It was written as news of Germany’s invasion of Belgium reached London, on the fourth and fifth of August 1914, setting into motion the United Kingdom’s entry into the World War, and delivered to the mails when a formal declaration was issued: a missive by Henry James to his friend Howard Sturgis. Demarcating its centre, there is one sentence better readers will find hard to ignore, whenever later it does happen to encounter them (or when contrariwise they stumble on it). And that the novelist, foreseeing by this time of life an eventual issuance of his correspondence, or at least a subset of the letters he sent, reckoned with the likelihood of rencontres such as those, seems one fair inference from remarks their editor interspersed in his preface, in 1920.* But be an answer what it may to the delicately open question of these lines’ intention and bequest, their share of that extraordinary closeness of tissue** found throughout much that he wrote. – A few years ago I alluded to the remark of midsummer 1914, on a tangent in the statement wherewith this website and its musical project started again. Recurring to his words, in order to ponder and unfold their meaning, for a closer look an opportunity now presents itself.
* See the Introduction by Percy Lubbock in the first volume of the Letters. Perhaps not by chance, this text is also spontaneously, artlessly Proustian.
** James, “Honoré de Balzac,” i
They were these. – The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.
Though this one sentence shall largely be extricated from the context, plucking it from its surroundings both epistolary and sentimental, in order to examine the point of his utterance more minutely, nonetheless I recognise it behoves me to specify to whom he referred when denouncing the “two infamous autocrats.” He meant with this phrase the nominal rulers in Berlin and Vienna, whom James, long resident in the United Kingdom though not yet a British subject, against the legions of adulators (Teutonophiles or otherwise susceptible to their appeal) and, as if presciently, the squads of historical revisionists to come, held to be mainly at fault for the outbreak of the War. History, at least that part of it within the present’s living memory, if one tries in first approximation to typify the role he held it was meant to play, would represent neither a judge nor a tribunal; but judiciousness and its ideal he did not banish entirely. Historical inquiry, as he conceived of its scope, will come across items evidently capable of ascertainment and assessment, even possibly by any literate member of the reading public. Moreover, now stated negatively, what one ought never to concede history should be, it seems he wanted to believe, was the well-known night in which all cats are grey and therefore none is, that is to say, varying the predicate, culpable. Hence, the novelist he was would conclude, the phenomena which become evident historically do evince numerous gradations; these await the moment when they will be, in his word, discriminated. And available particularly for discrimination is fame, in the more potent earlier sense one hopes does not only signify etymologically, i. e., a quality of distinction whose spectrum passes from splendid eminence towards pitch-dark infamies.
The history he himself had seen and known best, during the second half of the nineteenth century, appeared to him under the aspect of a gradual though not continuous or quick improvement, in several respects, notwithstanding such occurrences as, momentously, the Civil War in the United States, or, less but still weighty, the trials to which Simeon Solomon or Oscar Wilde were subjected along with the cumulative wariness those persecutions left behind, and certainly also the Affaire across the Channel, or, on yet another plane of importance, the alarm signals emitted in the outposts of progress which at least one of his peers did hear distinctly and, out of unease about what they foretold, sought to amplify; yet, with the events of 1914, history itself so it seemed made an about-turn and wiped out the ameliorations of preceding decades, expunging them with a vengeance and even taking perverse joy in the great violence of the deed. Shunting aside all at once everything that could foster a modicum of peaceful existence, as if at the behest of a force operating for the most part unobserved behind everyone’s backs, were novelties such as mobilisation on the largest scale, submarine warfare and blockades, bombardments by aircraft, the adjunct utilisation of covert means (terrorism, subterfuges, espionage) to paralyse the enemies’ morale at home, now made over into front-theatres, their smaller domestic tensions manipulated and exacerbated and at times metamorphosing suspiciously into mobile ancillaries. In short, louring in the August days into view were elements compacting into an entity formerly unimagined, to which soon would accrue the name of total war.
Its advent was marked in shock by this Jamesian sentence, even despite himself, for he too was caught unawares by it, as his view of the preceding era had taken the semblances of progress, the assurances of security as providing enough of a basis from which to extrapolate; but he did summon the intellectual courage to acknowledge his mistake. The recognition amounts therefore, in the old terms of tragedy, to an ἀναγνώρισις, a heightened flash of knowledge of the way things did happen, which may come to expression through an action more eloquent and indeed truthful than any words would be: the shedding of tears, or some less prominent access of involuntary genuine feeling, perhaps an exhalation as muted as a sigh. (How enduring or fleeting such a moment of recognition will prove in its turn, and what it might achieve or precipitate, is another question entirely.) All at once his view of the years he had passed through did change; assumptions grown so familiar he, like many others, hardly noticed them any longer, the better author in him now slated for revision, not least those pertaining to what was all along, as it seemed henceforth, given the denouement, the wrong raison d’être for higher cultivation (whether the vocabulary opted to speak of “civilisation” or of “Kultur”).
Gradual self-betterment of the cultivated, and by around 1900 their numbers were legion, even though, as the author saw, the more immediate results often revealed vapidity, hollowness, conceit, had been taken as a main “meaning” of those years; but mistakenly, for what they “meant” in fact was disclosed only later on, through something which on a first view must have looked to be fully opposite to culture or cultivation, namely, warfare raising itself towards an unheard-of obliterative pitch.
Here, on reflection, notable is an antithesis between what first appeared in a guise of sheer contrarieties, then perhaps to pass into another unity wherein something of each will be contained – by the leaping type of advance dialectical philosophers make or think they make again and again and again – moves that were this time even translated into the process whereby a great dialectic would start the clock in reality. (A textbook case to illustrate how it may operate, one might perhaps add.) On this cusp in 1914, in this pairing of opposites and their as yet unborn offspring, must this novelist not have recalled such a philosophy and the elated conception that once everything is set going the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos? Approaching with fastidious reserve this whole dark complex of intuitions, not in an affirmative or a negational mood, but with the suspicious, skeptical, scrupulous attitude good readers esteem, he too would make no claim to understanding it and much prefer to treat it merely impressionistically* – indeed, how else than “merely,” as then he would apply to its facets quite a better mode for fathoming them or it!
