far, far away the same voice returned.

Bibi’s voice came again: “The sad one?”

“Parya!” Jahaz said with such force that the water before him trembled.

Other voices, far and near, repeated Jahaz’s cries over and over and fishermen, some with nets, some empty-handed, began running toward the ghat from all directions. Even before they got to the shelter, some of them had plunged into the water. Jahaz was signaling to them with hand gestures when a splashing sound came from the left. I saw a barking dog running helter-skelter on the big boat and the two-colored cat, its back raised, looking at the dog from a corner of the roof. Then I saw Bibi, almost naked, like some prickly man-eating fish, cutting through the water. Her body collided with Parya’s boat, sending it spinning like a top. Bibi dived and came up on the other side of the boat. She signaled to some of the fishermen and dived again.

Fishermen from other ghats were seen rowing toward Sheesha Ghat. Some had jumped overboard and were swimming in front of their boats. Now heads were bobbing everywhere in the water between the shelter and Parya’s boat. The crowd grew, collecting along the shore as well. There was din and commotion everywhere. Everyone was talking, but it was hard to tell what was being said by whom. The loudest noise was the splashing water, obscuring all sense of the passage of time. Finally, a loud voice rang out. The clatter peaked and suddenly died to nothing. The bodies in the water, swimming soundlessly, slowly gathered at one spot.

All were silent now; the only sound was the dog barking from the boat. At that moment I felt my hand clamped as though in a vise. Jahaz was standing next to me.

“Go,” he said, giving my hand a shake.

I didn’t understand where he wanted me to go. But now he was leading me inside the house. Turning back, I tried to look toward the lake, but Jahaz tugged my hand and I turned to look at him. His eyes were glued to my face. “Go,” he said again.

We had come to the back door of the house. Jahaz opened it. In front was the barren plain. “They’ve found her,” he told me, then pointed off across the plain and said hurriedly, “You’ll reach the glass-workers’ settlement in a short time. There you’ll find transportation out of here. If not, just mention my name to anyone.”

He deposited some money, tied in a handkerchief, in my pocket. I wanted to ask him many things and didn’t want to leave, but he said: “Only you saw her drown. Everyone will ask you questions. Bibi more than anyone. Will you be able to answer?”

The scene rose before my eyes: the people—fishermen with rings in their ears, rowers with bangles on their wrists, visitors from different ghats—all forming a ring around me two or three deep, questions flying from every direction, Bibi fixing me with her intent stare. They all fall silent as Bibi approaches me …

Jahaz noticed me trembling and said, “Tell me what happened …

Anything … Did she fall into the water?”

“…No…” I managed somehow.

“How did it happen, then?” Jahaz asked. “Did she jump?”

“No,” I said, and repeated it with a shake of my head.

Jahaz shook me: “Say something, hurry!”

I knew I wouldn’t be able to say anything with my tongue, so I tried to communicate through hand gestures that she had been trying to walk on the water. Yet my hands halted again and again. I felt that even my signals were beginning to stutter, and that they too were uninterpretable.

But Jahaz asked in a constricted voice, “Was she walking on the water?”

“Yes,” I said again with some difficulty.

“And she went under?”

“Yes.”

“She was heading toward Bibi?”

“No.”

“Where then?” he asked. “Was she coming toward us?”

“Yes,” I gestured with my head.

Jahaz lowered his head and grew a bit older before my eyes. “I’ve seen her every day,” he said at last, “from the day her tiny head popped out of the water”—he was nearly coughing the words—“but I hadn’t noticed how grown-up she’d come to look.”

I stood silently watching him grow even older. “All right, go!” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll find

something to tell them. Don’t you tell anybody anything.”

What could I tell anybody? I thought. And my attention, which had meanwhile strayed from the ghat, returned to it. But Jahaz gently turned me around and nudged me in the direction of the open field. When I reached the edge of the field, I turned toward him and he said, “Your father came to take you back yesterday. I told him to wait a few days.” Again he coughed a little. He grabbed both panels of the door and slowly began to back away.

Before the door had closed, I’d already started on my journey, but I’d only gone some fifteen steps when he called out to me. I turned around and saw him walk toward me haltingly. He looked as though he were mimicking a ship whose sails had been torn off by the winds. He came up to me and embraced me. He held me to him for a long time. Then he released me and stepped back.

