Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Socialism Remaindered

Was Hrabal the Studs Terkel of Moravia? He and Terkel were more or less contemporaries. From similarly humble backgrounds, they both got law degrees. Both were blacklisted and censored for questionable patriotism. Both were famed raconteurs. Most importantly, both concerned themselves mainly with working people and their culture.

The difference of course is that Terkel, in his Working in particular, asks people about how their jobs gave positive meaning to their lives. Hrabal inquires more about how the roles people play are always ambiguously productive and destructive. For him, there is something of the symbolic and cosmic rather than the personal in each character. Perhaps this is the key to the difference in American and European moral sensibilities.

Too Loud a Solitude starts like one of Terkel's case studies, a first person account of a man dedicated for thirty-five to the waste paper compaction business. Well not quite. None of Terkel's subjects ever said anything like "If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself." This working stiff knows something about iconography and semiotics.

And not just about the books. Hrabal's characters themselves are like icons pointing beyond their immediate experiences: "When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through the air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ." No ordinary sanitary engineer then in his poetic vision and singular appreciation of the doctrine of transubstatiation.

The books in question, the primary raw material involved in the protagonist's production/destruction, are not allowed to become idols that inhibit their own transcendence. They possess a dialectical character for Hrabal as they bring both "ineffable joy and even greater woe." The protagonist, Hant'a, reinforces this realism; he is gnostic as well as Hegelian: "The heavens are not humane," he says, and "books have shown me the joy of devastation." Books are the centre of his existence, but they are nonetheless tainted and therefore not to be worshipped as divine.

I manage a small academic library, so I recognise the syndrome Hant'a demonstrates. He is constantly distracted from his duty to crush the books by the irresistible temptation to read the damn things. Not an efficient trait in either a librarian or a book compactor. The equivalent of a doctor's emotional involvement with her patient. Frequently dangerous. Always frowned upon. His addiction is controllable to the extent that he does fulfill his duties, if on occasion only barely.

But reading of the condemned books is only the entry level drug for Hant'a. Hard core addiction is bringing the space-eating things home. They quickly take over your life. And taking up all available house-space is only the half of it. The threat of death by book-avalanche is constant. As it is, Hant'a had already shrunk by a good four inches under the compressive weight of the books in his bedroom. The books are not merely a monkey on his back, they constitute the world he inhabits and that inhabits him.

Aside from a distinct preference for Schiller and Goethe, Hant'a's workaday world is not unlike many of Terkel's subjects. He's over-qualified for the job of pressing first the green button and then the red button; with a nag for a boss; and he drinks too much beer at lunch, and for that matter even on the job. By no standard can he be considered passionate or even interested in his job except for the unauthorised side-benefits. The job itself is irrelevant to Hant'a's identity, just as is his participation in a socialist state.

Hant’a’s fear of technological redundancy is, however, as real as that of one of Terkel's subjects in capitalist America. Ever since a gigantic new machine was installed in a neighbouring town, he knows his days in book-compacting are numbered. In fact he looks forward to retirement. But he desperately wants to bring his now surplus compactor home with him since he's not sure he can do without the daily routine of waste paper disposal. He's not worried about income in retirement, however, and certainly not the loss of social routine. The problem is where to source a reliable flow of good books!

Not Terkel then.

Postscript: just to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction, this little news piece from Turkey showed up in my ‘feed’: http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk/news/t...

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Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hapless Irony

Flannery O'Connor was a woman who knew her world. Not just the gentile facade of a world but the nits and grits and dirt under the finger nails world of poor black folk and edgy white trash, of the huckster and the street beggar, the good ole boy and the smug gossip, the person of faith and the person of lost faith, the arch prostitute and her bumbling client. They are misfits, defectives, near-psychotics, needy obsessives, fanatics.

O'Connor knew how these people act in this world, and how they speak, and, more important, what they are completely unaware and incapable of. They don't know how to act and speak in many circumstances. Not necessarily because they are uneducated or inexperienced but because the culture of which they are a part demands their role of ignorance and ineptitude. It's in their blood. They have a place and best stay put.

Call it the Old South for convenience or American Gothic for legitimacy. But this world is the one in which we all live. We might shiver a bit at the casual racism of a Hazel Motes, or chuckle at his use of a toilet wall in a public convenience as a local yellow pages. Nonetheless, our everyday language is equally thoughtless. And the evening television news is hardly any less gossip-ridden and tawdry than the scrawls in the average men's room. Enoch Emery's pointless attachment to Haze and his bizarre interpretation of what's needed to help him succeed are symptoms of an insanity equally evident in recent American political rallies.

The suspicion-laden, functionally autistic interactions we have every day - on public transport, walking down the street, in run of the mill commercial transactions - are essentially no different from those of O’Connor’s country bumpkins. But this is how she gets us to pay attention to them, by using the bumpkins and rubes to make her point fairly painlessly. But that point is no less clear as a consequence: no one escapes life undamaged; and the damage only gets repaired through other (damaged) folk.

Despite the apparent horror of the book, it is her underlying, soft, meticulously articulated irony that makes O'Connor so hypnotically attractive to me. A rusted iron glove filled with scented cotton rather than a fist. But oh what an after-effect. The blow comes after one stops reading. Understanding comes without an argument but through her so precise hints and suggestions. What unites us as human beings is not some abstract essence or capacity but a thorough-going and fateful haplessness. Through her we become conscious of being subject to the vagaries of our time and place. Paradoxically, it is an appreciation of this haplessness - not religious belief or its absence - that offers freedom.

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The Stone Raft by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brexit Forefelt

Spain and Portugal float away from Europe as a disunited kingdom, leaving Gibraltar behind, a lonely Atlantic island. Written in 1986 about the Iberian leave-taking from continental Europe, The Stone Raft is the perfect book for Brexit 2016. A cliché, I know, but not an un-useful one.


Separation from the rest of Europe is just not easy emotionally for either party. "A loving mother, Europe was saddened by the misfortune of her lands on the extreme west." All sorts of connections - journalistic as well as legal and physical (particularly electricity) - have to be worked out, as any country with experience would know. And, with Saramago, Portugal has that experience and can share it with Britain.

Apologies by those departing are of course necessary, along the lines of 'it's not anything about you, it's us'. So in their letters home, the inveterate exiteers write "...that their world had changed, and their way of life, they were not to blame, on the whole they were people with little willpower, the sort of people who could not make up their mind..." No fault international divorce.