* William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture iii
Reticence was to be observed both with respect to the external data, the findings, and towards the inward thinking about them. Concerning a matter so deadly as total war and the manifold imperilment of national life it posed, putting to an extreme test the reservoirs of strength upon which the belligerents’ existence as nations was sustained from day to day,* caution in expressing one’s responses is well-advised, not only on account of their own fragility, but also due to the small self-fulfilling prophecies all of them may in essence be. Here one really did need to tread warily, since one’s reflections don’t really bear being uttered – as he wrote in the very next sentence to his confidant and to posterity. Of course it was a paradoxical statement; a moment’s thought brings into focus the delicate sense of humour, even the small joke which informs it and effaces itself nearly in a single breath. – Perhaps into his mind as this notation was being written sprang the idea, recalled from a work he’d read by another philosopher and near contemporary of ample wit and unmatched dexterity of intellect, that one’s insight one no longer loves enough the very moment one communicates it (seine Erkenntniss liebt man nicht genug mehr, sobald man sie mittheilt).** And, as a further turn of the screw, the likeness between the two caveats, inadvertent or otherwise as it may be, could also encourage a reader to peruse the philosopher’s works for illuminations of the total war to come and also for reflections upon the role played in speeding up its arrival by the wide embrace of dialectical modes of thought in several versions, up until 1914, and beyond. (Reading from which no one will emerge quite unscathed.) – Shall I venture an initial conjecture about what the “dialectic” may actually have achieved in reality? From the century’s last years onwards, the inclination to view human history under the aspect of dialectical triads and the dynamism intrinsic to their interrelations, once it had been multiplied and distributed in the shape of a habit amongst the mental storehouses or armouries of some sufficient number of readers, students, the more passive members of the republic of letters, started to narrow the focus of its intellectual attention; no longer in principle did the whole historical continuum spark its interest, but, more and more, solely the sector of the imminent future, where those thus inclined expected to witness events that would bolster the idea which they strove to believe in: whenever the substantiations their by then habitual outlook required did not happen to materialise, or tarried ahead in abeyance off on the horizon, an impatient intensity was emboldened amongst the aficionados, a potent frustration translating at last into action early in August, as the loud relief or even the welcome with which they too, them from whom one might have hoped for a better response, cheered the outbreak of the World War.
* Earlier notions of a “struggle for existence” were frivolity itself by comparison.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Viertes Hauptstück, 160
(with a syntactical transposition)
If in the belligerent states many sped themselves and everyone else up in order that, inter alia, one might receive what was deemed a verification necessary to confirm the paradigm of thinking into which they had settled, then, one may ask, cutting short all those mental exercises with their time-killing redundancies, how bored must such impatient people have gotten, that they espied some potential of thrilling release in the onset of the global hostilities? More precisely: which of the several varieties of boredom had they opted for? – this question maps nicely onto one of life’s terrains which the novelist was well-placed to observe from a window.* Yes, between those who were loitering there, his own position apart would enable or even invite him to discriminate. And an inward preparation to undertake such a task seems to shimmer throughout this section of his letter; the character of these lines suggest that he too was putting himself into a state of anticipatory excitement. He meant to adopt a posture suitable for fathoming the minds of those who had in the end cast themselves into boredom and then were seeking an escape from the malheur: their preference for the more drastic options was one of the features he wished to comprehend, probably indeed the item he recognised as key. Thus do I interpret the thrilled undertone, even the breathlessness of phrasing: these audible signs bespoke the author’s imaginative first steps to intuit how it happened that they, heedlessly or otherwise, found themselves in a situation which had become more terrifying than all of war’s terrors,** whereby their choice of the terror of war when they did opt for it brought an intense flash of relief (or even a frisson). At the end of the day a relatively crude calculus of pleasure and pain would guide them.
* W. Somerset Maugham, “Some Novelists I Have Known,” ii
** Hannah Arendt, Introduction, in J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors
So, were the artist in him to plumb their bad decisions, his own fastidious nature would have to be set to one side temporarily, if not overcoming at least suspending his penchant for reticence.
Now, none of the foregoing means to contend that he then planned or envisioned public texts in which the tragedy of 1914 would feature, even impressionistically; but merely to suggest tentatively that the novelist’s interest may well have focused henceforth on the groundswells of approval which arising as if from underneath life’s thin surface did begin to pervade every terrain, with the declaration of war.
Acknowledging how deceptively the whole previous era had steered towards the catastrophe (this perpetual illusion constituted one major part of the tragedy of it), and admitting also his own oversight regarding that surreptitious development, all with a view towards shaking up his capacities of perception (raising the author in himself to the occasion of a critical juncture): should it come really as a surprise to find the idiom in which this letter was framed disclosing an exaggeration of effect?
What else if not a theatrical attitude does the utterance translate into words? (“Attitude” seems more apt a term than either “sense” or “sensibility” would be.)
But in that case, should one not, hewing to his usual ethos, regard their quality under the glass of, as he would say, discrimination? The least a reader could do is to search for its proper name (assuming there is any). Well then, what should one call it? Oddly enough, without running too great a risk of anachronism, emitted by his letter the nose of one’s mind may catch a scent or note of “camp.”* – Yes, also or especially an effusion of overwrought despair can rightly be categorised as such.
* vide Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 10, 16 et seq., 23, 26,
etc., and, the most pertinent/impertinent of the remarks, 39
There isn’t need, in my view, of rehearsing how the author could have possibly become familiar with the “camp” style during its earlier phases or avant la lettre. More to the point is the use he made of it; utterances in such a key were perhaps meant cagily to assuage the difficulties when he had somehow to grant how faulty, how wrong had been his view of the character of the age: not an easy thing to admit for one who should excel in the higher truthfulness of characterisation, or on their side for his circles of readers to accept. So, these manifold challenges might be met better when the pill was sugared: and speech that is “camp” can amongst its other charms at times be sweet. Communications may then go down more smoothly; as happens, I would suggest, with this bit in his correspondence.
Proximity of sweetness and persuasion, marked from antiquity onwards in the very terms themselves,* might indeed figure in an intriguing manner in the style of pronouncement that is “camp” – when the latter enters as evidently it did in this instance, to ease some difficulty into which an author has gotten himself by virtue of his regard for truth. Moreover, that the anguish he expressed, with as it seems to me inarguable sincerity, did portray him as a man who observed the guidelines of writing and speaking veraciously, this I take as read, or a point useless to contest. In short, if one looks more closely at his utterance styled somewhat in the manner of “camp,” notably juxtaposed to truth and the urge to truthfulness was some other factor meant simply to balance or round out their expression. (Merely on account of its intervention, at least with this war-letter, no antithesis need have sprung up.)
* Some inquiry into these etymologies was compassed in an earlier essay.
Brought in August 1914 by the force of events face-to-face with an extended failure to understand the historical period in which he lived, such that only once it had reached an end did its real character strike him in the form of an overarching “meaning,” in all likelihood a crise de conscience must have beset the author. For, if as he himself implies, his grasp of that whole world had been flawed, would he not also hold himself obligated to revisit (even perhaps again) some of his smaller and finer discriminations in particular, for much the same reason? What errors of insight, comprehension, tact might they not disclose! How well would the beauty of their truth and the truth of their beauty, such as each had been collated and set down on the page, hold up later on under a more searching retrospective scrutiny! And, since the subset of discriminations which pertained to his characters would not have been exempted categorically from this self-reappraisal, the author did seem to doubt how far his own powers of observation had sufficed, over against all the pretences in society. Unfortunately often, in effect he appeared to admit, he may have been taken in by them. Such a perplexing acknowledgment! – but even more disconcerting was the question which then arose. Had the lapse taken place unwittingly, or did some degree of choice or will on his side have a share in it?