“Jahaz!” Bibi’s wail was heard from the ghat. The pale eyes of the old clown looked at me for the last time. He nodded, as though in affirmation, and I turned and walked on. _

 ———————————————————————-

—Translated by Moazzam Sheikh and Elizabeth Bell

In Defense of Poetry

Marjorie Perloff

One of the most common genres in writing about academia today is the epitaph for the humanities. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Weisbuch–an English professor at the University of Michigan and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation–declares:

Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities–it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it–is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries…. As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable.

More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities–with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever–has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.1

Devastating as that last comment is, it’s all too accurate. Even the current boom in the economy cannot accommodate the best of our new humanities Ph.Ds.

Weisbuch does also offer some “solutions” (he calls them “Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities”): (1) gather data on our departments, finding out where our graduates get jobs so as to insure better planning; (2) practice “doctoral birth control,” using Draconian means to cut down the number of entering graduate students; (3) “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time faculty members rather than adjuncts; (4) “create jobs beyond academe for humanities graduates”; (5) “redesign graduate programs so as to accommodate the new community college market, where teaching skills are more important than scholarly expertise”; and (6) “become newly public”–that is, to make better contacts with the so-called outside world. 2

The trouble with such practical solutions is that they assume that we humanists have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable–that we simply need to convince those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us. But that assumption is untrue.

What are the humanities? Consider the answer provided on the web site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH):

What are the Humanities?

The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evident in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on “The Many Realms of King Arthur” at your local library, that is the humanities. When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England midwife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil War, that is the humanities too.

What a wonderful justification, this last, for being a couch potato! And this vacuous statement is not an aberration. Just look up the “National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965,” which brought the NEH and NEA into being:

1. “The arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” What can “belong” possibly mean here? I as citizen do not “own” specific art works and philosophical treatises the way I might own stock or real estate. And how does this compare to the sciences? Does microbiology–or protein chemistry–”belong” to all the people of the United States?

2. “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” At best, this statement is blandly patronizing. Imagine someone claiming that “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to the humanities alone, but must give full value and support to those great branches of intellectual activity, the sciences and social sciences”? But further: the assertion that arts and humanities somehow make us better persons and citizens is, at best, implausible. Hitler, let’s remember, was so enraptured by Wagner that he attended performances of Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera House ten times in 1908.

3. “The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” Do the arts and humanities foster diversity? I know of no evidence for this proposition. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are generally held to be classics of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. They aim to define the poet’s unique genius, but the last thing they foster is “respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.”

But if the NEH’s claims for the humanities are, to say the least, questionable, they are also quite typical. At Stanford, where I teach, the official Bulletin contains this description:

The School of Humanities and Sciences, with over 40 departments and interdepartmental degree programs, is the primary locus for the superior liberal arts education offered by Stanford University. Through exposure to the humanities, undergraduates study the ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of the human experience, past and present, and so are prepared to make thoughtful and imaginative contributions to the culture of the future.

The language used here is revealing. Whereas the social sciences (according to theBulletin) teach “theories and techniques for the analysis of specific societal issues,” and the “hard” sciences prepare students to become the “leaders” in our increasingly technological society, the humanities “expose” students to the “ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of human experience.” Exposure is nice enough–but also perfectly dispensable when leadership and expertise are at stake. Indeed, the humanities, as now understood and taught in our universities, no longer possess what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic capital”: an “accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration, or honour” founded on the “dialectic of knowledge [connaissance] and recognition [reconnaissance].” In the capitalist and multicultural democracy of late-twentieth-century America, ordered as it is based on money rather than on social class, “exposure” to the “intellectual dimensions of the human experience” is no longer a sine qua non of success or even the Good Life: witness Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey.

Nothing could bring this point home more forcibly than the recent controversy over the NEH’s invitation to President Clinton to deliver the 2000 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, an invitation Clinton declined after a strong protest from the scholarly community. The annual Jefferson Lecture, inaugurated in 1972 by Lionel Trilling, has been given by the likes of Jaroslav Pelikan, C. Vann Woodward, Vincent Scully, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Emily T. Vermeule–all of them serious scholars and outstanding intellectuals in their respective disciplines, ranging from architecture (Scully) to history (Woodward) to classics (Vermeule). Accordingly, when William Ferris, the chairman of the NEH, explained that his hope was that in making the Jefferson Lecture a Presidential event, “the humanities” would be brought “into the lives of millions of Americans who don’t know what the humanities are and have no sense of the great work we do [at the NEH],” what he was really saying was that the term humanities no longer means anything, that at best it has a negative thrust–specifically, in the case of the Jefferson Lecture, giving the President a chance to make a speech that would not be overtly political but would deal with what are vaguely conceived as “humanistic” values. And of course this “lecture” would be written by the President’s speech writers–a situation that, in the scholarly community, would be classified as plagiarism.

