Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

I come to the town of Nancy. It is a place of quiet souls, like my older self, Ulysse, not at all the sort I have been accustomed to meeting on my travels, the sort who would have found Achille, my younger years, far more to their liking.


Stanislas, the King, is a man of contentment. He knows how to gaze: an art, I fear, we have all too often forgotten. I have spoken to him on more than one occasion. He treats me with great respect, for my father was among those brave of Saint-Malo who fought for him in Danzig. From his pedestal he is willing to provide informations, the result of observation, or of private thought; and indeed, he has had time to think, to become. The cursus of the sun affords him the opportunity for every kind of vision: because he faces north, the glare never blinds him, except, of course, for the scintillae of windows, coated or shuttered, burning in reflection. The shadows, always quite sombre, begin long, grow short, and grow long again, as the works of history. But the shadow of his index, pointing out the north, remains always the same length.

We discuss posterity. That devil Diderot, I mention, said that posterity for the philosophe was the same as the afterlife for the religious man. We who have an afterlife—must needs we have posterity also? Ah yes, says the King, who was a friend of Diderot. It transpires that he has composed an essay on the subject, which he recites to me in a stertorous voice from his plinth. It is a thirst for posterity that makes us perform miracles to humanity. His words swell:

That which we desire for our descendants, Nature and Reason make us desire for ourselves. Down here we live, if I might put it thus, two sorts of lives: the one we have in common with the animals—it is only a simple vegetation, it begins again each day, it makes us last for years, we hold on to it without merit, and we should have as little regret to lose it as we had to acquire it. But there is another life more essential to man, that makes him appear with éclat on the world stage, or that at least makes it pleasant by a sweet and beneficent humour, by a scrupulous probity, a constant application to all the duties of society. This man lives in the esteem of others, and his life, for the advantages he derives from it, is more precious to him than that by which he simply exists, and through which he would be no more than a creature destined to consume the fruits of the earth, a breathing automaton who, forever useless, would be in effect buried even before his death.

I can certainly appreciate his sentiment. All my years I struggled not only to exist, but to live, and moreover to be remembered with fondness and admiration. Stanislas enjoys posterity here in Nancy and perhaps in Poland, but not elsewhere. He has been subsumed by the currents of history. I myself retain a little fame, but the memories of my glory are swiftly fading.

*

I have petitioned the King to release me. I would find my tomb again, and remember the sweep and stave of my great mother. Nancy is too far from the waves! When I brought my case before him he would only point. The north! Oui, le Nord, mais aussi l'Ouest, n'est-ce pas? He is not generous with words today. Just then the sun turns in its course, and for the first time the shadow of his index is distended along the square. It is an auspicious dawn.


By late morning I arrive in Verdun-sur-Meuse. There is a great wailing among my comrades, as if the last shocks of a catastrophe. Ils ne passeront pas, said Nivelle—or was it Petain?—and so, ILS N'ONT PAS PASSÉ. Death did conquer man; and man, death. Le Mort-Homme, a greater king even than Stanislas, was already here, a little colline near the town, before the War broke out; that I have learnt in my travels. I am familiar with him, of course. I have met him many times, only to evade him. Ah, loss! In the future some exquisite critic will write,

Chateaubriand-Achille should have died in Combourg, when he tried in vain to commit suicide, or in Rennes, when his comrade Saint-Riveul was massacred before his eyes, taking the place which should have been his, or in Le Havre, when he was spared at the last minute by a shipwreck that should have been fatal, or in Thionville, where the manuscript of Atala stopped the bullet that should have struck his heart, or even in London, where he was only an outcast, promised death. . . This Achille watched in sympathy the Chateaubriand-Ulysse who sought to regain Ithaca in 1800, and who, from career to career, found himself in the end growing old, with everyone else, under the rule of usurpers, and reduced to memories.

Now I am doomed to remaining an old man, an Ulysse, for eternity. But there has been plenty for me. I did venture into the land with my winnowing-oar, and now I am returning to the sea.


Afternoon by the rocks of the shore near Cognac. Here, by the land we call 'Groies', full of chalk and clay, walk Achille and Ulysse, the young man and the old, the cut short and the livelong, competing in posterity. Stanislas had changed his mood after his first discourse; in his second address he had said—

Does history not teach us that dreadful chasms, in which the monuments and stories of our times are swallowed up forever, yawn open before those ages in which we flatter ourselves to live by our reputation? All has perished, as far as the memory of most of the nations that precede ours. The chain binding their time to ours has been smashed by floods, earthquakes, violent tremors that have knocked over the universe. All totters, all ends, all is lost in the immense spaces of eternity—and one man, one simple atom, the chance product of the nothingness that begat him, flatters himself that he might bear his name to the final extremities of Time, which has no limits at all!

After his peroration I teased him—I said he should stop reading Cicero before bedtime. If I was Scipio, he was my Manius Manilius. But the King would not be teased, and remained solemn. I still think of his words. We have our afterlifes, and perhaps he and I should be content with a diminishing posterity.


The most marvelous thing about the Grand Bé, other than its name, is the smell, its scents and aromas of hyssop and uncut thyme, and bergamot, and the almost incessant petrichor, and the smell of great noise and tumult, quieted, a romantic caesura facing out into the unknown. When I first arrived at Saint-Malo from Le Havre, just after the revolution, I had cause to remark on the divisions and misfortunes of France: the châteaux were burnt or abandoned, and their owners vanished. The place retains even now the same mood of ruination. But now, as I return again, it is the most brilliant of dusks, and the grand cour of the heaven is full of birds, coming from nowhere to swoop and glide over the edge of the black rocks, to be transmuted into waves. Les ondes, rondes, surrondent, rebondent, surabondent, sarabandent.

Here, where I was born, I am again almost among the living. François, René. The whole world is speaking of my life. And neither am I alone now. Maclou is here with me, the great traveller, who, they say, has seen the Isles of the Blest and the Paradise of Birds. His pockets are overflowing with precious stones. I have no pockets. It must be the perquisite of a saint.

And here again, by my six feet of sand, I vividly recall the ceremony in which I left. On ensevelissait souvent les morts fameux au bord de la mer. My friend M. Ampère, the son of the celebrated scientist, related the event to his confrères and colleagues in the Académie.

When we had arrived on the beach, shuffling between the ramparts and the sea towards the funeral rock, the magnificence of this unequalled mourning, the incredible poetry of the spectacle, just for a moment veiled the sadness of death beneath the pomp and the glory, and the funeral assumed the character of a Christian apotheosis. At the foot of the Grand Bé, the coffin was raised up by the marines and carried to the top, against a gust of wind like a tempest—the ocean's supreme caress of that man who had so loved the noise of the waves and the winds.

I found it an admirable tribute. It sealed my death, as my life, in the ears of his listeners, as it will in the eyes of his readers. The sea is the source of mythology, as the ocean, which tides twice a day, is that abyss of which Jehovah said, You will go no further. And so in the face of the sea, endlessly ruffled in detail, but perfect in smoothness from horizon to horizon, I can think only of posterity. I have, I believe, bequeathed myself appropriately.

*

All our life is spent circling our tomb; our various maladies are the winds that approach us from the harbour. I was near death from the moment I entered the world; the roar of the waves, whipped up by a squall heralding the autumn equinox, prevented my cries being heard. There is never a day that I do not see again in my mind the rock on which I was born, and the chamber in which my mother inflicted life upon me.

Tout fut difficile dans ma vie. I long wanted to be buried here, and wrangled incessantly to have it. They came to me as I lay gasping, finally, and petitioned me—What words will you have upon your tomb? I brushed them away. Let me think on the matter. Give me two days. And so I considered the problem. What words could carry the weight of a whole life? For the first time in my life, I, a wit, a brazen pen, a great doyen of the language, could not muster a single phrase. What could be more ironic, than that I should fail to devise my own epitaph? They returned in two days. M. Chateaubriand, what will you have upon your tomb? I looked up from my circles, and said, Give me four days. They went away, barking and mooksing. I shut my eyes tight and toyed with abstracts—Liberty, and Poetry; Immortality and Eternity. It was no use. Le Mort-Homme was mocking himself of me. I scribbled down some rhymes and rearranged them into some semblance of a poem. Gribouilleur. In disgust I could only fling the wretched papers across the room for the servants to tidy up. What words could possibly carry the weight of a whole life? My window, which opened west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, was open: it was six in the morning, and the moon I could see was pale and gravid, sinking over the spire of the Invalides, scarcely reveiled by the first golden ray from the East. Finally those cagotz and magotz descended upon me, carrion birds, and demanded of me, with the most appalling obsequy, Grand Seigneur Chateaubriand, what will you have graven on your tomb? All I could pronounce, by now, and with a grave laughter already on my lips, was: A week longer. The next morning I was dead.

Horlicks

A friend sends me a link to an article in the Scientific American, entitled 'An Unethical Ethicist?' I try to read through the intricate morality tale, but all I can think about is the word, ethicist. Why does it stick in my craw?

