perspectivalism: a small defense

 

No discussion of perspectivism should neglect Blakes’ couplet:

“How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense World of Delight, clos'd by your senses five?”
Delight is a special word for Blake. Delight, etymologically, comes from the Latin for charm or entice, delectare, and is related to delicious. A false cousin is the French word délit, meaning fault or sin, and coming from delictum – a relationship that Blake might have liked. In a famous couplet found in Auguries of Innocence, Blake writes: “Some are born to Sweet Delight/Some are born to Endless Night.” The verb “born” may make this seem a matter of temperament – for which Blake had a healthy respect – but the larger meaning is birth into society, where the determinants are class, sex (gender) and race. The birds, for Blake, are always delighted – except when they are caged. Another verse from Auguries of Innocence claims “the Robin Redbreast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a rage”.

Blake wants to give voice – or song - to that particular view of heaven. The voice in which delight and rage are judged comes from the Devil in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, who has this to say:

“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:--
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:--
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Reason, in Blake’s terms, has a positional essence – it is a formal thing, rather as it is in Kant -- although Kant comes to that formalism much more reluctantly. As the bound of energy, or eternal delight, Reason both participates in and negates life. This, at least, in its proper place. But in the Bibles or sacred codes, Reason is set up as something more than a bound – it is set up as a separate essence, independent of energy. This is the great fiction of oppression – that Reason is life. Since it is, in fact, the bound set on energy, according to Blake, the Life of Reason is death in life, and the God that torments those who follow their energies is the God that lives off death.

Blake, of course, did not see this as the opposite of Jesus’ teachings – but rather thought those teachings affirmed delight. The great renewal, the life more abundant, the life without the law (that fulfilled the law), was what Jesus was striving for. And of course, before Blake’s eyes he saw the Kingdom of Heaven in full revolt -- he saw Jesus' successors in the Jacobins, and the dance around the liberty tree.
I think Blake’s perspectivism, although without the Blake reference, comes out as well in Nietzsche, with his quite opposite view of Jesus and the dance around the tree of liberty.
Here’s a passage from the preface to Beyond Good and Evil:

Let’s not be ungrateful to them [Platonism and the Vedanta philosophy], even as it must also certainly be confessed, that the worst, most boring and dangerous of all mistakes up to now has been a Dogmatic mistake, namely, Plato’s invention of the pure mind [Geiste] and of the good in itself. But now, where it has been overcome, where Europe breathes out from this nightmare and at least enjoys a healthier … sleep – here we are, whose task is the awaking itself, the inheritance of all the force which the struggle against this error has bred [grossgezüchtet]. This meant standing Truth on its head and denying the perspectival, the fundamental condition of all life, in order to speak of minds and of the good as Plato has done; yes, one might ask, as a doctor would, how did this disease attack the most gorgeous animal [Gewächse] of antiquity, Plato? was he really corrupted by the evil Socrates? Was Socrates, in fact, a corruptor of the youth? and did he deserve his hemlock? But the struggle against Plato, or, in order to say it more intelligibly, and vulgarly, the struggle against the force of the Christian-churchly for millennia – because Christianity is Platonism for the people – has created in Europe a splendid tension of the intellect [Spannung des Geistes] as there has never before been on Earth; with such a taut bow, one can now shoot the furthest goal.”

Gratitude and struggle are the things we pick out of that quotation. The mistake often made by critics of perspectivism is to presuppose that  perspective is stable, that it is pre-given, that it is perfectly defined. In fact, quantifying over perspectives is tremendously difficult – it is the same kind of difficulty encountered when quantifying over events. In our opinion, the mistake is shared by those who claim to be perspectivists, when they come out with the moral rule that one cannot judge another perspective or -- perspective's stand in - culture. How can I judge is the cry in the classroom and on social media. This is not a rule derived from perspectivism,  but from its enemy – Night. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Blake's bird knows, which is the coupling of delight with a certain cruelty.

It is of the essence of perspectivism that, among all possible perspectives, there is no single one that can encompass all the information found in every perspective. In other words, perspectivism claims that there is no God’s eye perspective. The myth takes that to mean something like: there are no universals. The two claims aren’t equivalent. It may well be that there are invariants across perspectives. But this does not mean that you can make, out of those invariants, a sort of uber-perspective. There are no back doors to the God position.

