The Sellout by Paul Beatty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Creating History

Whatever your conscious attitude toward race, and whatever your race, your self-image will be shaken by Paul Beatty's work. And whatever criticism that could be offered about the work has already been addressed within it. To coin a phrase: this changes everything. It cuts through everybody's bunk - white people's, black people's, sociologists', politicians', journalists', not forgetting novelists' major bunk-lode. Beatty's point is clear: the world of race in America is a lot more complex than can be expressed by anyone involved in it. In comparison, quantum physics is kindergarten stuff. By exposing just about every academic and cultural shibboleth available in this tragi-comic masterpiece, Beatty clears the deck for something else. For my money that something else might well be grounded in just one of his prescient observations, "...history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you." As far as I am concerned, Beatty has created history.

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Doctor Copernicus by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Accidental Hero

What was it that inspired this book? Apparently not its subject. As portrayed by Banville, Copernicus is hardly a prepossessing character. Emotionally he is vacant and incomprehensible - at times irrationally loyal to his brother, at other times completely indifferent (ditto for his cousin-housekeeper-concubine), alienated from his female siblings for reasons that are vague, essentially friendless with a chip on one of his tradesman’s son’s shoulders toward the aristocracy, and on the other toward the better placed intelligentsia of the period. Intellectually he is a desultory scholar. His concern with astronomical theory is intermittent and hardly the driving force of his life. He is a dabbler who reacts to conditions, both of the mind and of the body, usually passively, as they arise. Although a minor cleric as cathedral canon in a Catholic region, he has no point of view on faith or the church (or on science for that matter) except as a possible impediment to the publication of his ideas.

The best that can be said of Banville’s Copernicus is that he is no fanatic, religious or humanist, in a time of fanatics. He is a medical doctor without empathy, a perennial student without a clear subject, a competent bureaucratic administrator but without perspective or judgment, a diplomat with little diplomacy, a lawyer without a practice. He is a grey personality, having no clear direction in his life except a desire for reclusion and anonymity. The world of the Reformation, global exploration, the humanist Renaissance, and Prussian militarism swirls about him but raises little concern except when he is confronted directly by their effects - and even then he barely registers a response. The overall picture is one of an accidental intellectual hero, detached and aloof to the point of psychotic depression. Not therefore an obvious candidate for a biographical novel, or a promising beginning to Banville’s Revolutions Trilogy that moves from Copernicus, to Kepler to Newton.

There is much ‘throbbing’ by dogs and silences in Banville’s prose, and frequent allusion to the seductive evils of the time - nominalism, Gnosticism, solipsism, and clerical homosexuality - which pervade an otherwise brutal European existence. There is the typical Banvillian expansion of one’s vocabulary with words like ‘jesses’. ‘prog’, and ‘biood-boltered’. But there isn’t much attention devoted to the intellectual challenge Copernicus confronted in overcoming the remnants of scholasticism. Banville seems to be anachronistically anticipating the ‘reality vs explanatory’ schools of quantum theory rather than developing the issue of the biblical authority for an earth-centred cosmos.

In short, Banville doesn’t give the reader a reason to be interested in Copernicus’s life other than that he is an historical celebrity. Perhaps that is the only justifiable reason. If so, is it reason enough? That science and scientists can be excruciatingly prosaic?

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Holy Orders by Benjamin Black
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Noir With a Conscience
But a fraud.

Peopled by characters you might not invite to dinner but who are nevertheless comprehensible as human beings: the alcoholic, emotionally damaged protagonist Quirke, his co-dependent, suicidal girlfriend Isabel, and his sympathetic but not terribly clever daughter Phoebe.

Set in a theocratic Dublin of the 1950’s, with a few blatant Irishisms and just a subtle touch of the sod in the voices of the more rural characters, there are brewery drays and wind-up telephones for colouring. But really the only colour is some shade of terminal drab. Every room is cold and every day is damp. Clothes never fit properly except if the wearer is a cad. No social intercourse happens unless lubricated by Jameson’s whisky in an atmosphere of Player’s cigarette smoke (Port is what one who is on the wagon drinks and the only non-smokers are those trying to quit). Seedy, louche provincialism, in the form of yokels, tinkers, criminals and clerics, continuously threatens to overwhelm urban civilisation. The mystery is more the ultimate direction of various interacting neuroses, including ecclesiastically inspired ones like homophobia, than it is the identity of the murderer.

