The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Innocent Betrayals

Secret Scripture is a story of betrayals - by those we love most, of them in turn by us; but particularly our betrayal of ourselves in memory and history. We betray ourselves through memories in which we both find and avoid guilt. We are innocent because we are hapless when it comes to memory. They are of us but neither reliable nor controllable by us. Memories rarely comfort. Good ones remind us of loss; bad ones evoke regret. Curiously, memories become dissociated from motives. So the reasons for our actions at best appear incomprehensible; at worst we end up condemning ourselves.

According to Barry's fiction we don't calculate consequences - either of betraying or of being betrayed - we creep into situations which explode. We did not intend these explosions which destroy the matrix of life. They are beyond our control. We are then trapped in the rubble - of marriage, of family for an individual; and, for a community or a nation, of the enemies we have created of one other. Roseanne Clear, a centenarian confined in a mental hospital for seventy years is one such hapless victim - a woman cheated of her life through hatefulness and the mendacity of those closest to her.

Roseanne, and her home of Sligo, also represent all of Ireland of the last century. Her "life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it... The fact is we are missing so many threads in our Irish story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together." Barry describes a drear and confused Ireland, a land of religiosity without moral principles; populated by self-righteous priests and their repressed and obedient congregations. A land of fanatical peasants and their murderous leaders who have always blamed others for their murders, particularly the English whom they murdered as much as their own.

But this description is also recognised as questionable by Barry. It is a judgement based on history. History is merely recorded memories and cannot be trusted. As the doctor in charge of Roseanne’s care comes to recognise, "I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history... most truth and fact offered by syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable." The unreliability is not so much down to lies as incompleteness, axes to be ground, loyalties to be safeguarded. Penetrating this morass seems impossible, but it sometimes can be done. Reality is then found "like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair."

This is a highly emotional book. It conjures sympathy, disgust, and ultimately hope in about equal measure. It is honest rather than clever; it is spare without being sparse. It is very Irish; and it is very good.

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Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Gulag for the Aged

An old peoples' home is to Hrabal what a cancer ward is to Solzhenitsyn and an Alpine sanatorium to Mann: an allegorical setting for a society in the process of disintegration. Czechoslovakia, however, was a far less malign society than the Soviet Union or even fin de siecle Europe - an amateur one might say, in the techniques of repression and self-delusion. Nonetheless, the old people's home is part of the Czechoslovakian Gulag, less overtly oppressive but no less dismal than that of the Soviets or pre-WWI Big Powers.

There are enough cultural relics in the castle-turned-retirement-home to remind the resident population that at some point in the not distant past things were different. A cultural life had thrived. The evidence is in the mouldy statues, and decaying frescoes that are the only distractions for the pensioners. Formerly elegant spaces have become communal wards; the library, a boiler room; the tied convent, a laundry.

A trio of pensioners are a source of orally transmitted memories and myths about events in the nearby village going back centuries. When alone with each other, they are silent, having heard everything each other has to say. But when approached sympathetically by someone else, they pour forth facts and rumours and tall tales in coordinated first-person detail, a sort of syncopated Greek chorus.

History, in Harlequin's Millions, does not take a wrong turn; it stops entirely. In 1945. The village is one that time by-passes. The enormous clock in the old people's home, a remnant of aristocratic life, has ceased to function long ago. The buildings are slowly crumbling; their sedated inmates barely existing in a state of permanent boredom. While free to roam, they rarely make it to the end of the drive before scuttling home.

The men shuffle aimlessly waiting for the next meal; the women knit unneeded baby clothes endlessly. The principle effect of the creation of the communist state had been to institutionalise the class animosities, national hatreds, and personal resentments of the past; not just in the workplace but also into old age. Correct procedure is valued above all else: even the laundry van is meticulously and tediously inspected on entry and exit for no apparent reason.

The eponymous Harlequin's Millions is a favourite popular tune of the Director. It plays constantly in the intervals between Czech-language news broadcasts on ubiquitous loud-speakers. A sort of institutional theme-song. Alternatively the title could refer to the country's duped population. Or perhaps to the local misperception that nationalisation of the local brewery had created instant millionaire-shareholders of the workers. In any case, Harlequin's Millions is the functional equivalent of Abide With Me played on the deck of the Titanic: a dirge in the face of impending death. At one point, a rotting gutter on the castle falls and crushes a tannoy-speaker mounted in the garden below, which continues to drone on. Only the expectation of lunch holds more interest for the pensioners.

A clutch of mad doctors look after the health of the inmates. One comforts by prescribing whatever quantity of cigarettes and alcohol is currently consumed by his charges. The other constantly plays classical pieces by Czech and German orchestras on the gramophone as balm for his patients. This latter unaccountably begins a sort of violent revolution among the retirees but regrets his imprudence and has them all sedated the following day. I am I insufficiently familiar with Czech history to understand the allusion but can guess that the reference is to political leaders and their vacillating nationalistic courage.

Visitors to the pensioners bring tales of woe from outside: disruption from construction, economic hardship, road accidents. Much better, they say with some irony, to be in the peace and quiet of the haven of the castle. All the inmates want to communicate to the visitors is how frightful old age is. They are agitated by these visits for days afterward. Retirement for them represents a defeat, a loss of not just material possessions but of a place in the world. They have nothing in common with those not similarly placed

"What is life," asks the narrating pensioner. "Everything that once was, everything an old person thinks back on and tells you stories about, everything that no longer matters and is gone for good," she replies to herself. Even the graveyard within the castle grounds is turned into a theme park, the tombstones, coffins and bodies treated as so much refuse. A Gulag even for the dead. "Such a wonderful beginning, and now such an end," she concludes. Written in 1981, there wasn't that long to wait.

I usually find allegorical tales somewhat tedious. Having to decode esoteric allusions, many obviously personal, does become arduous at times. However given the conditions under which Hrabal wrote in 1980, the allegorical form is probably the only one possible; and at least the outlines of his references can be comprehended by someone not similarly inhibited.

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Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Which Way Is Home?

The urban legend that we're never more than six feet away from a rat may be rubbish science but it is accurate politics in Schlink's novel. The message of Homecoming is that the political evil of fascism is perpetually lurking just out of sight, just under the floorboards as it were, masquerading as modern philosophy in even the most refined and educated society. Particularly, as it turns out, in the United States.

The narrative of Homecoming is of a German son's search for the details of his Swiss-German father's life, a life spent mysteriously involved with the Nazi occupation of the old Hapsburg province of Silesia. But the recurring central theme is the choice of what can be described as one's fundamental ethical presumptions about the world, one's duty.

Peter Debauer, the protagonist, is a symbol of the German post-WWII generation - wary of commitment, eager to 'get on', liberally-educated, unable to comprehend the motivations of their parent's generation on either a personal or national level. Peter's unfinished doctoral thesis in law is about the absolute requirement for justice regardless of practical consequences. Doing right is for him a matter of principle not effects.

The conventional stance on justice can be summarised as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the traditional Judaeo-Christian principle which is arguably the core of European civilisation. It is so widely taught as philosophy and preached as religion that we might be tempted to take it for granted as defining the only defensible moral stance. 

But Peter is confronted in his paternal search by a very different moral principle, the Iron Rule: Do not make others endure what you are unprepared to endure. A law of chivalry rather than love perhaps. At first glance the Iron Law seems to have some affinity with the Golden Rule. Both appear to restrict behaviour within similar ethical bounds. But this is not at all the case.

The Iron Rule was the central moral principle of fascist Germany. Among other things, it implies an acceptance of killing to the extent that one accepts the possibility of being killed. In other words, total commitment of one's life to the cause is the moral justification for any action taken in the name of the cause, including mass murder. In less inflammatory terms it can be ​interpreted as the willingness to endure the effects of evil in pursuit of the good.

Peter finds the Iron Law abhorrent but also discovers it to be the foundation of his father's position in legal philosophy, and his teaching at an American university. His father's arguments to justify this position are a combination of solipsistic analysis and the philosophical maxims of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi intellectual apologist of the 1930's. As a political rat, the father has substantial influence in New York City and Washington, DC; a combination of Werner Earhard and Warren Bennis.