Even in translation one has often to voice Saramago's prose in order to get the sense of it much less enjoy its full effects. It is a form of written/oral story-telling that has an essential musicality which is as much a part of the tale as its subtle humour and irony. It is also lots of fun. The characters and cadence could be from The Canterbury Tales:

"So let is not ask Jose Anaico who he is and what he does for a living, where he comes from and where he is going, whatever we find out about him, we shall only find out from him, and this description, this sketchy information will also have to serve for Joana Carda and her elm branch, for Joaquim Sassa and the stone he threw into the sea, for Pedro Orce and the chair he got up from, life does not begin when people are born, if it were so, each day would be a day gained, life begins much later, and how often too late, not to mention those lives that have no sooner begun than they are over, which has led one Piet to exclaim, Ah, who will write the history of what might have been."


I am particularly fond of Saramago's alternative Cartesianism: "...the only great truth is that the world cannot die." Quem mundus non potest mori, perhaps, as a replacement for the Cogito ergo sum. Not that it has the same epistemological pretensions as the Cogito, of course, but " ...in the absence of any certainties one has to pretend." Indeed, pretending to leave the EU may be Britain's salvation as well.

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In Babylon 
by 

Marcel Möring

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 28, 2016  ·  edit

did not like it

bookshelves: dutch-flemish 

Filling a Much Needed Gap in the Market

A very odd book indeed. A sort of horror fantasy with no resolution or discernible moral. A family saga of impenetrable import. A tale of incestuous infatuation which is entirely pointless. A reader can only stand so much unstructured inconsequentiality before utter tedium establishes itself. The final deus ex machina is anything but divine and entirely insufficient to justify the previous 400 pages.

Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite by Suki Kim
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eastern Gossip

Here are my questions, none of which are answered by the author: Why on earth would North Korea allow Christian missionaries to teach at a military college? Indeed why let them into the country at all since their avowed mission in life (the clue is in the name) is to proselytise the natives? What's the real motive?

Further, why would said missionaries seek or accept such an assignment knowing that they would be stopped on in one way or another the moment they engaged in any talk of the Lord? What did they hope to gain? Are they playing the long game?

Finally, knowing that whatever latitude they were given by the North Koreans was dependent on compliant behaviour and discretion, what possessed the missionaries to allow an undercover journalist to slip through their vetting? The task was teaching English after all. Surely one or two bona fide members of the tribe had acceptable qualifications. Why not use trusted members of the team?

Answers to these would have been at least as interesting as her rapportage, even if demanding a bit more investigativeness on her part. Or perhaps I'm wrong. Who knows, could be wheels within eccentric wheels to consider here.

However, presuming there is no larger picture and given the circumstances of her arrival and job in North Korea, Suki Kim's apparent intention and status hardly put her in a dangerous position. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut, which she generally did, and teach young men some grammar. There's no John le Carre sub-plot of secrets sought or officials traduced. For six months she walked from Point A to Point B on the campus, with the occasional guided tour to some nondescript 'sights' (mostly just sites it seems).

And there is certainly nothing new in what she has to report. On the scale of North Korean horror stories, hers might rate 1 out of a magnitude 10. Mostly she gossips about the social discipline exhibited by her pupils. That and their lack of trivial cultural knowledge, for example about the latest Harry Potter film. Who on the planet with the least interest in North Korea doesn't know that the Internet is highly restricted and censored? Any existential detail she provides is based almost solely on her classroom interactions, which are probably not that different from the highly regimented educational regimes in South Korea or Japan.

So the only real consequences of Suki Kim's publicised 'investigation' are likely to be the reduced credibility of the missionaries and the increased political vulnerability of her former students. North Korean undoubtedly will remain as dismal and as mad as it has been. Having said that, I like gossip as much as anyone. So I hard a hard time putting it down. I feel shame.

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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lispector Calls

The Hour of the Star transcends genre. How, with utter fluidity, does an apparently conventional narrative transform itself into the author's introspective confessional? And when does that slip into narcissistic myopia which then becomes therapeutic technique? Before it develops simultaneously into a romance, a feminist tract, and a pointed sociological commentary? All in 90 pages?

Clarice Lispector is difficult to keep up with simply because she writes the simplest prose with undoubtedly the highest ratio of thought to word on the planet. It takes time to digest. One can open to any page to find a dozen arresting examples:

"... The truth is always some inner power without explanation..."
"... Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word which combines with other words to form phrases and [from which] there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases."
"... God belongs to those who succeed in pinning him down.... Why is there so much God? At the expense of men."
"... what is fully mature is very close to rotting."
"... Death is an encounter with self."

The reader is bounced on her sea of prose like a survivor from a wrecked civilisation. With more pensees per page than Pascal, meatier aphorisms than Montaigne, contradictions and reversals to challenge the Bible, and offbeat observations to rival Borges, Poe and Kafka, if you like your fiction and your thinking densely packaged, you cannot go wrong with Lispector.

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Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Neverland Cult

Korelitz never disappoints. She writes what she knows about. And she writes about it well. In this case she writes about the insanely competitive process of getting admission to Princeton University, where she did work at one time in the Admission (no 's', thus creating an interesting sub-plot) Office.

Korelitz's raw material is the young people who want to become undergraduate members of the institution, and their parents who are prepared to mortgage their own lives to allow it, and the professionals who pretend to some sort of objectivity in sorting out the intellectual wheat from the merely ambitious chaff. But her far more interesting subject is the mores and obsessions of the American middle class. Not the entire middle class population to be sure, but certainly an identifiable segment large enough to supply the applications to fill available Ivy League university placements ten times over.

Admission can be read as a commentary on the material culture of this part of bourgeois America. And indeed there is a lot of conspicuous consumption of educational commodities apparently going on. But I don’t think Korelitz is that trite. Among other things such a slant wouldn’t fit with her signature denouement. There’s something far subtler she has in mind, the burden of which she places on her heroine who progressively discovers how the process she is a key part of has consumed her.

What is being produced, distributed, consumed and digested isn’t material at all. It isn’t even something as ephemeral as ‘education’ which still has some degree of concreteness in terms of human welfare. In fact, what is being pursued by the cast of characters in Admission is clearly and entirely immaterial: expectations. Expectations not of anything meaningful to those students, teachers and administrators involved except… for yet further expectations. A fragment of the life-long process of increasing abstraction from any possible personal need, including purely selfish or material betterment.