Benjamin Black can't entirely resist the erudition of John Banville. So we are treated to some typically arcane vocab. Words like 'parp' and 'boreen' (to be fair, an assimilated Irish word), as well as a handful or two of gypsy bon mots defined in a handy appendix. But are these worth the price of admission?

I don't think so. The problem I have is this: if you're going to use a weak murder mystery on which to hang a greater mystery of the complexity of psyches, then the reader is owed a resolution; this we don't get. Clearly the author expects us to buy the sequel in order to find out what happens. Bad form in the worst tradition. No more Quirke for me I'm afraid.

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Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Rosenhead Gambit

I had a Jewish colleague during graduate school whose parents had emigrated from Germany to London in the 1930’s. Unsure of the state of anti-Semitism in England at the time, they changed their surname from Rosenkopf to Rosenhead to create what they thought would be ethnic anonymity. Mr. & Mrs. Rosenhead could easily be characters in Kalooki Nights in their move to disguise, but not really, their Jewishness.

Howard Jacobson doesn’t so much create characters as a world in which characters work in a certain way. That world is one of Being Jewish, or as he puts it: Jewishry. It’s a world with the same physics but with different initial conditions than the world within which it exists in parallel. Therefore, it is permanently out of sync. It grates, it irritates. Often it mirrors but it’s never quite comfortable with either itself or the larger world. And despite its relatively small size, Jewishry has a strong claim to being the original and authentic world. This is of course a mixed blessing. No one likes a smart ass neighbour who thinks he knows more than you do, especially when he does know more than you do.

A fundamental conceit of Christianity is a presumed transformation of the soul through baptism, allowing entry into membership of a self-defined chosen people. This is a clear attempt to establish a metaphysical equivalence to Jewishry. We might conclude that, after 2000 years, this attempt has failed, largely because nobody thought the thing through to the longer term: Easy in also means easy out. Christians can annul their Christian being, and do so at an increasing rate, simply by repudiating and walking away from the sacraments.

This is an essential problem created by the somewhat unbiblical Christian doctrine of supercession, that the Church is the real Israel. This doctrine of course relies on large-scale rejection of much of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the destiny of and divine promises to the progeny of Isaac, a task initiated by the Jew, Paul of Tarsus without much real analysis and no foundation in the recorded opinion of Jesus. And doctrine of course is a matter of belief. Belief suspended is special status out the window. But Jews can never opt out, escape being Jewish - neither the world nor their Jewish past will let them (“…there was no refuge from the dead,” Jacobson writes).

Even the rejection by other Jews can’t destroy the fact of being Jewish. The atheistic, unobservant Jewish father of Jacobson’s narrator sets his theme early on: “Jew, Jew, Jew. Why, why, why, as my father asked until the asking killed him, does everything always have to come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?” Why indeed? There are millions of lapsed Catholics, Methodists and even Mormons, not to mention unobservant ex-Hindus, ex-Buddhists, ex-Muslims. But there are no ex-Jews. There are pious, secular and atheist Jews, but they are all Jews, if not recognised as such among Jews then always among Christians who provide a timely reminder in the event of any sort of social tension. No abstruse, wishy-washy, theological claptrap about transformed spiritual states. Jewishry is in the blood, from whence it reaches the soul, not vice-versa.

Christians are simultaneously jealous and scornful of the reality, the physicality of Jewish identity. It threatens and annoys them at the same time that it attracts and confirms them. Without Jews, Christians have no real identity. ‘Without us there is no you’ is not a bad answer to the Christian (or Muslim) who asks the Jew, Jew, Jew question. This gets under Christian skin - like Hillary does Donald, in fact exactly like Hillary does Donald. And then they, the Christians, act badly indeed.



"Goyim do that. They get upset, see red, hit the roof, and take it out on you anally." To be fair, Trump has a Jewish son in law. Perhaps that's reason enough.