Implicitly Peter recognises the uselessness of engaging in debate with his father. Both the Golden Rule and the Iron Rule are self-fulfilling prophecies. Following either will produce the conditions justifying the chosen behaviour. Both, it turns out, fit his initial thesis, that is, they are applied regardless of consequences. But the consequences are exactly contrary. Neither can be 'proven' by either logic or experience. So, Peter can only do one thing: walk away, even if it requires abandoning his own heritage.

This, of course, is not a resolution of the issue. Peter is aware of the continuing problem: "I did not like my father, and I did not like his theory: it freed him of all responsibility, the responsibility for what he had written and for what he had done. At the same time, I was fascinated by how he had made his way through life, getting involved in whatever came his way, then moving on, and in the end creating a theory to justify it all." Peter's ambivalence does not dissipate because of a single ethical decision; it is a permanent condition.

After all, the Iron Rule is manly, it gets results, it's simple, it moves the earth. It also eliminates the post-war "... fear of being on the side-lines..." So Peter feels comparatively inept under the Golden Rule, "unlike his father the successful adventurer and latterly legal scholar who could cope with anything." The Iron Rule sits waiting patiently for the right moment and the right vocabulary with which to re-exert itself. Therefore, there is real existential content to Peter's intellectual choice. Does he become a Telemachus fighting at the side of his father-hero Odysseus or does he reject the Iron Law permanently and let his mother and father work out their own problems? What does homecoming really mean?

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4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Glazed Over

I had a personal interest in this book. I was born just three weeks before it's protagonist, Archie Ferguson, and nine days after his author, Paul Auster. I grew up in a similar suburb of New York City, and in similar economic and educational circumstances. So, to the extent that Ferguson was shaped by the cultural context of the day, perhaps I could detect unrecognised influences in my own life. Or, even more exciting, given that 4 3 2 1 is about alternative universes, I could explore the paths not taken in my own life. Not the most noble of motives, but certainly not the worst.
 
But there are certain literary problems with the premise of alternative lives that I don't think Auster has worked through thoroughly, at least not for my purposes. By now most educated readers know of Chaos Theory, the idea that even the smallest changes in initial conditions can generate immense consequences. This, one supposes, applies as much to relationships as to particle interactions. Therefore, who we meet, indeed who our parents or friends or their parents or friends have ever met, obviously have untold ramifications for any individual life. 

So, which relationships should the author choose to modify in alternative life-stories? Mother-father? Mother-aunt? Father-uncles? Among the in-laws? The possibilities are obviously endless, with no inherent rationality no matter which are selected. If there is any significance to the relationships Auster has chosen to use as narrative fulcra, they have escaped me. This annoys my aesthetic sensibilities; I have no way to relate to the method and therefore the characters are abstractions and unrelated to my life even though the frequent environmental references - Kennedy, Vietnam, New York City - are familiar.

The randomness of life also includes one's own genetic make-up, which may or may not be translated into any number of behaviours. Does watching a world-series game at age four create a seed of interest in playing baseball or merely following baseball? Does a loving auntie's fondness for literature create a capacity for literary taste or a distaste for oppressive direction in reading? Will a fascination for journalistic writing at a young age forestall development of athletic talent? 

Clearly the possibilities are uncountable and complex, a problem which doesn't arise if the story is a unitary narrative. But how does an author create four such stories with any cohesion? The bumps and nudges Auster introduces in each of Ferguson's lives are like random variables in a gigantic mathematical equation. But the equation, if it exists, is hidden throughout the text. I admit to an inability to solve the mathematical problem. In any case I don't see myself anywhere in it.

And, of course, life-paths bifurcate constantly. So, influential events and choices compound deviations. How can an author maintain control over the cascading possibilities in a way that still has some sort of narrative sense? How does the reader, for that matter, keep track of the partially congruent lives and the not-quite-the-same protagonists as they float through an interweaved existence? 

4 3 2 1 is a long book structured episodically. By the time of the protagonist's adolescence, it is unlikely anyone who isn't a member of Mensa would be able to remember which teenager descends from which toddler, whose father was the thrusting entrepreneur and whose the local shopkeeper, which girlfriend called Amy is in love (or not) with which version of Ferguson, and whose aunt lives in California and whose in Brooklyn. I failed the associative test, having to retreat to my bed with a migraine. An inadequate as well as unsympathetic reader therefore.

The continuities among the four lives are more interesting: Suburban, Jewish, Intellectual, Liberal. These are the axes around with everything else in 4 3 2 1 mutates and rotates. They are the sort of Kantian categories which shape the universe from which alternatives are selected. These, of course, are as arbitrary as the scenarios that Auster creates within them. But perhaps they are the only things that really matter.

In other words, it may be the continuities not the variations that constitute Auster's point. That, for example, the possibilities available within the universe bounded by these categories are not infinite. Or if they are, they are at least countable. And in a sense, they converge in a kind of fatalistic unity. This would constitute a rather sophisticated literary game. To say more risks giving the game away. 

I have real questions whether this game is worth playing though. Or, at least, that I have the talent to play it. I ended up like one of Auster's characters, with "the glazed-over look of a man unable to see anything but the thoughts inside his own head." Just where I started, I suppose.

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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Come Back Alfred, We Love You

In 1904 the French Catholic theologian, Alfred Loisy, published a book called L'Evangile et l'Eglise, The Gospel and the Church. In it he, channeling Augustine, pithily phrases the central fact of early Christianity: "Jesus foretold the Kingdom, but it was the Church that came." Loisy was attempting to refute the individualism of the Protestant theologian, Adolf Harnack, by pointing to the historical necessity of an ecclesial organisation. For his trouble, he was censured and eventually excommunicated from the Catholic Church for the arch-heresy of Modernism. No one was sure how to define Modernism, but the churchly authorities were certain they knew it when they saw it in the writings of Loisy.

It is now generally recognised that Loisy was correct. Jesus expected the arrival of the Kingdom of God within his generation. And not only Jesus. Throughout the next two Christian generations, at least, it was presumed that the end was nigh, that the Messiah would return with a terrible swift sword. The protagonist of this 'imminent eschatology', as it is called, was Paul of Tarsus. It is Paul's letters that are by years, often decades, the first Christian Scriptures and undoubtedly influenced how the later gospels were written.

Nonetheless the 'tension', as theologians call it, between the Pauline Christ and the Jesus of the gospels is real. This is most apparent in two specific areas. First in the universal ethic of love propounded by Jesus, not just among human beings, but also between God, who was all forgiving, and humanity. In Paul, this ethic is made conditional upon something called pistis, faith, and becomes organisationally controlled by his authority. Second, Jesus makes clear his sole concern is with Judaism and the continuation of the traditions of the Torah. In opposition to the Apostles who actually knew Jesus, Paul claims Jesus's message as equally applicable to Gentiles as well as to the Jews; and he, quite contrary to the words of Jesus, unilaterally abrogates the eternal covenant with the Jews and any necessity to follow Jewish traditions.

Although Paul's expectations of the return of the Messiah were unfounded, he did a fairly good job of creating the organisation that would be its substitute, just as Loisy had quipped. Paul, not Jesus, it has often been said among theologians, created Christianity. And he created it not as the carrier of the ethical message of Jesus but as the emblem of the triumphant Christ who, despite sensory experience to the contrary, had already conquered evil in the world, freed the world from sin, and now led, from the grave, a new worldwide religion, whose spokesman was Paul.

Pullman's book captures this difference between the evangelical Jesus and the ecclesial Christ by the simple device of Mary, wife of Joseph, having twins, one called Jesus, the other Christ. Jesus is more or less the figure we know from the gospels: human, uncertain, complex, sometimes contradictory, but always on message. Christ, the younger brother and favourite of his mother, on the other hand, plays several roles in Pullman's narrative. 

