Criticism – Page 5 – Common Infirmities

La planète des singes

Imagine a French cartoon showing a scene from “‘Batman’ à l’américaine”, showing a portly Batman stuffing his face with a cheeseburger, demonstrating how an American Batman would differ from the normal French Batman that everyone is familiar with.

The most recent (28 July, 2014) issue of The New Yorker has a cartoon, showing two figures trudging along a beach, from which the top of the Eiffel Tower can be seen poking through the sand; the woman holds the reins of a horse, the man has hurled himself to the ground, crying “Non!” The caption is “‘Planet of the Apes’ in French”.

So, I found myself wondering how this is supposed to be understood. Do most people know that Planet of the Apes was originally a novel (in French) by Pierre Boulle (author as well of The Bridge on the River Kwai), and that the Eiffel Tower does play an important role in the end of the novel? Does the author know? Does he expect the readers to know that? It very much affects how you read the cartoon, and what the humour is (which I’m having difficulty discerning). If he knows, then it’s presumably supposed to be some sort of comment on Hollywood appropriation of other countries’ icons. If he doesn’t know, then the joke is supposed to be about how ridiculous it would be for space explorers to be exotic Gauls, rather than normal Americans. Hence my thought above about how a comparably ignorant French cartoonist might “americanise” a normal French character that he doesn’t realise was already American to begin with.

Chris moves on

I was looking for an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, which I’ve never read, except in excerpts. I discovered this 1869 edition by Mary Godolphin titled Pilgrim’s Progress in Words of One Syllable. I was fascinated. It sounded like a modernist literary gag, like writing a novel with no E’s. When I had a look, I found the monosyllabicity wasn’t quite as thoroughgoing as I’d hoped. For instance, we are spared the protagonists Chris and Prude, and the City of Destruction has not been renamed to Knock Down Town, or Ruin Burg. There would be a nice alliteration if the Slough of Despond had become the Swamp of Sad.

“Crazy-headed coxcombs” becomes “such fools”, which has a certain pithiness to it. On the other hand, Mme. Godolphin does apologise: “It may be objected that my system involves the use of words which, though short, are difficult to understand.” I am reminded of Alexander Pope’s great self-referential parody, in the Essay on Criticism,

While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.

Which, in turn, reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s “Folk Song Army“:

The tune don’t gotta be clever
And it don’t matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line.
It sound’s more ethnic if it ain’t good English,
And it don’t even gotta rhyme.
Excuse me, rine.

Bert and the Duke

I just read Terry Teachout’s biography of Duke Ellington. The most prominent theme of the book — beyond Teachout’s efforts at a clear-eyed appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Ellington’s music — is an elucidation of Ellington’s, to put it charitably, magpie tendencies. Throughout his career, Ellington compensated for his own deficiencies — little talent for melody, inability to write for strings, extreme procrastination — by poaching the inventions of his sidemen, often with minimal compensation and little or no credit. This tendency reached its acme in Ellington’s wholesale subordination of Billy Strayhorn, who was almost completely subsumed into the Ellington persona.

This reminded me of another fascinating biography that I read many years ago, John Fuegi’s Brecht & Co. That book portrayed Bertolt Brecht as a kind of literary parasite, who seduced brilliant women and enslaved them to write plays for him. Just to mention one of the most egregious examples, Elisabeth Hauptmann appeared on the original publication as co-author of The Threepenny Opera — even there, only as the “translator” of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, with “German treatment by Bertolt Brecht” — though almost certainly a substantial majority of the text is by her. Brecht later sold off the international rights entirely on his own, under his own name. Similarly, Mother Courage and The Life of Galileo were cowritten with Margarete Steffin — and again, her contribution is not minimal, the same not being entirely clear for Brecht himself — but are invariably described as works of Brecht.

These sound like clear cases of abuse, they seem to undermine the stature of the great artist — perhaps worse in Brecht’s case, where erotic seduction was being abused as well, and the weak social position of women vis-à-vis intellectual property. And yet… it’s clear that both Ellington and and Brecht produced brilliant, world-changing work with a variety of collaborators, while none of the collaborators produced great work apart from the master. (Billy Strayhorn is an interesting possible counterexample, in part because Ellington’s thefts from him were so extensive — some of the “collaborations” were entirely Strayhorn’s work, or almost so — and in part because the collaboration with Ellington subsumed almost his entire career.) Elisabeth Hauptmann, at least, always denied that she had been ill-used by Brecht.

