Authors: William H. Gass
We frequently apologize for mankind’s infatuation with the opera of ideas by pointing out how desperately we all require illusions: firstly of our lovers about ourselves, and for ourselves concerning them, while privately we trouble or amuse our inner eye by assuming the roles of phantoms. Without our myths, we say, we could not create or preserve the social order; we could not enable others, of course weaker than we, to establish an identity and choose wise goals. We need belief to bind us together a little better than baseball, and form a community of expectation that exceeds the lottery. How else could we persuade people to make the necessary sacrifices on occasion or daily to endure the unendurable. So we shall surround perhaps a poisoned well with legends of eternal youth, and lend to otherwise futile lives both hope and meaning. Before us all, there is the same great black hole in the ground, a yawning hollow, the boredom of the earth for our Being. We simply must erect a protective fence in front of this abyss.
The earth reflects this abyss in the night sky, so there we shall imagine heaven peeking warmly through the stars; there we shall construct our most glamorous confusions, cosmologies which defy the world’s demise, and put Nature in a cage of words.
One virtue of Giambattista Vico’s theory of history, at any rate according to the reading of his compatriot Benedetto Croce, is that it carefully separates material history, with its simple chronology, its routine of wars, plagues, earthquakes, pogroms, tyrannies, and
famines, from that which represents the innermost movement of the human mind, and every invention of the human spirit. That is, over against a human history written as if it consisted of physical events in that realm I’ve called Nature, Vico places a history of culture. Language, of course, is the principal shaper of this cultural history. It is a history which advances as language advances, especially as it passes from that period when men gestured their desires and danced their desperations, through a time when they blazoned them on walls and shields and standards, wore totems like skins and skins like totems, and invented a language of tribal logos very much as our designers do now for Ford and General Motors (that far has the word
logos
fallen since God first said: “Licht und macht schnell!”), to the day they howled a vowel and growled a consonant and exchanged real caves for Plato’s.
I sometimes think that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Freud were right. Inertia is the one real law. Sometimes called preservation, sometimes called equilibrium, sometimes called do-nothing. We’d stay in bed if someone would feed us. And we leave home looking back. Behind us are the soon-to-be-consummated tragedies of domesticity, and their queens and consorts: Medea, Electra, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and the rest; before us are the epics of the
Iliad
and the
Aeneid;
action and interrogation alternate; but while we swing between these poles of departure and return, reluctant change and unchanging reluctance, the rope tightens around our neck.
How beautifully Joyce pictures it in his brief tale of the prankquean, a tale that capsulates Vico’s eternal returns and the cycles of Joyce’s own book, the cycles that turn round like Beckett’s heroes will on their broken wheels, for we can wait for the end of our world anywhere now, any nearby bench will atomize as well as any wall, meadow, or church. We can begin to bleed from our nose and eyes while in or out of bed. We can be raped and riddled in a foreign country or on our own front porch. This borrowed cosmology, which no longer, in the Christian manner, imagines History as the shortest distance between our first Fall and our final Redemption; that is, as the marked accretions of Time, the crowding
together of events that then darken it and make it palpable the way points may be imagined queuing in front of the Future, as if it were selling tickets, to compose a sentence of some length, if doubtful significance. The Christian line of Time resembles the line of Life, for both begin with a birth, descend unevenly toward death, and end, for the true believer, again, in a move which takes them out of the play, saves them from oblivion, and saves History from overcrowding.
The Viconian view treats history as if it were a cycle like the seasons, like the flooding of the Nile, like the paths of the planets and the movement of the stars. It treats history as if it were a thing, not an event. Things may be annihilated, but it makes no sense to speak of them as if they had just begun, had gone halfway, or were nearly over. We don’t say: Hurry, the statue has just started. The world moves, according to Vico, like the brightly lit glass ball in the ballroom; its phases begin and end, but it revolves only to come round again. The pattern itself is a cultural invention. This moving image makes romantic a tawdry gym. Nevertheless, Vico’s separation of historical mind from historical matter, which Croce applauded, allows us to see how much more important the invention of logic was, for example, than that drawn-out war on the Peloponnesus; how extraordinary even the creation of a new notation can be, like that which was finally devised for music; how like the discovery of the wheel is the Socratic conception of the soul—no longer shadow, blood, or breath, but a thoroughly abstract entity; how fundamental, in short, are the forms of the mind, how weak the so-called solid, simple facts.
That man must eat to live. That everyone must die. Really hard items. Dissolve into a dew, like Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, do they? then evaporate entirely, only to be gathered together in soft clouds and driven against the mountains, where their rain enriches the rivers. The linear view of history is based upon the linear life of man, but where man’s life draws an arc like an arrow’s drooping path, the purpose of providence is to pull him out of his dive just in time. Vico’s pagan view of history, however, sticks close to those
rhythmical alternations that beat back and forth within life, and that seem to express long, slumberous lengths of Egyptian time and the continued quiet begetting of the generations, as well as the more tumultuous periodic conflagrations imagined by the Greeks.
So there is the stuttery voice of God, the clap of thunder, mutter in the mountains. The bomb drops, the ice cap cracks, and we hear the hundred letters of Joyce’s lightning bolt punctuate the periodic appearances of the prankquean; we hear it as written on Finnegans’ wind:
It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his love-saking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself. And his two little jiminies, cousins of ourn, Tristopher and Hilary, were kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse. And, be dermot, who come to the keep of his inn only the niece-of-his-in-law, the prankquean. And the prankquean pulled a rosy one and made her wit foreninst the dour. And she lit up and fireland was ablaze. And spoke she to the dour in her petty perusienne: Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease? And that was how the skirtmisshes began.
