Grand Hotel Abyss

Does technology make us dumber? Socrates thought so (see the Phaedrus and beware its bottomless ironies) and the case can still be made. Information that can be immediately accessed online need not be learned, need not be internalized, need not become authentic knowledge, something deeply known. Just as the corporatization of the university is transforming it from a site of education to a place of vocational training, so the technologization of thought transforms knowledge into information, a distinction best understood thus: information is something we use; knowledge is something we are. Knowledge is the brick and mortar of our subjectivity; information always remains an object outside us, something used for a specific purpose and quickly discarded. The triumph of information is the death of human subjectivity.

We think of him partly as the poet of love, and partly as the poet of death and its terrors – the pain of disease or violence, and the fear of hell. Donne had been to war; friends had been far too close for comfort to treason and its hideous punishments; his wife died and he feared it was his fault. Those of us who have seen fewer nightmares, and who share neither his hope of heaven nor his fear of damnation can still share with him his sense of unworthiness, his sense of sin, his hope of reconciliation to the end of life.

There’s forces that are going on that I don’t think a lot of motherfuckers that make music today are aware of,” [D’Angelo] says. “It’s deep. I’ve felt it. I’ve felt other forces pulling at me.” He stubs out his cigarette and leans toward me, taking my hand. “This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in,” he says gravely. “I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you’ve got to be careful.

The art market may have deep pockets, but historically it hasn’t been very hospitable to literature. As far as the “artist’s book” is concerned, the first term in the phrase has tended to take precedence, in the past century at least. A lover of literature can’t help feeling that—as the conventions of the paper book have come under the interrogation of the visual arts—poetry, rhetoric, narrative, and meaning have often suffered.

…irony is the trope of life, it is the life of culture itself without which it would age and wither within just one generation. Irony is the true cultural pharmakon: too much (like in the case of de Man or Rorty), and too little of it (like in the case of cultural traditionalists) equals death; only the right measure, the secret balance, the proper limit gives life. We therefore cannot dispose of irony—but we have to do everything to find its right limits in order to save both, freedom and responsibility, and not just freedom—or just responsibility. We need them both, together, at the same time.

The long-term effect of this usurpation of the public sphere by God, Walzer concludes, was the growth of Jewish messianism. “The secret source of messianic politics is a deep pessimism about the self-government of the covenantal community. … Israel was more often the subject of absolute judgment than of conditional assessment and counsel.” And while Walzer does not say so explicitly, it is easy to imagine what his denigration of messianism means for the modern Jewish radical tradition, which has so often prided itself on holding out for a messianic transformation of human society. If the Messiah is what we demand when we can’t or won’t engage in politics, then the Revolution, too, must be seen as fundamentally antipolitical, a dangerous dream that rests on the abdication of human judgment. The rejection of Revolution as a concept is perhaps the dividing line between liberals and leftists, and Jews increasingly find themselves on the liberal side of that line.

There are times when it may be morally productive to employ invented characters and invented facts. For instance, one cannot help flinching when Binet writes, “You are now entering Auschwitz,” or “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution.” We are not present. And, surely, not you, and not we, but they: people whose appalling fates we can imagine but do not share. The distance seems as important as the proximity, and the inventing novelist may negotiate that doubleness more effectively than the passionate documentarian.

It’s possible to see “HHhH” as part of a fashionable anti-novelistic movement, made popular in the Anglophone world by works like David Shields’s recent manifesto “Reality Hunger,” and by the essays of Geoff Dyer. I share these writers’ impatience with slack novelistic convention. And I also have a good deal of fellow-feeling for the kind of hatred of fiction that, like Roland Barthes’s prosecutorial ruthlessness, is really a kind of inverted love (in which you kill what you dislike in order to save what you idealize). But it is important to defend both the fictionality of fiction and the “reality hunger” of fiction, and to insist that these are complementary literary needs, not incompatible superfluities. A proper skepticism about the truthfulness of fiction has no need of becoming a despair about the possibility of fiction.

Q: As a teenager, did you read Marvel and DC comics?

PM: As a teenager, I didn’t read comics. I used to like — I was much more interested in literature. As a teenager, I didn’t read Stan Lee, I read Rimbaud. He was my kind of like — on of my heroes when I was a teenager. The French poet Rimbaud?

[Keep in mind, he’s pronouncing it “Rhambow.”]

Q: The French..?

PM: Arthur Rimbaud?

Q: Rimbaud, ah Rimbaud. Ah, yes, I know Arthur Rimbaud.

PM: [Something in French which I can’t even begin to transcribe. Most likely a quotation from a poem.]

Q: Rimbaud, not “Rambo”

PM: Yeah, well… (laughter)

Q: Not that one…

PM:…the other one. (laughter)

Yeah, I used to love that kind of stuff. I think that — I think the reason that a lot of British authors and writers are doing well in America is that we weren’t brought up on comics as much as the Americans. I think that’s myself, Grant, Neil, other people. I think we read other stuff. We didn’t just read comics, we read books as well! [Laughter all around.] I know what you mean, it sounds crazy! Sounds crazy! But it’s true. So, I think when we write about something, we’re drawing on our own experience which is not just a comic experience.

When I became a radical in 1948 (the last year of the politics of the Thirties), it was taken for granted (on the Left) that the Fourth of July was really a front for the four hundred families. In part, this was a heritage of European socialist theory, in part a legacy of the American experience of a Depression which had demystified so many clichés. One did not get angry that the powers that-be lied and cheated and manipulated. That, after all, was their function in life, just as it was the task of the Left to create a society which would not need to corrupt its avowed values.

The young radicals of today, it seems to me, did not start with this inherited cynicism. They came to teenage during the American celebration of the Eisenhower years and were, for the most part, not really conscious until after both Korea and McCarthyism. They seemed to have believed what they were told about freedom, equality, justice, world peace and the like. They became activists in order to affirm these traditional values with regard to some ethical cause: defending civil liberties against HUAC, picketing for the life of Caryl Chessman, demanding an end to nuclear testing, fighting for civil rights. The shock generated by the society’s duplicity in this or that single issue then opened their eyes to larger, and even more systematic, injustices.

It is, I suspect, this unique Fifties-Sixties experience which gives the New Left its distinctive flavor: a sense of outrage, of having been betrayed by all the father figures, which derives from an original innocence.