How Does It Feel To Be The Enemy?

An Arab Mother’s Reflections on the Boston Tragedy

By Lama Zuhair Khouri

Lama Zuhair Khouri is a psychotherapist in private practice and a researcher and student at Teachers College Columbia University.

I am writing this essay as I sit on a bus heading back to New York from Boston. It is just few days after the Boston Marathon tragedy and my head is pounding with thoughts of those murdered and maimed, and the cries and wails of their loved ones feel almost audible.

I came to a conference in Boston to present on a topic that has been on my mind for a while—namely, the experience of otherness. When I arrived in the West, I felt as if I was landing on Mars, or whatever other alien planet you might think of. I did not arrive here with six months of Peace Corps training, after a diplomatic briefing, or following a reconnaissance mission. I arrived as an adult, a 20-year-old woman, who was expected to be as knowledgeable and fluent in the local language and culture as any American of that age would have been. However, for all intents and purposes, I felt as ignorant as a child. This feeling of alienation never fully left me. It seemed as if I was living in a perpetual state of anxiety and dread, wondering when, where and how I would step into a minefield that would obliterate me.

I thought that this was the predicament of other immigrants like me who had to adapt to a culture that was the polar opposite of their own. But what started as a personal quest on a desk in New York ended in Boston, with a deep sense of sadness and shame.

Initially, I did not want to write about the Arab experience in America per se. I felt that often the word Arab immediately conjured up images of September 11, Guantanamo Bay, terrorism and so on. But the Boston tragedy was a rude awakening. I realized that I was fooling myself thinking I could separate my experience as an Arab immigrant from the present political reality. However, the more I wrote about the topic the more inauthentic I felt. It seemed to me as if I was going on and on, with rhetorical speeches and banal arguments, and dwelling in the abyss of self-pity and recrimination. I finally realized what was blocking me. It was the elephant in the room—a big elephant that never forgets. Western colleagues and friends politely tiptoe around this animal, rarely addressing it directly, partly out of consideration for my feelings and partly, perhaps, due to their struggles with unconscious feelings, beliefs and inevitable stereotyping. The elephant is my being from Osama Bin Laden’s gene pool and all of the archenemies of the West long before him. To paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, the ever-unasked question between me and my friends is: How does it feel to be the enemy?

Yes, I do represent the enemy. Perhaps acts by a member or members of the white majority do not implicate the majority as a whole, but, as it is with most stigmatized groups, an act by any Arab or Muslim tarnishes each and every one of us.

Throughout the ages, from the crusaders to Al-Qaeda, my people killed people considered the majority here, and the majority did not spare mine. It really doesn’t matter if the terrorists are Chechen, Pakistani or even American; as long as it is a terrorist act that has the hint of Islam in it, I feel impacted, responsible and ashamed.

Why was it so hard to write about this topic, you might ask? Well, being the enemy means being hated—and hated for crimes I did not commit. It is this hate, I believe, that creates discomfort in my social encounters. Initially, therefore, I felt I needed to allow my counterparts or readers the space to wiggle out of such discourse. A way to avoid looking at the issue straight in the eye—the issue, the main issue, is my core identity as an “other” versus the white majority’s identity. I do not mean by identity my name, or height or even country of origin or religion. I mean my core and felt self, my connection to my race and my people. My race, my core identity, is my bond to my ancestors, my heritage and the country where my loved ones reside and with whom I share history, culture and tradition. The people who held and loved me deeply are seen as savages, and the long entrenched animosity between the Muslims and the Jews—as well as the Christians for that matter—seems inexhaustible, endless and vicious.

So, initially, I wanted to mull issues most will agree upon, or at least most of the Zeteo readers I imagine would agree upon: Probably, for example, if I raised the issue of the war on the axis of evil and such rhetoric, most will empathize.

I cannot stress enough that I do not intend in the following discussion to make sweeping statements about the experiences of all immigrants, whether Arabs or otherwise. What I will be talking about here is merely my own personal experience and the experiences of other Arabs I have worked with as a psychotherapist.

The Arabs are a stigmatized group and its members carry with them the criminal record of their people and the history of their ancestors. Fear and animosity between the Arabs and the West bring up primitive feelings on both sides. The enemy is not seen as human—as if one forgets that soldiers or civilians fallen on either side have children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who weep for them.

However, such feelings of aggression, whether expressed or not, are disowned and projected on the other side. Consequently, Westerners are slaughtered, and the Arab is relegated to a sub-human category, which she learns to accept without question. For example, an African-American would be up in arms if he or she were racially profiled for a crime of any sort, but not an Arab. It is as if she agrees that she needs to be measured by a different yardstick. For example, until just a few years ago extraordinary rendition and water-boarding were not questioned. Few question the dress code of a nun or an Orthodox Jewish woman, but in some countries Muslim women’s dress is banned by law. For many of us Arabs, the call for prayer, Allah ou Akbar, often brings feelings of warmth and comfort. Understandably, in the West, such words can bring chills down the spine.

What happens when an Arab immigrant who was raised in the East moves to the West? In my own experience, arriving in the New World challenged my felt identity, or my subjective sense of myself. The image I saw in the eyes of my friends and family back home was nowhere to be seen here. Suddenly and without permission, I felt cast out of the status of being an educated woman, whose name, appearance, demeanor and heritage commanded a certain level of respect and recognition. Instead, I found myself a minority, misjudged, ignorant and illiterate in the language and culture of the adopted world. Everything I thought of myself and felt about myself was not true here. The reflection I saw in the full-length social mirror of my Western counterparts felt unappealing, unattractive, stifled, restricted and dangerous. It was an image that had existed long before I was born and that has been forming, probably, since Moses parted the Red Sea.

So, how does it feel to be the enemy? It feels like carrying a bad gene, a dormant virus that might erupt at any moment rendering me contaminated and contaminating. It erupts every time terrorism, Islam or Arab issues come to the forefront of daily life. And it doesn’t really matter if the perpetrators are Chechen, Afghan or Iranian—my virus is rooted in history and perception, not in hard facts and logic.

I did not diagnose myself with this dormant virus until my Italian ex-husband and I had to see a divorce mediator. At the end of our first interview, the mediator asked: “But where is the Jordanian part of your home life?” Indeed, my children carry Italian names, Arabic music is rarely played in my home and the main languages of the household are English and Italian.

The other day, as my children and I were sitting at dinner, I wondered, looking at their European-like faces, how it might feel if their father had not been European? It would be heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking to know that not only did I bring on them the plight of people like me, but also branded them with a face like mine.

I had hidden for many years behind the shield of being a Jordanian from a secular Christian family. An experience I had working with a group of Arab middle-school boys just a few years ago shattered this façade. The principal of the school where the group met dropped by one day. He came unannounced and seemed to just want to chat and help himself to snacks. He acknowledged the boys’ social and academic achievements, but singled out the one boy who was, in many ways, the quintessential stereotypical Arab (or perhaps the group and I had assigned him that role). The boy—I will call him Basem—was in seventh grade at the time, and was often ostracized and made the scapegoat. The principal said, “Basem is not behaving like a man. Manhood is important in your culture, isn’t that so? In fact, I think men are given special privileges over women just because they are born male.” That comment was piercing and hurtful to Basem, the other boys and me. At that point I realized that I am a Muslim and a Christian, every Arab child is my niece and my nephew, and every Arab man is my father and my brother. I am a Saudi, a Palestinian, a Jordanian, a Tunisian.

So, what is the answer to the question, “How does it feel to be the enemy?” It feels like being naked. Whatever garment I might take on, be it education, profession or just simply Western dress code, is always transparent—my social deformity is for all to see and the bad odor of my ancestors is pungent and toxic.
Let me share with you the following vignette, which I hope will illustrate this sense of nakedness. It is an incident that took place in the same group of boys I mentioned above. A boy I will call Tamer was the most Westernized in this group of newly arrived Arab immigrants. He insisted on speaking English at all times and was a fan of American football. One day the boys were chatting about their experience as Arabs. Tamer said, “But I don’t feel different from the Americans. I don’t think they would misunderstand me.” He continued, seemingly contradicting himself, “I was going on the subway the other day and had a large camera with me that I carried in a black case. The police stopped and searched me. They were extremely apologetic when they saw that I only had a camera.” Tamer said that, as he entered the train, the speaker announced, “If you see something, say something. If you see any suspicious activity on the train or bus, do not keep it to yourself. . . .” Tamer did not need to finish his sentence. We could all see him plastered to the door, avoiding the piercing gaze of petrified subway riders, and we burst out laughing. A nervous laugh, because we knew how it feels to narrowly escape incarceration, where we would be guilty until proven innocent.

I am not Chechen nor, for that matter, am I Muslim. However, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old second bombing suspect, with his dark eyebrows, black wavy hair and wide eyes, could easily be my son. In fact, the Arabic version of his name is my father’s first name.

Let’s be honest, what are you thinking right now? What would your reaction be if I was the mother of the two men who intended to amputate the legs of marathon runners? What would your reaction be if the blood of little Martin Richards was on my sons’ hands?

Usually, at this point of such a discussion, my audience or friends or colleagues feel uncomfortable. They squirm in their seats and say something warm, compassionate and disengaging, such as “My roommate from college was from Egypt. I’m still friends with him.” Or they vehemently and wholeheartedly criticize American policy in the Middle East: “I can’t believe what George Bush has done to your part of the world.”

To paraphrase Du Bois: At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, “How does it feel to be the enemy?” I answer seldom a word.

The psychiatrist Henry Stack Sullivan said that we have as many selves as we have relationships. Indeed, I do not walk around feeling scared or targeted. I know I am not smelly or rejected. In fact, I often feel loved, nurtured and accepted. I can confidently tell you that I managed to build a life in the West I could have never imagined building, certainly not if I had stayed in Jordan.

However, beside my happy, contented self lives an ashamed, scared and reticent one, a self that tags along, often casting her shadow in the crevices of my mind, questioning every action and reaction. Her presence is so strong at times that she takes me over and I feel as if I just got off the boat. To survive I try as hard as I can to be invisible, minimizing my exposures, keeping quiet, dodging imaginary bullets shot by what I perceive to be the superior white race. Unfortunately, this state of mind is at times so strong that my unsuspecting counterparts fall prey to my unconscious scheming by fulfilling my prophecy and proving my otherness and vulnerability.

Despite the fact that being an Arab is an important and difficult aspect of my life, we are all, as Sullivan noted, “more simply human than otherwise,” and, therefore, my day-to-day issues are like most people’s: just “problems in living.” My therapist, who, by the way, is a white male, listens compassionately, keeps alive, keeps well and keeps awake.

I wanted to end this essay on a positive note, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. How can I end it on a positive note when the wails and cries of those grieving the maimed and murdered in Boston are still audible? How can I say something positive when the 19-year-old second bombing suspect, the boy who could have been my son, was captured less than a week ago?

I decided therefore to lean on Erich Fromm’s wisdom. So, to answer the question “How does it feel to be the enemy?” I chose Fromm’s response in The Art of Loving: “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” Love, Fromm said,

is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the . . . world as a whole, not toward one object of love. . . . [Love] isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. [Love] isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.

Bibliography

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Tribeca Books, 2013. Originally published in 1903.

Frank, Jerome D. Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961.

Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper Perennial, 1956.

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Khouri, Lama Z. “Immigrant’s Neverland: Commuting from Amman to Brooklyn.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 48, No. 2. 2012: 213–37.

Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1971.

Lionells, Marylou. “The Interpersonal Self, Uniqueness, Will and Intentionality.” In Handbook of interpersonal psychoanalysis. Edited by M. Lionells, J. Fiscalini, C. Mann, & D. Stern. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1995, 31–63.

Sullivan, Henry S. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. 1953.

———. The Psychiatric Interview. New York: Norton, 1954.

Volkan, Vamik D. Blind Trust: Large Groups and their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone, 2004.

———. Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone, 2006.