Christ is first of all the recorder and, progressively, the augmenter, of Jesus's preaching, a sort of composite evangelist. He also is the betrayer, the Judas figure, who is convinced by the mysterious Stranger, obviously the Deceiver of old, to play Abraham to Jesus's Isaac and instigate Jesus's death. And, finally, he is the Pauline figure, the spiritual entrepreneur, who establishes a Gentile-oriented organisation which is, in his mind, a version of the Kingdom on earth. His modifications and interpretations of Jesus's remarks and mis-quoting of the Hebrew bible (a Pauline vice) conveniently endorse and support this organisation.

Pullman's theology therefore is well grounded even if his literary portrayal seems radical. The points he makes in casting Jesus as confronting Christ are important ones that true believers would prefer not to be raised or discussed. "It's a matter of faith," they typically say. But their faith is a faith in Paul and his literary hero, Christ. What they really mean is that they do not have sufficient faith in Jesus to confront the very real inconsistencies, not to say paradoxes, in the creation of Christianity. The possibility that Paul betrayed the man he never met and sacrificed him to establish his own position of power is too unsettling to be taken seriously.

Pullman isn't having it. By making such a dramatic distinction between the Jesus of the gospels and the Christ of Pauline Christianity, he is putting down a challenge squarely to those who call themselves Christians. No longer, thank goodness, does the threat of excommunication which hung over Loisy mean much a century later. It’s safe now Alfred; you can come back.

Postscript: first more on Paul, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Living by Henry Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because, Just Because

Things are changing in 1928 England. Or so the old and the young in Living think. The old men are engaged in the crises of declining vitality; the old women are primarily coping with these masculine crises. The young men are ambitious and feel themselves under-appreciated; the young women feel the same and attach themselves to the optimistic young men. It is the same for the folks who ride the trams as it is for them who ride the Bentley motor cars. Everyone is dissatisfied with his lot. But class boundaries, particularly language, prevent the possibility of mutual sympathy.
 
What is clear to the reader, however, is that precisely the same life-patterns are being established by the young as the old have come to regret. The young men inevitably will be disappointed that they 'escaped' into the trap of marriage and the slavish role of bread-winner. The women will eventually grieve over their lost lives and a futile reliance on masculine effort. The things that tempt them to the trap are universal and timeless although they appear unique and urgent: sex, companionship, independence, reputation.

Those who are no longer young but not yet old, namely those who actually run the show, all worry about maintaining whatever it is they've achieved. Their positions are vulnerable. The young are militating for change because the past is rotten and the world has been mis-managed. The old, the mentors and promoters of the middle-aged, are incapacitated and unable to protect their former protégés. They scheme and intrigue among themselves to hold off their inevitable decline. 

Meanwhile the business, a steel foundry on which they all depend, is slipping slowly down the plug-hole. The Belgians (not the Chinese yet of course) outbid them routinely. Waste is immense because of bad workmanship. Customers are returning obviously defective products. Machinery is not maintained properly and has become lethally dangerous. Union organisers are making inroads. These are mere annoyances, however, compared with the issue of the toilet monitor installed by the factory manager and removed by the son of the owner. Such is the rule of the trivially dominant.

This is a remarkably insightful novel for a young man of 22. It is at least partially autobiographical since Henry Green (Yorke) was the son of a Birmingham industrialist and took over the family business. Despite admiration by Auden, Waugh, and Anthony Powell, Green was not a reader's writer and never sold more than 10,000 volumes of any of his eleven titles, perhaps because he pursued the family's business interests over his literary career. The family firm, H Pontifex & Sons, continued in operation until its bankruptcy in 2011 so he apparently did not degrade that legacy.

Nevertheless, Green died a somewhat lonely, alcoholic death in 1973. One is tempted to the conclusion that even acute literary insight doesn't prevent ultimate disappointment with one's lot. The only response to the question about the real point of life that is posed to one of Green's characters is "Because, just because." Perhaps no other is possible.

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Buddha's Little Finger 
by 

Victor Pelevin, 

 

Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

 

A Dialectical Comedy

Victor Pelevin has created a dialectical dream-world: two opposing dreams contained within each other, dreamed by the same protagonist. In one, he suffers the traumas and excitements of the Russian Revolution. In the other, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he undergoes therapy for "split false-personalities" and loss of memory. He attempts to find himself, or Russia as the case may be, in both dreams. 

"The Russian people realised very long ago that life is no more than a dream," says one of the characters in Buddha's Little Finger, thus establishing the allegory about Russia half-way through (it would have been far more helpful on page two). The two dream-searches touch on milestones of literature, philosophy, psychology, art, religion, and history, with the occasional empathetic experience of other personal histories thrown in. Complicated? Not half.

In one dream, the educated aesthete, Pyotr, high on cocaine and very bad vodka, gets caught up in the Russian Revolution. By luck and pluck he escapes the Checka secret police and assumes the identity of a sometime friend he has murdered. He embarks on a military train-journey to an indeterminate destination in the East as political commissar in a cloud of socialist, idealist propaganda. Wounded heroically in a battle of which he remembers nothing, he recuperates in a mountain village which is remote from the conflict.
 
Pyotr's revolutionary life takes place in a kind of masquerade in which various roles are being played out. The Master of Ceremonies for this production is Chapaev, part Commander in the Red (or White, depending on circumstances) Army, part sorcerer, part philosopher, part spirit-guide. Chapaev is a master at solipsism as well as dialectics and can argue any point from any angle. He supplies stability and then snatches it away. "What I have always found astounding is the starry sky beneath our feet and Immanuel Kant within us," he says with obvious irony.

The other dream-Pyotr, the one institutionalised and under therapy, can't remember his name much less his past. He is "infected with the bacillus of insanity that has invaded Russia" during the Revolution. He undergoes "turbo-Jungian therapy" in the asylum, an attempt to recover the meaning of lost symbols. He is also injected with drugs that provoke hyper-empathetic responses to the tales his fellow patients tell about themselves in group sessions.

The symbols being recovered include those of the Revolution itself - class, history, consciousness, disciplined thought - which exist in Pyotr's unconscious as reality. But there are quick-fire references to the 'new' world: Nabokov's Lolita, TV soap operas and block-buster movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CNN, and Harrier Jump Jets are the featured symbols from another patient. Donald Trump even gets an allusive reference in "You're fired." Remarkable for a book published in the year 2000. Things are somewhat chaotic, but as his psychiatrist observes, "Russia cannot be grasped by logic." 

Therapy is interrupted through a blow by a fellow-patient using a plaster bust of Aristotle. Their argument had been about alternative metaphysical accounts of dreams. This throws Pyotr back into the Revolution on his train to the East. Rationality gives way to mysticism. Chapaev resumes command and continues Pyotr's dialectical education. Oxymorons like "lascivious chastity" abound. Women are goddesses and the source of all evil. G. B. Shaw's syllogistic aphorism about progress depending on the unreasonable man is transformed into one dependant upon scoundrels.

Throughout the book, time is malleable, as is identity, memory and space - that is, all the Kantian categorical certainties. The two dreams leak into one another, confirming that there is one protagonist. But none of the personae, or names, Pyotr adopts as either revolutionary or patient is authentic. Ultimately there is nothing behind the eyes. What sort of person, after all, is possible within the context of Russian history of the last century?

To say that Pyotr's dream-worlds signify the "inner drama of Russia," as one character puts it, verges on the trivial. But what else is there to say? That Russia and its inhabitants are neurotic after their self-inflicted totalitarian nightmare is inevitable. The inevitability arises from the nature of a revolution grounded in rationalist principles, principles which are then further used to rationalise mass killing and incarceration. To admit that faith in rational thought - including its forms in literature, art and history - is just as dangerous and just as anti-human as faith in religion feels like death to an intellectual... or for that matter to a democrat.

Hitting the buffers of human thought - not just in logic but in practice - is bound to dismay anyone. For someone educated in thought itself, philosophy, the continuing trauma in Russia must be acute. Educated residents of the United States - the other rationalist country - are only feeling a tiny fraction of this trauma with the election of Donald Trump. But they share the fear of an authoritarian nostalgia and the basic issues are the same: How did it all go wrong? Can anything about the social world be trusted? Can anything prevent the persistent self-delusion of human beings?