The situation, oddly in a proudly secular society, is not unlike that of adherence to church doctrine in the Middle Ages: the creedal dogmas of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth and the Atonement, among others, may not have meant the slightest thing to the daily lives of even the most educated or pious citizen, yet they were considered essential beliefs for some deferred reward. Rubric was, in a sense, its own reward. That is, strict adherence to the ritual was enough to ensure grace, the ultimate expectation of salvation, at least for the elect. The metaphor is more than casual: submission to the common entrance examination (Baptism), studious preparation of the application (Confirmation), the self-revelatory interview (Confession), are essential preludes for that all important receipt of the acceptance letter (Communion) in the ritual of university admission.

This de-materialisation begins even before the prep school stage that is the focus of Korelitz’s fiction. There is of course the pre-prep school which functions to allow entry to the best private and selective schools. In England it is these schools which are essential for entrance into Eton, and Wellington, Marlborough and the other ‘public’ schools which the Americans classify as ‘prep’. And the process continues with increasing intensity at university and beyond.

Think about it. At what point do the children’s’ lives described by Korelitz become in any meaningful way better? Getting into Princeton does not mean beer and skittles or an American version of Brideshead Revisited for the next four years. It means gruelling, relentless graft, sixteen hour days, and pervasive anxiety about the next set of expectations - graduate school or employment. These latter expectations, once met, will demand even greater commitment to the next set, namely career advancement. The pursuit of greater and greater expectations leads not to relative comfort and security, regardless of one's bank balance or net worth, but to white-collar drudgery and a kind of well-paid insecurity

The process is documented by many accomplished authors, but two in particular seem most apt to frame with Admission. The American prep school experience, for example, is the subject of Louis Auchincloss’s 1965 novel The Rector of Justin. The eponymous rector founds a school to produce an end product of comprehensible human import: young men of character who understand certain values like responsibility, discernment, and integrity. He fails utterly because, well, times were changing. The emerging corporate world did not need character, it needed high expectations which can be ’sold’ as valuable in themselves to others in order to both motivate and enrich.

Karen Ho’s cultural-anthropological study of 2008, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, shows how the level of expectations after university becomes more brutal and more removed from any sort of well-being. She, as it happens, is a Princeton graduate who knows first-hand as well as professionally the experience of competing for the honour of ‘top’ positions in investment banking and consulting firms.

I scare-quote ’top’ only because the positions offered are explicitly described and experienced as demanding an even higher level of commitment than that required at university, notably by permitting no interference in a candidate’s professional life by private concerns. “If you are the best, you will of course want to stay in the company of the best, which is why you will want to join us,” advertise Goldman Sachs or McKinsey & Company or Bankers Trust at their Princeton recruitment soirees. The likelihood is that successful candidates will be exploited as relatively cheap labour for two to three years and then discarded (associate billing rates are typically three times or more of their salaries; it is no coincidence that the duration of a young persons career coincides roughly with the period it takes for the billing rate to approach his or her compensation).

The expectations only get harder to bear and more physically and emotionally exhausting as they are met. ‘Expectations for’ slowly morph into ‘expectations of’, and these latter are infinitely expandable and burdensome. When they are ultimately (and inevitably) not met, one’s market-value plummets and one becomes subject to quite rational (and even expected) downsizing, restructuring, or is simply fired. Ho's case studies and vignettes are remarkably familiar to anyone who has experienced this realm of expectations.

This is the unavoidable consequence of value as expectation, as continuously deferred improvement in one’s life circumstances. One’s home, occupation, social relations, even family are abstract investments, assets, acquired or entered into on the basis of expectations…about future expectations. It is from these expectations they derive their value, not from anything intrinsic. Consumption really is only of oneself; everything else is prospective investment. If this is materialism it is of a decidedly monastic caste. So discovers Korelitz’s Portia Nathan.

In short, what Korelitz chronicles is an untitled eschatological cult whose members are the obsessively aspirational, the achievers devoted not to what might be worthwhile, that is, authentically valuable to themselves or society, but to the techniques of achievement itself. There are two cardinal virtues promoted by the cult: Passion and Excellence. Portia Nathan promotes both vigorously (until she doesn’t, in the way of these things).

Passion is the willingness of individuals to sacrifice their lives to the immateriality of expectations. Those who want to ‘change the world’ or ‘make a difference’ are particularly drawn to the somewhat flexible ethics this virtue implies (its extreme form, of course being terrorism). Excellence is the willingness to submit to the conventional rules as prescribed by those in charge. It means being good at technique - initially those of exam-taking and interviewing; eventually those dictated in professional life, particularly those techniques involved in creating expectations.

The devotions this cult engages in appear nonsensical, superstitious, even morbidly self-destructive to those not part of it. But, and in this the populists in North America and Europe have a point, it is this cult which rules, governs and manages our society. Perhaps the recent political upheavals will provoke a recognition of this cult, a social admission of its existence and influence.

Then again perhaps not. Cults tend to persist in times of confusion that they themselves create.

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Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trumping Trump

If Tavares were to have published Learning to Pray in 2016 rather than 2007 he would have been successfully sued by Donald Trump for slander and invasion of privacy. Or possibly hired as Trump's campaign manager. Who knows, perhaps he was even the inspiration for Trump's presidential aspirations, a sort of anticipatory biography of 'alternative facts'.

Tavares' protagonist, Lenz Buchmann, lives in a world created by his father and described by Thomas Hobbes, a world of barely contained brutal competition and animosity. It is a world motivated and glued together by fear of each for each other. To Lenz there is no question that the world really is this way because it responds to him with the same hostility as he to it. His father's dictum is his lifelong guide: "Doing what we want, that is the first level; the second is making other people want what we want." There are only two forms of action relevant to executing this advice, defence and attack. The latter is always the more successful.

Lenz doesn't just recognise the world as Hobbesian, however. His aspiration is to be, not to be part of, the Leviathan, the force that keeps the heaving hostile mass in order, his order. To induce fear but never to fear. He is this sovereign whale domestically, of course, and also in his profession as a surgeon, where he metes out humiliation or approbation, happiness or tragedy. Or, more metaphysically, he is creating the Kingdom.

Lenz is conventionally virtuous because virtue pays not because it is virtuous. He similarly tolerates social and religious ritual because it creates a communal mood appropriate to an occasion, and assigns roles which individuals can play predictably as positions of leadership, respect, and influence, not because ritual has any demonstrative meaning. This vulgar pragmatism he calls competence, "organic craftsmanship", rational technique: "All actions are good as long as they meet their objective."

Technique is the opposite of nature; indeed, its sworn enemy. Technique is laudably unnatural. Nature experiments with the most effective ways to deceive and to seduce bodily organs to "change sides", to give up on the body. Technique attacks nature to mitigate and correct its irrationality. Effective technique is also the sign of people who make things, who contribute, who build, and whose duty it is to protect the things which they make, contribute and build.