Winnicott, Donald W. Maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of the emotional development. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

Credits

Lead photo is by Eric Thayer, as published in the New York Times, April 20, 2013. Second photo is of the author, Lama Zuhair Khouri.

The post On Being the Enemy appeared first on Z e t e o.

Oil Paintings of Word Paintings of Nature’s Paintings

Gauguin’s Early Tahitian Canvases and Pierre Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti (The Marriage of Loti)

By Richard M. Berrong

Richard M. Berrong is a professor of French and director of the Master of Liberal Studies program at Kent State University. 

Art historians have long known that one of the things that led Paul Gauguin to go to Tahiti for the first time in 1891 was the story French novelist Pierre Loti had told in his very popular 1880 narrative Le Mariage de Loti (The Marriage of Loti) about an English naval officer’s love affair there with a young native girl, Rarahu. While this fact is regularly cited in both scholarly and popular works on the painter, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone to examine his Tahitian canvases in light of Loti’s novel. That is what I propose to do here, since the results shed light on how Gauguin conceptualized and developed some of his best known work.

Despite his dismissal of nineteenth-century French academic art, much of which was devoted to imitating predecessors like Raphael and painting scenes taken from Classical literature, in some of his early Tahiti canvases Gauguin did something somewhat similar. He developed a dialogue with the literary work of a contemporary predecessor, Loti’s novel, so that he could highlight the ways in which what he was doing was revolutionary and new.[1] In this respect, he was not unlike perhaps the most innovative French painter of his era, Éduouard Manet, who three decades before had played off Raphael and Titian in his revolutionary works Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia not just to make fun of the academic obsession with Classical models, but also to highlight in what ways his works differed from theirs.

After first reviewing Pierre Loti’s standing at the end of the nineteenth century, how he was seen by Gauguin’s contemporaries and why Gauguin would have chosen to dialogue with The Marriage of Loti in particular, we will consider a dozen or so of the painter’s Tahitian-period canvases, including some of the most famous, to discover how they rework specific passages in Loti’s novel. In the process we will see that Gauguin repeatedly emphasizes not the ways in which the Tahitians were similar to Europeans, an important theme in Loti’s novel, but those that made the Polynesians different. We will also see that, despite his interest in what he saw as “childlike” cultures, Gauguin repeatedly chose scenes in Loti’s novel that presented the Tahitians as joyous and carefree only to highlight serious and contemplative aspects of their nature instead. This included depicting the Tahitians as still very much involved in their Maori religion, a religion that Loti had described as almost completely forgotten.

As Loti would do in some of his later, more mature works, Gauguin, in these mature paintings, chose to confront his European audience with people who, though very different, were worthy of serious consideration. If Loti, in his early novel, sought to win respect for the Tahitians by showing how similar they were to Europeans physically and socially, Gauguin, in his mature art, chose to win that respect by highlighting the value in their differences. 

Pierre Loti’s standing in the late nineteenth century

Gauguin’s decision to dialogue with a Loti novel may seem strange to twenty-first century Americans, who still recognize the importance of Raphael and Titian but probably have not heard of that French writer. The situation was very different in the late nineteenth century, however. By 1891, the year that Gauguin first sailed to the South Pacific, Pierre Loti had become one of the most successful and admired novelists of his day, winning election to the French Academy’s “forty immortals” in April of that year in recognition of works such as Le Roman d’un enfant (1890; The Story of a Child) and his masterpiece, Pêcheur d’Islande (1886; Iceland Fisherman). The latter is perhaps the finest recreation in French literature of Monet’s style of Impressionism, and therefore put its author in the camp of the finally successful new style of painting from which Gauguin, by 1891, was so eager to distinguish himself.[2] Loti was also highly admired outside France. Henry James, for example, a demanding judge, declared Loti to be “a remarkable genius,” “one of the joys of the time,” “the companion, beyond all others, of my own selection.”[3] By 1891 The Marriage of Loti had gone through thirty-nine editions and was playing a significant role in shaping how the French were imagining their Polynesian colony. Vincent van Gogh, an avid reader of contemporary French literature, and Émile Bernard, a younger and himself innovative painter whom Gauguin met in Pont Aven, in Brittany, both evidently suggested that Gauguin read it when he was searching for a new place to paint.^[4]

Why Gauguin would have used Loti’s novel

Loti’s depiction of Tahiti would have appealed to Gauguin in part because it portrayed Tahitians as having the qualities of naïveté and childishness that the painter already perceived in the Bretons, whom he had depicted as primitive during three painting sojourns in Pont Aven starting in 1886.^[5] As Edward J. Hughes has shown in his chapter on attitudes toward the exotic in the literary works of Loti and Gauguin, this view of the Other as primitive was typical of late nineteenth-century Europe.[6] Gauguin made clear that it was still his attitude regarding the Tahitians even after he had lived among them for several years. In 1895, during his one trip back to France after first sailing to Tahiti, he explained his stay in Polynesia to a journalist by saying, “In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.”^[7] Since Loti’s novel had a great success in France, Gauguin knew that a connection between it and his work could only benefit him. Frances Fowle, another art historian, has remarked, “Gauguin was commercially minded.”^[8]

There was more involved than just riding Loti’s successful coattails to lucrative sales, however. Since Gauguin could have counted on some of his viewers recognizing allusions in his work to Loti’s novel, he was able to use this well-known reference as a way of highlighting by contrast what he was doing that was new and different. His competitive nature was such that he relished the idea of showing how he could surpass Loti at his own successful game. Gauguin biographer Nancy Mowll Mathews has pointed out that “he proclaimed in the newspapers [before his departure that he would] sail to the romantic isle of Tahiti [to] let the Paris public see in pictures what Pierre Loti had described in mere words.”^[9] Loti, who had initially studied to be a painter himself, had already tried to create pictures in his medium, in part because he had seen Tahiti as a series of natural canvases. He wrote the wife of playwright Jules Sandeau with regard to The Marriage of Loti: “I only knew how . . . to reproduce the tableaux that chance put before my eyes.”^[10] This, too, would have given the competitive Gauguin reason to dialogue with Loti’s novel when he, in turn, came to paint the Polynesian paradise.

Merahi metua no Tehamana: Differing portraits of a Tahitian as a young woman

One of the ways Gauguin chose to differ from Loti was by emphasizing the physical features that separated Tahitians from his potential audience back in France. After some preliminaries devoted to the circumstances on the island of the protagonist, English naval officer Harry Grant, The Marriage of Loti gets underway with a verbal portrait of the young Tahitian woman/girl who will become the object of his erotic and eventually amorous attention.

Rarahu had reddish black eyes, full of an exotic languor, a caressing sweetness, like that of young cats when you pet them; . . . Her nose was small and fine, like those on certain Arab faces; her mouth, a little thicker, a little wider than the classic model, had deep corners with a delicious contour. . . . Her hair, perfumed with sandalwood, was long, straight, a little coarse; it fell in heavy masses on her round, naked shoulders. The same tawny color verging on brick red that you see on light-colored terra cotta pieces from ancient Etruria extended over all of her body, from the top of her forehead to the bottoms of her feet.

Rarahu was of small build, admirably formed, admirably proportioned; her chest was pure and polished, her arms had an antique perfection. . . .

What characterized her race above all in her was the excessive closeness of her eyes, which were level with her face like all Maori eyes; when she was laughing and gay that glance gave her childlike face the malign finesse of a young monkey; when she was serious or sad there was something in her that could be no better defined than by these two words: Polynesian grace. (I.V)^[11]

Though the description of Rarahu’s eyes distances her, Loti’s assertion that her skin color resembles Etruscan pottery and that her “admirably formed, admirably proportioned” body is “polished” and has an “antique perfection” ties her to admired works of Western Classical statuary and culture. One of Gauguin’s most famous early Tahitian paintings, Merahi metua no Tehamana (1893; fig. 1), specifically recalls this passage in Loti’s novel.[12] The painter presented his young vahine (Tahitian for “young woman”) very differently, however. If Rarahu has a nose that, “small and fine,” could appeal to European tastes, as Loti meant it to do, Gauguin did not hesitate to make that of Tehamana, the young woman depicted in this canvas, particularly broad. Her eyes are not close together, and she bears no resemblance to a young monkey. Nor, however, does she resemble Classical statuary. If Loti tried to make Rarahu sympathetic to his European readers by highlighting elements in her appearance that were similar to those that Europeans knew and even esteemed, Gauguin was intent on emphasizing how different the Tahitians were physically.

The background is important in this painting as well. As Stephen Eisenman shows in his analysis of this canvas, Gauguin presented Tehamana as still very much surrounded by elements of her non-Western, non-Christian culture: the inscriptions on the wall behind her, the scantily-dressed dancing figure, the mangoes on the floor. [13] Loti had used Rarahu to demonstrate the decline and disappearance of traditional Polynesian culture under European occupation. Born in 1858 and raised as a Christian, “Rarahu wasn’t at all familiar with the god Taaroa, nor with the innumerable goddesses who accompanied him; she had never even heard anyone speak about any of these characters in Polynesian mythology” (I:LXIII). Privately, as Gauguin scholar Claire Frèches-Thory has remarked, Gauguin also lamented “the near disappearance of Maori civilization, forever corrupted by European colonization,” [14] and wrote to his wife back in Denmark, “The Tahitian soil is become quite French, and the old order is gradually disappearing.” [15] That was not how Gauguin depicted his Polynesian subjects for his public, however. In this painting he presents his young Tahitian as someone who may have assimilated superficial aspects of Western culture, such as her dress, but who still lives in a traditional Maori world. As in other of his Tahitian paintings that we will consider shortly, here the artist argues that Loti was wrong, that the land Gauguin had chosen to paint was still different from France, which was rapidly becoming the most secular nation in Europe.

That shift in France worried Gauguin, himself no respecter of organized religion, for artistic reasons. Some of the most important canvases that he had painted during his three sojourns in Brittany before his departure for Tahiti had emphasized the primitive, mystic nature of the region’s Christianity. In 1903, in a letter to his friend Charles Morice, Gauguin showed why he believed that religion was so important to contemporary art:

We have just undergone a great period of aberration in art caused by physics, mechanical chemistry, and the study of nature. Artists, having lost all of their own uncivilized wildness, no longer having any instincts, one could say any imagination, have gone astray in many directions in order to find the productive elements that they do not have the strength to create, and then they act like confused crowds who feel afraid, as if they are lost when they are alone.^[16]

If Gauguin presents Tehamana and her fellow Tahitians as still very much in touch with their past, it was also to present their world as one in which, as a result, the creative arts could still flourish. Remember Gauguin’s admonition to the journalist: “In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source . . . of mankind.” As we shall see, Gauguin often depicted his Tahitians as engaged in creating music, often in connection with their ancient religion.

Loti, too, had presented the Tahitians as natural artists: Rarahu is famous for her inventive songs. In The Marriage of Loti, however, there is no suggestion that such creativity results from maintaining contact with the past or religion. As already noted, Loti presents Rarahu as being completely detached from ancient Maori culture. Nor does he ever suggest that the Tahitians are any more artistically creative than Europeans. The idea that overly refined European civilization had become detached from the vital primitive forces necessary for the creation of great art, an idea shared by authors like Gustave Flaubert whom Loti greatly admired, finds no echo in The Marriage of Loti. For Gauguin, Loti had not understood the source of the Tahitians’ artistic creativity and its relevance to the situation in contemporary France.

Fatata te miti and Arearea: Tahitians at play, more and less playfully

Evoking scenes in The Marriage of Loti in order to insist on the Tahitians’ greater seriousness, on their not just being childlike, was one of Gauguin’s guiding principles in constructing his painterly dialogue with Loti’s novel. When Harry Grant first encounters Rarahu she is often in the company of her young friend Tiahoui.