Jewishry is not a herd of musk-oxen, acting jointly against the world which periodically tries to exterminate it. “We are psychologically at war with ourselves, that’s what it comes down to. One half of us would destroy the other half if it could…” Jewishry is permanently dialectical: “…that’s what I’m paid for - excoriating my people when I’m not shielding them from harm.” Its inhabitants exemplify what the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth identified as the essential paradox of God revealing himself as he conceals himself: “He was my tree of knowledge but he was also my angel of oblivion…illuminator and expunger. But I suppose that’s what we’re all doing, making people remember what we would wish them to forget.” Like a burlesque fan dancer, Jewishry has its anti-Semitic aficionados who are fascinated by its revelatory concealment and are effectively seduced by it: “Consigned in their Jew-hating to an eternity of Jew.”

Meaning is not stable within Jewishry in which there is an inherent and arbitrary divine nominalism. Names, especially proper names have no fixed denotation but float as if directed by a deity that only is paying attention intermittently. Ilse Cohen, a suburban lady, player of cards, becomes Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Belsen; the more well-known Isadore Demsky is “transmogrified” to Kirk Douglas. Even the meaning of Jewishry is questionable: "To a Jew there is no acceptable way of being Jewish. Every other Jew does it wrong."

But it is perhaps in sexual politics that meaning is most ambiguous. Jewishry is a mysterious world that attracts adventurous women, to whom adventurous Jewish men are attracted for the same reason. At least that’s the story of Jacobson’s Max Glickman who ‘marries out’ four times. Each time mistaking the female intention as well as his own. The symbolism of Jew and Gentile are mutually misconstrued. Max summarises the situation neatly, “When the devil seeks to make trouble in a Jewish family, he does it as a blonde.” Why this should be so is a further enigma which baffled even Sigmund Freud, a Jew who knew more than most about hidden meanings.

Comedy, at least comedy created with the skill of Jacobson, is probably the only effective vehicle for describing the complexity of Jewishry in situ, as it were, the casual passing references to non-events at the intersection of two worlds:

“Noseless, it’s possible that I could have got away with being merely Slavic and depressed. Whereas where Asher walked, the whole of the Old Testament walked with him. Seeded like a pomegranate he was with the sorrows and tribulations of his people, but juicy with the wine of pomegranate, too, spicy with spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, his lips like a thread of scarlet. And people notice when you look like that. Especially people from cold countries”

Who else could get a laugh out of a joke based on ancient Hebrew poetic tropes? I doubt even Stanley Elkin. In any case, Jacobson is undoubtedly right, "Only mockery keeps you on the right side of idolatry." Perhaps that is what Mr. & Mrs. Rosenhead had in mind after all.

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The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There Is No Dead Matter

No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter.

But the 19th century American philosopher C. S. Peirce audaciously suggested that we have it the wrong way round. For Peirce, matter is a degraded, and therefore a potentially upgradable, form of mind or spirit. Spirit and matter transform mutually into each other; they are alternative forms of that which is.* The 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, would have felt comfortable with Peirce in his intimations of a world imbued with the divine.

Bruno Schulz likely never heard of Peirce, but he would have known about Spinoza in his Galician Jewish community; and he certainly subscribed to Peirce’s philosophy. “There is no dead matter…lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life,” one of Schultz's characters announces. It is not just life which is deserving of respect in The Street of Crocodiles but literally everything that exists, all matter sentient or inert. Both these forms are temporary; each is necessary for the other, and for the emergence of new forms which are at any moment inconceivable. Such unexpected forms are nonetheless inherent in the infinite possibilities in matter.

This attitude has profound consequences. Nothing, for example, is undeserving of one’s attention. Importance does not lie in magnitude or mass but in delicate, not necessarily conventionally beautiful, form. The creeping dementia of one’s parent, for example, is such a form, as it literally transforms its victim from an urban shopkeeper into, temporarily at least, an Old Testament prophet: “He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colours and scents of Oriental spices.”

This is remarkably similar to the ethos espoused by Peirce: “What is man? What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force." So too, for Schulz, a retarded village orphan, a puppy, a familiar building, a ghoulish tramp, or a deadly boring winter’s day can be appreciated for the potential they hold. He therefore contends that “…we should weep…at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong has been committed.”