Lenz has an epiphany in his maturity. His ambition to become Leviathan can't be realised in his somewhat restricted role as surgeon. For real clout, he needs a bigger stage, a political one. And politics too is a matter of proper technique, that "of joining men and separating them." He becomes a successful Babbitt. The illusion of community created by Party politics became his milieu to manipulate as effectively and decisively as he had dealt with a defective kidney.

[Excursus: Any resemblance to Donald Trump is unintended and purely coincidental of course. The comments of the protagonist that "the price of anarchy has fallen in recent years" and "everyone wanted security, but first they wanted to feel more threatened" and his reputation as "an out and out crook" notwithstanding.]

There is a school of moral thought called Virtue Ethics which teaches that we take on the attitudes and dispositions of the positions and rituals we perform. Practice virtue and you become more virtuous. The process also works in reverse: the practice of evil facilitates increased evil. Lenz becomes an exemplar of this phenomenon.

At one point during Lenz's accumulation of political power, he recognises a paradox however. The more power one has, the less clearly defined are his adversaries, and the more it is possible that the enemy is neither in front or behind but lies where Lenz remembers from his childhood. The real threat lies "below", in this memory, in the very earth one walks on. As an adult this below is not in the earth but within the depths of oneself, below one's own consciousness, hidden but active and awaiting opportunity.

A Faustian Lenz begins to take on traits of a Dorian Grey. Publicly he is sane and in control, but his increasingly debilitating headaches and fetishistic urges begin to dominate his inner portrait, his private self, which has become notably homicidal. Nature has arrived. But as a retro-virus, looking like the cells it attacks. Cleverer than any technique, the brain cancer progressively takes charge, with its own homicidal objective. The body spits on itself.

Here's the question: would even incipient death provoke Donald Trump to forego his ethos, to do something with no technique at all? Does he in fact pray or negotiate by the numbers with God?

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American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Paracetamol for the Soul

Each of us has a preferred method of self-medicating for stress: alcohol, drugs, sex, adrenaline-inducing sport. John Kaag's story is that he was stressed out about a failing marriage and the dismal prospect of an endless graduate thesis. His drug of choice is philosophy, specifically the idealist/pragmatist philosophy of the turn of the 20th century, centred at Harvard. And why not, since it has fewer side-effects than most of the alternatives?

I confess to sharing Kaag's philosophical interest, but more when I'm on a high than on a low. And I also share his enthusiasm for Harvard-sourced philosophy, although I lean much more toward Royce and Pierce than toward James and Santayana. So I get his point: thought, as long as it somehow 'connects', can be therapeutic. What that connection might be is something as impenetrable as the philosophy it adheres to. So in the end you either have it or you don't, a lot like the Christian idea of grace.

The connection for Kaag (and me) is the overlap in idealistic pragmatism (or pragmatic idealism, no one is fussed) between science, that is, rational thought, and what lies beyond it, that which is sometimes called metaphysics but which is more simply named spirituality. This spirituality is what is left over after one has accepted all the paradoxes and limitations of science. Which is quite a lot really, particularly if you're stuck in a loop of rigorous logic suggesting self-immolation.

The essential character of this philosophy is its unique combination of intellectual humility with transcendental hope. Pierce for example thought that the quality of current knowledge will be risible in light of ultimate truth, which he defined in eschatological terms as the end point of human enquiry. Such a conception is simultaneously devoted to science as well as to a future that is beyond any existing thought. It's Judaeo-Christian inspiration is obvious.

To put the matter in more mystical terms: What is above is necessary for the things undertaken below. The former practically energises the latter; and it makes sense of human rationality in a particular way, as a permanently unfinished process of approaching the divine. A process of fits and starts, not necessarily always progressive but a process that can nonetheless be engaged in with confidence of ultimate success. Both Plato and Aristotle would be happy, which is no mean accomplishment.

It is this prospect of a very different, an unimaginable future from that contained in any current expectation which was, I suspect, most compelling for Kaag. It is an instinctive idea that not only keeps us going on occasions of stress or depression but also prevents from doing lots of questionable things on an exhilarated spur of the moment - like getting a tattoo, or proposing marriage on a first date.

Louis Menand's 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club, argues that American Pragmatism originated in the passionate desire of some eminent Bostonians to avoid a recurrence of a trauma which was the equivalent of the French Revolution in Europe, namely the American Civil War. But its effective life-span extended only to the next traumatic event, The Great War. The war of 1914-1918, I believe, tested the virtue of hope beyond philosophical as well as popular endurance. Neither Pragmatism nor Harvard philosophy disappeared entirely as a consequence but they did go underground, pursuing a low-level guerrilla-war for the next half century or so.

My point in raising this bit of history is to note that, despite Kaag's purported experience to the contrary, it ain't necessarily so that a philosophy of hope can engender hope. It was Kaag's discovery of the private library of William Ernst Hocking (an epigone of Josiah Royce) in rural New Hampshire, not the content of his philosophy that gave Kaag hope for his own academic future. Attributing his 'conversion' to intellectual enlightenment or an infatuation with Hocking’s beautiful wife is a bit fatuous even if it makes a good story.

So there are probably many good reasons for taking a stab at Kaag's book, not the least of which is an education in a somewhat underrated school of thought that has had considerable influence on the world, and, who knows, might have considerably more. But I wouldn't recommend it for chasing the blues, even for academics. We may have to settle for grace after all.

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The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Communion of Sometime Sinners

I find myself enthralled by the literature of small countries - Portugal, Ireland, The Netherlands in particular. This is a fact but certainly unintended and unplanned. What is it I ask myself that is so captivating? I suspect it has to do with the emphasis many writers from these countries seem to place on what might be called the magnificence of the quotidian, the celebration of things at hand, making the otherwise trivial into objects and events to be appreciated. Perhaps I’m projecting. In any case, Peixoto is a master of the beauty of the everyday and the mundane and the mis-shaped. How else to judge this poetically revealing prose?

The morning light doesn’t feel the clean window panes as it passes through them, coming to rest on the notes of the piano that emerge from the wireless and float in the kitchen air.

…or this?

...the telephone screams. Strong as iron, it stretches out with a persistent urgency, which stops to catch its breath, then carries on again with the same panic and the same authority.