When neither thought nor faith is reliable, one of the few paths left is humour in one form or another. Humour, especially if it's about philosophy, is a risky business. Some might take Pelevin as making a philosophical point through his fictional survey of thought. I don't think this is wise. Such a stance certainly wouldn't help to understand the text, which if anything throws suspicion on all thought, even its own. The point of comedy, I think, is to have a chuckle, in this case at oneself and the unstable character of everything about oneself.

Ancient Light by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mysteries of the Kitchen

A young man's sexual fantasy about an affair with a married woman becomes, if he lives long enough, an old man's nostalgic reminiscence of first love. Or is it an unacknowledged trauma which crippled him emotionally and created an entirely mis-recalled scandal? Ancient Light isn't telling with complete certainty. In any case, as Banville's male protagonist has it, "...what is life but a gradual shipwreck?"

There are several connected stories hung on the memories of adolescent adultery, all continuations of themes used in Banville's previous novels, The Shroud and Eclipse: betrayal, suicide, and family trauma among them. The common thread in all three volumes is identity - how it is constructed, maintained, and eroded. In Ancient Light identity is explored as it is created through the traces of the past that, like light from distant stars, reaches us blurred and distorted in memory.

What Banville reveals is not what one might expect, at least not entirely, about male identity. He makes it quite clear that men, or at least his man Alex Cleave, remember primarily the sex and the threatened deprivation of sex in their youthful past. That and the incessant emotional demands - singular attentiveness, immediate empathy, motherly tenderness - they make on the object of their affections. It appears that it is the acquiescence to these demands that constitute the primary reason for Alex's 'loving' memories. In a word, Alex is selfish.

And he is not noticeably less selfish at age 65 than he was at age 15. Alex's mature reveries about his teenage exploits with the 35-year-old Mrs Gray, for example, never provoke the slightest serious thought about why such a woman, the mother of his best friend, might take the enormous risk of an affair with a pimply-faced, whinging youth. The best he can come up with is a projection, "Perhaps that's what she accomplished for herself through me, a return to childhood..." Not anywhere near the truth of course. He merely presumes, even in his maturity, that she had the same motivations as his own. To this extent, then, Alex's identity seems constant; or is a 'fixed' a better term?

Another symptom of male selfishness is Alex's contemplation of an 'alternative universe'. "How would it have been," he muses, " if Mrs Gray and not Lydia had been my daughter's mother?" This is the Lydia to whom he has been married for almost 40 years, with whom he has had a handicapped daughter who committed suicide a decade previously in mysterious circumstances, and who sleep-walks the house at night in search of her lost daughter. Yet he calmly fantasises about the life he might have had, implicitly comparing it to the one he has. Just thinking about it causes him to exclaim, "Lord, I feel 15 again." Bastard.

Banville also suggests that - probably because of their intrinsic selfishness - men are entirely incapable of understanding, much less entering into the kind of relationships women routinely have with one another. His symbol for this male alienation is the kitchen, a room in which male presence is not encouraged and within which women speak with each other of mysterious matters incomprehensible to men. The relationships among women, including those who are virtual strangers to one another, are entirely opaque and inexplicable to Alex. Even the relationships between living and dead women, such as between his wife and daughter, do not compute in his experience. Learning, it seems, is not part of Alex's identity.

Problematic maleness pervades the narrative otherwise with frequent references to the man, Vander, a character appearing in the first two Cleave novels, who is the likely cause of Alex's daughter's suicide. Ancient Light has a little twist of the post-modern, probably ironic, in that Alex, an actor, plays a biographical film-role of Vander, thus implicating him, at least in a literary way, with his daughter's death.

In sum then, male identity doesn't come off well here. It is certainly an inept and bumbling misogyny that Alex demonstrates on every opportunity he has. But it is misogyny nonetheless. This begs the question of course: Who taught him, or failed to teach him, about appropriate relationships with women other than the women with whom he has had relationships? Could his shipwreck of a life have been avoided through a little feminine instruction in sex, life and the universe? Or is the X-Y genetic profile merely a curse?

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

History As Intention and Response

History can be told in several ways: as a textbook-like sequence of events and dates; as a moral tale; as a story of the strong or of the weak; from the point of view of the victors or the vanquished; as an account of divine providence or satanic interference. Snyder has a particularly engaging method of narrating history: as intention and response to circumstances. According to his title one could conceive his subject as the history of a specific geographical region, namely Eastern Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. But this is merely the location of the action.

The real history in Bloodlands is stated in the subtitle, namely the personal intentions of Hitler and Stalin and how these intentions were formed and interacted. Events in Bloodlands are relevant only as they relate to these intentions. Dates are relevant primarily to distinguish action and response. The story is not one of conflict and victory or loss but of joint persecution by Hitler and Stalin of a victim-population of Poles, Slavs, Jews and other ethnic groups. It is this genre of purposeful historiography in which the centre of attention is the intended victims that makes the book highly readable and intellectually compelling.

According to Snyder, the fundamental aims of both National Socialism and Soviet Communism were the same: to control their own food supply. The Germans, by expanding eastward, to acquire the most productive agricultural acreage in Europe. The Russians, by expanding westward into Poland and collectivising Soviet agriculture, primarily to finance industrialisation through exports. It is these intentions, their mutual responses to the other, and the interpretations by their subordinates that determine the trajectory of events from the end of WWI through the conclusion of WWII.
 
The central 'show' according to this view was never in Western Europe or Southeast Asia but in precisely that area for which both powers contended for agricultural land, Snyder's Bloodlands. It is here as well, and only here, that the full horror of both fascist and communist regimes can be appreciated. The details of the military campaign, as well as the 'formal' atrocities of Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag are important but, in a sense, obscure the wider and ultimate intentions to murder or displace the entire existing population of the region. The millions who died and the millions more who suffered were not 'collateral damage' incidental to war, they were the point of the war on both sides.

Stalin's clear purpose in his agricultural policy of the early 1930's, for example, was not just to crush Ukrainian nationalism and to eliminate any residual Polish influence in the Western Soviet Union, but also to replace its indigenous population by Russians. German strategy was commensurate, that is, to liquidate or otherwise enslave the Slavic population of the same region, and encourage the emigration of German farmers. Stalin used starvation as his weapon of choice; Hitler his Einsatzgruppen. Both were strategic necessities not incidental aberrations. Both used substantial resources that appear wasted only if their strategic intent is ignored. 

Moreover, both leaders seriously risked their own positions to pursue these aims, an indication of their centrality. Ukrainian collectivisation was an obvious economic failure. It was nevertheless pursued by Stalin until de-population was largely achieved. The Einsatzgruppen which carried out the bulk of the Nazi liquidations in occupied countries were opposed by the regular army as a militarily useless collection of thugs and psychopaths. Yet they were given free rein in military areas by Hitler and received logistical priority, even in retreat. 

These sorts of actions can only be perceived as errors in judgement if their real intent is ignored. Neither man was as concerned so much about the outcome of any particular battle as about his ability to carry out his ultimate purpose. And this purpose remained constant. Every significant political and military act, even the most bizarre, can be traced to the need to eliminate opposition to the requirements of the overall purpose, no matter how politically inept or militarily inefficient.

Failure to appreciate these aims was also the root of misunderstanding by contemporaries who should have known better. Among journalists only the Welsh Gareth Jones could see beyond the fascist and communist propaganda to the ultimate aims. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief of the New York Times, simply refused to believe the overwhelming evidence of mass starvation. Even intellectuals like Arthur Koestler temporised about the most horrible events - including widespread cannibalism - by insisting on the ultimate beneficence of socialism. American foreign policy simply ignored the reality of German and Russian intentions for two decades.

Continuing failure to appreciate the impact of these tragedies is the 'take-away' from Snyder's analysis. For example, Stalin starved to death approximately 3 million Ukrainians in 1932-33, and killed approximately another 3 million whom he had already deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. These people were murdered not because they refused to conform to his policies but because they were who they were. Can there be any doubt about the conviction of present-day Ukrainians to resist further assimilation by Russia?