Of course this unconventionality can and does lead to The Great Heresy of man as Creator. It is proclaimed by Schulz’s father in his state of advanced insight/dementia: “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!’" And it is through an imagination worthy of Mervyn Peake that Schulz lays in the forms missed by the divine Creator. Whereas God, as the gnostic Demiurge “…was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.”

The demented father, therefore, re-creates creation out of the Demiurge’s dross. He makes new forms of life beyond that which even God had contemplated,

“…these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendour of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.”

The pathos is increased infinitely when one knows his fate as a Jew in Galicia - shot as less than vermin by an eminently disrespectful SS officer.

In my experience Schulz’s prose and imagination are unique. Among other things, he doesn’t narrate a story, yet still manages to convey a way of being so intimately and concisely that one feels a profoundly important tale has been told. But unlike a Proust who dwells almost interminably on each and every detail so that one can feel deadened by description, Schulz moves his attention continuously to yet another interesting thing so that his exquisitely laconic descriptions have wonderful force.

Schulz's language is somehow comforting while simultaneously unusual and exotic. The effect is not unlike that of Borges in the osmotic passage from the real of the quotidian to the hyper-real of imagination. In the manner of another contemporary, the English Charles Williams, his forms appear sometimes as if a wind from the mouth of God that threatens to consume the world; sometimes as the indistinct but overpowering sound of a mob or crowd of shoppers; sometimes as apocalyptic signs in the air and water; once as the visage of crumbly old Aunt Wanda conjured up on the back of a dining room chair.

I have a conceit that if C. S. Peirce or Spinoza could have written poetic prose it would look like this.

* I suspect that both Schulz and Peirce received at least some of their inspiration for this idea from the 16th century Italian, Giordano Bruno. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Polish Science-fi writer Stanislaw Lem also has a rather interesting variation on this idea of the relation of mind to matter emphasising the latter as superior: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination by Matthew Guerrieri
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Was Beethoven Jewish?

I have spent a day with this book and I can’t go on. Not because it is horrid but because it is wonderful. Every page is not only informative, it’s inspiring. The consequence is that it’s got me off pursuing obscure possibilities, that lead to further conjectures, to more research, to more possibilities, potentially ad infinitum. So I’m calling it a day until I can recover some equilibrium.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Guerrieri starts with the hidden (except to musicians) eighth rest that begins the Fifth Symphony. Who knew! This magnificent work begins in silence. Then it occurs to me in a flash that this rest serves exactly the same function as the silent consonant Aleph in Hebrew. Although it has no sound in itself, Aleph indicates a sort of preparation for the speech to follow, equivalent to the conductor’s baton stroke. The kabbalists consider the Aleph therefore to be the silent origin of all words, indeed of the entire universe, from the mouth of God. The parallel with the creative mind of Beethoven is irresistible, particularly in light of the fact that he was almost certainly entirely deaf when he wrote the symphony. From nothingness to existence and yet an existence that is of a fundamentally different kind to its creator.

Meditation on the eighth rest/Aleph then leads to further thought. The rest creates an odd musical stress, as Guerrieri discusses in detail. Although the piece is in 2/4 time, there is only one beat, and that is on the last note of the bar: dah dah dah DUM. This too is the general rule in Hebrew in which the stress moves toward the final syllable (the mil-ra). This is very unlike most European languages in which the emphasis tends to move toward the initial syllables with a consequent historical loss of final sounds. It’s why English has few distinct noun-cases; German has a few more but these are indicated by the form of the definite or indefinite article not in the noun itself. So Beethoven’s dramatic emphasis on the last note is in a sense unnatural for a German-speaker.