Part of the problem may be with the romantic image we have of the lone genius. As Fuegi’s title suggests (perhaps ironically), the image of the “workshop” may be more appropriate to some — perhaps most? — artistic creation. There is a special skill required to recognise the flashes of creativity in others and shape them to a whole — as Ellington did (Strayhorn excepted) — or to provide a framework to which creative artists can contribute their own genius wholeheartedly. This was the job of the master of a Renaissance workshop, and it’s not clear that we should think less of “Brecht” or “Ellington” as creative artists, to know that these names are, at least in part, fronts for a collective. While they were alive it would have been good to redirect some of the material rewards — though Ellington, at least, directed everything he had to maintaining his orchestra — but now all that remains is esteem for the work and its creator, however the latter is defined.

Leopold Bloom’s speculations

I was just reading Ulysses for the first time in more than 20 years (actually, listening to the wonderful reading by Donal Donnelly), and among other things I was struck by the extent of Bloom’s scientific interests and speculations. But one other thing that jumped out at me was Bloom’s fantasy, as he is falling asleep, of schemes to raise money to become a country squire. One of those crazy hypnagogic schemes was similar to the scheme that I described as the reductio ad absurdum of financial technology, spending a large part of a billion dollars to reduce the communication time between New York and Chicago or London by several milliseconds:

A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of I or more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr 8 m p.m. at Ascot (Greenwich time), the message being received and available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p.m. (Dunsink time).

Of course Bloom, being a sensible chap, puts this on a level with “A prepared scheme based on a study of the laws of probability to break the bank at Monte Carlo” and a plan to obtain riches by finding a lost dynastical ring “in the gizzard of a comestible fowl”. And winning a million pound prize for squaring the circle. And all of this he values primarily as an aid to sound sleep.

The long arm of the gay mafia

I was amused by the intimations that cropped up in reports on Brendan Eich’s dismissal as CEO of Mozilla that he had been (in the words of one comedian) “whacked by the gay mafia”. Now, the “X mafia” is a standard lazy joke, and the more nonviolent the image of the group whose mafia this is supposed to be the better the appeal to those whose livelihood depends on a steady stream of cheap laughs. But my first reaction was that for gay people to be accused of mafia tactics must be a marker of progress — people don’t like the mafia, but they respect its power! Surely the notion that gay people are too powerful would have been a difficult concept to formulate until very recently.

I was wrong, at least as regards the entertainment industry. In Terry Teachout’s fascinating new biography of Duke Ellington, Mercer Ellington is quoted as saying that his father was unconcerned about Billy Strayhorn’s homosexuality.

But Mercer also reports that Ellington believed in the existence of “a Faggot Mafia… He went on to recount how homosexuals hired their own kind whenever they could, and how, when they had achieved executive status, they maneuvred to keep straight guys out of the influential positions.”

“He does not miss church”

A modestly interesting article in The Atlantic about the influence of parents on their children’s politics includes a delightfully ambiguous sentence. It quotes a Christian conservative Floridian:

“My son, when he was 16, thought he should be able to decide for himself whether or not he would go to church,” he recalls. “I explained to him that I agreed with him and when he moved out and was self-supporting, he could certainly make that decision for himself. Today as an adult he does not miss church.”

So, does the son attend church or not? From the smug context I presume that, in fact, the son attends church regularly — that is, he “never misses church”. But on my first reading I missed a few cues, and thought that the son never goes to church, and he “does not miss” it.

James Joyce on demography

I’ve been listening to Donal Donnelly’s wonderful recorded reading of Ulysses, and naturally both the format and my advancing years have highlighted passages that didn’t interest me when I read it in my teens and 20s. In particular, there is the unceasing drumbeat of birth and death: hundreds and hundreds of references, only the most prominent of which are, on the death side, Stephen Dedalus’s mother and Leopold Bloom’s son Rudy, and Paddy Dignam, whose funeral Bloom attends; and on the birth side, Mina Purefoy’s agonising three-day labour. Of course, you can’t miss it, but I didn’t notice the big picture. In particular, I didn’t notice how Bloom keeps circling from the individual death to the population level — what one might call the demographic perspective — and back again. (I also had forgotten how much time Bloom spends reflecting on scientific matters generally.) He has thoughts like

Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute.

Child born every minute somewhere.

and most impressively

Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions.

This sheds some light on the telegram that Stephen recalls early on, with its famous misprint: “Nother dying come home father.” It’s not just a misprint. “Nother” is one letter away from “Mother”, the person he should care about most in the world. But it’s also one letter away from “another”, that is, just another one in an endless sequence of humans dying. And many people are appalled that he seems to have treated his own dying mother as just an instance of a principle.

