three books

The world is usually going to hell in a handbasket, and few enough of the great works of scholarship have been carried out in politically placid and financially serene circumstances. My currently fashionable favorite, The Arcades Project, is only one out of many that fit George Steiner’s offhand query about grandiose intellectual endeavors (a specious but provocative remark, as so many resonant questions are): “Do societies harvest before a storm?”

Well, probably not, George, because there are enough would-be encyclopedic enterprises that didn’t coincide with the world’s quite frequent wars and invasions and revolutions.

And yet there are just enough odd cases of intellectuals who plodded through in spite of everything to justify my own persistence in cataloguing the unfinished ventures of the moment, a moment that is as potentially catastrophic as any in my lifetime.

But since I like deferring such things (vive la différance-avec-un-a), I shall first reflect on my bewilderment at the extent to which Rudolf Bultmann’s project of demythologizing Christianity was a major topic of debate in wartime Germany (while Dietrich Bonhoeffer was busy with pondering theoretical justifications for the more urgently immediate business being conducted by his associate Count von Stauffenberg).

As with the German and Italian studies in art history that date from those years (including years when I wonder how they got the paper and presses to print them), I realize that theologians couldn’t exactly argue over the best way to overthrow the existing order. But to quarrel over existentialist minutiae that I found unintelligible a quarter-century later still seems strange. In particular, the notion that no modern man could believe in the three-tier Biblical model of the universe was a peculiar complaint to raise at that particular moment of history. Revising the Bible’s cosmological scaffolding did not seem like the most obvious course of action, but I suppose somebody had to argue it out someday, and it just happened to be done in, say, 1944.

But if I get off on topics such as how Gabriel Marcel’s philosophical essays in France in Homo Viator or Francis Picabia’s “bad paintings” of the years of the Occupation seem more relevant responses to the politics of the day without ever alluding even remotely to politics, I shall never get on with it.

I am also becoming increasingly fascinated with what goes on in intellectual life in neutral capitals during moments of global conflagration. I know I’ve often quoted Tom Stoppard’s lines in Travesties (I think) in which one of the characters remarks regarding the avant-garde of Tzara and the Cabaret Voltaire: “To be an artist at all is like living in a neutral country in the midst of a world war. To be an artist in Zürich, in 1916, requires a degree of self-absorption that would glaze the eyes of Narcissus.”

But Erich Auerbach wrote his great study of European literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul during the Second World War, and Henry Corbin also carried out uninterrupted scholarly research there during the war years. The city was a barely neutral zone on the border of German-allied Bulgaria (and apparently one of the reasons the French had given away the Sanjak of Alexandretta a.k.a. the Republic of Hatay was to damp down Turkish discontent in the troubled summer of 1939). But neutral it was, and scholars who would have been scrambling merely to remain alive further west on the continent of Europe were able to turn out leisurely volumes with no complaints except that the contents of the greatest libraries were unavailable to them.

Which allows me to segue into one of the current intellectual ventures to which I’ve alluded, enshrined in a catalogue I’ve just bought.

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting is the scholarly accompaniment to a 2008-2009 exhibition that would have seemed inconceivable not all that many years ago. Organized and first presented at Yale, the show traveled to Tate Britain in the summer, and is now scheduled to open next (assuming the itinerary hasn’t changed) in Istanbul, with a concluding stop in Sharjah.

The whole business of Orientalism is being revisited on several fronts, a generation after Edward Said’s epoch-making theoretical assault on the enterprise, and the real shocker is that these paintings, presumably supremely offensive in style and subject matter, are traveling to the lands where they were originally painted. (The Orientalist painters, many of them, didn’t make stuff up, they just saw it with a sentimentalizing and exoticizing eye. And they presented it to a largely clueless public eager to experience something more than their boring everyday environment.)

That the cities to which the show is now traveling both host international biennials of contemporary art explains much, but not everything…and that is quite another topic.

I have scarcely done more than leaf through the volume, but clearly these works are aesthetic and stylistic kin to the paintings of myth, history and British domestic life that British painters were producing in and about their home country. Visual and emotional excess was the order of the day, and just as with the scholarly Orientalists who were mapping and annotating the intellectual worlds of the continent east of Suez, the motives of these artists may or may not have been more ambiguous, more dialectical, and sometimes more full of misguided good will than Said’s accusations suggested. Whether others were able to use their aesthetic and analytical productions to advance political agendas is a separate issue.

I deliberately ordered the late Hugh Trevor-Roper’s posthumous fragment The Invention of Scotland at the same time, since it deals with the shaping of Scottish identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century through the literary assertion of immemorial origins for objects and customs that were either fictitious (in the case of the poems of Ossian) or other than imagined (as in the case of the kilts of the Highland clans that left Lowland Scots wondering what Sir Walter Scott had wrought).

So there are a slew of nineteenth-century topics with twenty-first century implications that ought to be investigated and synthesized. If only one had the time and energy to do it right.

The same can be said at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum (if the intellectual life were indeed a spectrum instead of a kaleidoscope of shifting connections).

John Johnston has kindly presented me with a copy of his new book from MIT Press, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI. Johnston, a professor of English at Emory University, has been involved with these issues his whole professional life, and has attended his share of conferences in which he was very nearly the only non-scientist present, but in this book (both a historical survey and an up-to-date analysis) he separates himself entirely from the topic's reflections in art and literature, and goes after the thing itself.

We had an interesting chat on how my interests in the biological substrate stop at the point at which his interest in the machinic arrangements of the human brain begin. (I would now say my suppositions, based on his spoken summary, were inaccurate. That is all I will say at this point of ignorance, and possibly at subsequent points of ignorance. This subject and this book is at the intersection of philosophy, physics, computer science, and biology, and I would be a fool to claim I can properly evaluate it; I call on my more qualified readers to look at the book, and offer opinions.)

And anyone who thinks that this post is not germane to the presidential election, or to the anniversary date on which this post is written (as distinct from the day on which it is posted), just isn’t paying attention.