Furthermore, these invariants aren’t necessarily “truths”. I suspect that there are invariants that are fictions. Now, it is at this moment that someone inevitably pops up, a smirk on his face, and says, aha, how can you talk about truths and fictions if everything is just a perspective? This objection comes down to saying that truth is an extra-perspectival process. To which the reply, properly, is: so what? If it is true (that the truth is extra-perspectival), it amounts to saying that there is an invariant across perspectives. And if it is false (I believe it is false), this means, merely, that truth claims are judged on their relation to perspectivally specified frames of reference. In both cases, truth is not grounded in reality, but in procedure. What is at stake here is not really the truth, but something that is more like the reputation of the truth. The reputation of the truth is that it is a good. The reputation of the truth takes the truth to be more than it is – a selection procedure for statements. One of the hallmarks of modernity is the divorce between truth and its reputation. That divorce has been taken hard by foundationalists.

Another myth about perspectivism makes it equivalent to that extension of the liberal ethics of tolerance in which it is claimed that cultures are equal. This is, in some ways, a throwback to the Leibnizian notion of monads – those windowless things. It is as if cultures grew up in perfect autonomy and independence one from the other. Nietzschian perspectivism is quite different, and in this does not share the Blake-ian thought that the human animal can become like the bird – existing in the element of delight.  In N. perspectivism, perspectives – and for the moment we will treat cultures as different perspectives – are constituted by the assimilation and rejection of other perspectives – a constant will to power. The liberal ethos of tolerance, according to Nietzsche, could only arise after the liberal culture had sufficiently disenfranchised rival cultures to the extent that it could patronize them. This is a agitated point in Nietzsche’s writing – it is, on the one hand, a point at which a culture has come to the summit of its power, and, on the other hand, it is a point at which a culture manufactures the kind of nihilism – the kind of misunderstanding of its own historical dynamic – which undermines it. Nietzsche was inclined to describe this moment in medical terms. Indeed, Nietzsche is famous for using the metaphors provided by medical terminology – of sickness, health, strength, weakness – to diagnose (another medical metaphor) Western culture. Nietzsche went to the extent of identifying certain of his texts with convalescence itself – they were convalescent acts. Metaphor, here, is supported by metaphor.
Such, then, is the sermon on perspectives.
One p.s. Perspectives, as I said,  are very difficult to quantify over, which means that they are difficult to individuate. Since the tribe of analytic philosophers have a superstitious belief that knowledge begins with quantifying over its object, they have a hard time with perspectives. Thus, they tend to get impatient with Nietzsche. However, this is a superstition. You cannot, in classic analytic fashion, quantify over electrodynamic fields, as Maxwell described them. Physicists are rightly not worried about that.

The great point to keep in mind is: perspectivism is neither incoherent, nor nihilistic, nor philosophically untenable. And it makes a damn good alternative to foundationalism, which is not, in my opinion, entirely compatible with a scientific image of the System of the World, to use Sellar’s terms. I’ll trade the old stuffed Owl of Minerva for Blake’s songbird any day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Keep the dogs hungry - Western policy in the Middle East

 In spite of the delusions of the Stay in Afghanistan crowd - whose heartfelt solidarity with the women of Afghanistan does not seem to have caused them any lack of sleep - the policy of the Western states in the Middle East is exploitative and heavily tilted towards exemplary slaughter, such as the slaughter in Baghuz that the NYT is headlining today.

Here's a little Sunday history regarding the background of the great "nations of the free world" policy in Oman. For the history minded.