Simplifying though not terribly, let me suggest that, amongst the kinds of relations a novelist such as he would encounter in society, those which forcefully caught his eye were the rapports that arise as allies and antagonists are sought out, through the search which is eminently social, in the old Roman sense of the term, especially when the several participants in undertaking it make a point of its demonstrative aspect,* aiming to see themselves and to be seen in action all the while as these alliances and antagonisms are formed, informed, unformed, etc. The spectacle these participants tend to make of themselves and their relations in this society, is not merely a quasi-inert result, although into that too it can verge, but imperiously a director or conductor in the premeditation of actions and inactions, as well as in the assessments all these do call for, while, after, and before they are transpiring. What challenges then await a novelist who delves into such an array of relations, not with the view of participating in them, but in order to observe the participants, thus assembling his materials in the course of writing a book in which they and their many facets will truthfully be discriminated! How to ensure, or at least how to assure himself, that the people he wanted to observe did not interact otherwise than they would have done in his absence? – I raise this semi-rhetorical query to point out the first difficulties he very likely might have met. Others follow directly; the modicum of participation in social relations requisite to observe them, could embroil the observer in the alliances and antagonisms whose spectacle in the best case would merely furnish him his materials. Even the delicacy with which he most often did satisfy the demands of his observer’s “role” (for fully anonymous this outsider would never be) might suffice to provoke an unwanted response, rendering the author a focus of social interest or animosity. For him this profession came with some personal dangers of its own; by publishing truths he glimpsed while in society, he might position himself to be the latter’s victim. Moreover, the possibility of being taken in by the appearances, and this indeed longer than momentarily, remained a pitfall not only for the author, who had to conserve his basic credibility; the readers too will be judged for their credulity, in a verdict later which the better of them would evade (one hopes) if only because they signalised themselves by their relative lack of it. But as for all the others, depending on how the winds might blow, altogether they could start to pose quite a large problem.
* Which they do often, and in several tempos: the ostentation of it is underscored slowly, surreptitiously, suddenly, shockingly, to mention just a few of the modes whereby even those rapports that looked to be firm one moment can vanish into air the very next, or may, conversely, materialise out of it with a resounding flash.
Deceptions in which not only novelists came to be entrapped or enrapt, along the way of a quest for the difficult truths of society and the relations comprising it, perhaps to the more reflective of observers yield clues about a hazard intrinsic to the endeavour, insofar as the “role” assumed by the writer when he enters into social relations deploys in inconspicuous espionage primarily his eyes, which are however in this field too the first to be defeated (primi oculi vincuntur).* What they do see, or think they see, itself often comes to deceive them. This poses a quandary to him, but ruled out in advance would have been a different manner of approach towards the inadvertent disclosure of truth about the society then and there, given the sorts of truthfulness for which the search took him through the social domain. Not with anyone like him in mind had the proposal been made which long before one wit on the Continent devised, that amidst its goings-on a truly curious person might shut his eyes for half an hour (auf eine halbe Stunde die Augen zudrücken) and then the sonic quality patent all around him would reveal to the hard listener the essential truth of that society (das Wahre der Gesellschaft),** i. e., what it was and what it would give itself out to be: no, nowhere in the society he frequented could any such auricular experiment be conducted. Any such attempt would itself have become the focus of everyone’s attention, or clear the room tout entière, thus obviating its purpose. – But, if the eyes are credulous and the ears unavailable, by what channels to forestall those deceptions on which, as at times it seems, some active force within oneself does wish to trip?
* vide Tacitus, Germania, 43
** Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, “Papillotten”
Unease after recognising that a deception one had credited was established and persisted all along due to some complicity on one’s part, is hard to grapple with, so much into doubt does the moment of insight cast the abilities discerned in oneself. On the other hand, beginning to absorb this experience, one now may prove more capable of honesty against oneself. But who can say how long this new confidence will last, or if it too is not deceptive, already an after-image, not the aptitude itself.
A retrospect over the preceding decades and the whole period’s “meaning,” as the author calls it, would discern numerous starting-points for serious reflection about truthfulness and, even more salient, the historical urge towards it.* So a few bits in earlier works of the nineteenth century, an ingenious passage, a fine metaphor, an apt façon de parler, may fittingly be called in here, though it’s wise I suppose to deny formally that by this anything is implied about the lines of influence there may or may not be amongst the writers. Better to bracket out all of that; questions pertaining to the truthful already seem tricky enough to think over by themselves.
* “Historical” it is at least in the sense that this urge does not represent a constant relative to human nature, itself conceived largely as an invariant. On the contrary, the penchant for truth can be fostered by cultivation over longer periods of time (not animal breeding but horticulture will furnish analogies as needed). Yet, if so, the grasp of these matters could also be assessed for its consistence; this quality seems likewise mutable: thick or thin it may fluctuate throughout human history.
Heinrich Heine during his last years in the Paris throughout which were arising strange beauties of a future already dubious, as the Second Empire commenced, set into French part of an older essay of his and added to it more recent work.* At the outset, perhaps with a jolt of surprise, readers may encounter one such point of departure for reflection on truthfulness and its urges. Whether this invitation is accepted, or where their stroll then would take them, are of course other questions.
* His text, under the title “Les Dieux en exil,” was published for a wide public, on April 1, 1853, in the Revue des deux mondes; source of the one portion was the Elementargeister, which appeared in Hamburg a decade and a half before.
Leitmotiv of his new composition was the vanishment of belief, and not solely in the metropoles of his times, but also far afield in obscure locales where to a thing of such importance as the moon, as missionaries were reporting, people no longer lent the same credence as formerly.* But if even on far-off islands the most specific kind of belief, comprising the varieties that are religious in the broader sense of the term, was vanishing, in its stead which other kinds were gathering, more or less everywhere? This pointed question accompanied his essay from start to finish, complementing it as something like an unprinted but insistent refrain; nor is a plausible answer as easily devised as one might imagine, especially if one grants what does seem probable, that a vacuum left by defunct beliefs others soon move to fill, though perhaps these will comport themselves just slightly less obviously, more subtly than the antecedents. And prominent amongst these successors (this inference he did leave to his readers) is the belief which comes to raise veracity above all else, whereby if it is thwarted the sequelæ may be incalculable and dire.
* This key to his composition he provides in a prefatory note dated March 19, 1853.