(The Gabler “corrected edition” appeared in 1984, right around the time I was first reading Ulysses, and so I recall that the press coverage of this publishing event emphasised a few obviously significant emendations, in particular this one, where editors had consistently corrected the telegram misprint back to “Mother”, thus making a complete hash of the scene since it was impossible to understand why Stephen said that the telegram was a “curiosity to show”. But even then the thematic significance eluded me.)

Quoting clichés

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times on hackers’ use of remotely controlled devices like thermostats and vending machines to penetrate otherwise well-secured corporate networks. The subject matter is interesting, but I was also interested in the way experts were quoted. In particular, one network security expert

compared the process of finding the source of a breach to “finding a needle in a haystack.”

I’m sure she really did use those words, but it seems peculiar to be putting a standard phrase like that in quotation marks, which are usually reserved for individual turns of phrase, or for emphasising the particular choice of words. In particular, it’s strange that only the cliché was quoted. It’s as though a national security reporter wrote “An administration source said the decision would have to be made by “the president”. Another source agreed that the decision would be made by “Barack Obama”.” Or “the engineer in charge of developing the product reduced the size of the design team, arguing that “too many cooks spoil the broth”.”

Four ways of paying the piper

I was thinking about four different expressions, interestingly different, for the platitude that people shape their consciences to their circumstances.

The most straightforward is the English classic

Who pays the piper calls the tune.

This is the most straightforwardly economical. The boss makes the decisions, and the opinions of the underlings are irrelevant. It says nothing about what those underling opinions might be.

A step more cynical is the old-German proverb

Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich Sing. [Whose bread I eat, that’s whose song I sing.]

It has the same general musical theme, suggesting the court jester performing for his master. But the singing, rather than piping, is more intimate, and to my mind suggests a more complete subordination of ones own beliefs to those of the master.

Perhaps the most pessimistic is the saying that Mark Twain claims to have learned as a boy, from a young slave:

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.

In other words, as Twain explains, no one can afford to have opinions that interfere with his livelihood. It’s not a matter of dissembling — which is what makes this more pessimistic (but maybe less cynical?) — but rather of naturally adopting the opinions that are a comfortable fit to his circumstances. (Twain’s more cynical version was “It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.”)

And then there was the perfection of the corn pone line, the famous dictum of Upton Sinclair,

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Here we see the complete identification of master and slave. The slave not only gives voice to his master’s views, he not only comes to accept the master’s views, he has deformed his intellect to the point where any other opinion has become completely incomprehensible to him.

Tevye in the City

I recently read Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories (inspired by the wonderful book by Alisa Solomon, Wonder of Wonders: A cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof — they’re available now free from the Yiddish Book Center), and I was startled by several features. Tevye is a much more forward-looking figure than he appears in Fiddler on the Roof, which chose to emphasise the cultural divide between him and his daughters.

One thing that really caught my attention was that Tevye, before he got to marrying off his daughters, the travails of which are the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, lost all his savings in some vague financial schemes. The description is priceless, how his distant cousin Menachem Mendel

let me understand how he makes three rubles out of one, and from three — ten. First of all, he said, you invest a hundred rubles and then you order ten somethings — I’ve already forgotten what they’re called — to be bought for you; then you wait a few days until its price goes up. Then you send off a telegram somewhere with an order to sell, and with the money, to buy twice as much; then the price goes up again and you dispatch another telegram; this goes on until the hundred becomes two hundred, the two hundred — four hundred — eight, the eight — sixteen hundred, real “miracles and wonders”! There are people, he said, in Yehupetz, who just recently walked around barefoot, they were brokers, messengers, servants, today they live in their own brick houses, their wives complain of stomach ailments and go abroad for treatment. (Trans. Joseph Simon)

(Much of the imagery of the song “If I were a Rich Man” comes from this story.) As ever, finance was an extractive industry, fuelled by a steady stream of gullibility and greed, in varying proportions.

Anyway, this all reminded me, obliquely, that Tevye had an exact contemporary, who has recently been experiencing some great success on the small screen, having been updated and moved into modern London, namely Sherlock Holmes. I don’t mean to draw any comparison between the figures, but it seems to me that Tevye might do equally well in modern London. (Mad magazine moved him into the American suburbs in the 1970s, which was an obvious idea, but in some ways more foreign.) I could see him drudging away in a small hedge fund, trying to do the right thing, never getting to see his family, suffering with computer breakdowns, losing money through honest dealing, accepting the ups and downs of London real estate with his idiosyncratic proverbs, like

All life ends in death. We’ll all be dead some day, Golda. A man is like a carpenter: a carpenter lives and lives and dies, and a man lives and dies.