Her ways of spending time were very simple: daydreaming, swimming, swimming especially, and singing and walks in the woods in the company of Tiahoui, her inseparable little friend. — Rarahu and Tiahoui were two carefree and laughing little creatures who lived almost entirely in the waters of their stream, where they jumped and frolicked like two flying fish. (I.VIII)

Gauguin also presents young Tahitian women in pairs engaging in the same activities. Fatata te miti (1892; fig. 2) and Arearea (1892; fig. 3), both from the time of Merahi metua no Tehamana, show young women bathing and engaging in music under the trees, respectively. The young Tahitian women they depict do not appear to be “carefree and laughing,” however. In Arearea they are more serious and meditative. Even in Fatata te miti one would not say that they “jumped and frolicked like two flying fish.”^[17] In Areatea, the one young woman is smiling to the viewer, but her expression does not suggest licentiousness or frivolity. In the background, we once again see Tahitians still connected to their ancient cult. Whether Gauguin hoped his French audience would see a link between that connection to primitive religion and the young woman’s music making is difficult to say, but it is true that he does position the musician as if she is next in line after the third devotée of the worshiped statue. In Mahana no atua, which we will consider shortly, he makes that link very clear.

In Te rerioa (1897; fig. 4), which dates from after Gauguin’s one return to Europe and which Gauguin scholar George T. M Shackelford has called “the finest interior of his Tahitian career,”^[18] the young women’s daydreaming does not seem simple. Like Tehamana, they are surrounded by what appear to be depictions of scenes from their mythology and might well be meditating on them.^[19] Again Gauguin would appear to be arguing for the Tahitians’ intellectual and emotional seriousness. It is true that Rarahu and Tiahoui are still in their early teens, an age that generally does not exemplify the profundity of any civilization’s thought. When Loti presents the elderly Queen Pomaré IV, she is anything but carefree and frivolous. Still, the women in these Gauguin paintings do not appear to be much older than Rarahu and Tiahoui.

Parau api: More physical difference

Several of the novel’s short early chapters are just portraits of Rarahu in her various settings. When she goes into Papeete for Sunday services, for example,

Rarahu possessed two muslin dresses, one white, the other pink, that she alternated on Sundays over her blue and yellow pareo to go to the Protestant missionaries’ church in Papeete. Those days her hair was separated in two long, very thick tresses; in addition, she stuck over her ear (where elderly clerks put their pens) a large hibiscus flower, whose burning red gave her bronzed cheek a transparent paleness. (I.XIV)

Gauguin’s Parau api (1892; fig. 5) shows two young Tahitian women—or one from two different angles, as some have suggested—one with a blue and yellow pareo, the other with a white and pink town outfit, just as in Loti’s text. The one on the right wears a large hibiscus flower, also as in Loti. Once again Gauguin is intent on portraying his Tahitians as less European than Loti’s. He paints the skin of the woman on the right so dark that the red flower does nothing to make her look more pale, i.e., more European.

Mahana no atua: The omnipresence of religion and artistic creation

Depicting young Tahitians as still devoted to their ancient religion was not the only way Gauguin altered reality in his Polynesian canvases. In them he also continued to develop the break from mimetic realism with which he had first experimented while painting in Brittany.

Harry Grant’s first meeting with Rarahu is right out of a 1930s movie. One day he goes for a walk in the Apiré district in an area where European sailors know that young Tahitian women come to bathe in the Fataoua River. (The location is now designated the “Loti Baths” and has a bust of Loti on a large pedestal that features a sculpture of Rarahu. There he comes upon a pleasant scene that he describes as a tableau, recalling the author’s already quoted remark to Mme Sandeau that he had encountered natural tableaux on the island.

The young Tahitian women, the regulars at the Fataoua stream, overcome with sleep and the heat, were stretched out along the shore on the grass, their feet dipping in the clear and cool water. . . .

In the background of the tableau suddenly the mimosa bushes and guava trees opened, . . . and two little girls appeared, examining the situation like mice emerging from their holes.

Their hair was made up with crowns of leaves that protected their heads from the heat of the sun; their waists were surrounded with pareos (sarongs) that were dark blue with wide yellow bands; their tawny torsos were svelte and naked; their black hair long and free flowing. . . . . . The two little ones, reassured, came to stretch out under the waterfall that began to spray more noisily around them. . . (I.XI)

Gauguin depicted a similar scene, producing one of his most famous Tahitian canvases, Mahana no atua (1894; fig. 6), which he painted or at least finished in France during his one return there. Again the artist stresses the seriousness of the scene, again adding a Maori religious dimension with the statue in the center of the background. This time a young woman making music is located in the same plane as the idol and appears to be playing for it, making a direct link between primitive religion and artistic creation that Gauguin had only suggested in Arearea. These women may adopt Western-imposed attire in town and attend Western religious services on Sundays like Rarahu, Gauguin would seem to be saying, but when they are back in nature they are once again in touch with their primitive traditions in a way that Loti’s creation is not. The novelist had not understood. This is not a civilization in decline.

The blatantly unrealistic coloration of the water seems to suggest something else as well. Gauguin pointed out to Charles Morice that “certain forms and colors” in his latest paintings “move away from reality.”^[20] This canvas is, in fact, a striking example of what Dina Sonntag calls “Gauguin’s anti-mimetic concept based upon visionary imagination.”^[21] Indeed, George Shackelford has declared that the artist’s “notions of antinatural color and rhythmic, sensuous line [are] brilliantly revealed in his 1894 painting Mahana no atua.”[22] Here Gauguin is putting into practice the philosophy he expressed to his friend and fellow artist Émile Schuffenecker in August, 1888, during one of his Breton sojourns: “Don’t paint too much according to nature. Art is an abstraction, get it out of nature . . . think more about creation . . . that’s the only way to rise to God’s level.”^[23] It is as if he is showing that, by getting back to primitive religion, to “the childhood of mankind,” he has been able to bring a whole new creativity to landscape painting, an original approach of which even the Impressionists had never dreamed.

Parahi te marae: More non-mimetic creativity

Gauguin discards concern with a mimetic depiction of nature repeatedly in his Tahitian canvases. Harry’s first riverside meeting with Rarahu does not go well, but he soon gets to know her and through Rarahu the rest of the island and its people, which, Loti implies, most Europeans there never bother to discover. One thing Harry discovers outside Papeete, the island’s only city, are marae, tumuluses that nineteenth-century Europeans took to be burial mounds but that anthropologists now believe served as temples.

[T]he Tahitians just planted clusters of ironwood trees on them. The ironwood tree is the cypress tree of the region, . . . These tumuluses, which are topped with large black trees and retain the whiteness of the coral despite the years, evoke memories of the terrible religion of the past. (I.XLVIII)

How white the coral marae were in the nineteenth century it would be difficult to determine. Today they are at best a dirty white. Gauguin, in another of his most striking canvases, Parahi te marae (1892; fig. 7), focused attention on the vivid yellow of the coral. It dominates the painting and, as those who have seen Tahitian marae know, bears no resemblance to the dull-white of the stones one sees there today. Again, the painter was intent on bringing out the strange and different in Maori culture. He also once again linked his break from mimetic realism to aspects of Tahiti’s primitive religious culture.

Manao Tupapau: The power of superstition and downside of primitive religion

Gauguin usually depicts his Tahitians’ relationship with their primitive religion as meditative. There are exceptions, though. One day Harry and Rarahu stop at one of these marae and find an old skull.

Rarahu had never looked so closely at the lugubrious object that was set there on my knees and that, for her as for all Polynesians, was a horrible bogyman.

You could see that that sinister thing awakened in her uncultivated mind a throng of new ideas, without her being able to give them a precise form. . . . . .

“Riaria!” Rarahu said. . . Riaria, a Tahitian word that is only imperfectly translated by the word terrifying, because there it designates that particularly dark terror that comes from ghosts or from the dead . . .

“What about this poor skull can frighten you so much?” I asked Rarahu. . .

She answered by pointing with her finger at the toothless mouth:

“It’s his laugh, Loti; it’s his Toupapahou laugh” . . . (I.L)

Loti’s declaration that Rarahu experiences fears at the sight of death “without being able to give them a precise form” may seem demeaning. Readers of other Loti works will recognize in it his description of the natural artist, however. Yves Kermadec in Mon Frère Yves (1883; My Brother Yves) and Ramuntcho in the eponymous novel (1897), two such natural artists, are both described similarly with no hint of disdain, reflecting a Romantic tradition that goes back at least to Friedrich Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795-6): unschooled artists create without conscious awareness of how they do so. Their inspiration flows directly from nature through them. They are its unconscious conduit. Gauguin suggested the same thing when he was trying to promote himself as a primitive. To art critic André Fontainas, for example, who had found fault with the painter’s symbol-filled masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, of which more shortly, Gauguin explained rather disingenuously that the canvas was “without any allegory that I could catch,” alleging “lack of literary instruction, perhaps” on his part.^[24]

The scene in Loti’s novel where Rarahu expresses her fear of the skull is more an example of late nineteenth-century liberal disdain for all religion, starting with Catholicism, that led to the separation of church and state in France in 1905. It is not a compliment, certainly, but it is not necessarily a question of racism so much as a form of anticlericalism.

On this issue Gauguin does not make a particular effort to distance himself from his predecessor as a painter of Tahiti and the Tahitians. In Manao Tupapau (1892; fig. 8), which Frèches-Thory has called “surely one of his greatest pictorial successes of the years 1891-93,”^[25] Gauguin also shows a young woman worried about the spirits of the dead. She does not seem as terrified as Rarahu, but she has not thrown off the shackles of religion either. In a letter to his wife Mette describing the painting, Gauguin wrote: “I put a little fear in her face.”^[26] That would have been part of her primitive charm for the painter, even though not part he would have deigned to share as a late nineteenth-century Frenchman. The bright yellow cover on the bed emphasizes the darkness of the young Tahitian’s skin, as the large hibiscus flower had in Parau api.

Another of this Tahitian’s charms for Gauguin was evidently her androgyny. In his study of the painting Henri Dorra points out that the artist modeled it on an etching of a young boy.[27] This recalls an episode in Noa noa, the highly fictionalized, while putatively autobiographical account of some of Gauguin’s first experiences in Tahiti, a book with which he dreamed of making some much-needed money. In that episode, the painter follows a young, unclothed Tahitian man into the forest to hunt for carving wood. Focusing on his back, the artist starts to have thoughts of sex, until the Tahitian turns around and Gauguin sees physical proof of his manhood.[28] This episode evidently titillated Gauguin’s initial audience. Had they known that the real-world model for this episode was not Tahitian but a French naval officer, Jénot, they would probably have seen it differently.[29] Frenchmen could get away with doing things with foreigners in foreign lands without provoking the censure that the same acts committed with Westerners would have provoked.[30] This was a fine line that Gauguin understood and that separated the admired and honored Pierre Loti from his imprisoned and exiled contemporary and admirer, Oscar Wilde. As Mathews remarks, for example, when Gauguin consorted openly with a Pacific island girl on his return to France in 1893, “her race, like that of Tehamana, actually deflected the attention of Gauguin’s European friends away from her age.”[31]

Street in Tahiti: Taking on Loti himself?

As we have seen, in his dialogue with The Marriage of Loti Gauguin generally criticized the author’s depiction of the Maori and their culture. On at least one occasion he seems to have taken a pot shot at Loti himself, however. Once Rarahu’s parents die, she decides to move into Papeete and live with Harry. Like a middle-class couple back in France, they get a house and settle down.

Not far from the palace, behind the Queen’s gardens in one of the greenest and most peaceful avenues in Papeete, was a small hut, cool and isolated. — It had been built at the foot of a stand of coconut trees that were so tall one would have said that it was a Lilliputian dwelling. — On the street side it had a veranda decorated with garlands of vanilla. — Behind it was an enclosure filled with mimosas, rose laurels, and hibiscus. — . . .

There, eight days after the death of her adopted father, Rarahu came to settle with me.