The Piano Cemetery is a sort of multi-temporal inter-generational meditation about love and family life, both of which subjects hinge on the prosaic and often trivial being raised to the dramatic. There are some unusual devices that Peixoto uses to energise the drama. Dead men talking, because dead men have no time and can see everything. Death can be liberating in that way: Father can then be son who can then be grandfather. An Olympic marathon runner whose life, and a large part of his father’s and his son's, maintains him on pace during a race in Stockholm, presumably in the 1912 Games (at which the legendary Jim Thorpe also competed).

The usual assortment of ‘distressed types’ which populate much of Peixoto’s work are here: the grotesquely fat sister, the half-blind uncle who tells endless incomprehensible tales, the Italian piano player on the razzle, the frequently abusive men, women both dark eyed and fair-haired, all of whom are long-suffering, and of course the eccentric carpenters, Francisco grand-pere, pere et fils, who are the interchangeable protagonists: "We are perpetual in one another."

The race is the trajectory along (within?) which the runner's “reflections constructed out of guilt” ramify in a sort of segmented stream of consciousness kilometre by kilometre from generation to generation. Augustine may be right. Sin and guilt are somehow genetic. "My memory is me distorted by time and mixed up with myself - with my fear, with my guilt, with my repentance," he says as he interleaves time and space. Guilt and repentance not just for things done intentionally but most passionately for those incidental accidents that shape a life; ultimately guilt and repentance for simply being and reality is "the same truth in different illusions."

This is powerful existential stuff in which the question of who is it that exists is made central by the technique. Peixoto knows a great deal about children and old people, particularly about their peculiar sense of time and sense of connection with others. His use of ambiguity of narrator very effectively captures this other way of seeing. Perhaps small countries more than others do indeed promote these kinds of thoughts.

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The Decision by Britta Böhler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Choosing Sides Artfully

This is a beautifully written (and translated) book. The epigraph from Wittgenstein is precisely apt for the book as well as for Thomas Mann: "ethics and esthetics are one."

For Mann, good art verged on the criminal. Its purpose is to expose reality, particularly to expose hypocrisy and the rationalisation of power. But Mann was an artist not a zealot (less like Nabokov, more like Prokofiev). He found the hypocrite and the abuser of power vulgar not merely dangerous. And he feared them on both counts. It is the manner in which Mann copes with his fear that makes him and The Decision interesting.

At the book's opening, Mann's physical safety from the Nazi regime has already been assured by his arrival in Switzerland. He is an established international literary celebrity, having received the Nobel Prize six years earlier, and recently having approved the adaptation of Death in Venice for cinema. But he is first of all a German, and therefore an heir to and a central part of an unparalleled cultural tradition. And he has just committed what amounts to cultural suicide, "national excommunication", by submitting a letter to the Zurich German-language press that unequivocally condemns the Nazi regime. Mann's fear is existential in the purest sense. "He had the feeling that his tree of life had been torn violently from the soil by the roots.", says Bohler's narrator. How could it have been otherwise than this?

This tree of life certainly included the bourgeois foliage of house, furniture, belongings, readership abandoned or vulnerable in Germany. But these are not the principle focus of Mann's fear. The tap-root of the matter is that all he has admired and valued as German contribution to the artistic world at large, including his own work, has become suspect as possibly infected with the same cultural toxins so aggressively promoted by the contemporary regime (his heroes Wagner and Nietzsche had been coopted by Nazi ideology). Could he be, as he had recurrently dreamt, "a fraud, a charlatan and worse?" But if his judgment has been fatally compromised by his cultural affinity with the regime, is it right to have criticised it so strenuously? This is alienation not only from one's homeland - friends, colleagues, children - but alienation from one's self, an acutely debilitating condition for an artist.

The rapid disintegration of the Weimar regime in 1933 - the unexpected rise of a right wing minority government, which is rabidly nationalistic, confronted by a befuddled opposition - has frightening similarities to recent political events in the United States. Those of us who find ourselves outside our native USA while it appears to be disowning its founding principles, may be able to appreciate as acutely as he did Mann's alienation and the emotional dislocation it produces. Can a government really be distinguished from the nation, for example? What are the duties and limits of resistance? At what point is decisive action, including action to leave a national community, warranted? Bohler captures this condition of existential uncertainty, essentially a sudden and profound fear of loss of self, wonderfully. Her American readership therefore deserves to increase substantially. Let's hope the Dutch Foundation for Literature is on the ball.

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De donkere kamer van Damokles 
by 

Willem Frederik Hermans

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 14, 2016  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: dutch-flemish 

Surface All the Way Through

After reading the first 20 pages or so of Hermans's Darkroom of Damocles, I began to suspect a problem with the English translation. The text is spare to the point of aridity with hardly any description of people or places. Similarly, there is no psychological commentary; motives, reflections, emotions are unstated. Dialogue is presented more like a punching match than a conversation. Sentences are terse; paragraphs are short. Transitions are unexpected and somewhat discontinuous, as if in response to interview questions which have been omitted. The cadence of the writing is unremitting: this happened; then this happened; then this happened - with sometimes disconcerting non-sequiturs. No digressions, no speculation, no deviation from the determined trajectory of the story. The book often reads in English almost like one written by an aspiring teen-ager, or a policeman in his notebook, rather than an experienced author.

But Ina Rilke is one the most experienced and honoured translators of Dutch literature. To the extent any translation can express the core of the original, Rilke's can't be improved upon. In the colophon the mystery is solved. Although published in English in 2007, the book was originally published in Dutch a half-century earlier. Darkroom, in other words, is an example of a very specific, very Dutch mid-twentieth century genre of somewhat advanced, even experimental, popular literature. As far as I am aware, nothing like it exists in contemporary English-language literature. I don't know if this genre has a name inside or outside The Netherlands, but it is certainly a type with a particular character and sophistication. And a type of which Hermans's Darkroom provides a leading example.

The effect of Hermans's style is one of an abrupt but comprehensible dream-like movement from scene to scene. The writing is clearly meant to jolt, to cause an eddy in the flow of the reader's concentration. Hermans supplies little backstory or historical context. He keeps the reader in precisely the same position of ignorance as that of the young protagonist who is never adequately informed of the circumstances of his father's death or his mother's involvement in it. The repetitions appear like practice re-tellings to get the story down pat. What parts of this tale are true? What is being left out? It is as if he is insisting to the reader, "This is the situation, you don't need to know more now, deal with it." 