“Keep the dogs hungry and they will follow you.” That, according to journalist Chris Kutschera, was the motto of Sultan Said bin Taimur, who ruled Oman and Muscat, as it was called, from 1932 to 1970. .
“There were, in all Oman and Dhofar, three primary schools and not a single secondary school. Students who wanted to pursue their studies had to leave their country illegally and start a long life of exile in the Persian Gulf or Kuwait. It was forbidden to build new houses, or to repair the old ones; forbidden to install a lavatory or a gas stove; forbidden to cultivate new land, or to buy a car without the Sultan’s permission.
No one could smoke in the streets, go to movies or beat drums; the army used to have a band, but one day the Sultan had the instruments thrown into the sea. A few foreigners opened a club: he had it shut, “probably because it was a place where one could have fun”, says one of his former victims. Three hours after sunset, the city gates were closed.
No foreigner was allowed to visit Muscat without the Sultan’s personal permission, and sailors on ships anchored at Muscat could not land. Not a single paper was printed in the country. All political life was prohibited and the prisons were full. Sultan Said was surrounded by official slaves in his palace at Salalah, where time was marked in Pavlovian fashion by a bell which rang every four hours. But one day the dogs got too hungry, and they tore the Sultan almost to death.”
The politics of the Arabian Peninsula in the fifties and through the sixties were shaped by a number of rivalries: that between the Saudis and Nassar; that between the Americans and the Russians; and that latent and silent struggle between the declining colonial power of Britain and the Americans. It was part of the last named rivalry that Britain took the side of Oman in its border dispute with Saudi Arabia – which regarded Oman much the way Saddam Hussein regarded Kuwait. Sultan Taimur was an anglophile. Although foreigners, including Brits, were not welcomed to roam the country, British military men provided the real security advice and structure in Oman. It was the British who helped Taimur put down various revolts against his power. What the British couldn’t quench, immediately, was a revolt that sprang up in Dhofar, that region of Oman that bordered The Democratic Republic ofYemen. The original insurgency was simply that of the aggrieved, but it evolved into that third world special, Marxist revolutionaries. The two division of what eventually became known as the “Popular Front for the Liberation of the occupied Arabian Gulf” were named after Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara – names that are a little hoary, now, but that, in the sixties, had enormous magical power. The Marxists wanted to secularize, provide health care and education for women, etc., etc. – all of the things that Western policy in the Middle East was dead against for fifty years. So naturally the British had to do something. What they did was “loan” Oman use of the SAS, and build the Sultan (who had forbidden the use of glasses as an intolerable modern affront) an air force. There’s a nice, Kipling-esque account of the war on this Small Wars site. It would probably be accurate to call the Dhofar war the last classic colonial struggle undertaken by the British.
The impediment to stopping communist subversion in the Persian gulf, it turned out, was the incorrigibly backwards Taimur. So he was overthrown in a coup that is surrounded by the usual Cold War murk – the Brits most likely pulling the strings, but no chain of evidence leading directly to any order. Thus they elevating his British educated son, the present Sultan, Qaboos, and kicked the war into higher gear.

“By July 1970, the province of Dhofar in western Oman was almost entirely in the hands of Communist-backed rebels belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). The Sultan of Oman had failed to recognize the danger and had done little to gain support among the indigenous people of Dhofar. The province was ideal guerrilla country, being dominated by a range of mountains in which the Sultan's Armed Forces found it difficult to operate. On 23rd July, the Sultan's son Qaboos bin Said, seized power in a palace coup to try and save his inheritance. He immediately introduced policies based on British counter-insurgency operations (COIN) and new government agencies were set up, designed to modernize Oman and persuade the ordinary people that the Sultan was worth supporting. Elements of 22 SAS were sent to help the expanded SAF defeat the PFLOAG.”

However, the British ability and willingness to sustain a war in the Arabian peninsula in the seventies was dependent on the rotten financial situation of the British economy, as well as emergencies closer to home, as in Northern Ireland. So Sultan Qaboos turned elsewhere – namely, to the Shah of Iran. Not only was a generation of British military men trained in the Dhofar war – by the end, it became an exercise field for the planes the Americans had sold the Shah .

numerus clausus a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Numerus clausus

 

A little extermination

is mixed into the formula.

In indifferent arms they lay

 

smudged by the dark angel

from whose connosieur’s fingers

they were untimely taken.

 

-         Untime being their time

in the ward, the asylum,

the camp, the out-of-the-way.

 

Its monopoly over the heart’s

promptu surges.

Henry Darger’s worlds

 

Charlotte Solomon’s worlds.

