A Statement of Accounts

Samuel Beckett wrote about Kafka (specifically, The Castle, which he stopped reading three-quarters of the way through): I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts. (I came across this in a footnote to John Banville's review of the second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett in The New York Review of Books.) He may have been wary of Kafka, but Beckett nicely captured one feature of Kafka's work: the lack of drama with which its dramas are presented.

I find myself increasingly put off by the way the word "Kafkaesque" is used, and Beckett's formulation makes the reason clear: all too often, the term is used to refer to events that are strange, surreal, and nightmarish — disastrous — but which are also presented as disasters, as oddities, surrealities, nightmares. But what makes Kafka's work so singular and striking is precisely its cool presentation of what others would present as dramas, or perhaps more precisely, as melodramas or tragedies. References to the Kafkaesque ought to include what they never do: the absence of the affect of disaster.

Astonishing Confidence in the Self

In Mark Lilla's recent article on the Tea Partiers in the New York Review of Books, he comes up with one of his wonderful summations of a situation:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

But I would add that these "new Jacobins" are not just American, as I have seen the same combination of public pessimism and private optimism in Switzerland as well. Many Swiss are just as skeptical of public institutions as Americans are (especially of what they call "Schulmedizin," that is, mainstream medicine) and just as optimistic about their own perceptions of the world ("the homeopathic treatment worked for me"). So while Lilla has perhaps correctly diagnosed the Tea Partiers here, he has limited the scope of his observation too much: what he identifies as "classic American traits" may once have been uniquely or at least especially American, but they have gone global as well—or at least Swiss. (Or does this have something to do with democracy?)

Perhaps someone will say, "Well, Andrew, what about your own 'astonishing confidence' in yourself?" But I am not skeptical about public institutions, and I try to understand my own experience as anecdotal (no matter how fun or funny the anecdotes are) and not representative of how people are and how the world is.

Eloquent Thinking about Torture

Here are some elqouent things I just read about torture:

My friend Don Brown, in response to his reading of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

Two posts (first and second) by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

Mark Danner's second article in the New York Review of Books. (Here's the first one.)

As for me, my line remains the same: put the guys on trial (guys = people you arrest for terrorist crimes AND the people who ordered that they be tortured).

[Still waiting to get my new computer fully operational. Once I do, I'll get the Daily Poem Project back up to date!]

Official American Sadism, by Anthony Lewis

This is from Anthony Lewis's "Official American Sadism," an essay in the September 25 issue of the New York Review of Books. The book he is referring to here is Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power. Hamdan is the plaintiff in the famous Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Bush's military commissions were unconstitutional.

One of the remarkable facts exposed in this book is that Hamdan was first questioned in Guantánamo by an FBI agent who carefully built up a relationship with him and, in time, got detailed statements from him about al-Qaeda and some of its leaders. The agent had ample evidence for Hamdan to be prosecuted in a federal court; he thought he could persuade Hamdan to testify against more important al-Qaeda figures in return for a reduced sentence. But to his dismay Hamdan was designated for trial before a military commission; the FBI was immediately cut off from him and lost a potentially important witness.

This confirms something I started being worried about in September 2001: the militarization of the "war on terror" meant that criminal trials would not be one of the principal means used to combat terrorism. And this proves it: the military commissions clearly hinder the battle against bin Laden and company!

Lewis also quotes Major General Anthony Taguba:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Taguba, "who was appointed to investigate the torture at Abu Ghraib and found that there had been 'wanton criminal abuse' of detainees, was forced into retirement."

Good mail

A good day for my mailbox today: no bills or junk, Poetry, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. All that kept it from being a perfect day was the absence of an acceptance (or, in the absence of an acceptance, at least a copy of Light Quarterly to guarantee my reading pleasure until Harry comes out next week).

In Poetry (the July/August issue), Brad Leithauser, Wendy Cope, and Richard Wilbur are among the many writers whose work I look forward to reading. In the New York Review (the July 19 issue), Freeman Dyson, Ian Buruma, Garry Wills, Tim Parks, and Thomas Powers all have essays, AND there is an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year (which is listed as "to be published by Viking next January, but is being published by Harvill Secker in September). In the New Yorker (July 9 & 16), there's another Tim Parks essay, as well as an essay by Louis Menand.

Where to start?? I ended up starting with the New York Review, and the opening essay by Dyson. A great read over soup for lunch.

Robert Hughes on the Isenheim Altar

This is Robert Hughes on the Isenheim Altar in Colmar, as quoted by Clive James in his article "Golden Boy," a review, in the New York Review of Books of January 11, 2007, of Hughes's Things I Didn't Know:

I had never seen such a frightening picture before. Of course, as in Bosch, its repulsive powers were wound into the very fabric of the skill with which it was executed. But could one imagine the Isenheim Altarpiece hanging in a church or an infirmary back in Australia, where art never spoke of real pain, let alone grotesque sickness or deformity? Would there be any public place for it in America, or anywhere else in the modern world? It was only then, gazing on Grünewald's enormous and deliberately wrought masterpiece, that I realized how deep the roots of euphemism and evasion were sunk in modern life; how alien, as a result, the entire "Expressionist" tradition in modern art had been to me having grown up in Australia—and would also have been had I grown up in North America.... Almost all I knew of past art, and that imperfectly, was its Apollonian tradition, which spoke of order, idealism, satisfied Eros. Somewhere beyond and below that stretched another continent of esthetic experience which had somehow to be discovered, and it was probably true that my life had been too happy and healthy for me to really grasp it. This, too, was part of the reason I had had to leave Australia and come to Europe.

*

Grünewald's altarpiece is, indeed, one of the greatest works of art I have ever seen. For another take on it, see the first part of W. G. Sebald's Nach der Natur, translated by Michael Hamburger as After Nature.