The unreliability of the press in reporting the factual detail of events was matched by the ineptitude of the intelligence and ambassadorial services in analysing their own sources of information. In part, at least, this seems due to an inability to accept the degree of depravity that human beings can reach. By any standards Stalin and Hitler were mad. But were then also the millions of previously normal citizens who necessarily carried out and even supplemented their malicious commands also mad? One small unit of NKVD officers shot more than 20,000 people during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union. If these men were not mad, how could they not have become so, and their families, their acquaintances, their country with them?

An interview with a communist activist who was charged with enforcing Stalin's orders to take the seed grain from collective farms, thus condemning the peasants to death, could be the most important theme of the entire book. "As before", he says, "I believed because I wanted to believe." This certainly would have been the response of every Soviet commissar, Nazi SS officer, Treblinka or Gulag camp guard and general army officer. This realisation is even more depressing than the seemingly endless atrocities recounted by Snyder. Commitment, loyalty, passion to and for ideals, no matter what they are, or leaders who represent these ideals, no matter who they are, are not virtues but vices. 

It was these vices - the real evils of commitment, loyalty, and passion - that allowed Stalin and Hitler and their henchmen to carry out their work. These men were inspired by the conquest of the American West and the liquidation of its native population. These men created myths of foreign plots to undermine national sovereignty and used them to justify the closing of borders, the isolation of minority groups, and the necessity for murderous action against unarmed people. These men were consistent in their pronouncements about what they intended to do and why. And still each was able to manipulate the unique politics of his own system to maintain popular support through an appeal to purported 'virtue'. It is this virtue, not nationalism, or ideology per se which was the driving force of the evil committed.

Am I alone, therefore, in feeling apprehension watching American political rallies or evangelical religious meetings, or even corporate 'team-building' exercises? Am I alone in suspecting that men like Trump and Putin are capable of the most horrific crimes regardless of the institutional constraints imposed on them? Am I alone in considering that the cause for strength, whoever puts it forth, is a fundamental evil which has no inherent limits? Why are commitment, loyalty and passion valued most by the people who do most harm in the world? Is it I who am mad?

An addendum on Purpose and History

In the 1980's I attended a lecture by an economist whose name now escapes me (it could have been Paul Johnson). His topic was the history of agricultural policy in the United States. He pointed out that the two main components of this policy from the 1930's onwards had been 1) Rather substantial subsidies to farmers for not growing certain crops, and 2) Also rather large subsidies to industry and academia for research directed toward the increase in yields for the same crops that farmers were already paid not to grow.

Every year when these subsidies were brought before Congress, someone would point of the apparent contradiction. A debate would ensue. And a vote would endorse both sets of subsidy, usually with and increase. The presumption of irrationality in the political process was put forward as the only possible explanation.

Until it was pointed out, I believe to the Reagan administration, that this outcome only appeared irrational because no one was looking for the fundamental rational, the real purpose. According to the lecturer, this purpose wasn't obvious because it was never made explicit, but it nevertheless was there and it was politically compelling. The purpose of the apparently contradictory subsidies was quite straightforward: to maximise the value of U.S. farm land. In this light both subsidies made sense.

The importance of this insight was not merely intellectual. Having articulated the implicit purpose of historical agricultural policy, it was then possible to ask the question: Is the increased value of farm land a national priority? The answer was 'no'. Consequently, for the first time in several generations, both subsidies were reduced.

The implications for historical method are to me profound. The presumption of purpose is crucial in historical analysis. Without it, one is confronted with apparently random often irrational events. With it, one is forced to confront intentions that are only implicit and perhaps only shared by a very few with leadership positions. It is a presumption that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But so is its negation. The example of U.S. agricultural policy is one proof of its superiority as a general method.

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The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Edge of Existence

Almost everyone in The Green House lives at the extreme edge of existence. But it is not death or annihilation that threatens; rather, it is an entirely different kind of existence. The novel opens with the abduction of two Amazonian Indian girls, an event that rips them out of their way of life and puts them into an alien land in which literally nothing has meaning for them. This is not merely displacement; it is an extinguishing of their former lives in all but their bodily functions. At least that is what is intended by the missionaries and soldiers who perceive this trauma as a noble cause and moral duty. Some victims feel a genetic pull to the former jungle-life but reversion is impossible.

The theme of fragile existence runs throughout the narrative as it shifts continuously between the dense tropical rain forest of North Eastern Peru and the enormous coastal desert lying on the other side of the Andes around Piura. It is difficult to imagine two more extreme environments within such proximity to each other. Water is the basic substance of one world; sand of the other. Both substances rain down on the inhabitants continuously, and change their environment visibly as they watch. There is no forest-land that cannot become water as capricious rivers change course; and each morning when the residents of the desert-city arise, every surface is covered once again by the sand that erodes its houses and seeks to cover them completely.

But it is religion, military force and commercial interests, not water or sand, that erode existence most rapidly and most decisively. The primitive jungle tribes are mirrored in the closely knit coastal communities of the Mangaches, descendants of the African slaves brought by the Spanish from Madagascar in the 16th century. Each group is distinguished by, among other traits, language and colour (red and black a recurring theme), which isolate them from the white population. Both groups are constantly threatened by exploitation, expropriation and extinction. These common threats force them into contact with one another in the world of smuggling, human trafficking, and, most significantly for Vargas Llosa's story, prostitution.

Life is universally degraded in the worlds Vargas Llosa describes. The Green House in the desert is a brothel. But functionally so is the Mission in the jungle which grooms young native girls for the Governor. All women - white, red and black - are chattels with only minor differences in their status as slaves. Sexual violence is always present or imminent. Rape is the usual form of courtship. Alcohol is a basic food group, consumed continuously by men whenever available. Cocaine is a festive alternative. All white people suffer terribly from the heat and molestation by insects, and they despise their environment as much as they despise the reds, blacks and women. Government is merely a criminal monopoly of power. Native tribes terrorise one another and in turn are terrorised by the whites. Bandits dominate the desert and the jungle.

Reflecting this existential fragility, the narrative shifts unpredictably from sentence to sentence in time and place, even more energetically than in some of Vargas Llosa's other novels. Characters travel under different names depending on which of the two primary locations they are in. Different characters have the same name. Conversations are interleaved. Sentences are often fragmentary and appear as badly translated obfuscations. Add the Peruvian cultural allusions strewn throughout and the result Is a sort of literary jigsaw that often demands trying an identity or meaning to see if it fits; if it doesn't the reader can only choose another possibility and tentatively move on.
 
The Green House is consequently an exhausting work. It demands continuous close attention to detail to catch signals of identity and continuity. Emotionally, it is frankly tiring to immerse oneself in 400 pages of unremitting squalor and hopelessness. And a not inconsiderable degree of confusion must be tolerated as the narrative unfolds. So, all in all, not a work for the casual or faint-hearted reader.

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Once a Greek by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Love in the Ruins

Arnolph Archilochos lives in a shabby but entirely orderly Swiss universe defined by icon-like photographs of his moral heroes: the president, the bishop, the owner of his firm, a fashionable portrait-painter, the American Ambassador, a lawyer, various others connected with the Old New Presbyterian Penultimate Christians... and his brother Bibi, the gangster. These photographs are his only possessions: The certainties of State, Religion, Law, Art and Family. They are all he needs; his devotion to these ideals sustains him.
 
One day he is "an insignificant particle in the grey stream of humanity." The next he is swept off his feet by a beautiful young woman. All his moral certainties appear to be confirmed instantly in the presence of this woman who gives to Arnolph a sort of bourgeois respectability for which he has secretly yearned. There is an obvious interpretation of such an event: It is a fateful gift from the gods. Arnolph becomes an inverse of the biblical Job, propelled from obscurity to riches. But no less confused about his fortune than Job was about the loss of his.