*

The word's suffix groups it with physicist, geneticist, classicist, historicist, lyricist, publicist—the OED lists 133 in total, but the others are either compounds or much more obscure. This group, however, is illusory: or rather, it consists of two meaningful groups—those words that derive from nouns and adjectives in –ic, and those that derive from nouns in –ics. Thus: lyric, public, historic, on one side, and physics, genetics, classics, and ethics on the other. Here it will be worth quoting the OED at length, on –ic and –ics:

In English, such words of this class as were in use before 1500 had the singular form, and were usually written, after French, –ique, –ike, as arsmetike, magike, musike, logike (–ique), retorique, mathematique (–ike, –ik), mechanique, economique, ethyque (–ik); this form is retained in arithmetic, logic, magic, music, rhetoric (though logics has also been used). But, from the 15th c., forms in –ics (–iques) occur as names of treatises; and in the second half of the 16th c. this form is found applied to the subject-matter of such treatises, in mathematics, economics, etc. From 1600 onward, this has been the accepted form with names of sciences, as acoustics, conics, dynamics, ethics, linguistics, metaphysics, optics, statics, or matters of practice, as æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics.

The formation of agent-nouns in –ic is predictable: arithmetic, logic, magic, music and rhetoric all have agents in –ician (although we also have rhetor, straight from the Greek). But –ics is unpredictable. Mathematics has –ician. Economics has not economicist but economist. Linguistics, likewise, has linguist, although curiously, the OED offers linguistician ('One who is versed in linguistics') as opposed to linguist ('One who is skilled in the use of languages', 'A student of language; a philologist', but not a student of linguistics). Athletics has athlete, and gymnastics gymnast. Georgics, of course, has nothing.

But hold on a moment; let's look at these groupings. Are we really to say that 'æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics' go together as 'matters of practice', as opposed to 'sciences'? Surely aesthetics and politics sit neatly next to ethics, just as economics fits next to linguistics. The streamlining of categories is beginning to look like a mess.

Still worse when we examine types of agents themselves. The politician is the man who practices politics, while the politicist—there are citations old and new in the OED—is the man who studies it. But the aesthetician, like the aestheticist, is the man who studies aesthetics; the practicer is the aesthete, which in turn goes formally with athlete. Metaphysics has been studied both by metaphysicians and, less recently, by metaphysicists. The criteria for –icist as against –ician appears bound neither to form nor to function. Rules collapse.

*

Before I began thinking about this in detail, ethicist stuck in my craw because its suffix seemed to give it a legitimacy as a technical discipline, like physicist and geneticist. But the whole point about ethics, to me, is that it is utterly lacking such an apparatus, despite the efforts of generations. To say 'I'm a physicist' is to identify not just your profession, but your body of knowledge—your scientia. But to say 'I'm an ethicist' is to identify only a profession: your body of knowledge can be no different to that of another. The very notion of an ethicist seemed, and I think still seems, incoherent to me: at best he could be reduced to a policy-maker, a jurist, a counsellor, or a bloviator. Hence the Wiki list of ethicists is really just a list of thinkers, or even more blandly, of people.

If we consult the OED on ethicist, we are in for a surprise. The first thing it says is '= ETHICIAN'. Indeed, ethician is attested earlier, from 1889, whereas ethicist appears only in 1891. French, by way of comparison, seems more comfortable with éthicien than with éthiciste, although the Trésor lists neither. Ethician seemed to fit better with aesthetician and metaphysician. We all have our ethics, our aesthetics and our metaphysics; none has validity as an objective scientia. And so one wants the morphology to reflect the conceptual agreement: one wants a stricter distinction between –icist and –ician.

But, damn it, there are mathematicians, physicians, technicians and all the rest. Language betrays me. It always does.

On Wimbledon

Today I found myself in the disconcerting position—disconcerting because, I think, historically unique—of being alone among my friends, with the exception of my wife, to take any interest in the sport. Normally, I'm the one who'd rather read a book than watch men in shorts. This will not surprise you. But the tennis, my god! Did you see it? They're saying it's the greatest tennis final ever. I haven't a clue about that, having watched comparatively little raquetry in my life. But there is no question it was a great match. I spent the last hour of it, with Nadal tossing away match-points like sweet-wrappers, in a state of increasing tension. Tennis is the ideal sport for the individualist: each match is like a scholastic disputatio, each drop and volley a stinging syllogism. You can see the whole of a match, weigh and measure every motion made. Give football, with its bluster of blues and reds, to those drunk on collective experience.

I was rooting for Federer; Lily, advocata diaboli, for 'The Spaniard', as the BBC commentators kept calling him. I was on the Swiss side for two reasons. The first, and more superficial, is that his game is so much the more beautiful. As Paul Weaver put it in the Guardian,

For the first two sets [which Nadal won] it rained on poets, and on aesthetes, stylists and all those with a keen sense of the refined.

Sure, Nadal had the power, accuracy and determination: but Federer was making his opponent do things I've never even seen. By the end of the fifth set, the dazzling Swiss sprezzatura had peeled off, finesse was out of the window, except of course for the continuing rattle of aces, and Federer, like Nadal, was human again. But my choice of side was founded on more than aesthetics. I wanted Federer to win because I need to believe that some things are fixed and permanent. I am uncomfortable with the Heraclitean flux of sporting rivalries. No, I want to witness a palace outlast its assailants, and I want to witness records broken, history. I want to be living in a historic age, an age of greatness, of six consecutive wins, not an age of decline, such as that proffered by all the front pages. Mine is a patriotism of time, not country. Nadal's victory was the announcement of inevitable decay, of death and rebirth, the hounds at the gate: all things must pass. What could be more humiliating?

Boomburbs

Four years ago, the English historian Tristram Hunt signed up as a visiting professor at Arizona State University, Phoenix. In Fall 2004 he taught an Urban History 598 with three other lecturers; the reading list is a delight, moving from modern urban analysts—Robert E. Lang, Kenneth Jackson and Dolores Hayden—to Walter Benjamin on Paris, and Asa Briggs on Victorian London. (Hunt did the London stuff, as one would expect from his book Building Jerusalem, published that year.) In February 2005, he wrote a longing missive back home to the Guardian, describing his new home with expressions like 'master-planned communities', 'the brave new world of exurbia', 'McMansions', 'big-box discount stores', 'boomburbs' and 'technoburbs'. He quotes David Brooks, the conservative pundit best known for coining the word 'bobo': in Phoenix 'there are no centres, no recognisable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. Only Brooks didn't write that; he wrote that in Phoenix 'there are no centers, no recognizable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. Such are the practices of the copy-editor. Hunt adds to the picture:

It is a polycentric universe where the rhythms of the day are oriented around drives to the shopping mall, housing subdivision, gym, church or work. There is no downtown or inner-city; few civic landmarks or historic signifiers. Through the highways of Phoenix's boomburbs, Walgreens follows Burger King follows Kmart [sic] follows Starbucks.

Hunt is horrified. No marks, no signs; just roads and commerce—call that a city? The force of his article is to implore the British government not to go down the same route. He notes, with equal horror, being a good New Labour boy, that it was places like Phoenix that handed the 2004 election to Bush, and also that these areas are the fastest-growing:

In a movement known as 'natalism', those decamping to the zoomburbs are choosing to buck the US birthrate by conscientiously raising large families.

Boomburbs? Zoomburbs? From where was this baroque language? At a guess, Phil VanderMeer or one of the other faculty introduced Hunt to Dolores Hayden's little 2004 bibelot, The Field Guide to Sprawl, in which she identifies a number of the classic features of American suburbia, and assigns them their latest pop-culture buzzwords. Here we get McMansions and big boxes, boomburbs and zoomburbs. A boomburb, according to Hayden, is 'a rapidly growing urban-sized place in the suburbs', and she quotes the original source of the term, a 2001 report by Robert Lang and Patrick Simmons for Fannie Mae: 'places with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities in their respective metropolitan areas and that have maintained double-digit rates of population growth in recent decades'. A zoomburb, she says, is a 'place growing even faster than a boomburb'. Technoburb is not here, but comes instead from Robert Fishman's 1987 study, Bourgeois Utopias: 'By technoburb I mean a peripheral zone, perhaps as large as a county, that has emerged as a viable socioeconomic unit.'

I think I like boomburb. It's a bit kitschy, for sure. But I've always found suburb to be unsatisfying as a trochee: sub- lacks punch as a stressed syllable. (Whereas suburbia is much more successful.) Boomburb rectifies suburb with good old-fashioned American moxie. (And boomburbia would be terrible.)