Feel the animal warmth

throat hunger, caried dribble

 

onlooker. In our larger crime

their scheduled prowling. In our time.

conservatism from the margins

 

Conservatism from the margins

Conservative parties have long dominated the political scene in the top OECD countries, and dominate policy choices even when so called “social democratic” or progressive parties are elected. That degree of domination has not, so far, been matched with an intellectual history of the movement that does not merely move from head to head: from, say, St. Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. I  am too much the left-bot, the Marx reader, to think that this is satisfactory. I take the conservative claim to monopolize or articulate “common sense” as a clue to understanding how the conservative effect emerged in the modern world. I’d maintain that the effect has two sources: one, rooted in the establishment – the alliance of landowners and Capital  – adopted a  strategy well summed up by the Prince in The Leopard with the famous phrase, “everything must change so that everything stays the same”. But Burke, I think, is an emblem of another kind of conservatism:  a conservatism from the margins. This kind of relationship is drawn to the organic notion of the social, identifying the organic with a form of lifestyle that is in the crosshairs of liberalism. The  marginal conservatives derive from various nostalgic pictures of an original society: the Catholic population of Ireland, the Bretons  in the French revolution, the Austrians (among others) in the Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. Their effect is to produce a double vision of conservatism as not only the natural ideology of the ruling class, but also, paradoxically, as the victims of the liberal order. This victimhood is systematically undervalued, if seen at all, by the liberal order – by those who generally have succeeded in Capitalism’s circulation sphere, per Marx – the emblematic winners in the world of non-productive labor.

University of Austin (the real one)

 

I suppose it is time to announce this: I, too, am starting a university I am calling University of Austin! A total alternative to "credentialled" liberal universities. Our curriculum consists of curated YouTube videos. We encourage students to take out those sweet sweet loans now! Our distinguished faculty will be such personages as Albert Einstein and Cicero and Robert E. Lee - all on Youtube of course, but we aree in negotiation to bring in character actors to portray them for you, our students - cost is no object! many of these fine actors will be found at blood banks, but we will provide them with employment - which is where some of that sweet sweet loan money will be going tol

In our classes, students will learn to oppose the horrors of political correctness, big government (get those loans now!), and entitled "minorities" - as opposed to the good ones! - who are even now brainwashing our youth. Also, evolutionary psychology will be taught (on many excellent Youtube videos, for instance by a man calling himself "avenging Bat") to show why women generally are bad at math and good in the sack! among other treasured items of our Western Heritage!
So apply now. Our tuition (10,000 per semester) is a bargain, and your education will be crowned, if all goes as planned, with a YouTube uploaded ceremony that you can design for yourself!
For those of you out therre - that brave band who have read their John Adams, their Cicero, their Jordan Peterson's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People - who want to support my venture in freedom, but are for some reason unable to attend classes, you can buy a t shirt: Proud to be Privileged - University of Austin (the real one) 2022 for the low low price of 45.99. That's right, 45.99. Along with the T-shirt you will also get an Associate's degree in Contrarianism suitable for framing!

The villainous empath

 

Wayne Booth’s book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, appeared in 1961 – a year of Cold War promise. It became one of the references for the exploration of fiction by a New Criticism that was organized to explicate poetry.

Booth used tools of both New Criticism and the traditional philology of sources – notebooks, letters – to explicate (a word tendered in the classroom to gently initiate the vaguely astonished, note-taking, crewheaded rows into the arcana of literature) the novel. Among the canon that passed through his hands was The Aspern Papers. I’ve been re-reading the Aspern Papers, thinking about its highly nasty narrator, and I’ve turned to the explicators for some discussion. Booth’s notion is that James set himself a rather impossible task – an irresolvable double-focused task: on the one hand, the goal of the Aspern Papers is to obtain material – letters especially – from a poet of the romantic period, a sort of American Shelley, from his now aged and dying lover, Juliana Bordereau – and on the other hand, in order to accomplish his task, he has to stoop to various deceits strongly reminiscent of a con-man.

“We have here, then, two neatly distinct subjects. There is a plot, the narrator’s unscrupulous quest for the papers and his ultimate frustration; it is a plot that requires an agent of a particular insensitive kind. There is secondly a “picture”, an air or an atmosphere, a past to be visited and record with all the poetic artistry at James’ command.”