Given this climate, perhaps we can think more seriously about the state of the “humanities” if we get rid of the word “humanities”–a word, incidentally, of surprisingly recent vintage. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose supplement appears in 1933, does not include it at all. Humane,humanism, humanist, humanity, humanitarian: these are familiar cognates of the word human. But humanities was not the term of choice for an area of knowledge and set of fields of study until after World War II. The more usual (and broader) rubric was Liberal Arts, Arts and Sciences, or Arts, Letters, and Sciences. The shift in terminology–reflected in the now-ubiquitous humanities centers, humanities special programs, and humanities fellowships–testifies, paradoxically, to an increasing perplexity about what these designations might mean.

Suppose, then, that we get down to cases and look at the state of one the central branches of the humanities: the study of literature, or, as I prefer to call it, poetics. “Literature” is an imprecise designator that came into use only in the late eighteenth century,3 whereas discussions of the poetic are more ancient and more cross-cultural. The discipline of poetics–which, from Plato through the nineteenth century, comprises narrative and drama as well as lyric–has been classified in four basic ways:

1. The poetic can be understood as a branch of rhetoric. From Cicero and Quintilian to such medieval rhetoricians as Geoffrey of Vinsauf to the late eighteenth century rhetorical handbooks of Hugh Blair and George Campbell, the three divisions of written composition–inventio, dispositio, and elucutio(invention, arrangement, and style)–have been studied as a way to improve the practice of writing (or speech making) as well as the appreciation and understanding of the speaking and writing of others. Rhetoric thus means practical criticism–the examination of diction and syntax, rhythm, and composition.

But effective rhetoric, as Aristotle first demonstrated in what is still the great treatment of the subject, is no mere “ornament,” as the tropes and rhetorical figures used to be called, but a matter of ethos and pathos: the artful presentation of a self designed to be persuasive to its audience, and the construction of an audience that will empathize with that self. If, to take some Renaissance examples, Philip Sidney is an excellent example of the ethical argument (in his case, the sprezzatura that makes us sympathize with Astrophel as with the modest speaker of The Defense of Poetry), John Donne is the master of the pathetic argument: the urgent and passionate appeal to the poet’s, and preacher’s, fellow sinners to be at one with his suffering.

In a forthcoming book, John Guillory argues that rhetoric is at the very center of our discipline as literary scholars. No other discipline, after all, has as its central focus the issue of how language is actually used in writing, whether in newspaper editorials or poems or the weather report. Conversely, inattention to rhetoric, as in Harold Bloom’s powerful poetry criticism, downgrades the materiality of the text at the expense of the ideas expressed in it, thus occluding the significant differences between, say, a Wallace Stevens poem and an Emerson essay.

2. From Plato to Heidegger and Levinas, poetry has often been understood as a branch of philosophy, and hence as a potential expression of truth and knowledge. Because poetry couldn’t pass Plato’s truth test–even Homer told false and salacious stories about the Gods–the poets were ostensibly banished from his Republic. I shall have more to say of this below, but for the moment, note only that this conception of poetry is antithetical to the first. If the main purpose of a literary text is to convey knowledge or formulate truths, questions of form and genre take a back seat. Rimbaud’s abandonment of the alexandrine, for example, in favor of free verse and then prose poems would matter much less than the content of those dense and oblique Rimbaldian texts, verse or prose. Again, if theories of poetry-as-rhetoric regard James Joyce and Ezra Pound as key modernists, the theory of poetry-as-philosophy would (and has) put Samuel Beckett or Paul Celan at that center.

The treatment of poetry as philosophy has produced some marvelous criticism, especially in the Romantic period and again after the Second World War, when Heidegger came to prominence. But it also has its problems, perhaps most notably that it favors one kind of poetry at the expense of all others–Wordsworth and Shelley, for example, at the expense of Popean or Swiftean satire, which doesn’t lend itself to comparable philosophical reflection. Whether the philosophical grid is Cartesian or Kantian or Nietzschean, lexical difference is subordinated to the Logos.