Two weeks ago Hunt wrote a piece for the Times on the current presidential election, contrasting the urban environments of Chicago (Obama) and Phoenix (McCain). Clearly, he is still reeling from the nightmare of the desert, and is fresh out of ideas. Thus, he resorts to self-plagiarism. He quotes David Brooks: in Phoenix 'there are no centres, no recognisable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. (Only Brooks didn't write that, etc.) Hunt adds:

It is a polycentric universe where the rhythms of the day are orientated around drives to the shopping mall, gym, church or work. In contrast to the great railway stations and art galleries of Chicago, there isn't much downtown or inner city; few civic landmarks or historic signifiers. Through Phoenix's boomburbs, Wallgreen's [sic] follows Burger King follows K-Mart follows Starbucks. I lived for a year in this exurban terrain of freeways and drive-thrus and at least once a week I would get lost trying to find my home through the sprawling, anonymous cityscape.

Does this sound familiar? He quotes the same Kerry statistics, the same figures from Steve Sailer, as he did three and a half years ago. He tells us again that 'those decamping to the zoomburbs are choosing to buck the US birthrate by consciously raising large families'. Only now he wants to say that Obama's got to watch out, and that whoever wins the presidency is going to have to court the vote of this conservative heartland, its natalist population pullulating and its myriad zoomburbs and strip-malls proliferating.

For all his love of metropolitan, liberal Chicago, it is grumpy old John McCain's Phoenix that represents the psephological future. And sooner or later, Mr Obama will have to join those tens of thousands of his Illinois compatriots swapping the icy winds of downtown Chicago for the sprawling embrace of metropolitan Phoenix, “Valley of the Sun”.

(He used the word 'psephological', or its variant, in his 2005 piece too. Hunt has an exquisitely small sesquipedalium.) This is interesting for a number of reasons. It is sort of a return to the climatic determinism beloved by Herder and his students in the nineteenth century. Back then, they said that Northern Europeans had a hard, harsh language, due to the cold, whereas Mediterraneans sang and danced gaily, with the rippling music of their Italian and Spanish, due to the heat. The heat, the sprawl—now that's the future. We are witnessing, again and again, and in anguish, the last half-hour of Annie Hall.

*

It is difficult for me not to feel some sympathy for Huntie. He and I are quite alike: young, handsome, bourgeois Londoners—his father went to my school, and for all I know he did too—who went to live in Phoenix for a year or three. I shared Hunt's horror of the low-rise and featureless monotony.

And Hunt is right to allude to the boomburbs and zoomburbs. All that not only applies to Phoenix, it comes from Phoenix. In 1984 Chris Leinberger wrote a planning document for the Phoenix region, advocating 'higher-density urban village clusters that mix high-rise offices, multifamily housing, and major retail stores.' In 1987 the Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau picked up on this term, 'urban village', and in 1991 he came out with his own version, the 'Edge City'. He describes its development across America:

First, we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization of America, especially after World War II. Then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism—our jobs—out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City.

In the chapter on Phoenix, he writes:

Phoenix is the first municipality in America to recognize formally, for planning purposes, that it is made up of a constellation of Edge Cities, locally referred to as "urban villages." It is logical that Phoenix came to this conclusion early. The urban village referred to as "downtown" historically never amounted to much. As recently as World War II it was the trade and government center for a rural area that did not add up to more than 185,000 people. Even as the Phoenix area erupted to an urban population of two million, downtown did not become grand. Two other cores with better parking and fewer derelicts grew larger. One was the area north, along Central Avenue, called "uptown." The other was the posh area along Camelback Avenue near the Frank Lloyd Wright-styled Arizona Biltmore. In fact, compared with older, Eastern metros, there is no sharp distinction between downtown Phoenix and those other centers. They all look and function like Edge Cities.

Garreau also discusses in this chapter another insidious feature of the Edge City, namely the 'shadow governments', powerful but unaccountable—homeowners' associations and the Salt River Project. Garreau concludes that the Edge City, which congeals out of sprawl, is actually a return to urban density, albeit in disparate pockets. As a description of a new urban pattern, the book was a hit. But not everyone was convinced.

One such person was Robert Lang, who helped to define 'boomburb' in 2001. In 2003 he published his book Edgeless Cities, arguing that most of the suburbia and exurbia around metropolitan cores was still low-density—an 'edgeless city' with no clear borders. He classified various important American cities by their distributions of office-space, citing Chicago as an example of a core-dominated, low-sprawl city, and Miami as high-sprawl, a continuous edgeless city. Phoenix, mysteriously, is left off the table.

But in 2007, Lang's Boomburbs, co-published with Jennifer LeFurgy, brought Phoenix right back onto the map. Here we find a thrilling list of failed buzzwords for the new, barely-classifiable suburban developments: anticity, city à la carte, disurb, outtown, penturbia, rururbia, servurb, slurb, stealth city, and my own favourite, net of mixed beads. But of Phoenix:

It is ironic that there are so few edge cities in Phoenix, considering that this is the region where the edge city concept began. . . While downtown Phoenix has a small office space market for such a big city, its buildings are much taller and larger (at an average 155,104 square feet) than the area's boomburb offices (with an average of 51,531 square feet). In fact, downtown Phoenix's offices are almost three times the size of those in Scottsdale, the boomburb with the largest average building size.

Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert are thus boomburbs; however, they are not high-density 'edge cities', as Garreau thought—he labelled Scottsdale as an edge city, Tempe and Mesa-Chandler as 'emerging' edge cities—but more akin to the edgeless, low-density sprawl characterised in Lang's earlier book. Mesa, in fact, would probably qualify as a zoomburb, as it is the biggest boomburb in the country, having outgrown Minneapolis and St. Louis. (Wiki counts it the 37th largest city in America.) And yet it has 'no centres, no recognisable borders'. As Hunt experienced, and as I did, you can drive straight from Tempe to Mesa without noticing any hiatus.

The boomburb—or boomburg, as it is delightfully typoed in an even more recent article—is big business, and it is specifically a feature of the West, or rather the Sun Belt stretching from California to Florida. Lang explains the phenomenon in terms of free, unincorporated land, and the problems of water regulation, as with the Salt River Project in Phoenix: 'Big incorporated cities are better positioned by buy water rights, providing an incentive for suburbs to join a large incorporated city.' And the sprawl of boomburgs between two cities leads to linear 'corridors', such as the Sun Corridor between Phoenix and Tucson. (Michael Crow, my old whipping-boy, drools vacuously about this here.)

So Hunt has applied the right label to Phoenix. And his British readership will be justified in its inevitable recoil from the image he paints. Garreau, despite his own intense dislike of the new suburbia, is forced to admit its massive appeal to the American man. He quotes Jack Linville:

In Paris, you've got roughly six million people living on maybe a hundred square miles, an area that would fit inside Loop 610 here. We have about 200,000 living inside that area. . .

The people in the United States are not going to live the way the people in Paris live. They will not live in a thousand-square-foot apartment and raise a family and go out and get the loaf of bread and the jug of wine and walk down the street and live their whole lives within one square mile. That is not the way Americans live. They have a different level of freedom, a different level of expectations. There's still a lot of Daniel Boone left in America. I don't know what the people in Paris want. But what they have is a very very small amount of space that is theirs, and a lot of public amenities. What we have is a huge amount of space that is ours and that we control, and very little in public amenities. We have much more individual life styles.

London, of course, could easily stand in for Paris. To Hunt, to me, this is awful. To Linville and David Brooks, it is wonderful. My wife, used to the authentic, old-fashioned suburbia of Fairfax, Virginia—with its archetypal Edge City of Tysons Corner—often remarks on the lack of space in our flat in Hornsey. (Hunt, incidentally, lives in our borough.) But that's what you give up when you want, no, need, to live on an organic, pedestrian-based street-plan like this:


Rather than a hierarchical, motor-based plan like this in Mesa:


Space is what you give up when you need to shop at corner-stores, or at worst High Street chains accessible by foot and public transport, rather than at giant Walmarts accessible only by car. The idea of these 'individual life styles'—and Hunt echoes this in his conception of Phoenix as 'profoundly individualistic terrain'—is frankly meaningless to me. Brooks has a similar fantasy that centrifugal movement to the suburbs and boomburbs represents a great, imaginative leap into the unknown, and that all the glittering consumerist attractions—the 'ampersand magazines', the faith healers, the mediaevalist or faux Wild West community names, the theme restaurants—are evidence that in America, 'material things are shot through with enchantment'. Nothing could be further from the individualist. Everywhere, the imagination is pre-packaged.

At the end of his Building Jerusalem—I read the chapter on Victorian London, and found lots of nice quotes but learnt very little about Victorian London—Hunt cries: 'Vibrant, living cities depend crucially upon people residing in their centres. The challenge for the former Victorian cities is to ensure that when singles become couples and have children they do not instinctively fly to the suburbs.' This was written before he went and saw for himself what happens when people instinctively fly to the suburbs: 'suburb' becomes inadequate to describe the result. At least, not in the sense that Hornsey is a suburb.

*

But Hunt, at least, can stop worrying about the forthcoming election, or so it seems. Despite being an urbanist, and despite having perused the glossy photos of Hayden's Field Guide, he still has a shallow notion of voting demographics.