In my fevered state, speculation on this unusual stress then becomes frantic. Treating the bar as a phrase rather than a word, The poetic meter of the first four notes is something called quartus paeon, a poetic foot consisting of four syllables, any one of which is accented or stressed. In the Fifth Symphony, it is of course the last musical word in the phrase. Hebrew poetry, at least its biblical form, has no clear metrical structure. However, it does make a distinction between open syllables, which end on a vowel, and closed syllables, which end on a consonant. In the former, vowels are long; in the latter preceding vowels are shortened, given extra punch if you will to the final consonant. This I think is the Hebrew poetic equivalent to the structure of Beethoven’s first bar, giving even more strength to that final musical word, DUM, while shortening or softening the previous notes in a sort of closed poetic form.

On a roll now, I can see the afternoon lost in the arcane subtleties of Hebrew grammar. One of the peculiarities of Hebrew is that it doesn’t express verb tenses - past, present, future, and so forth - with separate forms as in English and other European languages. Most often the tense of a verb has to be picked up from context (something that makes biblical translation a real art form little understood by evangelical literalists). Interestingly, the first four notes of the Fifth, G and E-flat, are, as Guerrieri points out, ambiguous as to their key. They could develop in several tonal directions. It is not until the seventh bar that the key is ‘established’ as Beethoven’s favoured C minor. This is eerily like a typical Hebrew sentence whose tense can’t be determined until sufficient context has been established.

At this point I have become too overheated to continue. Clearly, as the economist pointed out, if any of this were credible, someone would already have picked up the ten pound note off this particular musical floor. The human imagination is indeed a strange critter. Someone stop me.

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How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis by Adam Weiner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rasputin in America

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World is a classic history of ideas. By that I mean that it is fundamentally an academic exercise, the purpose of which is to demonstrate erudition and an ability to sustain a cogent argument while wading through largely irrelevant material. Adam Weiner is a literary historian who is clearly determined to fulfil his academic duty. But he also wants to make what is largely irrelevant to the rest of us relevant by arguing that a bad 19th century novel is the cause of the 2008 financial crash. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t so much fail, as just forgets about it in most of the book.

Weiner’s thesis, and it is presented as such, is that Alan Greenspan in particular and, more generally, many leading figures in government and academic economics are guilty of the ideological sin of ‘objectivism’, the quasi-philosophical school of thought promoted by the Russian-emigre novelist Ayn Rand. They (as well as other eminences of a less liberal nature like Vladimir Lenin) were duped, no actually ‘programmed’, according to Weiner, because they didn’t appreciate the source of Rand’s thought in the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky; nor did they read enough Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov in order to understand just how evil an influence - on literature as well as social thought - Chernyshevsky was.

The consequences of this literary ignorance, according to Weiner, have been dire:

“Disappointed that her novels, particularly Atlas Shrugged, had failed to transform reality into an objectivist paradise, Rand had created in Greenspan a final devastating hero, heir to Rakhmetov [a fictional Chernyshevskian character], heir to John Galt [one of Rand’s novelistic heroes], and freed him from her pages that he might operate unfettered in the medium of history. Greenspan was the flesh of her mind, her idea incarnate, and she must have wanted to live through him, as he began to wield objectivism, first in the White House, after her death in the Federal Reserve, where he would offer up the US economy in a spectacular hecatomb.”

The breathless floridity of this conclusion fortunately isn’t matched in the rest of the text, which has nothing to do with economic policy and a great deal to do with arcane literary influences.

There can be little doubt that ideas have consequences, and that some ideas are better than others. Nor is there little to argue against the fact that from time to time various fundamentally idiotic ideological fashions - one thinks of EST, the various brands of management-thought, and the currently dominant theories of corporate finance, to name but a few in addition to objectivism - prevail even among, especially among, the educated leadership of society.

Thus it has always been. The political writings of Aristotle and Plato are proof enough. The curriculum of any MBA programme is a confirming footnote. Indeed, it could credibly be argued that it is Christianity, with its doctrinal theory of individual salvation, that is the source of both Randian selfishness and Dostoevskian hatred of the untraditional. The situation is what psychiatrists call 'overdetermined'. There are as many explanations as there are tales to tell. Proving which tale is better is rationally impossible (The British serial killer, Ian Brady, was a keen reader of Dostoevsky. Make of that correlation what you will).