3. From antiquity to the present, poetry has also been classified as one of the arts(and here Aristotle is more important than Plato). In this configuration, poetry has to be studied side by side with, and in the context of, the visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. As such, discourse about poetry involves what Plato, in the Ion, calls technê kai epistemê. Technê was the standard Greek word both for a practical skill and for the systematic knowledge or experience which underlies it. So technê, meaning “craft,” “skill,” “technique,” “method,” and “art,” coupled withepistemê, meaning “knowledge,” is the domain of the arts. Plato himself concludes in the Ion that discourse about poetry doesn’t have sufficient technê kai epistemê,and that the rhapsode’s skill at speaking about Homer (but not other poets) is a matter of inspiration–in other words, a second-order poetry, one that cannot be taught or learned–it simply is.

4. Partly as a result of such Platonic skepticism about “teaching” poetry, as well as the unfortunate division of “literature” departments into the “critical” (English) and the “creative” (Creative Writing), poetics has increasingly been viewed as a branch of history. From this perspective, which is the guiding principle of contemporary “cultural studies,” a poetic text is primarily to be understood as a symptom of the larger culture to which it belongs and as an index to a particular historical or cultural formation. Literary practices, moreover, are taken to be no different in kind from other social or cultural practices. A poem or novel or film is discussed, not for its intrinsic merits or as the expression of individual genius, but for its political role, the “cultural work” it performs, or what it reveals about the state of the society. In this scheme of things, questions of value simply vanish, there being no reason why Henry James’s novels are a better index to or symptom of the cultural aporias of turn-of-the-century America than the best-sellers of the period–or, for that matter, early twentieth century domestic architecture, popular periodicals, or medical treatises. Read the list of topics currently being studied by the fellows at a university humanities center and you will find that “literature” functions almost exclusively in this way: the project titles would suggest to anyone outside the academy that all the fellows come from a single department–history.4

Literature as rhetoric, literature as philosophy, literature as art, literature as history: what is at stake in adopting one of these classifications to the exclusion of all the others? Interestingly, the first three inevitably incorporate history into the discipline, in that they examine the history of the different poetic, rhetorical, philosophical, and generic forms. But history of is very different from the transposition that views literature as history–the position of contemporary cultural studies, which is committed to the demolition of such “obsolete” categories as poetic autonomy, poetic truth, and rhetorical value. Since cultural studies currently dominates the arena of literary study, I want to focus, for the moment, on this particular approach.

We might begin by noting that the treatment of poetry as a branch of history or culture is based on the assumption that the poetry of a period is a reliable index to that period’s larger intellectual and ideological currents. Beckett’s Endgame, for example, testifies to the meaninglessness and horror of a post-Auschwitz, nuclear world. But as critics from Aristotle to Adorno have understood, the theory that imaginative poetry reflects its time ignores what is specific to a work of art, along with its powers of invention and transformation. Thus Aristotle’s point, in the ninth chapter of the Poetics:

The difference between a historian and poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse…. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and serious [kai philosophoteron kai spoudaioteron] than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

By a “general truth” I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily…. A “particular fact” is what Alcibiades did or what was done to him.

It is clear, then … that the poet must be a “maker” [poietes] not of verses but of stories, since he is a poet in virtue of his “representation,” and what he represents is action.5

The meaning of the possible (“what might happen”) is made clearer by Aristotle’s response to Plato’s complaint that poets are dangerous to the state because they tell lies. “The standard of what is correct,” writes Aristotle, “is not the same in the art of poetry as it is in the art of social conduct or any other art…. It is less of an error not to know that a female stag has no horns than to make a picture that is unrecognizable.”

But of course Plato understood this distinction perfectly. The danger of poetry to the ideal republic, after all, is in direct proportion to its power, its charm, its magic: “We will beg Homer and other poets not to be angry if we cancel those and all similar passages ["false" stories about the gods], not that they are not poetic and pleasing to most hearers, but because the more poetic they are the less are they suited to the ears of boys and men who are destined to be free.” One could hardly endow the poetic with more power. And indeed, when in Book X of theRepublic, Plato takes up the ancient “quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” so as to dismiss the latter from the well-governed state, he admits that “we ourselves are very conscious of her spell … her magic.” That magic reappears at the conclusion of the Republic with the poetic myth of Er, as if to let us know that, despite all the good reasons to the contrary, poetry is for Plato finally the highest calling.