On the other hand Holland, arguably the primary subject, is portrayed insistently as a 'twee' country. There is a certain intimacy adopted immediately between Dutch characters. There is no need to explain things because "we all know the score." Coincidence is almost a rule of this compulsive intimacy. The action shifts from city to city in Holland as if they were part of the same local neighbourhood. People keep running into each other, or their friends or acquaintances. Delivering a basket of cherries from a greengrocer in Amsterdam to a prison in The Hague is apparently no trouble at all. Zipping down to to Utrecht or out to Lunteren, or up from Leiden on the spur of the moment in the middle of the war is a snap. Complex messages are breathlessly communicated to virtual strangers with an expectation of complete discretion and immediate compliance. There are occasional German-sympathisers but they are easily identified and deftly ostracised. Surprisingly, this all works quite well once the stance and rhythm of the piece is accepted. The story then becomes quite irresistible.

Perhaps the best way to characterise Hermans's rather cinematic technique is that it shares much with several films by Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest in particular. There is a nostalgic realism of place as in Hitchcock: the blue intercity trams, disappearing as Hermans wrote; references to places like the Ypenberg airfield, now lying under the junction of the A4 and A12 highways; the still extant 19th century burgelijke houses on the canals in Leiden as well as one or two somewhat louche but long-standing hotels in Amsterdam. The protagonist (and therefore the reader) lurches from confusion to confusion; the situation is muddled; nothing he does yields clarification but only enmeshes him more deeply in a greater mystery. The constant theme of his (and his country's) situation is ambiguity. Is he a dupe, a fool, a patriotic hero, a Walter Mitty wannabe? Hermans, like Hitchcock, isn't telling without some work by the reader. The growing suspense isn't about who-done-it? but what-does-this-all-mean? And fortunately, also like Hitchcock, Hermans ultimately delivers.

All Souls by Javier Marías
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Uses of Absurdity

All Souls College is a real place. At least I think it's a real place. It might be a film set. Like most Oxford people I have never been inside it. I know it has no students, only fellows. And I know that Hillaire Belloc was refused such a fellowship, probably because of his fetishistic Catholicism. Oh, and it has a library, The Codrington, which is particularly known for is history collection. And that's it.



In fact, Marias's All Souls has relatively little to do with All Souls College, but with an issue contained in many of its ancient volumes. The problem of 'other minds' is a perennial flower in the philosophical garden, one of particular importance ever since that awkward Frenchman Rene Descartes threw his tuppence of fertiliser into it in the 17th century. His 'I think therefore I am' notably lacks a way to get to 'You think too, and therefore are as well.'

Philosophy has moved on from Descartes's solipsistic world, but not very far. As one of Marias's characters confides to his diary, "Life is still so medieval." We may be fairly certain that other people do think. But finding out what they think is something else. This sort of functional solipsism, virtually total uncertainty about what's actually going on in other people's heads, is what All Souls is about. It's not unlike Oxford and All Souls College really: we know it’s there but what goes on is a mystery better left alone.

This condition is fundamental to the structure of our world. From international politics to sexual politics, it dominates our lives. As Marias's unnamed protagonist sums it up: "Family resemblances notwithstanding, no man has ever known for certain that he was the father of his children. Between married couples, neither partner answers questions they don't want to answer, and so they ask each other very few." The porter at the Taylorian who lives in a different year every day, of which year no one else is entirely certain, serves as a theme for the entire book.

Other minds are mysterious, but the behaviour of others is more obvious and often just comical. Anyone who has read C. P. Snow's The Masters, or Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue or even Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited knows that the manners and rituals of Oxbridge life are not just quaint remnants of outmoded tradition but also serious rules for distinguishing 'members' from others and for keeping these others permanently off-balance.

Marias's wonderful vignettes of college servants, donnish types, classes, tutorials, and dinners at high table shows another reason for the persistence of Oxford rituals: they compensate for the impenetrability of other minds by providing a definiteness to social interaction. This is why they are often so hilarious. Otherwise detestable people can be accommodated with a fluidity and ease that is probably rare even in the best of foreign embassies. Raised voices, much less fist fights rarely break out even among sworn adversaries.

There is a one word description that I think captures Marias's brilliance in coupling a philosophical problem with an essentially comedic situation: absurd. One example: The fellows of All Souls College, atheists though they may largely be, are required to attend periodic services for the repose of the eternal souls of their benefactors. Wonderfully, divinely absurd one might say. All Souls is a fiction of the absurd told with a straight face. Not a small achievement.

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The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Portuguese Vietnam

While the USA was engaged during the 1960's and 70's in its insane war in Vietnam, Portugal was digging proportionately even deeper graves in its African colony of Angola (one and one half million men went to Africa, from a population of ten million; almost 80,000 died on all sides). Somewhat lower-tech than the American effort, the Portuguese troops went out not by jet plane but by ship. This was hardly a morale-building experience - they travelled in the same cargo holds that carried the coffins which would bring many of them home. Lobo Antunes was a doctor conscripted to help reduce the number of coffins needed.

Military discipline doesn't mitigate the emotional immaturity, frustration and fear of young soldiers, it condenses extreme emotions for periodic explosive release. The explosions, as we know, may continue for a life-time. Alcohol and prescription drug abuse seem to be popular longer-term dysfunctions; but the more immediate effect of putting lethal weapons in the hands of half-cooked, troubled adults is a casual, unpredictable inhumanity and the occasional massacre... and, of course, a chronic inability to talk coherently about the experience, even if that's all they do talk about. It's called post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lobo Antunes's voice (it can hardly be called a protagonist since it doesn't even have a name) has PTSD. He can't shut up about what he's gone through except to comment on what he's going through at the moment as a consequence. Guilt alternates with the effects of military irrationality, "...is it the guerrillas who are murdering us or is it Lisbon, or is it the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, or the whole fucking lot of them determined to screw us good and proper in the name of certain interests that escape me now...? ...Is there anyone who can explain this absurdity?" He understandably avoids mention of the secret police, the PIDE, which had more power than the army, and was more dangerous than the enemy.

They return unfit for normal life, as they always do, because war makes everything - relationships, possessions, personal history - cheap, disposable, and temporary. The young soldiers, "shipwreck victims", are shunted into "islands of despair", military hospitals of a quality and capability of the 19th century. However, for the Portuguese returning from Angola, as undoubtedly for those Americans returning from Vietnam, those French from Algeria, those Dutch from Indonesia and those Russians from Afghanistan, among so many others, it is the malign indifference of one's fellow citizens that is the final crushing blow. The shock of loss is far more profound than the relief of safety:

"We spent twenty-seven months together in the asshole of the world, twenty-seven months of anguish and death in the sands of Eastern Angola...we ate the same homesickness, the same shit, the same fear, and yet it took us just five minutes to say goodbye, a handshake, a pat on the back, a vague embrace, and then, bent under the weight of our baggage, we were gone, out through the main gate and off into the civilian whirlwind of the city."