It was her dream fulfilled. (II.VII)

One doesn’t have to be overcome with anti-orientalist fervor to laugh at the last line here, wondering to what extent living with Harry was really the young woman’s dream come true and to what extent his inflated male ego put that interpretation on her efforts to make the best of a difficult situation. Feminists would have every right to point out that in this novel Rarahu seldom gets a chance to express her thoughts; most of what we learn about her comes through the eyes and ego of Harry himself. Here he attributes to her a very Western middle-class dream.

In Street in Tahiti (1891; fig. 9), Gauguin depicted a house that seems to evoke the one Loti had described. The flora is once again luxuriant, the trees once again tower over the dwelling. Its female occupant is pensive, however, as if to say that even though she has a roof over her head and a European husband, she still has serious preoccupations. Living with Harry is not enough for her. Once again Gauguin’s Tahitian is more intellectually serious than Loti’s.^[32]

Siesta: Idleness vs. Work

As their domestic life together settles into routine, Harry learns to enjoy the afternoon siesta.

After that, sleep occupied the largest part of our days. — Those who have lived in the tropics are familiar with the stimulating well-being produced by a noon sleep. — Beneath the veranda of our dwelling we hung hammocks made of aloe, and there we spent long hours dreaming or sleeping, to the sleep-inducing sound of the cicadas. (II.IX)

Gauguin depicted a similar scene in Siesta (1891-1892; fig. 10). Once again we are on a veranda. The Tahitian women aren’t just sleeping, though; they are working or thinking. “You see,” the oil painter says to his viewers, “these people aren’t as lazy, physically or intellectually, as Loti told you they are,” a theme that runs through several of the canvases we are examining here.

Young Girl and Boy: More Seriousness

One sign of being accepted as a couple in the West is being invited to events as a couple. In best Western fashion Tiahoui and her new husband Téharo, who have left Papeete for the culturally more authentic countryside, invite Harry and Rarahu to attend a party being held during their honeymoon. The English officer and his Tahitian wife throw together a few things and set off for Papéuriri, which even today is a pleasant escape from the traffic jams of the capital. As they approach they

met Téharo and Tiahoui, who were coming to look for us, on the path. Their joy at meeting us was extreme and noisy. Great demonstrations of emotion between friends who meet are completely in the Tahitian character.

These two good little sauvages were still in the first quarter of their honeymoon, which is very sweet in Oceania as elsewhere; both of them were very kind,—and hospitable in the most cordial sense of the word. (II.XII)

Again Loti is intent on showing how much like Europeans the Tahitians can be, and Gauguin does not appear inclined to contradict him. Young Girl and Boy (1899; fig. 11) dates from after his return to Tahiti and therefore from a period when his paintings generally tend to be even less interested in mimetic realism. This particular canvas does not share that tendency, however. The subjects are serious and contemplative, as opposed to Loti’s with their “extreme and noisy joy.” As in The Marriage of Loti, however, so here this couple is presented as remarkably European, except, of course, for the skin color.

And the Gold of their Bodies: How different is different? And how permanent?

The Tahitians’ skin fascinated both artists, which comes as no surprise for painters interested in the nuances of color. Earlier we saw the detailed description Loti devoted to Rarahu’s skin color, which he had compared to Etrurian pottery. Once Rarahu settles into her life in the city, however, Harry notices that

she had become paler in the shade for having lived city life. Without the light tattoo on her forehead, which the others made fun of and which I loved, you would have said that she was a young white girl. — And still, some days there were tawny reflections on her skin, exotic shades of pink bronze that still recalled the Maori race, sister to the red skin races of America. (II.XIV)

It is as if Loti were suggesting that at least some of the Polynesians’ physical difference was not inherent, but just the result of exposure to a different climate. Gauguin would have none of that, of course. As we have seen, he often intensified the Tahitians’ darkness to emphasize their difference from Europeans, as in Parau api.

He, too, was clearly fascinated by their color. One of his last paintings, And the gold of their bodies (1901; fig. 12), even takes it as its subject, and this preoccupation can be seen in such earlier canvases as Ahe oe feii? (1892; fig. 13) as well. As with his portrait of Tehamana, so here Gauguin is not interested in winning the viewer’s sympathy for his subjects by showing how little real difference there is between the Tahitians and Europeans. Rather, the oil painter strives to emphasize the differences.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?: Tahitians as Serious Thinkers

As Dina Sonntag has argued, Gauguin came to believe that “painting must pursue the objective of lending visible form to an idea in the pictorial image.”^[33] He wrote Émile Schuffenecker in 1885, for example, “As time goes on, I believe more and more in translations of thought by any means other than literature,”^[34] in other words that painting had to convey ideas without relying on text or narrative. If Loti could bring painting into literature, why couldn’t he bring ideas into painting? Perhaps the most famous example of Gauguin’s efforts to bring philosophy into his painting is the large canvas he titled Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897; fig. 14), one of his major undertakings during his second stay in Polynesia. Writing with his customary lack of modesty to his friend Daniel de Monfried, he declared: “I have finished a philosophical work on this theme comparable to the Gospel.”^[35] I will not analyze the painting here. For that I would refer readers to, among other works, George T. M. Shackelford’s essay “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?.”^[36] If the canvas shows anything, though, it is that Gauguin was presenting his Polynesians as serious thinkers inclined to philosophical contemplation. When it was first shown in Paris in 1898, art critic André Fontaines, though he found fault with it, conceded that it depicted a land “peopled by a grave, somewhat precious, and uncultured race.”^[37]

As we have seen, Loti does not generally present Rarahu as so thoughtful—though it bears noting, again, that she is a young girl and in that respect no more representative of her civilization’s intellectual depth than her chronological equivalent would be in any other society. Still, given the right setting, even his young heroine can be inspired to ask profound questions. When she and Harry climb to the top of the island’s central volcano and she sees for the first time the expanse of ocean that separates Tahiti from all other land (except Moorea), she remarks:

One thing frightens me . . . o my beloved Loti . . . ; how did the first Maoris come here, since even today they don’t have ships strong enough to communicate with the islands situated outside their archipelagos; how were they able to come from that so distant land where, according to the Bible, the first man was created? Our race differs so much from yours that I’m afraid, despite what the missionaries tell us, your God the savior did not come for us and will not recognize us.” (II.XX)

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

The Fire Dance: Serious Desire

Gauguin’s Tahitians were not always contemplative, but when he portrayed them as active, it was with the same intensity. The last of the scenes in The Marriage of Loti that he seems to have used as a point of reference is one of the most striking and certainly one that his potential buyers back in France would have recalled on seeing his painting, The Fire Dance, or the Devil Speaks (1891; fig. 15). At one point Queen Pomaré makes a royal excursion to the nearby island of Moorea for the consecration of a new Protestant church at Afareahitu. Members of the crew of the Rendeer [sic], Harry’s bizarrely named ship, are invited to take part. Harry himself escorts the Queen. That night, however, he has to return to his ship. From it he sees and hears the festivities. As the night wears on, the celebration takes on a decidedly non-Protestant tone.

In the distance you saw the fires on land that lit the upa-upa [a frenetic Tahitian dance]; raucous and lubricious songs arrived in a confused murmur, accompanied in syncopation by drum beats.

I felt a deep remorse at having abandoned [Rarahu] in the middle of that saturnalia; a worried sadness held me there, my eyes fixed on those fires on the beach; those sounds that came from the land wrung my heart. . . .

I dreamed that at that particularly voluptuous hour of the morning Rarahu was there, excited by the dance, and left to her own devices. And that thought burned me like a red-hot iron. (II.XXXI)

This scene, repeated subsequently in countless B jungle movies, presents the Tahitians as savages and not just sauvages, even if Harry’s terminology is determined in part by jealousy that has nothing to do with racism.^[38] Restrained by no nineteenth-century bourgeois concerns with decorum, these Polynesians give vent to their wildest sexual desires.

Loti made a drawing of a young Tahitian woman dancing what could be the upa-upa (fig. 16). Its innocent charm, at least in the form in which it has come down to us, does little to suggest the “raucous and lubricious songs,” the “saturnalia” of his text. It does, however, highlight by contrast how Gauguin used all the genius and craft at his command to make us see, hear, and feel in vivid color what Harry can only imagine.^[39] Gauguin makes no apologies to his prospective audience for these Tahitians, nor does he do anything to belittle them. He does, however, show just how wild his otherwise meditative and sedate “primitives” could be. That might have scandalized some of his viewers, though Gauguin was a sufficiently savvy businessman to know that it probably would also have made at least some of them curious if not indeed envious as well. After having spent time in what he saw as highly prudish Denmark, he was more than a little delighted to “shock the bourgeoisie,” as the nineteenth-century French poet Théophile Gautier was fond of saying. Gauguin’s painting shows once again that his Tahitians were in touch with the sort of primitive passions that he felt were necessary to infuse life into creative art.

Conclusion

Gauguin devoted much effort during his best years as an original artist to differentiating himself from the leaders in his field, Monet and the Impressionists in painting, Loti in painting Polynesia.^[40] At times, in the paintings we have examined, he seems to be trying to claim a more accurate and profound understanding of these “primitives” who had fascinated the Western and in particular the French mind ever since Louis Antoine de Bougainville published a narrative of his voyage there in the eighteenth century.

In doing so, Gauguin saw himself as revealing the primitive in all of us. He wrote his friend Daniel de Monfreid shortly after he first arrived in Tahiti the initially strange declaration, “I am content to dig into myself, not into nature.”^[41] As we have already seen repeatedly, even before he left for Tahiti Gauguin had begun to break with the fundamental nineteenth-century artistic tenet that depictions of nature needed to reproduce it in at least some respect. No matter how abstract Monet’s Impressionism became, for example, he always strove to reproduce at least some of the effects of light and color that he observed in his motifs. Gauguin, with works like Mahana no atua and Parahi te marae, threw that tenet aside. In his correspondence he never pursued what he meant by the first part of his declaration to de Monfreid. Given his already-quoted explanation of his move to Polynesia, “In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind,” one might conclude that Gauguin imagined that in studying what he chose to see as primitive Polynesians, he would at the same time discover what lay at the root of his own nature.

In this respect Gauguin shared the then-common idea that modern “primitive” people had never evolved and so resembled and therefore provided keys to what Western man had been like before he set out on the road to civilization. Gauguin wrote to dramatist August Strindberg in 1895, for example, that the Tahitian language (which he evidently never made much progress in learning, despite his claims to the contrary) was “naked and primordial,” which may explain why he insisted on giving Tahitian—or at least what he presented as Tahitian—names to some of the canvases he did there.”^[42] Studying the Tahitians was, therefore, for him both a way of exploring a people that he portrayed as very different from the French and, at the same time, a key to self-understanding for highly-refined Parisians who had moved so far away from their own primitive origins.

At other times Gauguin seems to be showing how little he cared about mimetic accuracy, using Loti’s text to demonstrate that he could paint what Tahiti was really about better with his imagination. Loti dealt with this issue in his 1897 novel Ramuntcho, of which Joseph Conrad made use in his famous consideration of these ideas, Heart of Darkness (1899).

It is also possible that Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti made him resentful of Loti’s idyllic narrative. As Frèches-Thory has remarked, like those of other readers of The Marriage of Loti before and since “Loti’s book . . . had inflamed [Gauguin’s] imagination about an ideal life on an enchanted isle, an earthly paradise where idleness and easy love affairs would peacefully coexist—a place where he might find a Rarahu of his own.”^[43] The reality of Tahiti even then was otherwise, though, as Gauguin found once he got there. “Disappointment had gotten the better of his dream of Eden.”^[44] If Gauguin took to ridiculing Loti and his tableaux of Tahiti, resentment may have been involved. No one should have known better than Gauguin not to rely on tableaux, even verbal ones, for accuracy. Loti had warned his readers of this danger, having Harry write to his sister shortly after arriving on the island that he was disillusioned to find Tahiti was just “a land like all the others, my God” (I.IV).