Rather than parrot statistics already three years out of date, he should have attended Robert Lang's May 21 lecture in Paris on US voting trends. Or at least, like myself, looked at the online powerpoint. Lang examined the 2002 and 2006 mid-terms, and found a different story from Hunt's. He discovered that the 'megapolitans'—the huge cities composed of edged and edgeless boomburbs—were swinging Democrat. The denser a suburb became, and the more Hispanic, the more liberal its voter. Even in 2004, Bush's victories were narrowest in the fastest-growing boomburbs: Riverside, Dallas, and Phoenix. Lang told me by email that the 'booming states' of Virginia, Nevada and Colorado are 'turning Democratic as they grow'. Arizona itself would turn, he thought, if it weren't McCain's home turf. What Hunt fails to realise is that although the Republican territories are growing, their variety of growth is changing their political orientation. We'll have to wait and see what happens in November.

Languagey odds and ends

Earlier English had a fair number of words with short vowel in the context [f_____k]; cf. (38). Except for the well-known taboo word (not listed in (38)), none of these have survived as independent words, presumably in large measure because they sounded too similar to the tabooed word. Dates given in parentheses refer to the last attestation of given items.

(38)

fuk (a sail) (1529)
fac 'factotum' (1841)
feck 'effect, efficiency' (1887) (now only 'Scots Engl.' feckless)
fack/feck (one of the stomachs of a ruminant) (1887)
feck(s)/fack(s) '(in) faith, (in) fact' (1891)

— Hans Hock, Principles of Historical Lingustics (1991). Striking, the lengths to which even such a recent scholar will go to avoid a taboo word.

ΕΧΠΛΗΚΗΘ ΛΗΒΕΡ XV
ΑΜΑΛ
ΦΕΛΗΚΗΘΕΡ ΔΩ ΓΡΑ
ΒΕΡΤΟC
ΚΗΑC ΑΜΕΝ ΦΗΝΗΘ
ΜΕ ΦΕ ΚΗΘ
ΦΗΝΙC ΙCΘΑ ΓΑΟΔΙ
ΟΜ ΜΑΓΝΟΜ Ε

— From Chartres MS 152, St Augustine De Trinitate, 10th-century: a Latin explicit in Greek characters. Transliterated: Ekhplēkēth Lēber XV / Amal / Phelēkēther Dō Gra / Bertos / Kēas Amen Phēnēth / Me Phe Kēth / Phēnis Istha Gaodi / Om Magnom E. In Latin: Explicit [note that Latin 'x' has been wrongly written with a chi] Liber XV Feliciter D[e]o Gracias Amen Finit / Amalbertus Me Fecit / Finis Ista Gaudium Magnum E[st].

Talking of bad Latin, a recent Hollywood blockbuster has been advertised with a poster of its leading lady, her arm bearing the tattooed words 'TENEO VESTRI VOX'. This is ungrammatical and meaningless. And so assorted internetizens plug away in vain. I couldn't help but wonder if the phrase was chosen specially for its meaninglessness: as I put it to Steve, 'Get them talking and arguing—they'll never stop, because it doesn't mean anything to begin with.' A bizarre method of viral marketing?

(Two new Continental words, both usable in English. French abracadabrant, 'preposterous', and German Urdummheit, 'primordial stupidity'.)

Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice, seeking (to use the proverb of Cervantes), 'for better bread than is made of wheat', but is a mere necessity of the unresting intellect.

— Thomas de Quincey, 'Language', date uncertain.

nigri manus ossea Mauri
et cui per mediam nolis occurrere noctem,
clivosae veheris dum per monumenta Latinae

The bony hand of a blackamoor
Whom you'd not want to meet in the middle of the night
As you drove past the monuments on the hilly Latin Way

— Juvenal. The ancestor of our 'Wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley'?

Lutus Lutetiae

Squit, squit, squit, all weekend. Ten times a day, or more. It was horrible. Must have been something I ate—bad salmon or prawns, maybe. At least I could read as I squote, a small consolation. Other consolations were denied me. Normally in this condition, one's cul is easily torché, so wet and dilute is the dung. But this time—oh! I had a rich macerate umber paint with every swab. This morning the smell of a regular session was enough to put me off my imminent pain au chocolat. My arse, in fact, was itself like a huge pain au chocolat, after a minute in the microwave. (Georges Perec taught Harry Mathews the expression, avoir le pain d'épice au bord des lèvres.) I clench; I suffer.

Dali, in his Passions, which I purchased last week at a bouquiniste opposite the Île de la Cité—a worthy addition to my burgeoning collection of Daliana—tells the story of the Caca Dauphin. 'In the presence of dignitaries and the best artists of the realm, the divine child freed his bowels. There were collected coppers, ochres, greens, browns, and the Court was clothed in the colours of the Dauphin-poop. I know nothing at once more traditional and more subversive, nothing more legitimate and more scandalous, nothing more nobly alive.' Dali, of course, loves shit, scybales, sir-reverence, ordure. And he adores the thick palette of Moreau (detail, right): 'Gustave Moreau, the most glorious of erotic and scatalogical painters, pursued only one aim, but that fanatically: to make gold appear at the end of his brush. It is with excremental colours, ochres, burnt umbers, that a good artist succeeds in suggesting the matter of gold. Gold, as with Moreau, is born of the shadows, of the abysses of dark matter, and this is why our civilization, lacking grandeur, is that of fresh, gay colours—that is to say, inhuman and indivine. See America.' Moreau's hues are, as Dali puts it, antibonbons.

I did not visit the Musée Moreau. I meant to. But I wound up beat from all the skiting. I barely got to the Louvre without passing out from the sun and the din of tourists not even trying to parlay frongsay. But I did get to the Louvre. It was a necessity. Unfortunately I was really only there to see the Italian Renaissance, and that meant wading through all the run-off from the Gioconda. It was all creaking floorboards and Ah, Botticelli! Oh, Giotto! More interested in the name-plates than the paintings. March swiftly through the Tuscan Trecento—'don't like this stuff'—Raphael, check; Titian, check. Snap snap snap at the Veronese Cana. Peer appreciatively at the speck of the Leonardo. 'It's a self-portrait, you know.' For some reason they didn't want to flow out the back of the room to see the Ingres Roger and the rest of the famous French rubbish. So I was stuck with them.

Clearly, the Trecento was the room for the Moreauiste. The Trecento is the excremental century par excellence, with its defecund gold and ochre, the superb and unromantic brutality of its figuration. Who can fail to enjoy the Master of the Rebel Angels with his tumbling nasties—


What image could be more stercorine? Let us allegorize the fall of Lucifer and his infernal host as an expulsion of congurgitated matter from the white celestial vaults of the buttocks. Likewise, we discover Christ recast as a dung-beetle, with a stylised carapace for a chest, wrapped in a torchecul, and mounted on iconic gold, a classic Catholic gilt complex:


Dali says of Catalonia: 'The passion of God, of gold, and an erotics of non-consummation go together in the mystical soul of my country.' But it is not only Catalonia, as this Tuscan crucifix testifies. No wonder all the American tourists, accustomed to their deodorised, puritanical pastels and primaries, fresh and gay, walk right past this stuff, their glazed bored eyes hiding an unconscious dread. The Trecento room also contains Quattrocento primitives, including a very fine little Sano di Pietro predella with a St. Jerome comic-strip.


We are in the same world as the St. Anthony I wrote about here: a St. Anthony tempted by gold, mysteriously vanished, or metamorphosed into the brown landscape. Here Jerome has cast off his cardinal's hat, to reveal the aureate radiance of a halo, among trees studded with gold; his excrement has been transformed into vipers and scorpions. The vermilion towns sketched in each top corner are gorgeously charming, aren't they?

*

Oh, enough of shit. I've had enough, believe me. My wife, as always so pharmaceutically astute, has just given me a couple of Imodium tablets, chewable, mint-flavoured, and literally nauseating. I don't think they have taken effect yet. I continue to suffer.

Strangely, there are some marvelous paintings in the Louvre of a wholly inexcremental nature. In the long corridor of Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento proper, it is Mantegna who really holds my interest, as he generally does. For instance, look at his astonishing treatment of marble as a decorative element in the magnificent Virgin of Victory (1496):


And contrast this, in terms of technical skill, to the treatment of marble by an earlier generation, for instance Castagno's very fine Last Supper of 1447:


In 1497-1505, Isabella d'Este commissioned a number of matching works for her first studiolo in the Castello di San Giorgio; Mantegna painted the first two, Perugino the third, and Lorenzo Costa the last two. Mantegna, again, creams the competition. In my post on Quattrocento painting, I showed a mysterious cipher-text from a 1453 manuscript attributed to Mantegna; and here, fifty years later, the old bastard is at it again. A long scroll is entwined around a dryad-like figure to the far left: the topmost involution has some Latin, but below it are two visible faces containing nonsense-scripts of a Voynich variety, the second rather resembling (but not, in fact, being, at least not entirely) square Hebrew forms.