Durrenmatt has written a fairy tale set in Geneva but appropriate generally to the modern world. After all, Geneva is a place where the important institutions of modern life intersect: the military (NATO), religion (the Geneva Bible), international politics (the World Health Organisation), industry (MNC’s dominate the economy in Geneva and Vaud), even terrorism (The Geneva Convention of 1937). This world suddenly and mysteriously opens to Arnolph and he rises at remarkable speed in the corporate hierarchy of the Petit-Paysan Engineering Works (makers of obstetrical forceps and atomic cannons, thus serving the world from birth to death it might be said). As one of his new minions puts it, "Like an eagle you soar above the heads of us wonder-struck Chief Bookkeepers, into the empyrean."

Closer acquaintance with his moral paragons, of course, breeds growing contempt for their superiority. The head of the firm is a vacuous moron; the bishop smokes and drinks, the painter uses nude models; Arnolph's new wealth only serves to further debauch his brother's family. And much worse ensues. Disillusion is an extreme emotion, calling for extreme action even for the most phlegmatic of men. What happens when the certainties crumble? Where does the true believer turn? Does "clear-eyed love" overcome history and social convention? 

Durrenmatt, in his typical fashion, challenges the presumptions of the 'good life'. Perhaps the authentic good life is to be found in the ancient soil of Greece, buried under layers of Christian civilisation and middle-class prejudice. Archilochus, after all, was the great poet reputed to have promoted the cult of Dionysus in the 7th century BCE. Perhaps a modern Archilochus can find similar consolations.

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Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Future Belongs to Crowds

An astounding book. It reads like a series of essays by Montaigne but all directed toward the phenomenon of human organisation. Each essay, which might include references as diverse as the anthropology of South American tribes to the history of European warfare, contains some comment which is not only arresting but revelatory of profound insight. Who knew that an apparently sociological treatise could be so creative, so enthralling, so literate? Crowds and Power is also something like Dr Johnson's dictionary. It shows Canetti's pet-peeves and prejudices as well as his erudition.

Canetti's world is one composed of human groups rather than words, but his achievement is to describe these groups and their dynamics as had never been done before. His unit of analysis is the crowd, which may arise from something more primitive called a pack, but which takes on uniquely crowd-like characteristics and force. The crowd, depending on its type, of which there are several, has an implicit crowd-mind, not dissimilar perhaps from the hive-mind of bees (or ten-year old girls). 

After establishing his basic crowd-typology, Canetti presents page after page of remarkable observations and conclusions about what makes each type behave as it does. Only a few of his crowds could be termed mobs. Most are institutionalised, or 'closed', crowds, the primary issue of which is to prevent them becoming anything like a mob, which is 'open'. Prototypical of an institutionalised crowd is religion. Religions 'domesticate' crowds through precisely controlled ritual. Congregants must be united but not excited enough to press for too rapid expansion nor irritated enough by its demands to provoke departure. Consequently: "Their feeling of unity is dispensed to them in doses and the continuation of the church depends on the rightness of the dosage."

Parliamentary crowds, that is democratically elected Party-affiliated representatives, are an example in a modern form of bloodless warfare. Parliamentary crowds are only possible because the losers in democratic election are not killed or physically harmed. This is the reason, of course, that Trump’s threat to prosecute Clinton during the American election campaign was implicitly treasonous. It was a threat not just to Clinton but to the essential conditions of elected government. The very solemnity with which elections are conducted, argues Canetti, derives from the renunciation of death an instrument of decision.

His discussion of National Crowd Symbols is presented almost as an aside but is particularly thought-provoking. Some are obvious once stated: the Sea for England, Barriers Against the Sea in The Netherlands, the Mountains for Switzerland. But one tends to forget that these are far more than clichés. They have an emotional significance that is real (the last night of the Proms comes to mind, as does the role of the Dijkgraaf in the political unity of Holland). Others are less apparent but of very practical historical import. For example, the Marching Forest of the Army in Germany, a symbol of pan-Germanic strength and unity created by Bismarck was fatally disgraced by the Treaty of Versailles. It is Canetti's not uninformed view that "Hitler would never have come to power if the crowd of the army had not been prohibited by Versailles."

Like Dr Johnson, Canetti inserts more than one or two private prejudices into his analyses. Islam, he believes, is inherently a religion of continuous warfare as indicated by selections from the Quran. But similar references in the Christian and Hebrew Bible are not quoted. Christianity is a 'crowd of lament' for a slain god, and thus one in a line that stretches from the Babylonian cult of Tammuz to the various mysticisms of the Australian aborigines. This is an interesting hypothesis which has been articulated elsewhere but with neither discussion nor additional confirming material in Crowds and Power.

Canetti's final chapters on the use of power within crowds, to manipulate and lead them, are less satisfactory than his analysis of, as it were, naked crowd dynamics. But even here his insights are at least as provocative and stimulating as most organisational theorists today. His definition of the 'increase crowd' which is crystallised around an associated 'increase pack' is not an irrelevant way to view modern corporate organisations. Given its date of publication (1960), Crowds and Power is a rather sophisticated appreciation of organisation compared with the puerile discussions of such topics as 'Authority Structure' and 'Line vs. Staff' that were common in the mainstream academic discussion of the day.

Crowds and Power is a refreshing look at how human beings act in groups. Refreshing because after almost six decades this inter-disciplinary work has never found a disciplinary home in the social sciences and consequently never has been turned into countless doctoral theses and academic articles. It is a phenomenology not a sociological study. The obvious point of Crowds and Power is to escape from the tacit, largely unexamined presumptions and categories of social scientific thought. It remains therefore suggestive, if not inspirational. But very few social scientists would dare cite it to their colleagues. It breaks the rate, as it were, in both creativity and literacy and so is ignored.

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The Universal Meaning of Kabbalah by Leo Schaya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Warehouse of Mythical Wisdom

Because this book goes beyond the literary uses of Kabbalah and makes some claims about 'what's really there,’ it is interesting to contrast it with similar claims by modern cosmologists. The book is also an intriguing anticipation/echo of various modern philosophical views. But because Kabbalah's claims are about reality rather than truth, the best way to appreciate it is as a cultural compendium of symbolic knowledge, a warehouse of myth in which all sorts of intriguing stories are stacked awaiting distribution. Schaya's book is a sort of outline catalogue of contents.

Schaya is obviously a theist who is employing Kabbalah as a theological tool, particularly to explain God's role in creation. He uses some interesting language to describe being itself coming into being "... by the first ontological irradiation, God determines all things." The phrase 'ontological irradiation' is certainly evocative of scientific cosmology. This impression is reinforced in his description of subsequent divinely creative activity: 

"God's wisdom determines the uncreated archetypes; his intelligence manifests them as spiritual and supraformal realities, which in their turn clothe themselves in subtle substance and gross matter, in order to give birth to the heavens and the earth."

Although Schaya's determinism isn't quite as deterministic as that of physicists (there's a bit of divine self-determination in everything for Schaya), this theory is not incompatible with, say, the scientific description of Quantum Gravity in its progression from the granular formation of space up through the manifestation of non-quantum events. The Uncreated Archetypes sound Platonic but they could just as easily be the fourteen or so quantum fields hypothesised in today's physics.

The fundamental difference between the Kabbalistic and scientific views is, of course, in the presumption of intention and purpose by the former. Schaya quotes God in the voice of the prophet Isaiah as his authority:

"For the rain comes down and the snow from heaven and returned not thither except it water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, and give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my Word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, except it accomplish that which I please and make the thing where unto I sent it prosper."

Although it is difficult to imagine the Quantum Covariant Field assuming such a personal stance, it is equally difficult to imagine that it produced intentional beings which can't find their intentionality within it.

Schaya moves on from ontology to epistemology, once again using philosophical language that is rather modern. He starts from a very Kantian point: 

“. thought is the psychic and rational mirror of all intelligible things, a mirror which never becomes what it reflects...This dualism in thought is the cause of doubt and error...Truth cannot be discovered by thought alone."