Troubles espied ahead when the urge to truthfulness crashes into its own limits, collisions which could be anticipated, already then and ever more frequently in the rest of the century, he signalises between the lines. Thus did he suggest how if literature, taking note of beliefs on the verge of disappearance, recorded them and the traditions by which they survived, its attempt to preserve (préserver) all that from a complete oblivion (un oubli complet) would constitute perhaps a pious effort (peut-être une œuvre pieuse) – of embalming (embaumer). Some bit of truth would remain of those beliefs which at their best had been beautiful, but in what a shape: enshrined in the museum-cases of memory, or, shifting the unsettling metaphor just a little, deposited in mausolea of the imagination. Nor, opening their doors to those mummies, would minds put themselves into any better a state. Reminiscence and fantasy each would be transformed from the inside out, no matter the degree of skill in the undertaking’s resort to secret remedies found nowhere else than in the pharmacy of the poet (emploi d’arcanes qui ne se trouvent que dans la pharmacie du poète). So, in all probability, the very attempt to transcribe the earlier beliefs truthfully, will soon result in falsifying them in substance; the whole enterprise does in the end amount either to an errand for fools, or to a pastime for quacks.
Were, however, one to apply that last idea outright in some particular context, the usage would look peculiarly self-defeating, for such a comment will itself very quickly, indeed even before anyone knows it, be taken on faith, though its own longevity is likely to prove shorter. So, how could this entire transformation in its turn be represented in accord with the demands of veracity? (Who ever does have time if not also world enough for it?) Hence, here too, zealous truth-seekers did tend to stumble; possibly then some fell into silence. – Wherever unthinking habits of belief lived on, the writer’s endeavour for a higher truthfulness, even if it stayed further from vanity than most, was vain.*
* E. M. Forster, Maurice, Part Two, 22
If amongst the limits an urge towards truthfulness discerns and then crashes into headlong, is its own sheer contrariety but not antithesis to the inextricable reliance on belief, recognised as a brute fact of human life at least while one’s mood is more veracious, one probably would find it hard to resist the inclination to view these collisions under the aspect of tragedy or of the tragic awareness they betoken, eyes peeled for the flash of insight ahead, the compensatory ἀναγνώρισις. But perhaps more thought-provoking will it be to view the strife of truth and belief through a different set of lenses (or even simply let the eyes of the mind be guided by its ears and other reproductively imaginative powers). Situate all that within the ampler horizons of comedy and the comic events which are as though made to bring forth novelties very few or virtually no one could expect, even though post hoc they may begin to seem, sound, smell foreordained as outcomes – what might result then?
Heine, in one part of his essay, may have conducted a small experiment to find out, although none of this can be attributed to him with certainty. What is sure, however, is the verisimilitude of this poetic creation, “Henri Kitzler” (or, in the earlier text, “Heinrich Kitzler”), a superlatively learned professor at a German university around 1820 in whom, for the very brief period of his literary existence, since it is not at all likely that this fellow’s life was led anywhere else than in these paragraphs, the author in Paris may have remarked just something of an alter ego, another self and friend of the type he might readily converse with, someone whom his jokes, sarcasms, witticisms would not offend, possibly due to the other’s good nature, or else to his reluctance or incapacity really to follow them. An agreeable foil; just the sort of man who might show how the urge to truthfulness is pursued.
True to the life of a particular type in and around the world of the universities, publishing, and letters in Germany throughout the nineteenth century and later, up until 1933, some inadvertently comical quality does attach to this quintessential Privatgelehrter,* and the impression is of course fostered deliberately. Perhaps the aim in tickling the imaginations of readers was to sweeten the pill to be imbibed by means of the anecdote he invented around this personage. For in it the pursuit of truthfulness does take him far. – Around the university, the scholar’s intellectual reputation was mixed, and he was known most of all for never having published anything. Why he did not, late one evening by chance he told the essayist (or the narrator of what has the markings of a short tale in nuce); their lodgings were adjacent in a rooming-house, and on a quick visit to light the wick of his lamp or candle, near midnight the terrible secret (schreckliches Geheimniß) was confided.
* Regarding the profile of the Privatgelehrten in Germany prior to totalitarian rule, see the second part of the long essay on Walter Benjamin by one of his close friends towards the end of the 1930s in Paris, Hannah Arendt. Quite rightly she distinguished the type from the hommes de lettres across the Rhine. (At times one asks whose interest is served when, as often happens, sadly, the two are confused.)
While a long book almost was finished, sighed this neighbour, the very sight of the manuscript his mind greeted with melancholy (mélancolie, Wehmuth). Not to any publishers would he send it, but to the flames, much as all the earlier products of his labours were consigned. For, now divulging the secret, each time one had been completed, the worst misfortune (plus grand malheur, schlimmste Mißgeschick) beset him. Though in writing it he strove to develop as best he could the theses he started with, when the time came to handle with fitting consideration all valid objections to the scholar’s own position, the treatment proved to be other than definitive. Instead their seeds settled into his mind and gradually persuaded it; when the writing was over, they still occupied him, indeed literally so, as by then, the work done, his ideas had been modified step by step, to the point where they did form a group of convictions diametrically opposite those opinions he held before (son ouvrage achevé, ses idées s’étaient peu à peu modifiées, et à tel point qu’elles formaient un ensemble de convictions diamétralement opposées à ses opinions antérieures, es geschah immer, daß, wenn das Buch fertig war, die Meinungen des armen Verfassers sich allmählig umgewandelt hatten, und eine dem Buche ganz entgegengesetzte Ueberzeugung in seinem Geiste erwachte). Thus did this truthful man admit, I shall see myself compelled (je vais me voir forcé) not to hide the defeat of positions championed earlier; intellectual conscience chiming in vis-à-vis the finished, now outmoded text, the change in outlook led him valiantly to throw his manuscript into the fire (jeter bravement son manuscrit au feu, sein Manuscript ins Feuer zu werfen). And this fate overcame not just one of the books, but all of them, much as it would strike his current project, for on account of the tribute paid to veracity by the scholar he was, the author in him would be recognised in the end (disinterestedly). Just as a French writer would do in a comparable situation (wie ein französischer Schriftsteller ebenfalls handeln würde), so also this Privatgelehrter, by acts suggesting he too had honesty enough (er war alsdann auch ehrlich genug) to take up a cause higher than his own fame, profiled himself as sufficiently a man of honour to burn laurel wreaths of literary glory on the altar of truth (assez honnête homme pour brûler le laurier de la gloire littéraire sur l’autel de la vérité). – Hence, in the case of these fictive productions, veracity had the last, indeed the only word.