To me, the comedy of Booth’s point comes in with that “insensitive”. There, in that word, we find summoned a whole ideology of the golden era of the University and the humanities: the notion that scoundrels are, by their nature, insensitive. And that comedy came to be exploited over and over again, starting with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and ending with the novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, where the academic sensitives, those who memorize the verses, turn out to be quite as insensitive as Rotary businessmen, becomes a perpetual astonishment.  Booth’s notion here is that conmen, or those unscrupulous enough to manipulate people, through lies and pretences, in order to get what they want, could not possibly exude “pictures” of the high artistry of James, which entails a certain fatal counterfeiting in the confection of his story. To understand and express Venice with such language is the result of climbing Maslow’s ladder – or at least Matthew Arnold’s – where “all the best that is said and done” evidences the highest degree of sensitivity. In a latter phase of the litcrit business, this is labelled empathy and literature is worthy of study in as much as it promotes same. Myself, I think this underestimates entirely what entertainment is about. In a sense, Booth’s discomfort with “The Aspern Papers”  is with a mirror that reflects his own working procedure and self-fashioning as a critic. Though ‘science” has entered into the humanities (the epochē of the author’s life, the formalist attention to the text, etc.), still, “sensitivity”, that echo of an earlier era of connoisseur-ship, remains as the untransformable base. A base that should not be base in the moral sense. And here Booth is confronted, by one of the master texts, with a narrator proposing to use any “baseness” to get hold of Jeffrey Aspern’s private letters to his lover.

Surely, the discrepancy is the flaw in this particular Golden Bowl.

I rather like James’s transformation of the villain – although there is a sense where the villain, since at least Iago’s time, has been the better psychologist than the hero. The path of the villainous empath leads us through all kinds of matters, literary and extraliterary.

Doestoevsky translates Henry James

 Dostoevsky translates Henry James

 

…here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? – Thomas Pynchon, V

 

Dostoevsky scholarship has largely ignored Dostoevsky’s translation of Henry James’ Altar of the House of the Dead. In this paper, we  attempt to chart the hitherto unremarked influence of James on Dostoevsky. Under-remarked is, perhaps, the fairer, the choicer, the more exact assessment – in Leon Edel’s four volume biography of Dostoevsky, volume 2 devotes a good three pages to the circumstances of the translation, but – in spite of his, that is to say Edel’s, extraordinary extensiveness, his rather beautiful and at the same time rather ‘creepy’ ability to slip, as it were, like some rich letter into the envelop of Dostoevsky’s life, we believe that more can be made of this small but characteristic nuance in the life of the great American writer.  James, at the time Dostoevsky encountered his work in Paris, was almost unknown in the English speaking world, although this was a fate that he shared with most of the great Russian writers of the time, save for Turgenev – whose novels were circulated in the same trans-Channel circle as those of Flaubert and George Eliot. A circle that included, of course, Dostoevsky himself, although at the time we are speaking of more as an apprentice to that bright company than a trusted associate thereof. It wasn’t until Constance Garnett translated James’ work at the turn of the century that he became known,  or depending on your stance on her rather free  and as much as was in her power easy translations, mis-known first to the British, and then to the American, public, resulting in that craze for the Russian novel which we can now see through for all its exoticism, with its compounding the myth of the “Slavic soul” and the great criminal type,  but which is nevertheless a definite marker on the board game of the cultural moment. In elevating James to the headiest of heights, the English critics (not so much the Americans) had a tendency to invidiously compare the supposed pallor of the parlor politics of the American-English novel, with exaggerated gestures leaving it to one side of the great current of human thought. In this accusation of a commitment to a whole world of trivia, Dostoevsky’s work suffered by comparison: why should we care what overcoat his character, Basil Raskolnikov, choses to wear to his first meeting with Olive Karenov in that famous chapter of the Bostonians, after all?  Haven’t we, as it were, overcoats of our own? Yet the slings and arrows once shot at Dostoevsky’s work in the 1910s and 20s were, when all is said and redone, not exactly killing – a mere glancing at the extremities and never a piercing of the beating, momentous heart. We now know that literature is big enough to contain both Dostoevsky and   James. And yet we persist, erroneously I believe, in placing them into different regions of fiction’s vast atlas, as though they were separate poles, a North and a South.  All the more reason, given this phantasmal, as I would call it, cast of  exoticism – so reminiscent in my own case of the sea tan of a certain favorite Uncle whose employment as a Captain in the Merchant Marine led me, once, to dream of more thrown and carefree destinies -  to revisit Dostoevsky’s translation.