Richard Rorty's 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature points out precisely the same problems with the 'mirror analogy' that does Schaya, and then goes on to dissolve rather than resolve the problem, as does Schaya. Remarkably, Schaya also grounds his analysis not in some abstract principle of truth but in the human community itself:

"The only truth and only reality thus corresponds, under as many sacred forms, to the various comprehensions and temperaments of the great 'types' of the human collectivity."

Rorty would likely agree; Leibniz certainly would, as also Jurgen Habermas. Epistemology is ultimately a communal or, more precisely, a political undertaking.

There is also a striking affinity between Schaya and 20th century mathematical philosophy. Kabbalah has a strong tradition of the 'missing' elements. The first tablets taken down by Moses from Mt. Sinai and destroyed because of the golden calf are missing, presumed hidden by God. Similarly, there is a mythical missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet which is scattered but hidden throughout the Torah. These absences imply the permanent incompleteness of the interpretations of reality. Reality in Kabbalah is very much oriented toward numbers, which also signify attributes of God. The Gödel Incompleteness Theorem (that no formal mathematical system can contain its own axioms), therefore, is implied by Kabbalah.

The hiddenness of the divine word, its presence through absence as it were, also has another unexpected referent: the Christian Gospel of Mark. In Mark, there is frequent admonition regarding the secrecy of Jesus's message and role (e.g. Mark 4:12; 5:43) which is ignored as a matter of course (e.g. Mark 7:36). Kabbalah is also treated as secret with commentaries connecting to scripture: "The Haggadic Midrashim form the link between Talmudic or public instruction and the secret teaching of the Kabbalah." So, in both cases the secret is in fact public, an open secret but still secret because only those who are pre-disposed can understand the meaning of what is being said. In Mark those who are so prepared include the demons as well as the soldier guarding Christ's crucified body but not his disciples. The suggestion of Kabbalistic secrecy may similarly indicate a sort of 'democratisation' of spiritual understanding beyond Talmudic experts. 

Modern semiology, the study of signs, contends that there is neither a definable beginning nor end to language and the facility human beings have for interpretation of signs. This is also a contention of Kabbalah when it refers to the "...infinite chain of interpretations from Moses onwards...ultimately connecting Adam and the Messiah." When combined with the idea that there are missing elements in revelation, this contention is explained as a necessity: "The entire creation is an illusory projection of the transcendental aspects of God into the 'mirror' of his immanence. The Zohar notes, in fact, that the verb 'baro', 'to create', implies the idea of 'creating an illusion'... but it nonetheless is an illusion that contains fragments of reality." The clear implication is that even infinite interpretation will still contain illusory perceptions and conclusions.

Many of these themes - hiddenness, secrecy, incompleteness, infinite interpretability - are also themes in the modern philosophy of language. Wittgenstein for example seems on occasion to be quoting from Kabbalistic texts: " I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one." "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." Or even "The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is." When Schaya claims "The objective reality of The Sefirot is their indivisible infinity, their unlimited unity, which implies that every divine aspect is identified with the totality of God," it is unlikely Wittgenstein would have demurred.

So, it seems it is possible to balk at Schaya's, or anyone else's, contention that he is describing what 'really is'. Among other things this would appear self-contradictory in Kabbalah which concedes the ineffability of reality. But his lesser claim that the world is knowable only incrementally, tentatively, and with the assistance of an external agency, identified in Kabbalah as Ein Sof - the nameless, endless being - is a lot more compelling. To quote Wittgenstein one final time, "An entire mythology is stored within our language.” Kabbalah is a method for entering into the warehouse that is language.

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Kabbalah and Criticism 
by 

Harold Bloom

 

A Post-Modernist Tradition

Ever since Pico della Mirandola brought Kabbalah to the attention of Christian society in the late 15th century, the mystical Jewish discipline has found its way into a European literature. Jorge Luis Borges and H. P. Lovecraft use Kabbalah extensively in their short stories. Franz Kafka's later works indicate an increasing interest in Kabbalistic interpretation. Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is structured around the Sefirot, the Kabbalah's terms for the attributes of God. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, and Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano use Kabbalah as a central trope. So to some degree, Kabbalah has become naturalised into modern fiction.

Harold Bloom's little book is both a useful introduction to the history and symbology of Kabbalah, as well as an application of Kabbalah in poetic criticism. He respects its religious origin but also its unique character, "Kabbalah differs from Christian and Eastern mysticism in being a mode of intellectual speculation rather than a way of union with God." For Bloom, Kabbalah is a theory of rhetoric and a theory of writing, "writing before writing, speech before speech."

Bloom recognises that Kabbalah's primary subject is language itself, and quotes the authority of Gershom Scholem, the leading Kabbalistic scholar of the 20th century: "The God who manifests himself is the God who expresses himself, which means that the Sefirot [the ten mystical names of God] are primarily language, attributes of God... they are like poems." Religion itself is "spilled poetry," thus establishing a priority for Kabbalah as a critical not just a mystical method.

The Sefirot are peculiar poetic forms. They are self-referential; they comment poetically on themselves: "As early as the thirteenth century, Kabbalists spoke of the Sefirot reflecting themselves within themselves, so that each 'contained' all the others." As such, the Kabbalah, therefore, is not incidentally but essentially a method of poetic criticism.

Bloom is explicit about the literary method involved: "Kabbalah if viewed as rhetoric centres upon two series of tropes: first, irony, metonymy, metaphor, and then - synecdoche, hyperbole, metaiepsis." This corresponds to the sequence which Kabbalah describes as Zimzum, Shevirat, Tikkun - roughly Destruction, Re-assignment, and Reconciliation. Call it productive mis-reading to align it with Bloom's general theory of literary criticism.

This poetic process of mis-reading anticipates what has become known in 20th century philosophy as deconstruction, the phenomenological analysis of a text in order to identify its central presumptions and intentions. It also anticipates the epistemological method of the 19th century philosopher C.S. Peirce, whom Bloom discusses at some length. This epistemology he connects with the "wandering" or experimentation with meaning that is inherent in Kabbalah. "Meaning wanders to protect itself", primarily from premature or prejudicial closure of textual interpretation.

Kabbalah emerged from a philosophical conflict within Judaism between Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism. A similar conflict has also been perennial in Christian history. But in Christianity resolution has largely been imposed by the power of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The result has been increased conflict and ethical compromise. Judaism's solution is not only more pacific, it is also more productive, encouraging the incorporation of religious tradition within the core of literary civilisation. Quite an accomplishment. It seems almost...well, post-modern.

Quantum Shift: Theological and Pastoral Implications of Contemporary Developments in Science by Heidi Ann Russell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Nothing to See Here. Move Along

There must be a position between that of the gauche, ill-informed, puerile, fundamentalist atheism of a Richard Dawkins and the dogmatic, fideistic, tribal, needy, and equally fundamentalist position of the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith in the Roman Curia of the Catholic Church. But this book doesn't suggest what that position might be.

The good news is that the traditional attempts to prove the existence of God through rational argument have been dropped. As have the various God-of-the-gaps apologetics which served as the handy go-to explanation for the anomalies of science. So one might expect the foundations for a reasonable discussion in a book like this.

The bad news is that Quantum Shift typifies a new sort of theological rationalisation, a new genre in which all scientific thought is welcomed...and immediately distorted. Each major scientific breakthrough provides a new set of analogies for pushing the old doctrinal pap: General relativity indicates the fundamental importance of human relationships. Particle/wave complementary is another way of considering the soul/body issue. Quantum entanglement explicates the modern meaning of the Resurrection and the significance of the Body of Christ as described in the Pauline epistles. Chaos theory is affirmation of God's continuing role in creation. The possibility of a multi-verse of universes is but another reminder, along with the Copernican conception, that we are not the centre of existence. Quantum Gravity is something so counter-intuitive that it makes the mysteries of suffering and death seem quite plausible. And so on.