This thrill of obscurity recurs on the Paris streets, in a very rare moment of mystery. Just south of the Seine, at the entrance to the Jussieu campus, currently under re-construction, one finds high thin twin walls of graffiti, or possibly art of a strange urban sort, utterly illegible and incomprehensible:


Greg Afinogenov, a jolly nice chap and fellow blogger whom I met over beer near the Bastille last week, thinks Paris a dead city, replete with bobos and lacking all remnants of authenticity. I am inclined to agree. The city fills me with a slight horror, and yet I can't put my finger on quite why. Perhaps it is the visual monotony, or else the surfeit of grand architectural statements begging to be photographed, just like the Gioconda. Paris hardly allows you to find out for yourself. Everywhere is known, or not worth knowing. In London, the most known is also ripe with opportunities for new knowledge. Walk down Tottenham Court Road, looking not at the electronics stores but at the rooftops. At Buckingham Palace, walk around the corner to Lugsmoor Lane and the back streets of Pall Mall. Head north off Oxford Street and stroll down pre-Regency ways still intact. But Paris is without respite: it retains the totalitarian aesthetic of Haussmann. Consequently, its only successes are in the monumental, and for me, only in the modern monumental, or in other words, the monumental not betrayed by endless ornamentation. Thus the crystal city of Les Halles:


Or the oppressive and hieratic interior of the Bibliothèque Nationale (the reason for my visit), which a friend of mine rightly compared to Karnak:


But very little of the quiet succeeds in this city. We read about, and so desire to retrouver for ourselves, the quiet and cloistral streets of Maldoror, of Eugène Sue, of the Surrealists. This is why I took, to read on the train, the Williams translation of Soupault's Last Nights of Paris. But it is no good; and even Soupault is dull in the light of day. Dali writes: 'My entire mental life is made up of the recording of visions, with a view to total orgasmic superposition. There is a stretch of the Rue de Rivoli that I find sublime, from the Hôtel Meurice to the Place Vendôme. And, well, I always make it 'come out' at the last moment.' But I ask you: is this, said stretch now, sublime?—


When I at last return home to my wife, only the second woman to whom I have ever remotely mattered, cut off from telephone or internet contact for six painful days, and two of raw squitting, the relief on both sides is palpable.

Monday cat blogging

Aubrey is a discerning little catlet. When he's not chasing shadows or gnawing up Lily's finger, he goes for my books. And his favourites, evidently, are Joyce and Rabelais. I regularly find my 1946 Cape Portrait, and my Pléiade Oeuvres—he scorns translations—tossed out on the floor. Not for Aubrey the Lewis or Stein sharing shelf-space with Joyce, nor the Walküre zu zwei Händen score, or back-issues of the JWCI, next to Rabelais. Who could have expected such fine literary taste in a beast not yet old enough to read?

Rabelais would not have approved. He was evidently no great lover of cats, for neither of the two felines in his work are very attractive. The first of these, and the more famous, is Raminagrobis, an old poet who fobs Panurge off with some silly verses. Sainéan deciphers the name for us:

The name antedates Rabelais. One finds it first, with its primary meaning of 'tomcat', in a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the Mazarin Library: we see here two superb pen-drawn cats with the legend, Raminagrobis. . . This name, like its root grobis, is in fact the vulgar or provincial label for a male cat, and means literally a cat who has arched his back [fait le gros dos], or a cat who purrs, from raminer, to murmur with satisfaction, when speaking of a cat.

The other cat is the monstrous Rodilard, who makes Panurge conskite himself with fear. Rodilard, according to Sainéan, is properly ronge-lard (gnaw-lard). Both of these cats reappear in La Fontaine. As Sainéan points out, cats are also associated with furcollared lawyers as the chats fourrés (punning on chaffouré, a bit of argot for 'bruised, blotted')—the animal, being 'at once cruel and greedy', becomes a token for 'hypocritical and presumptuous magistrates'.

Joyce, likewise, was probably aware of the cat's demonic nature when he sent the beast headfirst into the devil's arms, in his children's fable, The Cat and the Devil. But in Ulysses another moggy excites Bloom's sympathies:

The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!

—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.

—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

In The Apes of God (1930), which reads as a pastiche of the marmoreal prose of Ulysses, Lewis would choose a cat as his very first image:

A cat like a beadle goose-stepped with eerie convulsions out of the night cast by a cluster of statuary, from the recesses of the entrance hall. A maid with matchless decorum left a door silently, she removed a massive copper candlestick. She reintegrated the gloom that the cat had left. The cat returned, with the state of a sacred dependent, into the gloom.

For a modernist there is something beautiful in the désinvolture of a cat: it is to be matched with a désinvolte prose, careful and steady. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, and so on. Myself, I find little to admire about Aubrey's grace and poise, little of the Ulyssean prose. He has a tendency to tumble inflexibly from furnitures, scratching or tearing the surface as he slips. His claws got two damned holes in my Portrait, the bastard! God help him if he does any damage to my 1946 Random House Ulysses—the prettiest edition of the masterpiece, at least for those of us who can't afford this.

*

"Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it." — Darconville's Cat (1983).

Alexander Theroux is looking on with amusement from the next shelf. Theroux, you see, was an aelurophile like his bellamy Edward Gorey, and would no doubt have approved of Aubrey's antics, as he would have approved the heteroclite but authentic orthography of aelurophile. Theroux is heir to the marmoreal proses of Joyce and Lewis, and to the bare erudition of Rabelais. He is an aspiring DWEM (not long to go now), and is therefore unlikely to feature on any trendy freshman reading-lists.

Spellvexit, the cat in Darconville's Cat—Theroux's Ulysses—is, on the face of it, a minor presence. He is a token, an opportunity for a few passages of désinvolte prose in the key of Theroux's modernist masters. We meet him early:

Darconville's cat leaped onto the windowsill and peered up, as if calculating the thoughts of his master: where were they? How had they come to be here? What reason, in fact, had they to be in this strange place?

Spellvexit continues to be associated with Darconville's thoughts. Isabel, the hero's love and trahiseuse, watches his house at night:

All are not abed that have ill rest, and one of them, lacking most because longing most, begins to pace out notions. Of these notions one lodges itself finally in her mind with cautious exactitude as the very thing indicated by the occasion. It's a cat's walk, a little way up and back. Then it's not a cat's walk. The figure is gone.

That second sentence—read it again. Theroux never wastes words. So why the pleonasm of 'cautious exactitude', why the apparently clumsy 'thing indicated by the occasion'? We want to see, and so will see: cautious exactitude, the thing indicated. The cat, which is there and is not, announces itself in the text, as a prelude to its actual half-appearance. Elsewhere he affords moments of quiet and elegant, semiperceptible musical comedy:

Darconville quickly rolled up and forward, bouncing Spellvexit in a high bumbershot from the top of his chest into a hollow of the blanket where he lay low and pouched for safety. A little vimbat of a face slowly appeared, with whiskers twitching. "Swowns!" squeaked the cat, who'd been brought up better than that.

Nobody alive writes like this. I have no idea what 'vimbat' means, and neither do any of the resources I've checked. It sounds right. Bumbershot is a portmanteau of bumbershoot, 'umbrella'—describing the cat's arc—and bumble, shot. Swowns reinterprets the core vowel of Mkgnao to suggest swounds, ie. 'God's wounds'. This is clever writing: but its words sing for themselves, and so can be enjoyed without interrogating a lexicon.

John Leonard, in the first and more complimentary review of the novel offered by the New York Times (the other is here), remarks: 'Perhaps you were wondering about that cat. That cat is art, vision, the erotic, Jesus, jealousy, memory, conscience and everything else that is silent and black and vanishes'. The cat, indeed, vanishes, out of his owner's hands in the courtyard of Adams House, Cambridge, MA: 'A cat never says goodbye. It just walks away.' But is Leonard right: is the cat of Darconville's Cat less a cat than a multivalent Symbol? On one level the cat serves to defuse romantic gestures:

Spellvexit, who despised philosophy, showed an utter disregard for Darconville's neautontimoroumenotic pain and preferred to stay outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over.

The rhythm of the prose says it all: 'stay outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over' is the classic riposte to the ausserweltlich Greek coinage that it follows. The coinage itself is a mistake. It should be heautontimoroumenotic, from Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos, 'The Self-Tormentor'. Shall we attribute the error to a printer, a copy-editor—or to Theroux himself? It seems to matter little. The cat is also, at times, highly symbolish. In the second chapter we are told:

At six, [Darconville] won the school ribbon for a drawing of the face of God—it resembled a cat's—and illustrated a juvenile book of his own dramatic making which ended: "But wait, there is something coming toward me—!"

While at the end of the antepenultimate chapter, as Darconville reaches his death in a Venetian palazzo near the Corte del Gatto:

Groping blindly, he made a motion with his hands as if something were coming towards him and stumbling forward, just before he fell, reached up in a last fatal moment of blindness to cry out inexplicably and desperately and loud, "My cat! My cat!"

Then something came towards him at last.

So here the cat is definitely a Cat: God, Death, the Nameless, whatever. Thus Theroux's title can salvage its claim to high literary dignity.