It is often a pleasant academic pastime to document the parentage of these ideas. It is aesthetically pleasing, minimally for the author, and may even help his career advancement. But beyond such personal satisfaction there seems little point to be informed that (selecting a page at random) “Chernyshevsky would later assimilate from the Petrashevsky crowd this jumble of Fourier and Feuerbach.” Need I know this in order to be on the lookout for the verbal and stylistic tells of the closet, policy-making objectivist?

There are, I think, bigger fish to fry, or at least catch, in one’s practical life. Personally, I blame Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt for Donald Trump. But I'm open to arguments.

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Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Make Words Your Homeland

Near the town of Paarl in the South African Karoo stands a structure constructed in 1975 which may be unique in the world: the Taalmonument, an architectural symbol of the Afrikaans language. As far as I am aware, only the Afrikaners have ever chosen to commemorate their culture through a physical representation of a central tool of racial hatred and repression. Mainly used in the rural areas of Cape Province, Afrikaans is spoken by around 7 million people. The symbolism of the Paarl Taalmonument is intended to show the history of Afrikaans linguistic development from archaic Dutch, Malay, and a smattering of native dialects. The year after the monument’s construction the inhabitants of Soweto began a rebellion against Afrikaans as a main language of school instruction. The government succumbed almost immediately to one of the first acts of organised civil rebellion and virtually all non-white schools under the apartheid regime chose English as the language of instruction. Since the death of apartheid, Afrikaans remains the lingua franca in parts of South Africa but is still associated with white supremacy. It is likely to die a slow death.



Yiddish is another language put under intense pressure in the 20th century. But for precisely the opposite reasons as Afrikaans. Although much more ancient than Afrikaans, Yiddish too is a syncretic mix of German, Slavic, Aramaic and Hebrew. Just prior to WW II it is estimated that there were 13 million Yiddish speakers, mainly in an arc of trans-national Jewish culture that ran from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Thanks to the Holocaust and subsequent emigration, Yiddish today is probably understood by perhaps a million native speakers, mostly survivors of persecution. Although there are many academic attempts to resuscitate the language, it seems unlikely that it will ever be recovered as a living part of modern life. Yiddish doesn’t have a Taalmonument, quite likely because it never was a language of repression or colonisation. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t commemorated, indeed mourned in a way that the death of a language like Afrikaans could ever be.

Songs of the Butcher’s Daughter is just the kind of commemoration that Yiddish deserves. Ostensibly a sort of love story and immigrant history, its backbone and binding theme is Yiddish and the culture it expressed, first in Eastern Europe and then in New York City. What was constant about being an Ashkenazy Jew, regardless of place, was language. As the protagonist, appropriately a Yiddish poet, is advised, “The Jewish future, like the Jewish past, can only be found through words. Not nations. Certainly not land…Make words your homeland Itsik. Make them your lover as well.” The suffering of oppression and dislocation is not eliminated but at least somewhat mitigated by language: “Can any solace equal that which is found by finding the proper words for all we encounter?”

In fact, as with Afrikaans but in exactly the opposite sense, Yiddish is the central symbol of Jewish culture as the vehicle for learning which is absent in the peasant culture of ignorance and bigotry in which it had to survive. It identified precisely what made that culture different: “The goyim are a curious people…Not curious that they want to know things,…curious that they don’t.” The only weapons that Jews had traditionally been allowed to possess are words. And words are honed through practice among non-lethal opponents arguing about whether Yiddish or Hebrew is superior: “How do Jews settle anything? With shouting such has not been heard since Babel.” Words may not be magical, but they certainly are sacred: “... the kabbalist’s lessons about the significance of letters as the building blocks of creation. Each told a story if one took time to read it.”

There is of course another memorial to Yiddish, which is implicit throughout Manseau’s narrative: its legacy in other languages, especially English, and specifically American English. At one point the narrator muses, “Who but a writer in a lonely room could impregnate the thoughts of so many.” Americans, and through them other English-speakers, have been impregnated by Yiddish vocabulary and even Yiddish thought patterns, not just through translations of literature (one thinks of Singer, Aleichem and so many others mentioned by Manseau), but in the influences of Yiddish on everyday usage. Growing up in a suburb of New York City in the 1950’s, I found, demanded a minimal familiarity with Yiddish vocabulary. Mensch, mazel, mitzvah were used without conscious thought but entirely appropriately in English conversation. Tsouris, simcha, and meshugenah were universally understood as states of mind with only the most contorted, and therefore ignored, translations into English. And of course, in light of the peculiar directness of much NYC social intercourse, the numerous Yiddish designations of bodily parts and functions were heard everywhere.