 

We must start this revisiting (quite in the Dostoevsky manner – I am here not so distantly influenced by the phrase in his preface to The Papers found in Aspern’s Mousehole that the past can be divided into that which one can visit with the standard Baedekers of history and that which one can only speculate upon with whatever lyric genius one has acquired from one’s experience or one’s nightmares) with Cesare Lombroso,. It was Lombroso, in his  remarks about James in Men of Genius: a study in a peculiar criminal type (1870) (Genio e Follia),  who brought James in particular to the bilious gaze of a Europe still surfeited with its classical liberal certainties. He so influentially used him as a literary touchstone in constructing his theory of the doubleness of the criminal consciousness,  with all its enfolding and alienating affinity to genius, as the skulls of one race show, in spite of the individual weather suffered by the ossature of this or that particular, broadly similar traits . Lombroso might well have met James on his voyage to Russia in 1867. We know that they both frequented the one salon in St. Petersburg in which both the foreign tourist or emissary and the Russian intelligentsia and ministerial official were brought together:  Fanny Assingham’s famous Saturdays. Assingham, the wife of Frederick Assignham, the head of the British legation, made her well appointed mansion, situated on 18 Bolshaya Moshkaya street (rented, her diary says, from Antonin Faberge), into a veritable crossroads of the most advanced thought. We know from James’s diaries that he took a decidedly satirical and even, sometimes, rather denunciatory view of his hostess’s circle of  “nihilists and future dynamiters”  – although this was tempered with his empathy for Fanny’s situation as a sort of female Robinson Crusoe, cast adrift on the terra incognita of a Russian empire that was tugged into shape, as it were, by those arch twin tuggers,  God and the Devil, both foreign entities to Fanny’s type, of a mind so sociable no thought of the divine could penetrate it.  Characteristically, James used his knowledge of Fanny’s character to outline the personality of Vavara Petrova, the expatriate Russian hostess in his Venice novel, The Possessed Ambassador, with her attention to the silverware and her failure to grasp the Russian spirituality that assumed, in the larger imagination, the quite material appurtenances of the bomb and the pistol. The hapless hostess has in fact become a type that entered Russian  phrase and fable as a byword for missing the point: Assingham’s silverware.  

 

James did not note down everything in his diary, or recount every Assingham evening in his letters, feeling no obligation, as we would comically like him to have intuited,  to his future biographers or critics, just as one imagines the lightning bolt to be quite unconscious of meteorologists. Thus, we have no notice of Lombroso in James’ notes. It is a speaking absence, perhaps – James, with his passion for Italy, would surely have fallen into discussion with the young Italian philosopher if seated next to him before Assingham’s cosy fireplace.  And surely the topic of Lombroso’s book would have attracted his notice, especially as it would have given James the impression that his fame had penetrated to the capitals of Europe. However Slavophile James became at the end of his life, he was always sensitive to the quite deplorable and at the same time quite interesting events in Europe. We know from his letters to his French translator how very au courant James was, in this respect, and even more so given his rivalry with Turgenev, a typically Jamesian love-hate affair of gambling debts, mistresses and a polemically proposed spiritual shallowness. However that may be on James’ side, on Lombroso’s we have the witness of his book that the young Italian philosopher was aware, or made aware (is this the guiding hand of Fanny?) of the extraordinary “event”, one  might say, of James in the progress – or decline - of mankind at least as it was composed of the frockcoated members of the species. Lombroso’s craniological and pseudo-Darwinian theories are now seen as quaint, if not maleficent, but in his time he was, of course, an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Dostoevsky did not pick up Men of Genius out of a need merely to amuse himself with one of the recently chic:  the doubleness of the human character is, after all, one of his great themes as well, however much Dostoevsky set his characters in a less volatile set than James. Murder, yes, would rattle their teacups; but one could well ask whether, for instance, Milly Theale in Dostoevsky’s The Injured Dove, that victim of a conspiracy mounted, after all, by her best friend in the world, was not in a manner hunted, all without the appearance of gunpowder, down.