Would that young men realise that this is inevitable and refuse the commands of the old men who hide it from them. Only then might the old men stop.

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All Souls 
by 

Javier Marías, 

 

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

 

The Uses of Absurdity

All Souls College is a real place. At least I think it's a real place. It might be a film set. Like most Oxford people I have never been inside it. I know it has no students, only fellows. And I know that Hillaire Belloc was refused such a fellowship, probably because of his fetishistic Catholicism. Oh, and it has a library, The Codrington, which is particularly known for is history collection. And that's it.



In fact, Marias's All Souls has relatively little to do with All Souls College, but with an issue contained in many of its ancient volumes. The problem of 'other minds' is a perennial flower in the philosophical garden, one of particular importance ever since that awkward Frenchman Rene Descartes threw his tuppence of fertiliser into it in the 17th century. His 'I think therefore I am' notably lacks a way to get to 'You think too, and therefore are as well.' 

Philosophy has moved on from Descartes's solipsistic world, but not very far. As one of Marias's characters confides to his diary, "Life is still so medieval." We may be fairly certain that other people do think. But finding out what they think is something else. This sort of functional solipsism, virtually total uncertainty about what's actually going on in other people's heads, is what All Souls is about. It's not unlike Oxford and All Souls College really: we know it’s there but what goes on is a mystery better left alone.

This condition is fundamental to the structure of our world. From international politics to sexual politics, it dominates our lives. As Marias's unnamed protagonist sums it up: "Family resemblances notwithstanding, no man has ever known for certain that he was the father of his children. Between married couples, neither partner answers questions they don't want to answer, and so they ask each other very few." The porter at the Taylorian who lives in a different year every day, of which year no one else is entirely certain, serves as a theme for the entire book.

Other minds are mysterious, but the behaviour of others is more obvious and often just comical. Anyone who has read C. P. Snow's The Masters, or Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue or even Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited knows that the manners and rituals of Oxbridge life are not just quaint remnants of outmoded tradition but also serious rules for distinguishing 'members' from others and for keeping these others permanently off-balance. 

Marias's wonderful vignettes of college servants, donnish types, classes, tutorials, and dinners at high table shows another reason for the persistence of Oxford rituals: they compensate for the impenetrability of other minds by providing a definiteness to social interaction. This is why they are often so hilarious. Otherwise detestable people can be accommodated with a fluidity and ease that is probably rare even in the best of foreign embassies. Raised voices, much less fist fights rarely break out even among sworn adversaries.

There is a one word description that I think captures Marias's brilliance in coupling a philosophical problem with an essentially comedic situation: absurd. One example: The fellows of All Souls College, atheists though they may largely be, are required to attend periodic services for the repose of the eternal souls of their benefactors. Wonderfully, divinely absurd one might say. All Souls is a fiction of the absurd told with a straight face. Not a small achievement.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nullarbor in New York

If you're going to write a thousand page saga about 1970's New York City, you shouldn't make it as flat and featureless as Kansas in the wintertime. I hit the wall at page 200.

Hallberg is certainly a competent writer but narrative-competence alone doesn't create enough payoff for the reader who has to slog through the tome that is City on Fire. No engaging emotion, no memorable physical description (I have no idea what any of the protagonists might look like), no humour, no elegant prose, just interminable story with an increasing cast of unmemorable characters.

It's a bit risky, as well, to set a piece like this in a time and place within living memory but of which the author has no experience. Codgers like me get proprietorial about our youth and then are provoked to take aim at sexual and racial cliches that we feel are trite. Add to that the pointed use of period vocabulary like 'spaldeen' we get irrationally annoyed.

Nevertheless, I am sure there are many who will appreciate what Hallberg provides: if not chicken soup for the literary soul, then at least some sort of feast for the culturally starved. BON APPÉTIT.

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Eclipse by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interrupting the Voice in Your Head

Self-improvement isn’t just an industry, it’s an ethos, arguably the most central in modern society. We owe it to ourselves as well as to society to realise our potential, to develop our talents, to discover our true selves. What could be more self-evident? But self-improvement requires, at some point or another, self-diagnosis. And therein lies a problem that is the subject of John Banville’s Eclipse.

Self-improvement is founded on an implicit and verifiable principle: There is no man without his other. The other is there even when one is entirely alone, especially when one is alone. There are always two selves involved, one who acts, thinks, feels and the other who reflects on acting, thinking, feeling. It’s called consciousness and it is an abiding enigma of being human. It also undermines the very principle of its own existence, and with that the prospects for self-improvement. The point of John Banville’s Eclipse is that neither one of the selves, the acting or the reflecting, knows the other very well. Alex, the protagonist is well aware of the problem. “I was an unknown”, he confesses,” unknown even to myself.”

And that situation isn’t helped at all by trying to mould, shape, fix, improve or otherwise transform one or other of the parts of oneself. Alex has spent most of his life as an actor in self-improvement of one type or another - diction, performance, carriage, dance. The result of course is that he has learned how to act, a worthwhile skill in itself but not if one thinks it makes a better person: “The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on,” he has come to realise. He suffers from "...an insupportable excess of self...a malady of selfness." How then to unravel oneself, this most profound of mysteries, if the mystery itself arises and is compounded from trying to manipulate, heal, improve or otherwise modify oneself?

This is where the idea of grace comes from: if either of the two parts of a person is going to change, that change will be initiated from somewhere or someone else - God perhaps, or another human being like a therapist or an unwanted houseguest, or an event as prosaic as children singing. Or, as most notably in Eclipse, an unexplained apparition, sometimes called a ghost.

Whatever it is and wherever it comes from, a ghost interrupts the conversation between self and self. Alex is at first confused about this ephemeral source of help: “So if the purpose of the appearance of this ghost is to dislocate me and keep me thrown off balance, am I indeed projecting it out of my own fancy, or does it come from some outside source? Both, somehow, it seems…” But he eventually understands the new rules of the game; something is real about the ghostly: “…they are not in my head, they are outside.” Ghosts, as Dickens knew, stop the flow of reality so that “The actual has taken on a tense tumbling quality.”

Eclipse for me has echoes of the Oxford Inklings, particularly of the lesser known Charles Williams. Wiliams's novels The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps employ similar devices and tropes to Banville to the same end: enlightenment, insight, authentic consciousness. Banville is a much better writer of English prose than Williams ever was. Nowhere in Williams will you find anything like the lovely, lilting, laconic Irishisms such as "The day is damp and fresh as a peeled stick." Nevertheless, the alternative ethos to self-improvement, namely self-abandonment, is something they largely share, and something needed in a world dominated by Trumpian self-will masquerading as morality.