Countless cosmologies have been crowded in here, as if Joyce had hired a hall.
But that is the cruelty. We have to enter this labyrinthian fiction, with its arbitrary cosmos, its made-up laws, and its compacted lingo; we have to pull over our heads a cover of concepts and sleep like H. C. Earwicker himself the sleep of these syllables, before we can encounter the truth: that the world away from this work, the world we really eat and sleep and sweat and fight and screw in, is a fiction, too; but a fiction that fails to acknowledge its nature and is
therefore and for that reason unreal; because the secret at the center of
Finnegans Wake
is written on a piece of paper which a hen, it’s said, has scratched from a midden. Yes, the writer has woven our lies around us like binding lines of evidence. He convicts us of culture.
The prankquean has got God’s goat for the third and last time. Here is how the skirtmisshes endupped:
For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbrag-gin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut ban-dolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill. And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy. And the duppy shot the shutter clup.
Whereupon the thunder punctuates the prose, and shortly Joyce concludes: “And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world.”
Nature is a lot like the blank page, the blank sky: there is a terrifying latitude to Nature, an immense indifference, which we symbolize by means of the sea and its implacable, impersonal, monotonous repetitions. If there is one thing we know about the world as it would be without us, it is the massive unconcern it has for us when we are present; for if we believe that the stars rule our lives, or that God’s in his heaven, or that times return wearing the same face as the clock, or that certain disgusting objects are edible and some surely splendid ones are not, or that we ought to sacrifice virgins or use the elderly as bait for wild beasts, or circumcise ourselves or scar our cheeks, or kneel in front of tatty statues or wear a veil or feel that some people are base and unclean and
others are like Shirley Temple … and so on until we reach leeks, as in Hobbes’s little list; Nature would not lift a correcting hand, wrinkle a discriminating nose or raise a disapproving eyebrow. It lets us behave like fools; it lets us live among lies and think we’re in a field of lilies; it lets us rape and call it marriage, enslave and call it soul-saving; it doesn’t even go hoot when we call someone a godlike king or pope or saint or buddha. Not only that, but many civilizations, many systems of ideas, many philosophies and many works of art, many physical sciences and versions of psychology, many different sets of laws and views of politics and economics, can flourish and seem to sustain a society, allowing a people to reach what we think of as the highest cultural heights—the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Chinese, the Hindoos, Englishmen, Bostonians, Southern belles—while contradicting one another so baldly, so continuously, so extremely, at almost every point, that we know most of them must be largely false—namely, every opinion but our own.
Although there has always been an honorable tradition in philosophy which holds that it is better not to believe at all than to believe badly—the list is long, from Socrates to Montaigne, from Nietzsche through Wittgenstein—philosophers have also been eager merchants of ideas. Still, they are wily. They commit only that part of the head where the hat rests. You cannot say, when you see one on the street, “Ah, there goes a person who believes that existence is a property.” By the time we have reached ideology (where ideas are organized and administered by bureau clerks), another nature has been glued firmly over whatever is otherwise out there, so that Nature will now appear to support a history of point and purpose, to provide moralities for man which thoroughly demean him, and to offer status to the undeserving, and false hope to the trodden down.
The significance of cultural diversity is not that there are no universal truths, no objective morality, no general standards of taste; rather, it is that Nature is not their underwriter; it has no cosmology, no theology, perhaps no ontology of its own, nor is it
made of Number, as the Pythagoreans suggested; and despite some suspicions to the contrary, Nature does not speak German. If we want walls on which to hang our values, we shall have to build them ourselves; but now the difference will be that we shall be beguiled by our cultural language only in the way
Finnegans Wake
beguiles us, and our standards supported the way
Finnegans Wake
supports its; for concerning fictions, as we know, many sorts of fine assessments can be made. Meanwhile, we shall enjoy all the advantages of doubt—a healthy, well-muscled mind among them. Who knows what we shall see when the mists of meaning lift? who knows how far we may be able to hear as ideological noise is reduced, all that white static cleared? Perhaps we shall even, now and then, receive the distant ding of the
Ding an sich
itself.
W
e are to imagine a terrible storm like that which opens Verdi’s
Otello
. The pavement of the
piazzetta
is awash. Saint Mark’s pigeons are flying about, looking for land. The Venetian sun has gone down like a gondola in the lagoon. As we wade along in the dying light, a baby in a basket passes. It is being swept out to sea with the rest of the city’s garbage. So is a large painting, beautifully framed, which floats its grand nude by us as if she were swimming. Then the question comes, bobbing like a bit of flotsam itself: Which one should we save, the tiny tot or the Tintoretto? the kid in the crib or the Canaletto?
It may be that during two thousand or more years of monsoons, tidal waves, and high water, this choice has not once actually presented itself; yet, undismayed, it is in this form that philosophers frequently represent the conflict between art and morality—a conflict, of course, they made up in the first place. Baby or Botticelli. What’ll you have?
Not only is the dilemma an unlikely one; the choice it offers is peculiar. We are being asked to decide not between two different actions but between two different objects. And how different indeed these floating objects are. The baby is a vessel of human consciousness, if its basket isn’t. It is nearly pure potentiality. It must be any babe—no one babe but babe in general, babe in bulk—whose bunk is boating by. Never mind if it was born with the brain of an accountant, inflicted with a cleft palate, or given Mozartian
talents: these are clearly irrelevant considerations, as are ones concerning the seaworthiness of the basket, or the prospect of more rain. One fist in this fight swings from the arm of an open future against the chest of a completed past.…