What constituted the ticklish theme of the work soon to follow its predecessors? It was to be an encomium to the “magnificence of the Christian religion,” and though remaining convinced the public would credit many of the arguments he drew from others and thought up by himself, while researching and writing the author had come to appreciate the force of the objections he dealt with, to such a point that in these matters, he said to his neighbour, circumventing the latter’s slightly drunken retort (a detail perhaps as fictional as the scholar) that the vanquishment of antiquity’s paganism did not kill but in fact pruned and thus raised again those gardens of civilisation to a more vital life, his own views had become positively Voltairean and Gibbonean. Never would he permit to leave his room the work he himself had put together, so full of pious frauds did it seem to him, lauding the destructive zeal (zèle destructeur, schwarzer Zerstörungseifer) that raged against the spring flowers of humanity, monuments to a period which never will bloom again (fleurs du printemps de l’humanité, ces monumens d’une période qui ne refleurira plus, Denkmäler einer Frühlingsperiode der Menschheit, die nie wiederkehren wird und die nur einmal hervorblühen konnte), he avowed. Then, caught up in the act of decrying those immense losses of the most essential works of art, his feeling of horror at the sheer barbarity of it rose even higher. He uttered his true opinion concerning these points, and as if to underscore them he hastened to carry out the deed he already had decided on: then and there this harvest of his own labour was cast without hesitation into the mouth of the fireplace, which devoured it hungrily.
The spectacle of a Privatgelehrter burning his own manuscript out of an exacting regard for truth, displays this prototypical figure from a more comical side. Such a literary treatment may call forth laughter from the reader (which here could even be a criterion of understanding), and yet, because the German poet exiled in Paris should also be accounted a thinker and even a philosopher, this response could be a prelude to another, the awareness that with this anecdote a twofold question is posed. Firstly: what need at all can there be to write such a pæan to the religion? – if, as some fiercer critics (paradoxically) later on were willing to admit, fostered by that same religion, on the scale of history, was the disposition which subsequently does turn on it too, as also against so much else, the urge to veracity.* Hence that attitude towards truth is a worldly fruit of Christianity, which everyone, whether or not the lineage is recognised, does utilise and enjoy. The urging of truthfulness, therefore, itself stands amongst the best of all encomia to the “magnificence of the Christian religion,” a circumstance for which all might give thanks, now and then, even or especially any honest atheist (ehrlicher Atheist), specimen of a scarce and but barely traceable species (eine spärliche und fast kaum auffindbare Species).** Not inordinately difficult will it be to do so, insofar as the gratitude is expressed properly when one gives one’s own veraciousness free rein, and grants latitude to others similarly; while by contrast to the magnificent passion for inquiry which might then prominently take wing, paltry encomia which no one would ever read do add nearly nothing, or else actually detract. – However, one’s laughing mood not yet wearied in thinking over this prescient comic scene of 1820, now the second part of the question it puts is spoken, more seriously, perhaps with a wink. Thus does the anecdote exchange the roles, taking the lead in effect to ask the reader: How long will it be before the hypotheses you attribute to me alter in character, tested no longer for the truth or falsity of what they aver as genealogy, but henceforth only believed, as though they are reliable facts? (And, with a laugh of its own, it may add: La recherche de la paternité sera interdite.) Yes, mixing genres up Lucianically, this philosophical literature’s question has the sound of rhetoric: its aim is persuasive. Avoiding as far as it can needless strife, it points its finger towards a strange facet of truthfulness: truths do tend to fall victim to their own acceptance, undergoing a bifurcation whereby each will encounter itself again under another guise, become something quite inimical, a belief into which it itself is as though destined to crash.
* Tentatively, to my mind this phrase hews closer to the thing than do terms like “will to truth” or “conscientiousness.” (From its bouquet fewer notes are absent.)
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo, “Warum ich so weise bin,” 3
Already from his base in Paris the satirist in exile was advancing impishly through mind-fields which would be mapped out a half-century later and afterwards; far in advance he espied the pitfalls and leapt over them. (Were his moves so truthful as well as tactful just because he preferred mischief so?) – By contrast, today’s readers often plod dutifully through these topics as arrayed vaguely under the headings of the “genealogy of morals” and the “protestant ethic,” a survey undertaken along the lines of “what one owes it to oneself to do,” replete with smothered yawns, yielding meagre results. Barrages of the coruscant truth-insights that come from wonder, entrance laughter, provoke questions, which arouse the mind and make it want to dance, such dull tours generally do not witness; of the amazement stirring in the works whose titles are degraded incuriously to hollow phrases, only some few ideas are left, now dishonestly and hence with accidental irony called “truths,” notions settled finally into a slack condition, heeded and believed in, lethargically: alas, there remains, after outings like those, no chance for any better Tigersprung.
However, if truthfulness of approach does figure amongst one’s guiding concerns, one probably also owes it not only to oneself to say, tentatively, that those inquiries (published in 1887 and 1904-05), differing from the essay which had preceded them (in 1837 in German, in French in 1853), forgot about the tragedy-tinted lenses they themselves had donned while viewing these topics, or at least omitted to remove them from time to time for another perspective, in consequence drawing up their pictures largely in accord with the tragic idea of history that the best has vanished irretrievably while the worst will recur again and again. So strange it is not, then, that their findings, now a century and more afterwards, meet with the mendacious approval that ignores and neuters them (in effect sealing their fate): this one also should admit. – Granting all this comes more easily, since that tragic idea of history, spelled out quite similarly, the poet in his Paris abode (lodged in the cité Bergère during 1837 and in the rue d’Amsterdam during 1853) had earlier thought about, seeking to estimate what would ensue, should someone or indeed everyone opine and act in accordance with it. A scholar, a manuscript, a fire: he devised this fiction playfully, not as a means to an end, d’accord, yet the anecdote did also transcribe a thought-investigation the thinker in him was pursuing. Veraciousness, in the shape of this Privatgelehrter, had turned around to look over that past which amongst so much else had spawned it, saw a great tragedy there, and then, to signalise its own tragic acknowledgement or ἀναγνώρισις, moved him to destroy his own work. He offered up as an expiatory sacrifice (offrande expiatoire) what was fated never to become a book; but, since insight and blindness come together, as one is supposed to know, the good scholar failed to see something else of no little importance: that his act did not break with what he avowed he abhorred, but actually continued it, even repeating albeit on a minor scale one of its worst manifestations: a miniature instance of just the thing which, it’s said, unwittingly turns history into farce. His creator, more fortunately located, could espy the dark humour of a situation where the urge towards truth, tending of itself to become imperative, even categorically so, by degrees would reveal itself to be no defender but a destroyer of the world: it, taking hold of many who never had learned the art of regarding themselves and their activities under the aspect of the comical, does negate from within not simply this or that world, but the coherence in each of them, the power without which worldliness itself will die. Yet, dire as the prospect may seem, hope cannot be lost, so long as all that is open-ended about comedy does not entirely melt away, for until then it remains possible, though barely, that they shall at last be taught how.
Comedy, possibly, with its awareness of the humour of situations, fathoms tragedy and the tragic idea of history, while the reverse proposal sounds less veracious. Beyond the irretrievable and the recurrent, comic sense also intuits a perpetual arrival of items that remain inconspicuously, incomparably new (each is perhaps sui generis). How to notice them, is the finer challenge. Comedy’s position proves the harder to attain; its twists and turns will be more elusive, better guidance rare.