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The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Coming Clean About LOST

Several years ago I was induced by my grandchildren to watch seven seasons’ worth of the television series LOST during summer holidays. Filmed in Hawaii from 2004 to 2010, the series recounted the increasingly strange existence of the survivors of a trans-Pacific flight on an apparently uncharted, and possibly uncharitable, island. Often tedious, always unexpected, the tale, I decided, was either an invention beyond my abilities to appreciate, or it was utter nonsense, with no overall plot or plan for an ending. Turns out it was a bit of both.

Although I have read nothing to confirm this conclusion, it is entirely clear to me that LOST is merely a derivative version of Bioy Casares novella, The Invention of Morel. At least three versions of the 1949 the book had been made into films during the 1960's and 70's. These were explicitly credited to Bioy Casares. But as far as I am aware there is no mention of him as the inspiration for the LOST series. Yet the substance of his book is identical to that of the series, with a few twists thrown into the series reflecting more modern tastes and technologies. Here are my main points of comparison:

1. Both the series and the book take place on a remote island which is inaccessible by normal means. This is explained in the book as due to a reef and an illness, but not in the series which relies on unexplained physical phenomena. The precise means of entry and exit from the island remains a mystery in both.

2. Bioy has a single protagonist who arrives on the island as a fugitive from justice for some indeterminate crime for which he feels both guilt and shame. In LOST this transforms into a plane-load of survivors most of whom are also fugitives, either from the law or from intolerable social conditions. All the main characters feel guilt and shame and demonstrate the same sort of paranoia as Bioy's.

3. There is architectural evidence on the islands in both the book and the series of a previous habitation, modern buildings of unknown purpose, which have been abandoned but left in serviceable condition.

4. Within these structures are found various sophisticated technologies of indeterminate function that are powered by a natural but novel source of tremendous energy. In the series this source is an intense magnetic field, in the book it is tidal forces.

5. These technologies, it is eventually revealed, both allow time travel within the island and provide immortality to its inhabitants. There are relatively minor differences in the series and the book having mainly to do with the level of contemporary technological development reached in each case.

6. The characters in the series mirror those in the book. LOSTS's Ben Linus is the same Californian-esque cult leader as Morel. Bioy's protagonist and his 'female lead', Faustine are the series Jack Shepherd and his sometime enamorata Juliet, this latter being the focus of rivalry by the male characters in both.

7. Several other tropes and devices from Bioy are used repeatedly in the series: half-heard conversations, dream-like sequences, and so on. Others are scarcely concealed variants. For example, in Bioy, trees on the island die before maturity; in the series, it is infants who die.

The parts of the television series which were comprehensible to me were precisely those written by Bioy. I appreciated them as creative and innovative even 60 years later. The rest was indeed junk. And yet not a mention of the real source by the tv producers. Shameful

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The Mighty from Their Thrones: Power in Biblical Tradition 
by 

J.P.M. Walsh

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 09, 2016  ·  edit

did not like it

bookshelves: biblical 

The Emperor’s Clothes

I am an anarchist. That is to say, I believe that power must justify itself continuously. I also agree with Lord Asquith: power corrupts. It corrupts everyone in a position of power, from the head of the college mailroom to the Pope, proportionate to the power they exercise. I observe that it does so without exception, either by rationalising self-interest or by becoming an end in itself. 

Consequently, I mistrust anyone in a position of power and needle them whenever I can to justify their actions whether I agree with them or not. They don’t like this and tell me that I don’t understand the difference between the good and the bad use of power. 

To correct my lack of appreciation, a very respected (and beloved) colleague has badgered me into reading James Walsh’s ‘The Mighty From Their Thrones.’ My colleague believes that the Judaeo-Christian explanation of power is one which will convince me that institutions of power are not just an evil (necessary or otherwise) but in some way a reflection of divine beneficence. Let’s see...

Walsh's fundamental point is that the ancient Hebrew vocabulary used to express concepts that are relevant to power - words for judgment, rightness, and justice - don't translate easily into modern language and society. He claims we must understand them in their original cultural context. This is obviously tendentious. We use these words the way we do, and the way we do is generally to justify the need for the powers that be, by the powers that be, often on theological grounds.

His next assertion is that the vocabulary developed by ancient Israel was in direct response to the prevailing 'Baal myths' of the Canaanite milieu in which Israel found itself. These myths, according to Walsh, have a simple moral: might makes right. Power flows from the divine to those who dominate their fellows; it is a symbol of divine favour.

At this point Walsh performs an intellectual sleight of hand. He claims there is a different concept of justice contained in Yahweh's lordship than in Baal's, one of compassion and care for the poor and dispossessed. What he pointedly neglects is that it is still the divine agents - priests, officials, judges, elders, kings - who do the interpreting of the Yahwistic ethos, whatever the god involved. To claim that the ethos of Yahweh is 'better' begs the issue: power still flows from a divine through his minions, human beings who may or may not interpret compassion and care any differently from the minions of Baal.

There is in fact no biblical evidence that ancient Israel ever developed institutions of government or law that were superior - by modern or ancient standards - to other civilisations. The idea of 'covenant' between a god and his tribe is hardly unique to Israel. And as far as it is analogous to a modern constitution, it provides no protection for those without power from those individuals and institutional bodies with interpretive power. The persistent arbitrariness and impetuosity of Yahweh and his various agents throughout the Old Testament, in any case, belie the assertion of a superior, or even more compassionate ethos that might be exercised through such institutions.

Walsh's consideration of the New Testament is equally tendentious. He, of course, makes much of the undermining of the 'principalities and powers' in the synoptic gospels and in the Pauline epistles. But even fewer hints are given in these documents for the construction of just structures of power than in the Hebrew bible. The general impression given by Walsh (and by the documents themselves) is that these structures are irrelevant to the extent that ‘Christian values’ are exercised by those in positions of power. Notably however, the Epistle of James, which contains the most direct statement in the New Testament on the inherent evil of power, or even the desire for positions of power, goes entirely unmentioned.

Clearly I remain unconvinced by Walsh's argument about the possibility of good versus evil in the exercise of power. If anything I am confirmed in my anarchism. After all Walsh is a member of the Jesuits, that group of men formed in the 16th century to defend and expand the power of the Catholic Church as the sole legitimate voice of the Creator. To me he is merely silly.