*

But all this is getting ahead of myself, isn't it? You don't want to read a thesis on 'The Portrayal of the Cat in Theroux's Darconville's Cat', surely one of those awful and imaginary monographs, 'of which necessity was hardly the mother', that Theroux awards to the mediocrities of a Southern university faculty:

"English Nose Literature"; Stephen Duck: More Rhyme Than Reason; "The American Disgrace: Overabuse of the Verb 'To Get'"; "Fundavit Stones in Crozet, Va."; Much Ado About Mothing; "The Psychopathological Connection Between Liquid Natural Gas and Agraphia"; The Story of Windmill Technology; "The Significance of Head Motions in Peking Ducks"; "Infusions as Drinks"; "Abraham Lincoln, Quadroon?"

No, you want to know what the book is actually like, and why Theroux's erudition is more worthwhile than Eco's. The simple answer is that it is more varied: it is a tool which is put to use, although it can be enjoyed for its own sake. Compare the above passage, for instance, to Eco's reuse of imaginary titles (De optimitate triparum) from Rabelais. Theroux knows that it is better to invent in a traditional style than simply to steal outright. And unlike Eco, he is not afraid of bad or pretend erudition when it suits him. For instance:

"Elbow room," repeated Prof. Wratschewe, interlacing his fingers. "Do you realize, Miz McAwaddle, that Shakespeare was the first person ever to use that expression?"

Mrs. McAwaddle was utterly adsorbed.

This joke is written for the connoisseur. Not only is Shakespeare (King John 5.7) not the first attestation of 'elbow room'—the OED offers a 1540 quotation and, uncharacteristically, ignores Shakespeare—but even if he were, we know that the first written attestation is rarely going to be the first actual use. The punchline is the killer, and it too plays with the truth. 'Adsorption' is the 'process by which specific gases, liquids or substances in solution adhere to the exposed surfaces of materials, usually solids, with which they are in contact'. But here the word is obviously used as a dry, easily-missed antonym of 'absorbed'. It has the decided ring of an off-the-cuff folk coinage, like pointful. The fact that Theroux, who knows his dictionary back to front, feels free to invent, and invents well, is what marks him out from the Ecos of literature. He is a master of, not a slave to, his (linguistic) erudition. To bring home the point, here is another snatch of the wretched Wratschewe in action:

"Potato," observed Prof. Wratschewe, graciously bowing a cup of punch to his colleague. "Did you ever stop to think that if 'gh' stood for 'p' as in 'hiccough'; 'ough' for 'o' as in 'dough'; 'phth' for 't' as in 'phthisis'; 'eigh' for 'a' as in 'neighbor'; 'tte' for 't' as in 'gazette'; and 'eau' for 'o' as in 'beau'—he snapped out his ball-point and scribbled on a flattened cup—"then the correct spelling of potato would be ghoughphtheightteeau?" He looked up smiling. But Mrs. McAwaddle was already on the other side of the room.

This is erudite in the broad sense that its force derives from its reference, although that reference is not high but popular. Theroux is playing on the well-known 'ghoti' joke, but prodding it, reshaping it, seeing what he can do with the material. Again, he is in control, but having fun. It rather reminds me of the scene in Nabokov's Ada where the protagonists work out the highest-possible scoring word in Russian Scrabble ('TORFYaNUYu').

So Theroux can be funny with low-level popular reference. He can do high as well: sometimes subtle, sometimes aggressive. Here's a bit of subtle: Darconville stumbles on a classroom of six narcoleptics snoozing to a lecture by one 'Floyce R. Fulwider':

This [tap] is a pot-walloper of the Flemish rubricator who called himself Pieter De Hooch, the grandfather of American gin. You may or may not be disheartened to know that he wanted nothing heroic [tap] in his art. His dry, domestic, explicit-as-arithmetic masterpukes [tap] tend nevertheless to narrative. Now let us look at this bit of scrumpy [tap]: Courtyard of a Dutch House.

Stylistically, Theroux is making subtle allusion to an early section from Finnegans Wake ('Floyce' is suggestive, isn't it?), in which the reader is shown around a 'museyroom' (museum): 'This is a Prooshious gunn. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleumhat. This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape. Tip. This is the three lipoleum boyne grouching down in the living detch.' (And so on: it goes on for a bit.) Now, I could be completely imagining the Joyce in the Theroux: but there is a fine, or possibly non-existent, line between exegesis and projection. It is always a danger. Darconville's Cat is full of tantalising suggestions like this, dreams and plays on earlier works.

There are plenty of more forthright displays of learning in the novel. Perhaps the most spectacular example is chapter 68, which consists solely of nine pages, listing misogynist books and parts of books end to end, from 'Burton on Infidelity' to 'The Eroticon of Paul the Silentiary'. When I first read through this list, several years ago, I took copious notes and hunted down some of the items, such as John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and Aretino's Ragionamenti. It's the idea, more than the execution: the idea that an entire personality or character can be formed by an accumulation of texts, especially if chosen laterally. I thought this was wonderful. Darconville's Cat manages to combine a linguistic and literary playfulness with a genuine gravitas: Theroux is not afraid to confront the obsessive, either in love or in erudition, and so he is not betrayed, as Eco always is, by a failure of nerve. He remains, in this respect, engagé.

*

At least, he is engagé in Darconville's Cat. I have read only the first chapter—available online—of his latest book, Laura Warholic, but it is enough to put me off the rest of the novel. The writing is, frankly, embarrassing. I don't know what has happened in the intervening 26 years to take the edge off Theroux's pen; but I disliked this from the very first words.

DC prefaced each chapter with an epigraph, which was fine, because the passages were quirky and well-chosen. Laura begins with five epigraphs, from R. Buckminster Fuller, Anne Carson, Kafka, Eluard and Stephen Crane. The Eluard is a cliché, and the Bucky is Bucky cliché: at least, it feels superficial, and present only for the impact of contrast. At any rate, putting five disparate epigraphs at the beginning of your novel is trying too hard. It lacks wit. Lacking wit, also, is the first chapter title: 'Womanifesto'. This is woefully inelegant as a portmanteau: the rhythm is all wrong, the sort of thing you'd find in an MA dissertation from UC Irvine. Lacking wit, also, are the first two sentences: 'One lover is always murdered in the act of love. A man poetically "dies"—Elizabethan slang for orgasm—at the moment of crisis.' This, from an ex-Trappist classicist? It is insultingly hackneyed. The fact that it is presented as the writing of the novel's protagonist, a sex columnist, does nothing to mitigate the squirm. I am only asking, in the final detente of coupledom, who survives and why? This is a poor rendition of Norman Mailer doing Carrie Bradshaw for Playboy. It is certainly not what I signed up for.

In the first narrated paragraph, we are offered a bit of ekphrasis:

He glanced out of his office window to a sky the color of pewter. It was the kind of late September afternoon, dark and rainy, smelling of fog and old quilts, that reminded him he lived in a seaside city.

Contrast this to the opening of Darconville's Cat, chapter 2:

SEPTEMBER: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret. The shutters were open. Darconville stared out into a small empty street, touched with autumnal fog, that looked like the lugubrious frontispiece to a book as yet to be read.

The latter passage is descriptive but oblique, evocative without being too sentimental: the zeugma of 'swallows and regret', and the 'lugubrious frontispiece', have just the right light touch of surrealism. The former passage, from Laura Warholic, is autopilot: nothing more.

The chapter continues at the same miserable level. The onomastic fantasias of the earlier book ('Hypsipyle Poore', 'Xystine Chapelle', and so on) have been replaced by leaden caricatures crying out for profundity, notably in the hero's name of 'Eugene Eyestones'. There are issues, such as racism, indelicately broached. And there are terrible, terrible sentences like 'Staring in at her face, pure and meltingly lovely, he wondered was E. M. Cioran correct when observing, "The hermits of the first centuries of Christianity were saints at grips with the dearest of all their possessions: their temptations"?'—or 'What lines of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa had he once written down and kept under his helmet?', preceding some Pessoa lines. Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa?? Never show thy face again, Theroux!

ergo hoc melius

I was planning, and am still half-planning, to write a post on Alexander Theroux this week. But then my doctoral work got interesting again, and I am wrestling to finish the first chapter of my thesis, which already amounts to a quarter of the whole, just about. For the moment, then, I leave you this to chew on.

*

Here's what happened. Last Friday, an anonymous man living in New York—let's call him X—was looking at Wikipedia's page on Alphonse Toussenel. From here he navigated to my translation of Toussenel on mole-rats, and from there, began exploring other Varieties. He alighted on 'Surrealissimo', my post about Salvador Dali and André Breton, where he left an outraged comment, under the moniker 'A. Toussenel', suggesting that I rename this venue 'The Onanarium'. (Not a bad name, in some respects.) The next day he returned, despite his outrage, and commented on my post 'Prescriptivism', this time a little more ambivalent with regards to my opinions. He concluded:

At the end of the day, descriptivism, to me, is merely another manifestation of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. It reflects a frantic race to the bottom, a form of the disease of neophilia; or, to put it another way, of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.