Where did the tragic opposition of recurrence versus irretrievability seem most conclusive? Amidst the relations that were social in the more exact sense of the word, those involving the search for allies and antagonists. There the process of their arrangement, re-arrangement, and derangement turned into a spectacle no one would live without: then everyone wanted to watch and to be watched. This ostentatious desire constantly recurred; while motives whose pursuit might take on more truly worthy shapes, overlooked, did vanish into the past, sight unseen, hardly to be found again. Hence, to say: tragedy, was perhaps also to say: society, and vice versa. The two a close, even a necessary tie may have bound together.
When did these complications, regarded from the outside, start to look like hell? They were met and memorialised as such in a number of locales, it seems clear, long before the German poet exiled himself to Paris. Poetry that was the bitter fruit of those encounters, there he could well have assessed for its truth in more than one language; but his circumstances did prompt inklings of an other kind of life to ripen in him, an idea of something else which then gave him more wherewithal to draw out sweeter and/or sharper notes of surprising comedy from even infernal materials. Along the way he took the opportunities at hand to fathom the wish of throwing off society, the eager interest in the several types of salvation, especially the political and the poetic; he knew the forms they took, and their limitations too.
No han de salvarte, no, tus ruiseñores,
tus noches de oro y tus cantadas flores.*
Nor, familiarising himself with them, did he scant his own person (reminders on these points, whenever they are issued, may be meant only nominally for him). Hopes for release from difficult conditions he knew from personal experience, as well as from his position out ahead of his times; and from both sources came an awareness that such expectancy also can prove treacherous, enmeshing those who entertain it even more tightly in the nets they would like to slip through, or in that well-known nightmare from which they are trying to awake. And this insight, for its part, owed more than a little to the wider horizons his liking for the vantage-point of comedy held open, whatever was the direction in which he happened to turn.
* Jorge Luis Borges, “París, 1856”
No, the writing and reading of poetry, or the poetry of reading and writing, should not be mistaken for paths towards salvation and pursued single-mindedly. Caution is wise on this point: not far down that track, serious risks of erring emerge. Those who listen solely or mainly to poems will not hear very well at all even what they are taken to say. The whole effort goes awry, to their detriment. – Fair enough: the Schöngeisterei is quite often an imposture from the very start, or soon mutates into it. Yet not only poetry has had to endure such ill-attuned attentions; sometimes they pester written history. Likewise this genre of literature is not heard; they are too busy listening to themselves listening. Dishonesty that a better witness of the absurd comedy will see, they themselves never remark, nor judge. Meanwhile, if a work of history recoils from these would-be æsthetes and their importunities, the truthful reports which it should aspire to convey, often are withheld. Or, as if in reprisal, with a faux-monnayeur’s touch of mischief, they may be offered solely under the guise of travesty. – In that event, assuming the garb is perceived as such, how could a sincere reader pass behind the work to acquaint himself with those semi-obscured historical materials, not neglecting to develop his ideas about them?
Questions such as this may have been on the author’s mind when, introducing his series of novels, in a text James must have known, Balzac brought in a striking metaphor to concretise the task of a novelist, whom he deemed akin to a historian.
With the world of letters expanding quantitatively during the nineteenth century, the quality of the interest with which the public approached the works of history, including some genres of the novel, often flattened out (or lessened outright), and this progression induced changes in their character, as they began to anticipate readers whose questions would show, despite themselves, the ostensible inquirers to be ever less able, and, still worse, willing to hear and comprehend the answers.
Relations like those tended to aggregate into larger interactions with a pronounced comical aspect, though from what vantage-point could it be noticed? But was there any real answer forthcoming at all to this question of the proper perspective one should take – or might a novelist do all that he could if in effect he simply managed to pose it? Which, with his perplexing, provocative metaphor, is actually what, let me suggest (perhaps not in full earnest?), was done in the 1842 preface by Balzac.
Not an author is the world’s greatest novelist (le plus grand romancier du monde), but the element that obscures all foresight, chance (le hasard), he remarks, whose ways one must study, to remain productive. Nor to himself, as the author, should there accrue in retrospect the title of historian (l’historien), but to French society itself. No more than in the office of secretary (le secrétaire) did he come to assist it. No less was involved, on the other hand, than a range of such an assistant’s tasks. First amongst them: taking the dictation, transcribing the scrawl of this mercurial personage. Then an inventory of his papers, which he might need to consult, is important to draw up and keep current (dresser l’inventaire). Moreover, from the files or elsewhere, essential facts and comparable things will have to be collected and collated (rassembler les principaux faits), at times discreetly; while on other occasions bon sens shall counsel that messages which arrive about certain affairs are better to sequester in an archive unread, or even entrust straightaway to the fireplace: these items the secretary, as a good arbiter, should select with a knowing glance, to separate them without a word (choisir les événements principaux).*
* Avant-propos, La Comédie humaine
The imagery resolves into a metaphor premised on this writer’s conscientious performance as an adjunct to the true author, serving him faithfully in his or indeed their best interest. And yet here, if the literary device looks somewhat belaboured, overshooting its putative goal, an unspoken wavering is detectable.
Yes: affirmations, perhaps even determinations, when too great a stress falls on them, may be set to work covertly to negate themselves and other items besides.*
* Factuality itself might be accounted amongst their numbers.
However, a reader, ignoring the ambiguity, could infer from the writer’s metaphor that in advance of completing the “history” the “historian” cleared for publication about himself, his “secretary” observed “secrecy” that was pronounced. What does he admit despite himself? Each of his volumes would cap off a silent undertaking.
These literary processes, put thus into an ominous chiaroscuro, may summon to mind an unending array of pallbearers (une immense défilade de croque-morts)!* Where then in this literature is the human comedy? – Well, the author having by his metaphor alluded to the obstacles met with and outwitted in the course of the work, he enabled himself to state his main aim, namely, depicting the mœurs as they were during the period, truthfully, to save them from oblivion; thus captured, here better readers will find the comical moments of social life, the comedies many of that society’s denizens would not let themselves notice. – Furthermore, beyond the comedy which may attach to any one of the mœurs, there is also the comical circumstance pertinent to all of them. If conventional decorum sought to arrange them that their better sides would be prominent, sufficiently at least that in society the pretence was upheld, well, with merely a small mishap, rather obviously their worse would appear instead; while, in addition, the efforts to fix each in a given state would at times achieve a contrary result, helping further to speed the arrival of the next one up, which already was advancing as if on a schedule to supplant it: all this, regarded with some distance, might seem rather comical, even a bit like farce. – And yet the more serious point of all these comedies better readers do ponder, they who treat the encounter with this capital literature of the nineteenth century differently than the greater numbers in the reading public do: namely, not as a chance to raise their profiles by swarming its author with questions whose answers even they never await. Rather, a more conscientious readership may ask how the mœurs became so crucial amidst the immense array of social relations that the task of recording them truthfully took on such importance in the preface of 1842. For, though each single instance of the mœurs was slated to melt away into air, taken in their totality the role they assumed had become weightier than ever.