In distinguishing mimesis (representation) from diegesis (straightforward exposition or narrative in the author’s own person), Plato, and Aristotle after him, isolates the fictive as the essential characteristic of the poetic construct: not what has happened but what might happen, either possibly or probably. In his celebrated book, Metahistory, Hayden White taught us that, contra Aristotle, historical writing, even the “simplest” chronicle, also has a fictive element. White places nineteenth-century historiography, from Hegel and Michelet to Nietzsche and Croce, within the larger tradition of narrative fiction. But Metahistory was published a quarter of a century ago, in 1973, and since then a major reversal has set in. For even as the notion of text as representation continues to be operative (there being no “reality” outside textual representation that one can access), in practice the study of representation as all there is has created, ironically enough, a situation where the what of mimesis has become much more important than the how. Subject matter–whether divine right kingship in Renaissance England or the culture of condoms in early twentieth-century America–becomes all.

At its best, the alignment of poetic and cultural practices has given literary study a new life. Ulysses, for example, was traditionally read as a parodic modern-dayOdyssey or as an elaborate experiment in which plot and character are subordinated to the investigation of the possibilities of language. From the perspective of cultural studies, it is seen as a brilliant exposé of colonial subjugation–illustrating, as it does, the fate of ordinary Dubliners under British imperial rule. Or again, Ulysses reveals the “colonial” status as well as the hidden strength of women in the masculinist Joycean universe. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Nostromo are similarly read as depictions of the horrors of colonial oppression under capitalist expansion, this time with respect to race in Africa and Central America; here too the representation of gender has become the subject of interesting and useful critique.

The downside of the equation between cultural studies and literary studies is that, carried to its logical conclusion, cultural studies dispenses with the literary altogether. Studies of consumerism, for example, can be based on the analysis of shopping malls or Home Depot layouts; no literary texts are required. Teen culture can be explored through music, film, and computer games. Current social mores and cultural constraints can be profitably studied by examining Internet discourse. And so on. Everything, after all, can be a text–so why not a golf course? A skating rink? A theme park? One professor, I read in the Bulletin of a leading university, “specializes in 20th-century American literature, film and cultural studies…. She has begun a … book-length project that reads important post-World War II Hollywood films as public relations maneuvers, with which the studios sought to create a benign impression of a beleaguered industry and to shape the nation’s social and economic agenda during the difficult process of reconversion to a peacetime economy.”

Such studies are regularly designated as “interdisciplinary,” but what are the disciplines involved? In this case, the archives of the Hollywood studios would be relevant, as would the correspondence of producers and directors and interviews with those still alive. The basic discipline in question is history but the mode of analysis would be, broadly speaking, anthropological, in keeping with the cultural critic’s primary purpose: to unmask a particular social and economic agenda. Treating a film like The Best Years of Our Lives as historical/cultural index rather than as art work or philosophical construct is supposed to be broader, more “interdisciplinary,” than “mere” close reading or rhetorical analysis. In reality, though, it is predicated on a curious refusal–the refusal, as a matter of principle, to distinguish between the daily schlock manufactured by the consciousness industries (as in this case Hollywood movies), and those films that are conceived and designed to be works of art. In the name of even-handedness and “scientific” detachment, cultural studies has gone a long way in removing the pleasure intrinsic to the production and reception of poetics.

In Chapter 4 of the Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of aesthetic pleasure: the “pleasure of representation” and the “pleasure of recognition”:

Speaking generally, poetry seems to owe its origin to two particular causes, both natural. From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals in that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things. And then there is the enjoyment people always get from representations.

The pleasure of representation is the basic human instinct one can observe most directly in young children who “play” at being someone else, who make up a story and pass it off as “true.” It is the pleasure of invention, of fictiveness. The twin pleasure, that of recognition, is its mirror image, the pleasure of taking in the impersonations, fictions, and language creations of others and recognizing their justice. When Prufrock concludes his “love song” with the line, “Till human voices wake us and we drown,” the most un-Prufrockian of us will recognize the aptness of the image.

Pleasure was paramount for Aristotle as it was for the Plato, who expelled poetry from his Republic because it caused too much pleasure. But of course the pleasure calculus is complex: “one should not seek,” we read in Poetics XIV, “from tragedy all kinds of pleasure but that which is peculiar to tragedy, and since the poet must by ‘representation’ produce the pleasure which comes from feeling pity and fear, obviously this quality must be embodied in the incidents.” Catharsis, the purging of pity and fear, is not an end in itself; it is a particular kind of poetic pleasure. And so on.