 

One voyage should not be inflated into any kind of real familiarity with the ins and outs of the intricate Russian in which James is acknowledged as one of the great masters. Lombroso took his bearings from an uncertain Italian translation of James’ The Golden Idiot. Although one doubts that D H Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, to give two famous examples, ever studied Lombroso, deplorably associated with the generation of the Shaws and the Bennetts, or knew him as more than a name that appeared in the journals,  we know that Dostoevsky did, in fact, read this book, in its French translation (L’homme de genie) , and, as we can see from the copy of the book found among Dostoevsky’s possessions, he made numerous marginal remarks on the passages in which Lombroso analyses James’s “epiloidal-obsessive” type. Dostoevsky was not equipped with the depersonalizing New Critical insight that the author should be separated from the text – it was, in fact, alien to his whole notion of literature as a branch, the golden bough as it were, of human reality. So he did not hesitate to project shamelessly James’s own psychology upon the character of Prince Amerigo, whose obsessive pursuit of Natasya Fillipovna, his wrenching her away from her perverse “guardian”, his spending his fortune upon her, and his final murder of her, was as well the blurry light by which Lombroso interpreted the subterranean decays of the liberal order.  We argue that James’ passionate struggle to mold an image of Christ in terms of Russia’s unique redemptive role profoundly effected Dostoevsky’s conception of his own fundamental task, which was, as he put it, “ to disclose the abjured figure, the wrecked aboriginal, the buried Caliban, in the great American carpet.” One remembers, as though it were some task du jour noted on a piece of paper and crammed into the pants pocket and retrieved oh so tardily from thence that Dostoevsky’s father was a great American Swedenborgian, and that however secular Dostoevsky’s own work sometimes seems – a paucity of mentions of Christ such as to make it seem an emanation from a preternaturally secularized society – the striving for grace was never far from his conception of character.

 

Dostoevsky purposely so dissolved the boundary between his fiction, his “lying muse” and his biography that the formalist tenet of the impersonality of art, besides being pertinent more to a mode of art of which he was the conscious, and uneasy, precursor than to his own aims or methods, simply must throw up its hands in despair at a case so hard as to be virtually uncrackable.. Thus, to understand how Dostoevsky came not only to read the Altar of the House of the Dead sitting in a Parisian café with a “brand new copy” of L’Observateur de Deux Mondes in 1870, but to understand further how the necessitous grip of the story was of such a degree that it interrupted the flow of his own work on the novel that eventually became The Portrait of the Possessed (1876), we must adduce the ‘personality of the artist,’ and, indeed, horror of horrors, his very historical circumstances, which were, after all, the stock of newspaper headlines. Although the translation acted as an interruption, one which other commentators have overlooked as so much not to the point and always to be condemned to the hell of footnotes, we see both sides, the regal and as it were the callipygious, of the coin, here: the other side was a release “devoutly to be wished,” upon the completion of which Dostoevsky embarked upon a series of novels and stories that were of a markedly different quality – indeed, his own quality, the ‘Dostoevsky’ who became, along with his beloved Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, the abiding American novelist – than the comparative hack work he had done before.

Hence, in spite of the strictures in which we were once schooled, we recall to the reader some biographical fact: in 1870, Dostoevsky was thirty years old. Five of those years he’d spent in prison in California for attempting to assassinate the governor. As he wrote of the narrator in his autobiographical novella, In the Cage:

 

“I had hoped, in visiting Paris again, to commune with the young man I had been, as I was assured by others if not, wholly, by the direct proofs and confidences of my own memory, at nineteen. But the lesson I learned was, perhaps, as old as Achilles, who though knowing that his invulnerability extended only to cover the majority of his public person, and not his very all, never in spite of this returned to douse himself, with a final completeness, in the holy water of the River Styx, no doubt instructed by the oldest of human instincts that tells us that fate transacts its business all at once, with the immediate brightness and crash of a lightning bolt, and that no dickering, no returning, no excuses, no, as it were, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, counted with that covert power. So too, douse as I would in the mellow air of that incomparable thing, a Paris Spring, I could never, as it were, touch bottom – so that, indeed, there were mornings of a grimness in my room at the Jockey when, in a fantastic mental rush, I was returned to hopeless days sitting in much less promising quarters, the smell of my own extruded necessity assaulting my nostrils. There was something in the memory that deprived me of breath, something that seemed to disclose a darkness as of a deep, an endless well, narrowly constructed, in which I fell further and further from the pale glare of the light that signalled the mouth and possible, or impossible, exit to the architecture. What had happened to me once could happen to me again – nay, could happen to any man. It was hard, then, to see the complacent paletot, the bourgeois opera hat, the bustle around some extraordinary product of the hour’s chef, without envisioning it all collapsing in a like darkness. I was, in a word, convict company, which it turned out was absolutely the right temper for encroaching into the high literature of that time and place.”HE MIRROR