* Charles Baudelaire, “De l’Héroïsme de la vie moderne”
Scholars of literature today, along with several closely-related types of practitioner, often show themselves wanting in vision and judgement alike, dual capacities of the novelist as this figure is sketched in the text by Balzac. (Their very lack of them, given an appropriate literary treatment, might display comical facets of its own.) – His metaphor of the historian was well-chosen; possibly he had intuited something of interest to himself within the concept itself. And that in it there actually can be found an intriguing arrangement of ideas, an examination of its origin energised by his imagery does seem to confirm. Generally, the oldest antecedent of the word “historian” or its fellows in Romance languages and some others, namely, “ἵστωρ,” competent specialists – philologists, etymologists, classicists – have in turn derived from the verb “ἰδεῖν,” which meant to see and by connotation to know. Ἵστορες, in those times, would venture from their countries to see at first hand notable things elsewhere, seeking to behold them with their own eyes, especially since the earlier accounts not infrequently were unreliable: their desire for knowledge outweighed the risks that might befall them along the way. Later on, something of this meaning persisted even though the word gradually weakened as it came to be applied more frequently, when, for instance, any eyewitness was called a ἵστωρ. Now, to the ears of a layman, this consensus does sound persuasive, according well with passages inter alia in the Homeric corpus or the books of the “father of history,” and yet at least one reputable scholar has proposed another derivation that could more finely illuminate some points of usage of the word “ἵστωρ.” Behind it, in this view, there was a different verb, “ἵζειν,” meaning primarily to sit as well as to bid to be seated, and thus a ἵστωρ was he who convened witnesses in some matter, bade them all sit, listened to their accounts, assessed each of them, and rendered the verdict: long before any such office came to be established there formally, ἵστορες fulfilled some of a judge’s responsibilities.* Sharpness of judgement, more than acuity of vision or depth of knowledge, typified the ἵστωρ, though by virtue of his activity he did hone those faculties also to an eminent degree; yet with him their role was as ancillaries.
* vide Edwin D. Floyd, “The Sources of Greek Ἵστωρ ‘Judge, Witness’”
As propounded, the case for this other derivation of the word also seems cogent; but about these specialised questions I am neither “witness” nor “judge” enough to decide. Conceivably, however, in this matter a decision is beside the point. Does it not seem likely that both roles informed the profile of the ἵστωρ? Each would have been prominent by turns, as someone ventured out to see, gathered impressions in stages, then sat down to ponder, turned or returned inward, and convened them.
Meeting in the office of the Balzacian metaphor, the “historian” and the “secretary” resemble one another by embodying to some extent both sides of the ἵστωρ. A bit of the “witness” and the “judge” enters into each, resulting in solutions of qualities (they are not syntheses!) which could prove challenging to maintain, depending on how exactly the demands of veracity are taken. Truthfulness requisite if the writer will distinguish himself as a good witness, whose main care follows what he sees and knows (not wanting to be defeated via the eyes), differs from the kind needed by the writer striving to judge as best he can (impartially, sine ira et studio), who while convening and assessing the evidence must attend selectively to that which he will hear and comprehend. – In practice these two modes of veracious activity may diverge quite far from one another. Holding them somehow in concord, then, is perhaps one criterion of a superior novelist at any time, and especially from the nineteenth century onwards, when the circumstances, rife with deceit, the falsity inherent in society or in some more localised set of social relations, in effect seek to insert wedges between them, as though focused on a victory in what may look and even sound like a grand concerted undertaking against the urges to truthfulness.
Opposed covertly and openly from without, those urgings seem to be undermined also from within by the many promptings of self-deception. – If that actually is so, then with a conscientious novelist his efforts as a “historian” at times would shift inward, permitting himself to observe the spectacle of social desires and assess them in their nascence (perhaps already alliances and antagonisms are forming). But never to be taken in while studying all those inner scenes: that is a tall order. Amongst novelists, as with all whose “historian’s” inclinations find other paths to tread, which of them could possibly aver in truth of themselves that they had not?
Lying to oneself is easy to denounce; to avoid always, impossible.* Presumably this acknowledgement would hold good not merely for the “secretary” in the Balzacian metaphor, but also for the “historian,” that is, speaking non-metaphorically, society at large. (In the 1842 preface the term, as were several others, was written with a capital letter.) If a novelist grants only much later on, long after the fact, that he succumbed to a large deception because something in himself had also taken him in – to recall the one dramatic sentence in the Jamesian letter of August 1914 – the admission, though phrased ever so windily, turgidly, grudgingly, will be marked by the tragic shade of ἀναγνώρισις. Agreed: yet if a similar awareness came with less delay or even in a timely jolt,** from out of the social relations themselves, directly, not by the grace of a novel or posthumous collection, what tone could it have?***
* For argument’s sake grant that a categorical statement is permitted here at all.
** Against expectation: since redeeming oneself from self-deceptions accumulated in one’s own past will always figure as a challenge, with a shrug one may imagine, hypothetically and/or duplicitously, that the effort would not be worth the trouble.
*** To say the tone would in that case be comic, simply short-circuits the answer.
Plausible responses to the question are hard to locate. Where to find a punctual admission of someone’s own fallibility, other than in a novel – but would not the words there disprove themselves the moment they were uttered, at the latest?
When, in the course of the nineteenth century, the search for allies and antagonists that pushed every social relation towards the condition of ostentatious spectacle, came to resemble more and more nearly the twists in the common run of novels, by dint of the reading public’s usual habits during that era of its rapid quantitative expansion, the scenes in the life of society which were the quasi-novelistic result, a novel of rather higher quality might in turn include amongst its themes, exploring how all that actually could have taken place; but this effort would be defeated, the novel that undertook it failing to handle the complications of the task, in the end a victim of the credulity its author showed himself unable or unwilling to overcome. Capacities to witness and to judge emerged largely unimproved from the debacle.
Much closer to a superlative novelist would be required, to step back from such a failed project in order to examine it and its defeat, if all that were to be gotten into a novel of his own, wherein somehow the profile of veracity, both its strength and its limits noted, was conveyed in faithful likeness. And here one author does spring to mind. Dostoevsky, in his last novel, it seems to me, did observe how hard the effort of truthfulness is, not slighting the valour of attempting it nonetheless, while a speech which acknowledges self-deception as a force in human life he assessed for its tone, its audible character and perhaps also its logical fitness. There, in one renowned passage, Zossima speaks as both a witness and a judge of the human character: with a squint of the mind a reader might discern a touch of the ἵστωρ or the novelist about him. Certainly he advised against the lie to oneself, the source of many deceptions and self-deceptions; but how he did so, invites readers to pause.