So the monument to Yiddish is not some fixed totem that attracts visitors who (for a fee) want to experience some historical experience of dominance. Nor are Yiddish language and culture something to be appropriated by non-Jews as a sort of historical trinket. The monument to Yiddish lives in literature and in other languages, that is in our social existence. Manseau’s novel is but one, very enjoyable, creative component of that monument.

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On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The End of Democracy

After watching the Clinton-Trump election on television, I felt a compulsion to do something, anything, that might dull the emotional pain caused by the Trumpian irrationality and mendacity. I found succour of a sort, if little solace, in Simone Weil's 1943 essay, On the Abolition of Political Parties. On the one hand, the piece is prescient as a prediction of the party-political phenomenon of Trump and its causes. On the other, unfortunately, it offers no real alternative to party organisation in a democracy. But perhaps the warning it provides, coupled with the confirmation of her hypothesis in almost every action of Trump and his supporters, may prevent a future descent into irrecoverable chaos.

Weil takes her inspiration not from the usual ancient Classical Greek and Roman cultures but from the unlikeliest of sources for someone who is ultimately critical of mob rule, namely the French Revolution. For her,

"The true spirit of 1789 consists in thinking not that a thing is just because such is the people’s will, but that in certain conditions, the will of the people is more likely than any other will to conform to justice."

What impedes this spirit is the attempt to corrupt the free will and reasoning ability of individuals.

The signal of such corruption is ‘passion’, that is emotional stimulus which stops reason and eliminates free will. For Weil, political parties are vehicles of collective passion whose function is to instil conformity through social pressure. The goal of political parties, that is of their members as well as their leaders, is growth in their own power without limit. Political parties kill conscience and promote mendacity, thus destroying the most fundamental connection with reality: Truth.

“The truth which we desire but have no prior knowledge of... is a perfection which no mind can conceive of – God, truth, justice – [words] silently evoked with desire, have the power to lift up the soul and flood it with light. It is when we desire truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content that we receive the light."

Political parties blind us to this light.

One is tempted to discount Weil’s desperately negative view until one remembers that Nazism, McCarthyism, and now Trumpism are all products of party-political democracies. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can Happen Here can and does happen here. Weil has an educational message for those in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly Britain and the United States. She notes that the continental European political system not only demonises rival parties but as a matter of course threatens party rivals with prison and even extinction.

Anglo-Saxon politics, Weil notes, hadn’t yet reached this level, preserving a fundamental civility that was real but, as she saw it, temporary. Because of factional dissatisfaction and frustration which are necessary consequences of democratic politics, the natural trajectory of democracy is toward the continental model. Donald Trump’s threat to prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton is a fulfilment of Weil’s prediction. As is the stubborn refusal of Trump’s Republican supporters - particularly religious evangelicals - to even recognise the possibility of immorality on the part of their chosen leader. Their consciences appear frozen and inoperable.

Weil in fact implicitly anticipates this last point as well. She traces the origin of such obstinate mendacity to the Catholic Church’s attempt over many centuries to control the spread of sects and threatening (to it) divisions which followed the French Revolution. Parties act like mini versions of a secular Church. Unity is maintained through the generation of collective passion, a drug which should be banned like other harmful substances.

Which provokes a thought that seems to be incipient in much of the wonder at Trump’s ability to attract and maintain such a stalwart following. Trump has in fact created a secular Church, with himself as self-designated pope. “There is no us without you” is the prayer of his congregation. Let us hope that like all such religions, Trumpism fragments into its own sectarian bits before it does any more harm to democracy.