Still, it is a tribute to Loti’s ability to paint pictures with words even early in his career that Gauguin, at what was the height of his, felt it worth his time to take on the author’s novel in a battle of the painters. Granted, we sometimes end up with one painter responding on canvas to works that another artist painted with words in an effort to convey to those unable to view them first-hand the tableaux that nature and a “natural” people had painted in Polynesia. Nineteenth-century French academic art, for all its reliance on the studio and historical models, never got further from nature and more literary than that. Gauguin had reasons to do so, however. Belinda Thomson has gone so far as to assert that The Marriage of Loti “performed a vital role for Gauguin as he assimilated his own experiences of Tahiti. . . . The very process of publically distancing himself from [Loti] helped Gauguin articulate his own aesthetic.”^[45] What I hope I have demonstrated here are the ways in which he did so.

List of Illustrations

 
Fig. 1, Paul Gauguin, Merahi metua no Tehamana, 1893. Wildenstein 497. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 2, Paul Gauguin, Fatata te miti, 1892. W 463. Oil on canvas. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art.

Fig. 3, Paul Gauguin, Arearea, 1892. W 468. Oil on canvas. Paris: Musée d’Orsay.

Fig. 4, Paul Gauguin, Te rerioa, 1897. W 557. Oil on canvas. London: Courtauld Institute.

Fig. 5, Paul Gauguin, Parau api, 1892. W 466. Oil on canvas. Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen.

Fig. 6, Paul Gauguin, Mahana no atua, 1894. W 513. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 7, Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae, 1892. W 483. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fig. 8, Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau, 1892. W 457. Oil on canvas. Buffalo: Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Fig. 9, Paul Gauguin, Street in Tahiti, 1891. W 441. Oil on canvas. Toledo Museum of Art.

Fig. 10, Paul Gauguin, Siesta, 1891-1892. W 515. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fig. 11, Paul Gauguin, Young Girl and Boy, 1899. W 578. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles: Norton-Simon Museum.

Fig. 12, Paul Gauguin, And the Gold of their Bodies, 1901. W 596. Oil on canvas. Paris: Musée d’Orsay.

Fig. 13, Paul Gauguin, Ahe oe feii?,1892. W 461. Oil on canvas. Moscow: State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

Fig. 14, Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, 1897. W 561. Oil on canvas. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.

Fig. 15, Paul Gauguin, The Fire Dance, or the Devil Speaks, 1891. W 433. Oil on canvas. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.

Fig. 16, Pierre Loti, Dance Scene, c. 1872. Book engraving from original drawing, now lost. Pierre Loti, Le Mariage de Loti (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1898), 130.

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Emphasizing Virtue over Victory

Why We Should Adopt a Virtue Ethics Approach to Social Change

By Jeffrey Allen Nall

A graduate of Rollins College’s Master of Liberal Studies program, Jeffrey Allen Nall teaches philosophy at Indian River State College, Florida.

Introduction

As important as determining what is morally right or wrong, or how to address moral dilemmas, an important question is all too often overlooked: “Why should I make the often inconvenient effort to do the right thing?” This may seem like a simple question with obvious answers, but our experiences as morally fallible beings teach us otherwise. Even when there is agreement concerning whether or not a particular situation or practice is immoral, there is not always agreement about when we are obligated to address such moral problems, and whether making an effort to address a given moral problem would make a meaningful difference.

My experience as a father, friend, activist, and teacher, has taught me that people give a variety of reasons for failing to take action to address everyday moral problems. Upon becoming aware of pervasive injustices, many feel that there is nothing they can do to foster meaningful change; they feel powerless before deeply embedded, powerful, institutional networks of power and oppression. Second, many inspired to challenge inequality and injustice grow discouraged by their inability to effect sweeping social change in matters such as peace and militarism, economic inequality, corporate power, torture, gender inequality, animal rights, and so on. A common feeling in both cases is that individual or even small collective efforts are incapable of making a real difference.

One of the crucial claims I hear in the courses I teach on ethics and justice is: “Even if I changed my own practices, everyone else would continue doing the same thing.” At age 8, my eldest daughter politely advanced this idea when we were discussing the terrible agony factory farmed cows experience in order to produce dairy milk. But these kinds of statements are not unique to the young. Over the course of many speaking engagements, I have heard similar statements from people of a variety of ages. There appears to be a firmly lodged idea burrowed into the conceptual framework of many Americans: “If I can’t succeed in bringing about wholesale or sweeping change, then my efforts would be wasted.” Put differently, “In order for my actions to be meaningful, they must be able to bring about sweeping or wholesale change.” The attending belief is that if one’s actions would not yield meaningful results, then one is alleviated of moral responsibility for failing to take such actions. Gandhi sums up these thought processes when he explains:

Men generally hesitate to make a beginning if they feel that the objective cannot be had in its entirety. Such an attitude of mind is in reality a bar to progress.[1]

Though understandable, these mindsets are nevertheless flawed and unjustified.

The main error of this pessimistic line of thought is that it fails to account for the way in which our moral commitments are about much more than achieving particular “end results” or “victories”; specifically, our moral commitments are core components of our self-identity: they define us as individuals, and thus are as much about forging virtuous identities as achieving lasting victory over the forces of oppression. Secondly, such pessimistic outlooks are self-fulfilling prophecies that prevent the possibility of systemic change. Broad societal change is often the result of unpredictable surges in human solidarity. These surges and the social change they effect are arguably an emergent property resulting from countless acts of creative, compassionate moral thought and action in a variety of socio-cultural arenas of human life. Thus in diminishing the value of seemingly insignificant moral action, such arguments have the effect of preventing us from sowing the seeds of change.

Thus the present work seeks to advance two key claims: (i) we should emphasize living virtuously, for in doing so we embrace the moral weight and creativity of our individual lives, namely to manifest change through our exemplification of core values such as justice, care, and moral courage; and (ii) life offers us many examples of the meaningfulness of individual virtuous lives, and the power they have to inspire broader social change.

Virtue over Victory: Seeking Change vs. Being Change

The previously mentioned, fatalistic moral calculations miss one of the most important questions of human moral life: how will we define ourselves when we are confronted with facts of injustice? From a virtue ethics approach, those offering the wholesale change or a waste of time argument have too narrowly conceived of their life project. The question is not simply, “Is change possible,” or, “Is wholesale societal change possible?” Two important and too often overlooked questions are: “What kind of person do you wish to be?” And, “To what are you ultimately committed?”

Ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics begin by asking questions such as “What actions should I take?” In contrast, virtue ethics urges us to consider “What kind of person should I be?” Rather than thinking of morality as a question of one’s duties or as a question of balancing positive/negative consequences, virtue ethics contends that our objective in life should be to develop virtuous character traits and to be morally good people.[2] Put differently, virtue ethics emphasizes moral behavior as an expression of character or identity. As the philosopher Val Plumwood explains:

Virtue accounts, for example, are based on a set of commitments inherent in a particular type of identity, and from them care does “flow naturally,” that is, it expresses what the individual wants to do, as that particular sort of individual, rather than what he or she is constrained to do through duty.[3]

Virtue ethics, then, provides an interpretive lens that highlights the way in which our moral decision-making has at least as much to do with defining ourselves as it does with achieving a particular goal of helping others.

A focus on the virtuous life helps us understand the impoverishment of any morality solely concerned with expected outcomes. Even if we were in a situation in which change in one’s lifetime was not possible, a morally good person would nevertheless act with courageous defiance of the prevailing and at times undefeatable order. Consider the following example. You live during a time of rampant sexism, but you know that sexism is immoral and based on the lie of male superiority. But it is nearly impossible for you to imagine that the whole of society will ever change its thinking on the matter. How would a “good”—anti-sexist—person act in such a situation? Would a person with such awareness or knowledge quietly go along with the injustice, or would a “good” person work to foster a just society in whatever ways possible, without overemphasizing likely outcomes? Would a good person ensure that, at the very least, he did not contribute to such immoral practices? Would a morally good person consent to complicity?

In La Peste (The Plague), which has been interpreted as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, Camus provides just such a thought experiment, and then offers his own view. In his book Camus’ protagonist, the physician Dr. Bernard Rieux, takes on the task of treating people who are beyond treatment. He does this because, in his estimation, a good life requires him to do so. His friend Tarrou, who joins Rieux in combating the plague, sums up this point this way: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”[4]

Acting in this way requires that we realize the power of our ideas and our actions. Being a good person requires us to accept the moral responsibility of either endorsing the evil that pervades our world or combating it. While Camus’ work is read as absurdist, the fact of the matter is that Camus has given us a tale wherein individuals recognize that all they can really control is their identities, and this by taking possession of their actions, whenever possible, and living out fundamental principled commitments.

As the ethicist Elliot D. Cohen has written, virtues are habits of behavior or dispositions that inspire ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, “under certain conditions, which are themselves morally desirable.”[5] Put differently, a virtue is a morally desirable disposition that inspires a particular habit of thought, feeling, and action. Here the question becomes, “How is ‘morality’ defined?” The present work presupposes the truth of a particular pragmatic conceptualization of morality and the good life. Specifically, I am interested in securing a decent life for those with moral status. What entitles one to moral status? Philosopher Peter Singer provides the following simple definition: having “interests” is the only requisite for moral status and moral concern.

It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. . . . A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is.[6]

The next question of course is, “What are ‘interests’?” Singer writes that interests include: avoiding pain, developing one’s abilities; satisfying basic needs for food and shelter; enjoying friendly and loving relations with others; and freedom to pursue one’s projects without unnecessary interference from others.[7] Similarly, the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young conceptualizes the just society as one in which the members of the society enjoy the right to personal development and political autonomy.[8]

Such an understanding of justice leads us to contemplate its opposite: oppression. Those who are oppressed experience the “inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings.”[9] To be oppressed is to experience unjustifiable barriers to one’s development. Oppression prevents people from flourishing. It is also worth noting that theories of oppression often focus too narrowly on violence as a form of oppression. While violence is most certainly a serious and far too common barrier to social justice, there are other frequently ignored forms of oppression. According to Young’s theory of oppression, there are five prominent “faces” of oppression: violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism.[10]

Certainly some will object to Young’s ideas about justice and oppression or to Singer’s ideas about moral status. The present work seeks above all to address the many people who agree with Singer that suffering is something we should alleviate, whenever possible, and that oppression, as Young explains it, is wrong. For it is often these very people who draw on the previously discussed excuses for not taking action to resolve moral problems. Indeed it may be the weight of these moral burdens that provoke a kind of rationalization of desensitization to defend inaction and ambivalence.

With these general aims in mind the question becomes, “What virtuous traits should people strive to develop?” Cohen contends that the following virtues are crucial to being a morally good person: justice, benevolence, trustworthiness, moral autonomy, and moral courage. For Cohen, a just person is “consistent in her treatment of others,” “respects individual rights,” and honors “obligations to others.” The virtue of moral courage is, at its core, based on the prima facie principle that one ought to expose injustice and combat oppression even when it does not appear to be profitable to do so. Thus a morally courageous person “is disposed toward doing what he thinks is morally right even when he believes that his doing so means, or is likely to mean, his suffering some substantial hardship.” [11] A person is benevolent when “disposed to do good for others when she is reasonably situated, and to do no harm.” [12] Trustworthiness requires keeping promises with the understanding that, on some occasions, morally correct behavior calls for breaking promises if failing to do so would result in “some greater injustice.” Finally, a good person must be morally autonomous, meaning that one comes “to her own decisions about moral issues on the basis of her own moral principles; and then, in turn [acts] upon her considered judgment.”[13] To this list, feminist philosophers have added that good people are also compassionate and caring.

Some may say that moral courage often fails to procure relatively immediate results. Yet a longer view indicates that morally courageous people and their actions quite often sow the seeds of social reform, realized many, many years after their life. As the Russian author, literary critic, engineer, and public intellectual, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote: “The germ of the future is always in the present.”[14] Tomorrow is written with the ink of today. In 1700, Mary Astell demanded greater marital rights for women and critiqued male domination in the home.[15] In the late 1700s, Nicolas de Condorcet argued that women were moral equals to men and advocated their full enfranchisement.[16] Astell and Condorcet offer examples of how social change can begin in lonely cries, cries that echo and eventually grow into a cacophony that propels change. Many may recognize that certain virtues and actions are laudable and yet do not feel up to them. While someone like the Egyptian democracy activist Asmaa Mahfouz, for instance, may seem wonderfully courageous, “I” could never act as she did. Virtue ethics rejects such essentialism.