It is, I would argue, the contemporary fear and subordination of the pleasures of representation and recognition–the pleasures of the fictive, the what-might-happen–to the what-has-happened, the historical/cultural, that has reduced the status of literary study in the academy today. The neo-Puritan notion that literature and the other arts must be somehow “useful,” and only useful–that the Renaissance and eighteenth century dyad of the Horatian aut prodesse aut delectare (“to teach and to delight”) no longer operates–has produced the mindset behind the NEH’s mission statement. If the arts are primarily designed to furnish us with role models from the past and thus make us capable of imagining a better future, they will always be found wanting. And in pretending that good artists are necessarily good people, people with the “right” ideas, who are bent on unmasking oppressive ideological formations, we will always find ourselves defending the arts and humanities to skeptical members of Congress who are offended by the obscenity of x and the politics of y.

Meanwhile, the NEA and NEH (and the academy) notwithstanding, the demand persists for art, for poeticity, for the pleasure of recognition–only now it is being satisfied outside the academy. In the past few decades–the decades that have supposedly witnessed a decline in interest in what we teach–the arts have flourished in extra-academic venues. Museum exhibitions and symposia, theater lecture series, poetry readings and festivals–these are jammed. It is easy to dismiss as mere bourgeois consumer culture the amazingly large turn-out at such blockbuster exhibitions as the Van Gogh show at the Los Angeles County Museum, with its attendant films, lectures, even staged readings on PBS of Vincent’s correspondence with his brother, Theo. But I have recently witnessed the public hunger for the arts in settings that are harder to dismiss.

A new Institute for Arts and Cultures has opened just this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; its first director, Paul Holdengräber, is one of those many recent doctorates in comparative literature who couldn’t find an appropriate academic position. The first four speakers at this new Institute were two experimental poets, Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin, the painter Kitaj, and San Francisco’s own famous beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If I invited David Antin, a “talk poet” I very much admire and on whose work I have written a number of essays, to give a reading for the Stanford English department, I would consider myself fortunate if fifteen people–mostly my own graduate students–showed up. At the LACMA Institute Antin drew a standing-room only audience of four hundred. For Kitaj and Ferlinghetti that number quickly increased to thousands–for Ferlinghetti, tickets had to be reserved and three thousand were turned away–and so now Holdengräber and his museum associates are left with the problem of how to allow sufficient public access to these events, and whether to charge admission.

The same crowds have animated theater symposia, art lectures, and roundtable discussions about literary topics held at non-academic venues around the country. At the American Conservatory Theater symposia in San Francisco, for example, a Monday evening discussion of, say, a new production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanyaor a debate on the meaning of revenge in Euripides’ Hecuba, will draw five hundred people to the Geary Theater. The hunger for literary discussion on the part of a public allegedly victimized by the public relations routines of the media industries is not, it seems, to be suppressed.

But it is the response to poetry that is most surprising. In the past few months, I have spoken at a number of poetry festivals, all of them very well attended and organized. One was the Barnard College Conference “Language Poetry Meets the Lyric,” attended by at least five hundred people on a rainy weekend in New York. The second was a conference on Greek avant-garde poetry and diaspora at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, sponsored by a Greek-American endowment. And the third–and most unusual–was the People’s Poetry Gathering in New York held on the weekend of April 9. This event, at which I was on a panel on “Poetry and Democracy,” was nothing short of amazing, ranging as it did from a reading at St. Mark’s by the poet laureate Robert Pinsky, to poetry slams at the White Horse Tavern down on Hudson Street, outdoor readings with bands at Irving Plaza, and multicultural events (one called “Is Charlie Chan Really Dead?” featured readings by Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Shani Mootoo). A lot of what went on was fairly amateurish, but the gathering revealed yet again the enormous disconnect between the current demand for poetry, music, art events, and the critical discourse and reductionist approach to the arts that now dominates the academy.