The further bad news is that none of these theological analogies seem to be able to find their way back into the dogmatic and organisational substance of the Church. For example, Perspectivism, a modern philosophy developed by Bernard Lonergan, not dissimilar from that of the 17th century Gottfried Leibniz, is put forward as compatible with Einsteinian Relativity. That may be, but Perspectivism is most certainly incompatible with credal literalism and the fixed, directive character of Church doctrine. The author may feel that the theory of multi-verses implies the prodigality of God's love, literally his fecundity. The 3rd century philosopher, Plotinus, would certainly applaud the metaphor. But it is highly unlikely that this could be crammed into any doctrinal niche controlled by the Curia.

It seems clear that if there is ever to be any rapprochement between science and religion, the embedded Aristotelianism of the Church with its concepts of objectivity, truth, causality, and purpose will have to be thrown over the side of the ecclesiastical ship. Without control over language, however, the Church loses all its traditional levers of power. Mutiny looks inevitable. Still, perhaps a good mutiny would keep the ship afloat. That might seem preferable to slowly sinking without trace.

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The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Swiss Banville

Should a detective story have rational plot-appeal? Must the clues and hints left by the author lead anywhere? Are the aesthetics of a mystery dependent upon its conclusion? Friedrich Durrenmatt thought decidedly not.

For Durrenmatt, it is the presence of the mystery itself, and its affect on those involved in it that is the point of the detective story. The details are important not because they add up to anything - although they might - but because the investigators are affected by what they consider facts, whether they are factual or not. That the denouement has only peripheral relevance to the investigation is almost an aside.

The rationale for this stance is that it is realistic. It is what police work is like. The narrator of the main part of the story insists that real investigation is conducted in a sea of chance. The investigative hypotheses that are formulated are at best stabs at a partial truth. Resolution, if it comes at all, is more likely to be the result of random events not deductive acumen. Clues, even relevant ones, are just as apt to lead to mis-direction.

It takes an accomplished writer to be able to pull off this kind of poke in the eye to an established genre. Durrenmatt is such a writer. The Pledge brings to mind John Banville's Benjamin Black mysteries but with the style and panache of Banville's 'serious' novels. Like Banville's mysteries, The Pledge takes place in a formerly neutral country of the post-war period. There are similar tensions between country-side and town in both Switzerland and Ireland. And the protagonists in both are distinctly eccentric as well as heavy drinkers, lurking vaguely on the edge of respectable society.

In short: An antidote to jaded tastes or boredom with your average murder mystery.

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Progress - Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Johan Norberg's message is simple: Things are much better than you think. So stop worrying and get back to making things even better still. This is a popularisation of the similar but more academic line that the (uncredited) economist Deirdre McCloskey has been promoting for the last decade. While Norberg's emphasis is on technology, and McCloskey's is on the generative ideas for technology, they are at one in a celebration of middle-class living and its prospects.

It had to come didn't it? A movement of factually based optimism. Journalists are paid to dig out things that alarm us. Economists and other social scientists are paid to solve the problems that journalists create. The more complex the problems, the more the further potential for journalistic investigation. It's the downside of the infinite interpretability of narrative. Norberg and McCloskey are making a bid to fill the market gap and stop the downward slide.

There's just room in this complex for a niche-marketing project to re-establish bourgeois calm and get them back to what they do best: running things for the rest of us. The sub-text of Progress is quite clear about that. The progress evident in every realm of human endeavour from sanitation to civil rights has been achieved quite independently of politics. The only things to be avoided like the plague, largely because it is a plague, is war; that and the Green fanatics who don't like GM crops. Restrain the war-lords and the neo-hippie enthusiasts and sane, well-tested liberal values will take care of the rest.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are the source of our well-being. They will continue to feed the world, to keep it clean, literate, and safe. We cannot be complacent however. The underlying enemy, aside from journalists, are "superstition and bureaucracy." These are the hidden forces behind anti-globalisation, the reduction in government-sponsored science, inadequate technical education and the bad-mouthing of hard-working scientists and entrepreneurs.

Sounds like Donald Trump has his international spokesman. Oh, I forgot, Trump's anti-globalisation, anti-science, and anti-education. And McCloskey's transgender status doesn't sit well with Republicans. But Trump does like entrepreneurial types and he's not afraid of a little contradictory policy-making. So he might just take these guys on.

Postscript: there is a very serious reason to question not just the statistics but the moral intention of people like Norberg and McCloskey. They both provide bourgeois propaganda which is meant to hide the existence of a permanent under-culture. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Kabbalah: A Love Story by Lawrence Kushner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Signs of the Times

This charming little book is the perfect sequel (or antidote) to anything involving modern physics, especially Quantum Gravity and String Theory. It's also not a bad companion to calm the spirit after much post-modernist fiction.

Kabbalah is attractive because it is neither rationalist nor dogmatic, yet it respects both thought and faith. It neither preaches nor proves; it simply invites consideration. Kabbalah does not provide truth; it hints at reality. What better way to present Kabbalah therefore than as a love story between a rabbi and a cosmologist?

There is a perennial controversy about the date and authorship of the central text of Kabbalah, The Zohar. Attributed to both the 13th century Moses de Leon and to the 2nd century sage Simeon bar Yochai, The Zohar is without doubt a sign of its times when it reached its 13th century form. Mysticism had been on the rise for two centuries in the dominant Christian society. Gregory the Great, John Scotus Eriugena, Bernard of Clairvaux, Raymond Lulle, William of St. Thierry, and Hugh of St. Victor were Christian voices reacting to a growing rationalism and dogmatism that were affecting the lives of medieval Jews as well as Christians.

The principle technique of Kabbalah is the exposure of language. It is intentionally obscure, vague, ambiguous in order to redirect thought and to require the questioning of vocabulary and logical categories. Kushner interprets this explicitly as a literary device:

"Judaism is a religion of books. The entire tradition is initiated by a novel...the Five Books of Moses...This is what distinguishes Jewish fundamentalism...each word issuing from the Source of Meaning must obviously contain an infinity of meanings.... The Zohar, itself masquerading as a commentary on God's novel, becomes inexhaustible."

This is Kabbalistic Semiology: the world conceived as a sign, that is, a story. This applies to the world in general but also especially to sacred texts. According to The Zohar, the stories of God and the Israelites in the Torah cannot be what they superficially appear to be because God would have written more interesting stories. The task of Kabbalah therefore is to uncover the hidden stories of the Torah, the meanings placed there by God within, or really beyond, the language.

Interestingly, this idea of the theology of the sign, of language, was also a principle concern of the 'Seraphic Doctor' of the Catholic Church, St. Bonaventure. Born a generation before Moses de Leon but very possibly known by him, Bonaventure also considered the world and its components as signs to be interpreted not taken at face value. Bonaventure was subsequently overshadowed by his contemporary Thomas Aquinas and Thomas's very Aristotelian rationalism.

Not until the 20th century, in the 'dialectical theology' of the Swiss Karl Barth did the insights of both Bonaventure and de Leon return to mainstream theology. Barth plays continuously, for example, with the simultaneous process of hiding and revealing that occurs in all language about God. This dialectic is the central theme of Kabbalah.

Kushner's weaving together of a simple love story with what might be called the universal love story of the cosmos with itself is totally apt. According to Kabbalah, both Creation and the Creator learn together what it means to love through their experience with each other. The relationship between Creature and Creator is necessarily tenuous, each making exploratory advances and unexplained retreats. There is progress and there is alienation; affection and disgust; communication and misunderstanding.

Ultimately it is the mutual commitment to find the meaning of love that continuously re-creates the world. Neither Creature nor Creator knows the final result, but simply trusts in the other. This is not a means to some other end - heaven, salvation, etc. - it is purpose pure and simple. Nothing else matters.

Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and scientists like Carlo Rovelli make the case that our intuitions of human purpose and intention and consciousness are illusory. While admitting they cannot demonstrate this contention empirically, they insist on its superiority. In other words, they have made a pre-rational, an aesthetic, choice about how to view the world. Having made that choice, the world appears to conform. This is the power of aesthetics: to create the world around us. The real illusion is that we claim this power as illusory while we exercise it. Kabbalah is a mode of grappling with this illusion.

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