Specifically, virtue ethics rejects the notion that our identities and capabilities are determined at birth. Moral virtues are learned through practice, by doing. Aristotle writes: “[M]oral virtue comes about as a result of habit. . . . We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”[17] Similarly one becomes gentle by treating others gently; one becomes kind by being kind to others; one develops the virtue of care by caring; one develops the virtue of hard-work by working hard. In sum, our character is forged by our practices, by our actions.[18] As Professor of Philosophy Emmett C. Barcalow writes:

If Aristotle is correct, we deceive ourselves if we think that our character is not at all up to us; it is simply an excuse for lack of effort. If we discover that we are cowardly, or disloyal, or selfish, we can take steps to perform courageous, loyal, and unselfish actions. If Aristotle is correct, by repeatedly practicing such actions we can eventually extinguish the unwanted trait and acquire the wanted trait.[19]

John-Paul Sartre wrote that a human being is “nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”[20] Similarly, the philosopher Cornel West says:

The question becomes, what kind of choices will you make in terms of the kind of human being you will be? What kind of traditions will you be a part of? What kind of story will you locate yourself in? What kind of narrative or set of narratives will you situate yourself in? Most importantly, what kind of legacy will you leave? Maybe we’re most human when we stand before the coffins with the corpses of our loved ones, like our mothers and our fathers and our brothers and our sisters. Because that’s where the deep existential question is: who are you gonna be in light of the past—the corpse; the present—you; the future—those who come after you?[21]

From this perspective, the question is not simply, “Can you achieve this or that singular goal?” but rather, “What kind of person are you determined to become?” Virtue ethics calls on us to supplant an emphasis on outcomes with an emphasis on being the best people we can be.

Instead of focusing on large, wide-ranging outcomes that may be often beyond our ability to predict or effect, we should focus on being the best possible people we can. In so doing we are at the very least assured of significantly reducing our contribution to the forces of oppression we object to, and increasing our contribution to the forces of justice with which we identify.

A morally good person is necessarily concerned with how his/her behavior impacts the people and beings in our community and world. But the calculation of likely outcomes is not sufficient for a moral life. For this work must be coupled with the moral insight that in order to be good people we must lead good lives, committed to not merely periodically pursuing noble goals but also regularly practicing—manifesting—the virtues of justice, love, compassion, moral courage, and nonviolence. In short, the overemphasis on identifying the ultimate strategy to make immediate, widespread social change comes at the expense of this foundational understanding: A good person, above all else, lives a life that is a testament to the social change she or he seeks. A good person may, sometimes, accomplish only a few seemingly small changes in her own time, but contributes to defeating oppression in the future in ways she can hardly imagine today. Her own life is in fact a concrete manifestation of the goodness she wishes to grow in the world. Virtue ethics offers us an important perspective on the question of how I can make the world a better place. The answer is an often repeated piece of persistent if ignored wisdom: be the change you seek.

Exemplifying Virtue

Virtues are best understood as existing in a web of relationality. Yet it seems appropriate to emphasize the enactment of moral courage given this virtue’s import for social change. The importance and value of moral courage is evident in life of the Roman Christian Vibia Perpetua and of the anti-Nazi resister Sophie Scholl, as well as in a number of recent examples of moral courage, such as that exhibited by Mahfouz and by U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Each of these individuals offers inspiration to those who aspire to develop their own virtuousness. They further remind us not only of their mortality, but also that it is because of their mortality that the willing embrace of virtue stirs admiration. Their humanity, perhaps, reminds us of our own often latent capabilities.

Asmaa Mahfouz

Mahfouz’s efforts helped inspire the 2011, eighteen-day uprising against the oppressive regime of the long-time, U.S.-backed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. In response to four Egyptians having set themselves on fire to protest government abuses, Mahfouz attempted to organize a spontaneous protest in one of Egypt’s central plazas, Tahrir Square. Only a handful of people participated, and security forces quickly ended the action. In response, Mahfouz made a short video in which she called on her fellow citizens to rise up and take to Tahrir Square on a given day. Mahfouz disseminated the video via Facebook, not at all aware or capable of knowing what her actions would lead to. Mahfouz did this despite the fact that, according to American diplomatic cables made available by WikiLeaks, Egyptian security forces had engaged in torture and had possibly sexually assaulted regime opponents. In the video Mahfouz urged her fellow citizens to join her in standing up against the security forces terrorizing the people and in demanding their people’s fundamental human rights. She goes on to denounce the pessimism and fatalism plaguing the people:

Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference. Talk to your neighbours, your colleagues, friends and family, and tell them to come. They don’t have to come to Tahrir Square. Just go down anywhere and say it, that we are free human beings. Sitting at home and just following us on news or Facebook leads to our humiliation, leads to my own humiliation. . . . If you stay at home, then you deserve all that is being done, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. And you’ll be responsible for what happens to us on the streets while you sit at home.[22]

While a number of factors played a role in precipitating the uprising, many believe Mahfouz’s videos contributed to its success. Her moral courage and compassion for those suffering in her nation were inspiring and effective in promoting social change in ways she could not have realistically predicted.

Bradley Manning

Manning provides a related example of moral courage and moral autonomy. Manning is currently facing life imprisonment for the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. Indeed he was responsible for making the previously mentioned cables available to WikiLeaks to publish. One of the most notorious secrets he apparently leaked is the so-called “collateral murder” video. The video, made by the U.S. military, documents soldiers in an Apache helicopter attacking and killing twelve people on July 12, 2007, in Iraq. The soldiers appear to believe the men they are attacking are insurgents, though none of them are engaging in offensive military actions. In the end the soldiers’ kills included a Reuters’ videographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and another man who had attempted to help victims of the helicopter attack.

Manning can be heard taking responsibility for his leaks in a secret recording of his February 2013 pretrial hearing in military court, at Fort Mead.[23] Facing a lifetime sentence, and having already spent nearly three years in a military prison, Manning spoke about the previously mentioned video. He explained that his conscience was alarmed by the helicopter team’s “delightful bloodlust,” and the manner in which they “dehumanized the individuals they were engaging,” referring to them as “dead bastards” and congratulating each other on the kills. Manning said he was saddened to hear one of the aerial crew members expressing hope that a wounded victim, who was trying to crawl to the curb, would pick up a weapon, and thus give the crew members cause to do more shooting. Further, he was “disturbed” by the callous response of the soldiers to the realization that their attack had significantly wounded children in the van that had been used in an attempt to rescue the injured.

The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later, in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body.[24]

Manning stated that his motive for leaking the documents was to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” [25]

Indeed, by providing journalists with information, Manning helped spur debate about U.S. military policies and actions in Iraq. A March 2013 Guardian and BBC Arabic report and documentary, “James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq,” draws in part on some of Manning’s leaks to detail the way in which the U.S. military armed and trained Iraqi death squads, which in turn ran torture centers around the country. The film’s executive producer, Maggie O’Kane, notes that the news “would not be coming out, if it hadn’t been for Bradley Manning. This information, the basic information, has been very key.”[26] Specifically, the investigators began to piece together their story when they were tipped off by a reference in Manning’s leaks to Fragmentary Order 242. According to O’Kane, this is “a U.S. military order instructing U.S. soldiers to ignore Iraq-on-Iraqi torture,” an order that appeared in the documents more than one thousand times.[27]

I believe that Manning did have noble intentions in turning over leaked documents to WikiLeaks. His course of action came with enormous risk; risk that has now materialized in years of imprisonment and isolation which some have likened to inhumane treatment. His thoughtful moral analysis of the materials he leaked provides perhaps the best evidence that his intentions were motivated by sincere commitment to the virtue of justice. As regards virtue ethics and social change, it is worth considering that, while Manning may have hoped something good would come from his actions, all he knew for certain was that the reports and videos he examined revealed morally troubling conduct on the part of his own military organization. The existence of these materials, many of which are morally disturbing, was known by a great many other people. Yet it was not until Bradley Manning decided to take action that the American public and the global public, including citizens of Egypt, came to know of the misconduct of the U.S. government. So while Manning could have very well quieted his moral concern with pessimistic serenades or fears of punishment, his decision to act upon his commitments to moral equality has not only defined him as a heroic human being in the eyes of millions around the world, but has also exposed U.S. military abuses in ways that may well reverberate for many years to come.

Sophie Scholl

The film Sophie Scholl: Final Days (2005)[28] offers an example of a virtuous life and the power it has to effect change in others. The film tells the story of Sophie and Hans Scholl who were, in life, brother and sister members of a non-violent, anti-Nazi student group, the White Rose. Sophie and Hans are German university students working under cover of night to write, print, and publish a series of letters or pamphlets challenging Hitler and the Nazi party. Their actions, as depicted in the film, are motivated by a desire to end the suffering the Nazi regime is causing the German people and those whose countries have been occupied and are being devastated by the regime.

The film’s interrogation scenes are based on records from the actual interrogation. In one of them, the Gestapo investigator, Robert Mohr, confronts Sophie with evidence proving that she collaborated in the production of anti-Nazi literature. He assails her for violating her nation’s laws, saying: “Without law, there is no order. What can we rely on if not the law?” Sophie replies that conscience is the true and rightful guide. Sophie’s assertion that her conscience is the ultimate judge of right and wrong exemplifies the virtue of “moral autonomy,” the idea that a good person comes “to her own decisions about moral issues on the basis of her own moral principles, and then, in turn,” acts “upon her considered judgment.”[29]

Frequently our movies and the media more generally present us with stories that start with some hideous crime—a common trope is the rape and murder of a loved one, or perhaps a political injustice—that, we are urged to believe, forces a protagonist to make a choice: either courageous, violent retaliation, or cowardly, passive withdrawal. Once courageous retaliation is chosen, a tidal wave of righteous violence is unleashed, and audiences are encouraged to cheer not in spite of but precisely because of the carnage. This vision of courage pollutes mainstream media including such Hollywood films as Law Abiding Citizen, The Crow, and The Gladiator. However, Sophie Scholl challenges this vision of courage as violent retaliation, a willingness to respond to threat or injustice with unsympathetic, punishing force. Members of the White Rose respond to the callous militarization of society and the bureaucratic destruction of innocent life by rejecting rather than adopting the dehumanizing means of those they oppose. Sophie, age 21, quotes her brother, “Strong in spirit, tender in heart.” Here the model of courage is not violence or retaliation; rather, it involves rejecting defeatism in favor of bold, defiant assertions of truth and justice, and this at the risk of one’s life.

During Sophie’s interrogation, investigator Mohr gives her the opportunity to reduce her punishment by renouncing her activities. When asked why she will not do so, she answers that she will not betray the ideas she has been defending. Here, and in her refusal to implicate her friends, the virtues of integrity and loyalty are exemplified. And when we hear Sophie’s agonized cry—when she is notified that she will immediately be put to death—we come to respect her actions all the more. She is human, vulnerable and afraid just like us. Her example forces us to realize that we are equally mortal, and all that is left to determine is whether or not we are equally morally courageous. Ultimately, Sophie’s efforts urge us to ask fundamental questions that lie at the heart of virtue ethics: “What do we ultimately stand for?” “Who are we?” “Who do we want to be?” “What will our legacy be?” “Whose side are we on?”

The Sophie Scholl of this film also embodies the virtue of reverence, a concept that is perhaps essential to a moral existence. Throughout the film Sophie is depicted as maintaining an awe for life itself, often looking out of windows to cherish blue skies, which symbolize freedom and possibility. This awe represents an awe for not merely her own existence but for all people who can also see the beauty and potential in an open blue sky. Sophie states simply, “Every life is precious.”