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Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2) 
by 

Octavia E. Butler

 

Much More Than Sci-Fi

Neither Amazon nor the Library of Congress has a classification in which The Parable of the Talents fits easily. So it typically gets dumped into science fiction by default. But while the book does take place in the future, and extrapolates some of the possible consequences of things like climate change and computer-controlled weaponry, there is nothing unrecognisable as probably existing on somebody's drawing board, somewhere. There is certainly no typical sci-fi bending of the rules of Newtonian physics, or speculation about time travel, or revolutionary technology. 

The Parable of the Talents is in fact, as the title suggests, a work of theology, specifically political theology, the study of the link between community and individual belief. And although it overtly criticises evangelical Christianity, particularly the militant American brand, its target is really the monotheistic religions of the world - notably Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - not because they are monotheistic but because they are dogmatic, and consequently sectarian, and therefore useful for political manipulation, especially in modern democracies. The tale that Butler spins (in 1998) is eerily prescient of not just Donald Trump and his collusion with the American evangelical Right, but of Vladimir Putin's manipulation of Russian Orthodoxy and any number of Muslim politicians' tactics from Turkey to Indonesia. Monotheism, at least in its dogmatic forms, is clearly susceptible to political co-optation from Moses to Constantine to Khomeini. 

It may not be obvious to those outside the theological community that the great monotheistic religions are heresies of each other. All other religions are merely pagan. The Christian Trinity is a polytheistic heresy to Judaism and Islam. Muslim views of Jesus are variants of the Arian heresy of the 3rd century. Jewish rejection of Jesus as more than a not untypical rabbinic preacher is also a heretical rejection of the Christian doctrine of supersessionism which claims that the Christian Church is the true Israel. The theological complexity of all dogmatic religion is such that each of these distinguishing heresies, as it were, promote further differences and ultimately conflicts and schisms within each major religion ad infinitum. 

Butler is acutely aware of the role of monotheistic religion in the creation of her American dystopia, and in its reconstruction. Her main character is descended from a fundamentalist Baptist minister; her brother is a congenital religious fanatic. It is the diversity of dogmatic views that has caused, in the first instance, the disintegration of the American polity, and is, in the second, the rationale for the election of a dictator and the violent persecution of all who do not the doctrinal position of this Trump-like figure and his sympathisers.

The spine of the novel, introducing each chapter and referred to continuously throughout, is the 'new faith' of Earthseed, which is the invention or, if you prefer, the revelation, of the protagonist as an antidote to dogmatic monotheism and its consequences. There are historical allusions to Ann Lee, the Shaker leader who brought that proto-feminist faith of Northern England to America, and to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, whose life-long concern was the primal religion that appears perennially throughout the world in various symbolic manifestations. But the main influence on Butler is clearly the so-called Process Theology that was developed originally by Alfred Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne in the 1920's and 1930's. 

The central insight of Process Theology, one can hardly call it a dogma, is that it is an essential attribute of God to affect and be affected by temporal processes. Although not consistent with some developed theology, this insight is not at odds with the fundamental scriptures of any of the monotheistic religions, which all present an acting, feeling, mutable God who apparently learns about human beings as they learn about Him. Process Theology does not deny various monotheistic tenets such as divine eternity, omnipotence or even the immutability of the 'core' of God, as it were. It just doesn't care about these dogmatic issues.

Butler presents her theology in the form of a poem which develops as her story unfolds, a poem that Whitehead and Hartshorne would not, I am sure, be ashamed to have written. A single verse is enough to give the substance of the piece: "All that you touch You change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change." Change for Butler is not a fetish such as that proposed by current-day management consultants and psychological improvement merchants. Change is simply that which is inevitable and necessary for life, divine as well as human. We shape change which shapes us. This includes of course the shape we mould God into, which certainly in turn affects the shape we assume.

The fashion for Process Theology comes and goes with hemlines, but it has become an abiding force in academic religious thinking and affects many of the mainstream schools of theological thought. The fact that it is a somewhat esoteric discipline means that its relevance for practical affairs isn't immediately apparent. Quite apart from its literary value, which is considerable, Butler's work is important because it makes explicit both a fundamental issue in American, indeed modern European and Middle Eastern, society, namely the religious foundation of national unity, and a way in which that issue can be dealt with in an intellectual but practical way. For this achievement alone her brilliance must not be under-appreciated.