I replied to some of X's points, but ignored his conclusion. Now, in this post I had cited a piece at Language Log, 'Evil', as an example of that site's approach to prescriptivism. X read this piece, and explored that site for a while, but was evidently dissatisfied, because he sent a private communiqué to its author, Mark Liberman, this time under the soubriquet 'Kevin S.', and concluding:

At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. Emily Bender's remarks, as quoted in your post of 10/28/06, offer a typically tedious, humorless, and self-righteous example of this type of morality. Descriptivism, like most such ideologies, merely reflects the values and tendencies of the society it serves. In this case, those tendencies are a frantic race to the intellectual bottom, where language and the Humanities are concerned; a perversion of the concept of democracy; a mutation of the virus neophilia; and a telling instance of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.

Liberman, being the sort of man he is, blogged this and demolished its reasoning, including in his new post a rather dull attack on Nietzsche for racism and bad etymology. Language Hat was intrigued by the affair, and posted on it in turn, commenting at the end of his piece:

Personal to "Kevin": if neophilia were a virus name, it would not be italicized according to AMA style, and "Humanities" should not be capitalized and your Latin is ungrammatical and says the opposite of what you want it to say.

Mr. Hat was picking nits. I picked them back in the comments, with no desire to defend X from Liberman's substantive mauling. The Latin is fine, I observed: 'hoc' ['hōc'] is the ablative of comparison, and the entire phrase means 'After this, therefore better than this'. Later:

I might add, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, that it makes rhetorical sense to italicise 'neophilia' both as a non-naturalised word and for speaker-emphasis, regardless of AMA conventions; and even the capitalisation of 'Humanities' serves the purpose of ironic hypostasis. I appreciate that LH and his readers may not like "Kevin's" sentiments, but these stylistic and linguistic nitpicks are simply not very forceful.

I was also curious about the origins of 'post hoc, ergo hoc melius'. Google turned up nothing, until I put the apodosis into its more expected order, 'post hoc, ergo melius hoc'—compare the phrase upon which it is based, 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc'. Now I turned up these:

Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801-1877) avait coutume de définir par une maxime latine: post hoc, ergo melius hoc. Ce qui vient après est toujours meilleur que ce qui précède.

— 'Concours d’entrée ENS Cachan 2006' [doc]

Il s'agit là bien sûr d'un sophisme, d'un sophisme ordinaire constitutif de la mentalité proprement moderne, dont Louis Weber [Le Rythme du progrès, pp. 22-24], en 1913, a donné la formule: "Post hoc, ergo melius hoc"—"Après cela, donc mieux (ou meilleur) que cela".

— Pierre-André Taguieff, 'L'idée de progrès' [pdf] (2002).

Thus, in all likelihood the most bloglike piece I have ever written.

[Update: James Ashley comments.]

Yet the sea is not full

In my youthful days, I never entered a great library, suppose of one hundred thousand volumes, but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind—not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes, on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to the books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some pleasure and instruction; and before I have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive, in all likelihood I shall be summoned away.

Furthermore, I had myself ascertained that to read a duodecimo volume, in prose, of four hundred pages—all skipping being barred, and the rapid reading which belongs to the vulgar interest of a novel—was a very sufficient work for one day. Consequently, three hundred and sixty-five per annum—that is (with a very small allowance for the claims of life on one's own account and that of one's friends), one thousand for every triennium; that is, ten thousand for thirty years—will be as much as a man who lives for that only can hope to accomplish. From the age of twenty to eighty, therefore—if a man were so unhappy as to live to eighty—the utmost he could hope to travel through would be twenty thousand volumes,—a number not, perhaps, above five per cent* of what the mere current literature of Europe would accumulate in that period of years. Now, from this amount of twenty thousand make a deduction on account of books of larger size, books to be studied and books to be read slowly and many times over (as all works in which the composition is a principal part of their pretensions)—allow a fair discount for such deductions, and the twenty thousand will perhaps shrink to eight or five thousand.

— Thomas de Quincey, 'On Languages' (1823)


* De Quincey estimates that 20,000 is 5% of the number of books published in Europe during a period of sixty years. In other words, in 60 years, there would be 400,000 new books: a rate of 6,667 per year. In 2007, according to theBookseller.com, 115,420 new books were published in the UK, and a projected 276,649 in the US—not including print-on-demand. Thus, at the current rate of publishing, and at De Quincey's pessimistic final figure of 5,000 books really possible to read in a lifetime, a Briton like myself can estimate his total accomplishment as 0.000722% of the number published at home during his adult life—possibly about the percentage of those books worth reading. But what chance freedom now?

The Tourist

On the rôle of erudition in literature.

Umberto Eco, Baudolino (2000)

It is easy to be erudite. All you need is a moderate intelligence, and the time and desire to hunt. For this reason, erudition, in and of itself, does not much impress me. It is, as they say, what you do with it that counts.

I have a history with Eco. I first read The Name of the Rose when I was 18, a page at a time as I worked the scanner or photocopier for my bosses in insurance. It took me two nine-to-fives to finish. I was highly impressed by it: this is the reaction of a young man to an older man. There was a kindly lady at my job who liked to read. I asked her what she thought of Eco's book at an after-work social in a docklands bowling alley. (A bowling alley is one of the worst places in existence, like a multiplex. Off the lane itself, light was scarce; you could smell the ersatz butter in the popcorn, the stale imported beer, and most of all the sweat of feet and oxters. I don't bowl. I think I got one lucky spare.) She said that if you took away all the fancy philosophy and learning, it was just a standard detective novel. I said, Well, yes, but you can't take off the philosophy and learning, that's the whole point of the book. She replied that if you took away all the fancy philosophy and learning, it was just a standard detective novel. I dropped the matter with her. Now I'm inclined to think she was right. I returned to The Name of the Rose years later, and found its philosophical debates trite, and its magisterial erudition, well, a bit less magisterial.

I dare not re-read Foucault's Pendulum, which dazzled me sufficiently to make me quit my insurance job and learn about kabbalah and alchemy.

But lately I was sitting with some friends in the aureate environs of the Blackfriars, after Easter service in St. Paul's, when a couple of them encouraged me to read Baudolino. I had my doubts—my impression of him then was a writer much less clever than he thought himself. But I'd read precious little fiction in years, and so decided to give Baudolino a fair shot. Thus:

*

The novel is set largely in the second half of the twelfth century, told as a flashback to Niketas Choniates during the siege of Constantinople in 1204 AD. The narrator, Baudolino, is an Italian peasant boy adopted since early childhood by Frederick Barbarossa, who finds himself 'behind' many of the great events and texts of the late twelfth century. As a young man he goes to Paris and meets Robert de Boron and the Archpoet, with whom he fabricates the 'Prester John Letter'. He 'discovers' the Grail and composes real love-letters. Later he saves Alessandria—his own hometown and also Eco's—with his father Gagliaudo, in a retelling of a 'genuine' legend. Finally, after witnessing Frederick's death, he sets off for the Kingdom of Prester John, which he himself has fabricated; Baudolino never reaches John, though he has, of course, lots of scrapes and adventures along the way. Baudolino is, in effect, the twelfth-century Forrest Gump.

The narrative is designed to flatter mediaevalists. Look, they will say excitedly, there's Otto of Freising! And he's talking about Abelard! And there's Alexander III—and there's the Archpoet! And when Baudolino reaches the land of Prester John, he encounters the fabulous beasts from Pliny and the Travels of John Mandeville—sciapods, blemmyes, panotians and so on. All those dusty obscurities cherished by the graduate are there revealed in their colours; she reads the book and feels part of a special learned club, just Eco and herself.

And within the special club of mediaevalists, the very special subclub of the broadly educated will twitter even more delightedly to itself—those who think of Quine when they see the name Gavagai, or those who, having read Eco's mediocre book on universal languages—or even a better book—can spot all the references to Dalgarno, Vairasse and other Enlightenment fantasists.

These references are supposed to be fun; but in fact they are smug and pointless. They add nothing to the book. In the Prester John section of the novel, Eco tries to demonstrate that he has digested modern philosophical problems and can redraw them in a fantastical setting; but it only comes across as that brand of science fiction desperate to show off its intellectual credentials. For instance, one of Baudolino's posse debates with the one-legged sciapod Gavagai:

Poet. "You are not friends [with the blemmyae] because you are different?"

Gavagai. "What you say? Different?"

"Well, in the sense that you are different from us and—"

"Why I different you?"

"Oh, for God's sake," the Poet said. "To begin with, you have only one leg! We and the blemmyae have two!"

"Also you and blemmyae if you raise one leg, you have only one."

"But you don't have another one to lower!"

"Why should I lower leg I don't has? Do you lower third leg you don't has?"