In Reverence: The Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff writes:

Reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods. . . . Ancient Greeks thought that tyranny was the height of irreverence, and they gave the famous name of hubris to the crimes of tyrants. An irreverent soul is arrogant and shameless, unable to feel awe in the face of things higher than itself. As a result, an irreverent soul is unable to feel respect for people it sees as lower than itself.[30]

By contrast, the reverent lack hubris and feel respect even for even those who may be unlike them. For some like Sophie Scholl, the more one recognizes the fully beauty of life, the more anguish one feels when others are robbed of its bounty. Perhaps it is those who are most awake to the full glory of existence who are most persistently disturbed by the deprivations others are forced to endure. Yet, for Sophie this model of bravery does not come at the expense of her humanity and, thus, of her reverence. She does not convey inhumanity, cruelty, or abusiveness. She is, at critical moments, profoundly irreverent. This irreverence, however, is not the mocking of the innocent or of suffering or justice, but rather the appropriate mocking of the arrogance of authorities drunk on power. Perhaps it is this virtuous elegance that provokes her interrogator to become fond of her. The film suggests that as the persecuted retain their humanity, persecutors grow squeamish of their own inhumane ugliness. Thus we see that Mohr is morally conflicted, swinging from outrage over Sophie’s actions, to soft, thinly veiled pleas for her to renounce her actions so that he may save her life.

Scholl died while Hitler was prevailing. Perhaps she was naïve to believe her moral stand was meaningful. Yet our admiration for her—something my students’ reactions to the film suggest is fairly ubiquitous—teaches us that victory is not the ultimate mark of moral success.

Vibia Perpetua

Very often losing with dignified moral courage is all the more inspiring. Indeed this was precisely the case with the once popular story of an aristocratic Roman woman, Vibia Perpetua, who, at the age of 22, refused to renounce her Christianity, and was consequently sentenced to be killed in the Roman amphitheater. According to Professor of Religion Elaine Pagels’s account in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Vibia Perpetua was “forcibly stripped naked and placed in nets,” and then “gored and thrown to the ground” by a “mad heifer.” After suffering additional torment she was slain by a gladiator. Accounts of the event contend that she “screamed as she was struck on the bone; then she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator, and guided it to her throat.”[31] Available accounts suggest Perpetua’s actions were motivated by her religious convictions. They were acts of both moral courage and moral autonomy. Her actions, from what we know, were not planned to provoke a particular effect. Yet such examples of courageous Christians boldly and righteously confronting the Roman Empire inspired Christians such as Tertullian and Justin the Philosopher to become Christians, in spite of the Roman authorities and prevailing dangers.[32] Perhaps the lesson is that we too often underestimate the power of virtuous selfhood to produce meaningful social change, and that we would do well to become and live out the ideals we wish to see manifested in the broader culture.

Virtuous Struggle over Eternal Victory

A variation of the wholesale change or a waste of time argument is what one could call the winnable or worthless argument. The basic idea here is that injustices are only worth fighting against when we can stop them forever. But this argument faces problematic implications that few could honestly embrace. For if the inability to permanently achieve something made trying to achieve it pointless, then the effort to live as long and healthy a life as possible would itself be pointless. Yet it is clear to a great many that striving to live a full life, despite the inevitability of death, is not pointless. Equipped with this realization one could see the profound error of making one’s efforts to make the world a better place contingent on being able to achieve widespread and presumably permanent change. Broad societal victories—in politics, policies, and so on—are difficult to predict and they are fleeting. But championing just causes and living just lives are not. And they are, in more ways than not, up to us.

Bemoaning whether we can end racism, sexism, homophobia, exploitative capitalism, or militarism often distracts us from fundamental existential questions such as: “What kind of person do I wish to be?” “What kind of life do I wish to lead?” And, “What sorts of principles will I exemplify?” As Zamyatin wrote in 1923:

Today we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die—and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start all over, from the beginning, what would we live by? And for what?[33]

Zamyatin’s demand for focus on the character our lives attest to was echoed, years later, by Vaclav Havel who wrote that it is a mistake to think of the struggle for social change as one that can be permanently won.

Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. At the very most, we can win a battle or two—and not even that is certain. Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war persistently. It has been waged for centuries, and it will continue to be waged—we hope—for centuries to come. . . . It is an eternal, never-ending struggle waged not just by good people . . . against evil people, by honourable people against dishonourable people, by people who think about the world and eternity against people who think only of themselves and the moment. It takes place inside everyone. It is what makes a person a person, and life, life.[34]

In determining what to do, how best to live, we must turn over our morality to a simple calculus of likely outcomes. Though such a task has its place, for instance in crafting strategies for effective change, morally good persons—virtuous persons—are not motivated merely by outcomes. We must not live for victory, but rather we must live for virtue, perhaps above all the virtue of compassion-driven moral courage. Sometimes such moral courage outshines both our accomplishments and even our failures.

The practice of moral courage is itself a good. For example, in addition to the extraordinary leadership role he played in the Civil Rights Movement, one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most important legacies is his challenging of capitalism and U.S. militarism. The very act of giving a speech such as “Beyond Vietnam,” wherein King directly called the U.S. government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world at the time, was itself a moral victory. This is what virtue ethicists mean when they say that virtues, such as moral courage, are not merely a means to an end, they are ends in themselves. Their worth is not simply bound up in their capacity to affect some other kind of change, but is also indicated in their very engendering in the world. As the historian Howard Zinn wrote:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.[35]

While many of us view social change as involving something dramatic such as the ending of a war, passage of a new law, or abolishing an unjust cultural practice, Zinn reminds us that these climatic moments are often the consequence of countless numbers of individuals embodying virtues of justice despite the unfavorable conditions in which they find themselves.

Manifesting Our Desired Change

Over the years I have regularly encountered feelings of powerlessness in friends, fellow activists, family members, and students. In the classroom, many students are dismayed and feel paralyzed when they think about confronting vast, institutional forces of oppression. In activist communities, some members feel their long hours spent working for justice have failed to procure meaningful results. These and other feelings are often present in the pews of progressive churches where I have spoken. As they are confronted with troubling facts, people are asking, “But what can we do about it?” On the one hand this is an important, honest attempt to move past knowledge to action. On the other hand the very question seems to ignore that promoting awareness and shifts in consciousness is a form of action in itself. Perhaps most importantly, such questions are meant, I fear, to disarm the feelings both of helplessness and of moral obligation that many people feel when they learn of some moral injustice. In many cases, underneath these questions lies the following protest: “But there is nothing we can do about these problems. We are too small, and the forces of oppression and injustice are too big.” And thus people are asking to be excused from having to even try.

Virtue ethics suggests that, when it comes to determining what our moral commitments should be, there is something profoundly wrong with overemphasizing the likelihood of “winning” certain battles or causes. From a virtue ethics perspective, we should replace our concentration on “victory” with a focus on “virtue”—a focus on morally desirable habits of thought, feeling, and action that are good in themselves, regardless of ultimate outcomes. A virtue ethics approach would, for instance, call on American citizens to replace the defeatist rhetorical questions “Why should I change when no one else will” and “What good can I do?” with “What would a good person do?” “What kind of person do I want to be?” and “Given this problem, how will I define myself?”

This is not to say that one should not be concerned with projected outcomes. Instead, the point is that our moral lives are about more than figuring out ways to foster change in others; they have as much to do with recognizing that our moral choices define us. Moreover, virtue ethics further functions to interrupt all-too-common reactionary rationalizations for inaction; turning the moral microscope, not so much on strategies for affecting others to alter their course of action, but towards our everyday habits of thought, feeling, and action. In doing so this moral lens reminds us that the manifestation of values we hold dear, such as justice, need not be put off until the world shifts in a new moral direction. Instead we may each choose to exemplify our most cherished values in our individual lives, thus directly and literally manifesting the change we seek.

Credit

Image is from “2011′s Amazing Women of the Year,” Mideast Posts: The Voices of the Middle East.

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Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Directed by Marc Rothemund. 2005. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2006. DVD.

Vaughn, Lewis and Theodore Schick, Jr. Doing Philosophy, An Introduction through Thought Experiments. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 2010.

Vaughn, Lewis. Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

West, Cornel. “President’s Forum – Dr. Cornel West.” Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Accessed April 2013 via http://www.hws.edu

Woodruff, Paul. Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2002.

Young, Iris M. “Five Faces of Oppression.” In Theorizing feminisms: A reader, edited by E. Hackett and S. Haslanger, 3–15. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

———. “Displacing the Distributive Paradigm.” In Ethics in Practice, An Anthology, edited by Hugh LaFollette, 540–555. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.

———. We. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York: EOS, 1999.

Zinn, Howard. “The Optimism of Uncertainty.” Common Dreams, November 8, 2004. Accessed via http://www.commondreams.org.

Endnotes

[1] M.K. Gandhi, “Equal Distribution,” Harijan (August 25, 1940), quoted in Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambrage, MA: South End Press, 2005), 97.

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“Community-Integrated” Housing for People with Developmental Disabilities

Queer and Critical Disability Theories’ Contribution to Self-Determination

By Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is a second semester student in the Master’s in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center, concentrating in the Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir track.

Introduction[1]

As debates about extending federal benefits to married same-gender couples rage across the country while marriage cases are processed by the Supreme Court, many other fights for individuals to control their own intimate relationships and living spaces are rarely discussed. People with developmental disabilities—especially those who are queer—are often denied access to family life, having children, and even choosing what clothes they want to wear on a daily basis. Perhaps surprisingly, many individuals with developmental disabilities who are facing these basic denials of self-determination are no longer segregated into institutions, but are in fact living in community-integrated housing.

As one self-advocate, Robert Martin, states in an ‘Our Rights’ guide for people with developmental disabilities, “Living independently is about being able to make our own decisions as to where and with whom we live.”^[2]
Historically, access to independent living has been stripped from people with developmental disabilities and people who are queer, especially when individuals are both developmentally disabled and queer. Today, this lack of access persists even in many community-integrated housing settings, which were originally designed to counter the oppression and dehumanization found in institutions.

People with developmental disabilities who are queer have historically been hospitalized against their will and labeled as diseased and abnormal, both because of their developmental disabilities and because of their queerness (people who are either developmentally disabled or queer have also experienced these forced hospitalizations[3]). This paper surveys academic literature; outlines some relevant queer theoretical ideas; and compares these ideas to notions of “community” and “home” in community-integrated housing for people with developmental disabilities. In doing so, I examine how the intersections of these identities continue to negatively impact individuals’ access to making decisions that dramatically impact their own lives, even as people are increasingly living in community-integrated housing rather than institutions per se. Community-integrated housing—both in academic literature and in practice—does not adequately take into account the diversity of self-defined needs and desires of people with developmental disabilities.

It is my hope that this paper will serve as a small contribution to those interested in researching or promoting any form of community-based housing and urban planning. Critical disability theorists and activists can hopefully push past the limits of this paper, which is too broad to focus in on specific abilities, levels of functionality, and desires of people with developmental disabilities.[4] Feminists – queer and otherwise – might find interest in this paper for its exploration of power, control, erotic space and constraint. I also hope that this paper serves as a reminder and call to action to queer theorists and activists who often forget that so many of us are in some way disabled, and even if we were not, our struggles have been similar, and we need to connect our work. Finally, this paper highlights shortcomings and oversights of current literature, in the hopes that they will be addressed in the future, especially because this paper highlights important intersections between scholarly literature and service-provision. Therefore, this paper can be widely read as a broad reflection on the real impacts of the assumptions and norms in academic literature on community-integrated housing.