For what is the fabled “interdisciplinarity” that ostensibly characterizes the humanities today? At the Stanford Humanities Center, as at most other such academic centers, it is a code word for subsuming poetry or painting under the cultural studies umbrella. “The Poems of John Ashbery” would be considered a little iffy by the fellowship selection committee, whereas “Cold War ideology and the New York School” would be more acceptable. Interdisciplinarity, in other words, currently means the subordination of the aesthetic to the political. Meanwhile, the truly interdisciplinary subjects are hardly taught at all. Consider photography, for the last century and a half one of the central art/literature disciplines. Photography cannot be studied exclusively in the art history department because most photographs are embedded in text and hence demand a certain literary expertise, especially with respect to rhetoric. I am thinking of the urban images of Eugene Atget vis-à-vis the Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin, of the photocollages of Robert Smithson and Laurie Anderson, as well as of the poet John Kinsella, whose most recent book Kangaroo Virus is a collaboration with the photographer Ron Sims: together, poem and picture create an important semantic debate that is further qualified by the sound track on the CD that accompanies the book. Photography also has an important philosophical dimension because of the complex relations of word and image: Jean-Michel Rabaté has recently edited a book of essays prompted by Roland Barthes’sCamera Lucida. And yet college and university curricula have been notoriously indifferent to this branch of the humanities. The same is true for architecture, a field that has witnessed, in recent years, some of the most exciting interdisciplinary critical discourse we have: witness the journal Zone, edited by Sanford Kwinter. Technically, architecture is, like photography, taught in architecture schools (or as a minor part of the art history curriculum), but I submit that if there were a genuinely interdisciplinary program in architecture, taught by philosophers and literary critics, as well as art critics, it would be tremendously popular. To visit, for example, the new Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and to see the incredible excitement of a highly diverse public is to learn that, Robert Weisbuch to the contrary, the arts are alive and well–they just aren’t a serious component of the university curriculum.

What is needed, in short, is a reorganization of departments themselves, so as to be more accountable to the current demand. Rather than subsuming everything under the history/culture umbrella, we should try the reverse. Thus, we would start with poetry in the generic sense as one of the arts, and an in-departmental program with courses on the verbal medium in relation to the visual and the musical and how these have interacted in different historical periods. Next, we would study the rhetoric of specific poetries across national and cultural boundaries and again in relation to the rhetoric of other art forms. Then there would be courses in poetry as a form of knowledge: Celan and Heidegger, if you will, or Yeats and Gnosticism, or a Lacanian reading of Beckett’s fiction. Finally, some consideration would be given to the historical and cultural place of a poetry like Celan’s, its response to the trauma of the Holocaust and postwar diaspora.

In making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice, we can also begin to make more useful connections between arts and sciences. Consider a recent exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, called “Degas as Photographer.” This was, in the scheme of things, a minor exhibition. The Impressionist painter only turned to photography in the 1890s, and he was a self-proclaimed amateur. His photographs are extremely literary: many were evidently undertaken as an homage to Mallarmé, whose whole family is depicted in numerous poses (as is the Halévy family, Laure Halévy having been a model for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes). Some of the photographs are narrative, telling the sad story of one of Mallarmé’s orphan nieces, and there are allusions to specific Mallarmé poems in one or two pictures. But the photographs also have a certain scientific interest, since Degas produced a number of photographs that were inadvertently solarized, and he kept them because he found them visually so striking. Then, too, Degas was one of the first photographers to use enlargement. A fairly pedestrian realistic contact print acquired, due to the time exposure, a blurring of edges that makes these photographs painterly–but, ironically, not at all like Degas’s own paintings, which emphasize the sharp outlines of the body.

It was surprising to see how many people attended this little exhibition. Why would so many Getty visitors–a very diverse multiethnic, multinational group–be interested in what are, after all, amateur photographic works, even if by so celebrated a French painter as Degas? I believe it was the curious relationship of science and literary allusion, of painterly dimension and photography that proved to be so attractive. A comparable “interdisciplinary” mix–this time between verbal text and poetic image, iconography and calligraphy, as well as its exemplification oftechnê–makes the illuminated manuscript rooms of the Getty so popular.

Now let me come back to the “solutions” to the humanities crisis that Robert Weisbuch advocates–solutions that reflect the thinking of the MLA and similar professional organizations. To gather data on our departments, find out where our graduates get jobs so as to insure better planning, “practice doctoral birth control,” “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time faculty members, and “redesign graduate programs so as to accommodate the new community college market, where teaching skills are more important than scholarly expertise”–all of these are largely window dressing. We don’t need to reclaim a curriculum that has lost its momentum; we need to devise a curriculum that does not reduce literature to cultural exemplum, a curriculum that will make poetics and its special pleasures once again material–not only to coursework, but to the way we live our daily lives.