Eco's point is that Gavagai doesn't divide the world up into the same conceptual categories as us humans, differentiating individuals not by morphology but, as it happens, by theology. But the philosophical problems and debates instantiated in Baudolino are not only borrowed: they have no relevance to the novel's world, theme, or, worst of all, to its aesthetic, its qualities as an artwork. The best Eco can offer us is a reheated postmodern insistence on the narrative construction of reality—the world is as we tell it, and no more. This is what leads hack-reviews to call Baudolino 'a parable about storytelling, a meditation on truth'. Never trust anything described as a parable.

Laura Lilli: This book is an apology for the lie?

Umberto Eco: Rather it is an apology for utopia, for those inventions that move the world. Columbus discovered America by mistake: he thought that the earth was much smaller. It is not true that he was the only one thinking it was round, as people still say; that it was round they knew before Plato. And what can be said about El Dorado? A continent is conquered following a myth.

'Coincidentally', Eco had already published a scholarly work about influential mistakes, Serendipities (1998). It is a saunter around well-trodden academic fields, peeking into some pleasant books and episodes with only the pretence of original insight. It is a tourist's guide to scholarship, without any guts.

Eco has no serious prose style—at least, not in Weaver's English—no special gift for plot or character, no worthwhile message: and so in Baudolino he has to rely on his game of references with the reader. All the erudition is fine. But, like I said, erudition is easy. The problem is that he is no good at the game. He fails in two ways. Firstly, he's patronising. The conceit of the first chapter is that a fourteen year-old Baudolino snatches a bit of used parchment and writes some of his own macaronic Latin over it—the joke being that the original parchment, still legible in fragments, contains the opening of Otto of Freising's The Two Cities (1145). But in the next chapter he spoils the joke by telling you that the parchment contained The Two Cities. Eco is not confident enough to pitch the ball down the field—he has to roll it. The effect is nothing less than humdrum.

Again and again, Eco explains his references. When Baudolino meets Niketas, we get this sentence: 'Niketas Choniates, former court orator, supreme judge of the empire, judge of the Veil, logothete of secrets or—as the Latins would have said—chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, as well as historian of many Comneni and Angelus emperors, regarded with curiosity the man facing him.' When Baudolino goes to Paris, we are told: 'Baudolino arrived in Paris a bit late: in those schools, students entered before they were fourteen, and he was two years older.' There is no immersion in Eco's world because is constantly feeding us facts and gobbets from the history books. Wanting to be storyteller and teacher at the same time, he fails at both.

The erudition is not just spoon-fed: it is also unimaginative. This is his second, and more serious failure. Eco reads, again, like a tourist in his own library. Thus, because he has chosen the period 1155-1204, his canvas is dictated: it includes all the famous kings, philosophers and poets. Eco wants to give us a panorama of the political and intellectual climate of his period; but this requires justice to each part of the picture. He has abdicated control. He is liberal and tolerant towards his world—not a tyrant, as the true artist must be. And so his description of twelfth-century history is unable to go very deep. You can get most of the references simply by reading Southern or Cantor.

Still worse. We are told repeatedly and with no subtlety that Baudolino is a liar, and that he may have fabricated some or all of his tale. The mediaevalist Tom Shippey, in his TLS review, writes:

Baudolino is in the habit of inventing works, sometimes only as titles, but also referring to them and quoting from them. But which are made up and which are genuine? A perfect reader, the perfect reader as constructed by the author in Eco's own theories, would know the answer, but who would care to declare himself perfect? I am fairly sure that the Venerable Bede did not write a work on the best kind of tripe (De optimitate triparum), and the Ars honesti petandi sounds securely spurious as well. . .

It is true that Bede did not write a De optimitate triparum, or an Ars honesti petandi. But then, Eco could not have come up with these either: he had to borrow them from a far better fantasist. Similarly, the only creature in the land of Prester John not plucked from the standard mediaeval bestiary is a female satyr called a 'hypatia'. The hypatia is Eco's invention, but only sort of. After all, she is named after the first philosopheress and feminist icon, Hypatia of Alexandria, and she expounds to Baudolino, with no narrative relevance, a doe-eyed version of Neoplatonist-Gnostic theology. It's all second-hand. Nothing in Eco's world is invented—this is what I mean when I say he is a tourist, or a slave to his erudition. He would rather be learned, with his allusions to Rabelais and Hypatia, than imaginative. He has no mastery over the material. And he does not have the cojones to make Baudolino a real liar.

Why I am bothering to complain about the poor standard of Eco's erudition? Can I not appreciate the book as a mere flight of literary fancy, with vivid colours and a few in-jokes? No. Eco is, in literary terms, a man's man—we are told his English grew up on Marvel comics and Finnegans Wake, those twin poles of the male reading spectrum—and he wants a man's response from his reader. He wants not to charm or delight us, but to impress us. This mood is present in all his writing. Consider this, from the New York Times, on the subject of Eco's 'inside jokes':

Take for instance, the love letters written by Baudolino, the new novel's title character, to the entrancingly beautiful wife of his patron, the Emperor Frederick. Many critics seized on these as obvious allusions to, or imitations of, what are known as the most famous love letters of the Middle Ages, those exchanged between Abelard and Heloïse.

But no, said a gleeful Mr. Eco in an interview. . . ''These love letters exist,'' he said, clearly pleased to have planted such a successful trap. ''Someone said Abelard and Heloïse, but no. It is a real epistolary exchange of love letters that was discovered recently.''

Eco does not name his source—but he is evidently referring to the love-letters published by Ewald Koensgen as Epistolae duorum amantium in 1976. These were taken from a 1470 manuscript (Troyes BM 1452) penned by Johannes de Vepria, and attributed by Koensgen to Abelard and Heloise, albeit with a twinkling question-mark. Constant Mews added his voice to this attribution in a well-known 1999 book; nonetheless, few are really convinced. So when Eco says that 'the German scholar' [Koensgen] 'was the only person in the whole world who could probably recognize' the letters in Baudolino, he is playing up the obscurity of his text. This is also why he is 'gleeful' and 'pleased' that he might have fooled his readers and one-upped his critics. (He seems a little unsure on the attribution, as he does accept Abelard-Heloise authorship here.) Here's an example of Eco's reuse. Vepria Letter 20 runs:

Stella polum variat et noctem luna colorat,
Sed michi sydus habet, quod me conducere debet.
Nunc mea si tenebris oriatur stella fugatis,
Mens mea iam tenebras meroris nesciet ullas.
Tu michi Lucifer es, que noctem pellere debes.
Te sine lux michi nox, tecum nox splendida lux est.

Eco has rendered this: 'The star illuminates the pole, and the moon colors the night. But my guide is a sole star and if, when the shadows have been dispelled, my star rises from the East, my mind will ignore the shadows of sorrow. You are my radiant star, who will dispel the night, and light itself without you is night, whereas with you night is splendid radiance.' Can we quibble? Polum is really 'sky', not 'pole'; Lucifer is specifically the morning-star, and there is no reason for the final lux to be translated 'radiance' and not 'light'. (Perhaps Weaver is to blame for inaccuracies—I have not seen the Italian.) The overall effect is a competent translation: nothing more. Again, Eco has not worked his material: it merely sits there in his book, translated but otherwise native. Lazy.

Now, I have no problem with erudition in literature, and no problem with books wanting to impress me, even by their authors' own admission. Hey, I'm game. I want to be impressed, not charmed or delighted. But if you are going to play a man's game, you'd better play it right—not botch a penalty and spend all night crying. And Umberto Eco is the John Terry of erudition.

*

There is a great history of erudition in literature. The first modern landmark is Gargantua and Pantagruel. In English, we have had Sterne, Carlyle and Joyce, most of all. There have even been brilliant novels of erudition in our time: the classic example for me is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat—more on that next time—and to a lesser extent Pynchon's various books. These writers have all done what Eco has not: they have created a vocabulary of erudition. Their books are not mere heavens of references—they are constellations, with distinctive shape and character. Consider the rôle of classical medicine and law in Rabelais, idealist philosophy in Carlyle, Irish literature and the Jesuit curriculum in Joyce. In each case, raw materials of learning are picked out and wrought into an original perspective. As Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver, 'I would not pay overmuch attention to [Vico's] theories, beyond using them for all they are worth'. Contrast Eco's genuflection before modern philosophy to Rabelais's parodic reinvention of scholastic logic:

Which was first, thirst or drinking? Thirst, for who in the time of innocence would have drunk without being athirst? Nay, sir, it was drinking; for privatio praesupponit habitum.

Contrast the exuberant and aggressive lists of books still to be found in Theroux, to the complacent and collusive winks glancing from the pages of Baudolino. The grand érudits ravish you: Eco tickles you. His is a limp handshake; instead of a confident argot of learning, he has a tourist's pidgin. The function of putting books into a novel is to create light and depth, personality through reach and considered choice. To put books into a novel is tell your reader who you are. This stamping of character is a practice of modernity, and of modernism. But Eco is decidedly a postmodern. Baudolino ends: 'You surely don't believe that you're the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone—a greater liar than Baudolino—will tell it.' For Eco we are all storytellers, and so none of us is. By telling stories we create a world, but at the same time we take ourself out of that world, or rather we become just another part of it, indistinguishable from the rest.