Whoever listens to his own lies (собственную ложь свою слушающій) becomes absorbed by what he hears himself saying inwardly, enclosing himself in a mode of perception that when active may be defined as “listening to himself listening”* – soon even the level of this activity will falter, while that which remains of his outer ability to listen will catch mainly the reverberations of falsehoods in which he has trapped himself. Damage inflicted on himself inwardly, moreover, has its match in the weakening of power to discern or discriminate amongst (различать) things in the world. Someone who lies to himself, therefore, pays for it with a gradual loss of the aptitudes which marked him as witness and as judge, impairing his ability as a ἵστωρ, and thus as a novelist, if he were one. And much the same consequence of deceit is anticipated when a further remark says that abatement of the capacity to make distinctions does foment in him, against both himself and others, a badly negligent attitude of disrespect (неуваженіе).** This strong word appears to state that attentiveness as it figures in the more visual pursuits, too, will decline; vision’s strength begins without long delay to wither once self-deceptions have taken hold.
* This is a phrase to which I may recur at some later time.
** Братья Карамазовы, pt. i, bk. ii, ch. ii
(Русскій Вѣстникъ, vol. cxxxix, no. 1)
How well the monk himself knew all these conditions, need not be asked. Vital is only the assessment: it also should be assessed. Although couched perhaps in the words of a homily, on closer examination its purpose seems an other. It was issued in order that the readership might ponder veracity’s fortunes in the affairs of the world. Or, more likely, the misfortunes, insofar as social relations exist by dint of self-deception. The search for allies and antagonists, everyone says to themselves, amounts simply to one of life’s necessities, but effectively it is the ostentation in the seeking, all the moments, facets, aspects of it becoming spectacle, that arouses their desire and draws them in. A subterfuge nearly none has honesty enough to admit to: already the lies they tell themselves ensnare them. Entered into relations that are social, it happens almost automatically that all begin to listen to their own; in consequence, not merely from any of them individually, also from every relation amongst them, whether singly or together, discernment and discrimination melt away: disrespect strikes the total set of such relations, the spectacles they comprise do attract a less fine regard (perhaps only thus does any of them bear looking at).
Thus the monk’s remark about lying, upon further reflection, a readerly response its emplacement was as if meant to encourage, applies not only to persons, but also at large to society.* By implication, every participant in social relations, simply on that account if not also on others, in effect is listening to his own lies. A perplexing, shocking portrait of them in aggregate! “Society” had become tangible enough to personify. But – a rejoinder just as readerly – how true could its image be really?
* A word it is probably best to write without a capital letter, nor prefaced by an indefinite article – if in this context it or any of its fellows is at all the mot juste.
One would greatly underrate the novelist by fancying he had not anticipated that counter-query. – If there is any truth to this picture of the deceit in social relations, whence was it espied? From the mobile observation-points of one whose priorities were other than social, securing him or at least the better author in him against the spectacle of society’s alliances and antagonisms as he moved amidst the interstices.
That the picture embodies a great quantum of truth, seems likely to me. And even on an occasion when the novelist comported himself as though he too were first and foremost a social creature, much like his “associates” then and there, the mind whose mobility one notices would best be regarded as still patently of another sort.
Dostoevsky, during a sojourn in Paris, reported a notable critic (subsequently inducted into the company of the Immortels) who met him there, in the course of an essay published some years after the novelist’s death, on one occasion launched into a diatribe against the country’s decadence, as he saw it, centring the complaint on a locale renowned during the nineteenth century nearly until the World War, which was favoured inter alia by a number of literary men, the Café Anglais. For this establishment a bleak fate would come; from it, some day, he predicted, will be sent out the signal for the end of the old world (partira le signal de la fin du vieux-monde), and the city, with everything of which it is most proud (avec tout ce qui fait son orgueil), shall collapse in fire and bloodshed (s’écroulera dans le sang et l’incendie).* The author ventured on like this for a while; recounting the scene, the Frenchman noted the slightly comical impression it left, though he had taken no offence at the Russian’s words, seeing in them instead a “naïveté” of judgement about conditions in the West that was “amusante.” And indeed, why deny that the novelist’s tirade comes across even now somewhat comically; while also granting that decades later his prescience was borne out in a terrible way, in whose wake the echoes and after-echoes still resound throughout the country and the city, and around much of the West generally, perhaps in the mode of a prelude, anno 2025: so that if one’s ears are keen one may want to stifle the laughter. Plus ça change . . .
* Dostoevsky’s remarks, quoted in Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé,
“Les Écrivains russes contemporains: F.-M. Dostoïevsky,” v
But, focussing solely on what the critic noticed at that time and place, it seems he regarded the novelist’s outbursts as having comprised simply a social gambit, the sending of an ostentatious signal that he too was looking for allies and antagonists. In the midst of speechifying, accordingly, just as in everyone’s social comportment, with him also a listening to these own lies of his was occurring: an inner allotment of one’s attention which can lead to becoming their dupe. His false animadversions against the Parisian establishment were of this sort, the critic suggested by way of unspoken corollary, since he needed to execrate the place in order to avoid dreaming about it too much (qu’il fallait maudire pour n’en pas trop rêver), precisely because in that case, the more the author would dream about it, the more likely were he to see that his lies to its detriment waylaid him. – That was the critic’s view of things.
However, does not an opposite reading of the situation appear to be at least as, if not more plausible? The novelist himself did not espouse what the critic took him to support; rather he had conducted an experiment with a number of layers. When he spoke he was not giving a tell-tale sign of listening to his own lies; he listened to the utterance quite aware it was a lie (whether of his own or loaned temporarily matters little). Attention he gave the statement was rendered incredulously, in the manner of listening in or eavesdropping, in order better to fathom its content and its appeal, to himself and to others. Yes, he also was tracking the social setting around himself, watching it shift or not shift in response; a bit of inconspicuous espionage and reconnaissance were involved. At no point did he forget his role as a novelist, though it never became a carte blanche whereby if not everything then certainly a great deal would have been permitted. Thus the prophetic phrasing of his remarks was simply a minor stratagem, a timely ψεῦδος he did authorise himself to deploy.
Between the critic’s firsthand account, supercilious and naïve around the edges as it is, and the hypothesis just put forward, which may be more Stevensonian and suggestive than serious, there are redoubts where this question of veracity could abide undisturbed; but just mentioning this suffices, as my purposes lie elsewhere.
Self-deception is hard to identify, much less to admit to, so how then to repair it? Restitution may upend everything, pushing all towards extreme amends; so the best course might simply be to let these matters rest, untouched by speech or action. Perhaps, if there remains time enough and world, to those who’ve lived their lives listening to their own lies some veracious urge will come of its own accord, or by the pointed concern a better piece of music is honoured to assist.