There are signs that such change is on the way. In the last few years, a surprising number of the assistant professorships in my own field, twentieth-century poetry, have gone to the poeticians, poet-theorists, or poet-scholars who hold the Ph.D. I am thinking of Craig Dworkin at Princeton, George Henry Clarke at Duke, Peter Gizzi at Santa Cruz, Yunte Huang at Harvard, Steve McCaffery at York, Jena Osman at Temple, Juliana Spahr at Hawaii, and Cole Swensen at Denver. The inclusion of these poeticians in English and comparative literature departments is already having repercussions: at the University of Denver, for example, poets Bin Ramke and Cole Swensen organized a large conference on the poetry/theory interface, a conference attended by Romanticists and Renaissance scholars as well as by post-modernists. Perhaps there is an academic demand for literary scholars–but the demand is for literary scholars who are actually interested in the workings of literature.6

I have been speaking only about poetics; in other humanistic fields there are no doubt different problems and solutions. But, whatever the specific field, it might be well to remember that apologetics is never a fruitful mode of discourse. Never apologize, never explain! I thus deplore those new MLA-sponsored National Public Radio programs (and I refused to do one) in which “we” (academics) explain to “them” (the public) what it is “we” do in our classrooms. At the same time, I take issue with such humanist jeremiads as George Steiner’s recent essay “The Humanities–At Twilight?” which argues that in contemporary technocratic mass culture, there may, alas, be no room at all for the humanities:

Democracy and economic-distributive justice on a democratic plane are no friend to the autistic, often arcane, always demanding enterprise of “high culture”…. Add to this the failures, the collaborative treasons of the clerics, of the arts, of the humanities in the fullest sense, during the long night of this century in Europe and Russia. Add to this the fundamental doubt … as to whether the humanities humanize, and the thrust of the crisis is inescapable. 7

Interestingly, Steiner’s elegiac essay never refers to a single work of art written since World War II: Adorno’s adage that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz seems to be taken as a given. This retro Kulturdrang strikes me as just as misplaced as Weisbuch’s “how-to” practicalities. One cannot kill the human instinct to make poetry–the German verb Dichten is apposite here–and to enjoy the poetry making of others: indeed, the study of poetry has been with us much longer than any of those current academic orthodoxies Steiner deplores, and it will continue to be with us. Some things, it seems, never quite collapse.

Let me conclude with a little Frank O’Hara poem that is nicely apropos:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

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(Note: A version of this essay was presented as a lecture at the Stanford Humanities Center conference called “Have the Humanistic Disciplines Collapsed?”, held the weekend of April 23, 1999.)

1 See “The State’s Role in Shaping a Progressive Vision of Public Education,” Phi Delta Kappan (November 1998).

2 In a follow-up article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Weisbuch outlines more fully his plan for “aggressively promulgating the value of what we do in [the humanities].” The Woodrow Wilson’s new project, “Unleashing the Humanities: The Doctorate Beyond the Academy,” with a budget of about $100,000, will award grants to academic departments that “encourage students to interact with the world as part of their graduate training.” A second program will award up to 30 grants of $1,500 each to support doctoral students who are using their training in a non-academic setting. The third program seeks to match top doctoral students with companies, schools, and other employers that can offer the “meaningful” positions outside academe. See Denise K. Magner, “Finding New Paths for Ph.D.’s in the Humanities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 1999.

3 According to the OED, literature (from the Latin littera, or letter of the alphabet) as “Literary work or production; the activity or profession of a man of letters; the realm of letters,” was first used by Samuel Johnson in the Life of Cowley (1779): “An author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature.” The more restricted sense of literature as a “writing that has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect” does not appear until 1812. Literature in the sense of “the body of books and writings that treat a particular subject” is first found in 1860.

4 Here is a partial list of project titles at the Stanford Humanities Center for 1998-99: “The Pathological Public Sphere” (Mark Seltzer, English); “Ethnography before Ethnography: Fabricating Ethnographic Objects within Medieval Christendom” (Kathleen Biddick, History); “Oaxaca and the New World Baroque” (Cynthia Steele, Romance Languages); “Navigating Diaspora” (Donald Carter, Anthropology); “Desiring Machines: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice” (Robert Fink, Musicology); “Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Premodern England” (Ruth Nissé, English); “The Pro-Choice Mistake (And Another Defense of Access to Abortion)” (Laurie Shrage, Philosophy).

5 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe (Harvard: Loeb Classics, 1960), pp. 36-37. I have translated the word philosophoteron as “philosophical” rather than “scientific,” which is misleading. Otherwise, I stick to the Fyfe translation.

6 Just as I was completing this essay, the Los Angeles Times ran a front page piece called “Answering their Poetic Calling,” describing the new boom in poetry programs. “Nearly 300 universities,” we read, “have established graduate poetry programs since the mid 1970s and the best ones are overflowing.” See Alissa J. Rubin, Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1999.

7 George Steiner, “The Humanities–At Twilight?”, P. N. Review 25, no. 4 (March-April 1999): 23.

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Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.
This piece was originally published in the February-March 200o issue of Boston Review.