Community-Integrated Housing: Broad Overviews and Oversights

Since the large-scale deinstitutionalization of people with developmental disabilities in the late 1960s (which is still incomplete), there have been a wide array of changes in the types of housing available. ^[5] These various forms of housing can reasonably be expected to have diverse effects on people with developmental disabilities, and this section discusses some of the many studies examining these impacts.^[6]

Dispersed housing is a common form of community-integrated housing in which apartments or houses are dispersed throughout typical residential neighborhoods, and are designed to blend in with the larger community (unless you know what you are looking for). Group homes, for example, are one form of dispersed housing and are now the dominant form of community-integrated housing.^[7] Group homes are owned by private agencies that provide services to people with developmental disabilities and employ a paid staff that lives with a small number of service-users.^[8]

Clustered housing features a number of living units that are spatially separated from the surrounding population, in which most individuals are not considered developmentally disabled. Village communities—one form of clustered housing—often host unsalaried support workers and families of people with developmentally disabilities and are designed to be largely self-contained.^[9] Residential campuses are distinct from village communities in that they are usually larger and pay staff to support residents, but they are similarly self-contained.^[10]

In 2009, Mansell and Beadle-Brown conducted a review of recent scholarship assessing health and quality of life outcomes in two broad kinds of community-integrated housing for individuals with developmental disabilities. This review analyzes nineteen papers (based on ten studies), published in English since 1990, which all compared quality of life and costs of dispersed and clustered housing, two types of community-integrated housing.^[11] Mansell and Beadle-Brown’s review concludes that clustered housing, despite its lower staff: resident ratio, provides poorer outcomes for most people with developmental disabilities than does dispersed housing.^[12] Despite their conclusion, McConkey (included in their review) find that clustered housing residents actually had better relationships than those in dispersed housing. Significantly, this study accounted for residents’ relationships with other residents, whereas others did not.^[13] Owen et al. also included in Mansell and Beadle-Brown’s review) find no difference in outcomes between dispersed and clustered housing. Notably, Owen et al. based their results entirely on extensive participant observation and in-depth interviews with residents.^[14] These conclusions—contradicting Mansell and Beadle-Brown’s findings—suggest that the more researchers rely on residents to inform their perceptions of housing, the fewer differences between clustered and dispersed housing seem to emerge.

Cummins and Lau critique the assumptions that often underlie the general hesitation to rely solely on resident-created definitions of quality of life.^[15] They challenge dominant definitions of “community” and “relationships” used in most quality of life studies, arguing that these understandings prioritize integration into non-diagnosed communities and relationships with non-diagnosed^[16] individuals.^[17] The externally-imposed definition of “community” and “relationships” is merely one (albeit significant) mode of neglecting residents’ diversity of perspectives in most studies of housing.       Another way in which assumptions that people with developmental disabilities do not or cannot create valuable relationships amongst themselves manifest in many studies is in the inadvertent treatment of residents as objects of analysis rather than as individuals capable of self-evaluation. Many studies that Mansell and Beadle-Brown review did not adequately create space for residents to articulate for themselves what they need and desire, placing their responses—if their subjective participation was invited at all^[18]—alongside those of family members and service-providers.^[19]  The subordination of residents’ viewpoints about their own lives to “expert” opinions reflects a belief that residents are not capable of complex self-representation.

Finally, while most studies indicate the severity of participating residents’ disabilities, other differences amongst residents—such as race, age, class background, gender identity, or sexuality—are not even mentioned. Two exceptions reviewed in Mansell and Beadle-Brown account for gender differences and both gender and age differences, respectively.^[20] This general oversight overlooks many forms of diversity in communities of people with developmental disabilities, assuming a uniform experience, goal, and identity.

The general review of housing literature above suggests dangerous holes in current academic discussions. To reiterate, these are:

• the implicit definition of “community” as “non-disabled” and the connected assumption that integration into surrounding non-diagnosed communities is and should be an end-goal for individuals with developmental disabilities;
• the lack of perspectives of individuals with developmental disabilities within the current literature; and
• a great silence on differences amongst individuals with developmental disabilities within most studies.

Queer theory can contribute a great deal to an analysis of community-integrated housing, and will thus be the focus of the next section.

What’s Queer Theory Got To Do With It?

A foundational text for understanding the impact of dominant views of bodies that don’t conform to mainstream expectations—non-normative bodies—is Singer’s article “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-normative Body Images.” Singer argues that service-providers’ responses to people with non-normative bodies are shaped by an inability to comprehend the vast complexities of possible configurations of individuals’ bodies.^[21] He asserts that these inabilities to imagine the possibilities that exist outside of a gender binary (which insists that there are only two genders—female and male and only one way to be ‘female’ or ‘male’ respectively) largely stem from the medical field. This teaches service-providers to view non-normative bodies as dehumanized medical oddities, rather than as manifestations of human diversity.^[22] He contrasts medical textbooks’ images and captions of intersex and trans individuals—often, positioned in front of backgrounds that evoke popular conceptions of mug shots—with trans and intersex self-representations (such as Loren Cameron’s photography: figure 1^[23]) to demonstrate the stripping of dignity from individuals with non-normative bodies in medical textbooks.^[24] These textbook representations of people as an assortment of “disordered” or “diseased” body parts—rather than as people with variant anatomies—create a situation in which medical professionals and other service-providers simply cannot imagine “disordered” individuals as fully human. This severely constricts the degree to which service-providers take seriously the abilities of people with developmental disabilities to assert control over their own care.^[25]

In other words, he argues that the mainstream medical profession, and by extension, service-providers for people with developmental disabilities, insist on viewing people who are queer, who have disabilities, or who are both queer and have disabilities as lacking some quality or qualities needed to be ‘normal.’ Thus, a service-provider viewing Saddi Khali’s photographs of Edward Ndopu, a self-identified “black queer femme man who lives with a visible disability,” may, due to their training, view Ndopu’s body as diseased, warped, or dysfunctionally contorted (figure 2).^[26] Thus, they might not be able to imagine Khali’s nude photographs of Ndopu as his “attempt to challenge the white, hetero, cis normative, ‘able’ bodied standards against which desirability and body acceptance is measured.” ^[27]

Singer’s analysis of trans and intersex bodies can be extended to include developmentally disabled people because of the ways in which the “medical gaze” powerfully shapes the lives of individuals with developmental disabilities, both historically through institutionalization and currently through the practices and academic literature involved with housing. Similarly, Singer’s analysis applies here because of the ways that dominant US culture dictates that body and mind are one. For example, transgender people who need hormones or surgery to affirm their gender are classified as having a mental “dysphoria,” thus unifying a state of mind with a state of body.^[28] Similarly, in more popular cultural understandings, the unification of mind and body in US culture can be seen in popular singer Lady GaGa’s “Born this Way” and similar phenomena such as President Barack Obama stating that he believes being gay is innate, which insist that sexual desire is something ingrained in the body and mind from birth.^[29]

Whose “Community” is Integrated into Housing?

Tackling the question of what academics and service-providers mean when they discuss “community-integrated housing” is, of course, crucial. As mentioned, Cummins and Lau widely critique both literature and service-providers for their widespread assumptions about what “community” is portrayed to mean. They write, “So which ‘community’ do authors target when they measure integration? The answer, almost inevitably, is the general community of non-disabled persons.”^[30] This statement calls attention to the unintentional undervaluing of relationships and senses of community amongst individuals with developmental disabilities that often underlie housing studies.

A recent academic debate over clustered housing—which, again, is often self-contained and is not designed for physical integration into non-diagnosed communities—offers an illustrative example of the increased visibility of the debate about what “community” means. Cummins and Lau and others have called attention to the assumed superiority of non-diagnosed communities within the academic literature on community-integrated housing. Emerson argues that clustered housing presents greater risks to individuals’ quality of life than dispersed housing, asserting that clustered housing exposes individuals to more restrictive management practices than forms of housing that more explicitly aim to integrate individuals into a non-diagnosed community.^[31] In response, Cummins and Lau assert that Emerson compared incomparable groups in his study, and that he overgeneralized his results. They state that they are not advocates of a blanket policy of segregation, but that it is important for individuals to have a strong sense of belonging. Thus, the option to access feelings of belonging with other diagnosed people should be open.^[32] Emerson then responds by arguing that subjective senses of well-being rank lower than medical standards of physical health.^[33]

This academic debate nicely frames the tensions between people’s desires about where and how to live and community-integration. Emerson states that his prioritization of community-integration of diagnosed people into non-diagnosed communities is motivated by a concern for physical safety. In effect, however, this prioritization constrains the choices of individuals who desire diagnosed communities (which clustered housing arguably facilitates better than dispersed housing).^[34] Singer would surely assert that a hesitancy to trust people with developmental disabilities with decisions that might involve making trade-offs between their physical health and social fulfillment is characterized by an inability to imagine these individuals as fully capable of making decisions for themselves.

While the above-referenced debate about clustered housing highlights assumptions about community and self-determination within academic literature, Thorn et al. illustrate nicely how the assumption that “community” means “non-disabled” dominates service-provision as well. While Thorn et al. argue that goals and staff trainings within residential facilities for people with developmental disabilities should be designed based on how each individual wants to live, they continue to make assumptions about community that undermine their stated goals.^[35] Centering their study on small group homes, Thorn et al. state that “‘community presence’ . . . incorporates the basic concept of physically being in a community integrated setting and occupying the same social space as non-disabled people” (emphasis mine).^[36] A goal-oriented strategy for creating opportunities to develop senses of community amongst individuals with developmental disabilities cannot be found in Thorn et al., but relationships between diagnosed and non-diagnosed people are given high priority. Indeed, the study premises much of its methodological strategy of assessing training programs on the basis that “every interaction between an individual and staff has therapeutic potential.”^[37]

The tendency to locate “community” within the context of non-diagnosed relationships reinforces Singer’s argument that it is difficult for service-providers to imagine diagnosed bodies, minds, and relationships as equally valuable and self-aware as non-diagnosed bodies, minds, and relationships. By forming goals oriented around valuing able-bodied community as the unstated ‘natural’ and ‘desirable’ state, service-providers inadvertently devalue what they claim to value at the outset: service-users’ own goals. These ideas about what is ‘desirable’ also perpetuate a dangerous assumption that individuals with developmental disabilities can only belong to one kind of community. The erasure of differences amongst people with developmental disabilities further erases their personhood. Despite these obstacles, most individuals with developmental disabilities—particularly queers—develop their own multi-faceted, dynamic communities, constructing self-identities based both on personal choices and on various experiences of exclusion in multiple communities.^[38]

By arguing that “community-integration” goals devalue the desires of people with developmental disabilities, I certainly do not mean to imply that all or even most people reject community-integration. Quite the contrary: many individuals with developmental disabilities do desire integration into non-diagnosed communities. Self-advocates and self-advocate organizations such as the Self Advocacy Association in New York State are often strong advocates for integration.^[39] Among their ranks are many who advocate powerfully for an end to institutionalization.^[40] However, self-advocates often clarify their desire for integration with the caveat that social and economic equality must be achieved alongside this integration.^[41] I concur and suggest—especially in light of the many other gross social and economic inequities individuals with developmental disabilities face^[42]—that if “community-integration” continues to ignore the diversity of developmentally disabled desires and devalue relationships between people with developmental disabilities, then it cannot result in equality, despite the best intentions of service-providers.

There is some literature, however, that explicitly attempts to reverse the erasure of self-advocates’ perspectives and put alternative desires and definitions of community first. Fields, for example, challenges dominant assumptions about community with her in-depth interviews and analysis of senses of belonging amongst formerly homeless individuals with mental illness living in dispersed housing.^[43] Fields’ interviews reveal that most, if not all, participants were involved or identified with multiple communities.^[44] She observes that the multi-faceted, diverse senses of belonging that many participants embodied ran counter to prevailing definitions of community-integration.^[45] Even though she does not exclusively deal with individuals with developmental disabilities, Fields’ effort to counter dominant ideas by prioritizing perspectives of diagnosed individuals provides a useful methodological means of dismantling hegemonic assumptions about the meaning of “community.”

Keeping “Home” Out of “Housing”

The dominant academic discussions on housing for individuals with developmental disabilities overwhelmingly deal with service-provision and neglect a consideration of “home.”^[46] As Pinfold —whose methodologies influenced Fields’ work—points out, housing for people with developmental disabilities is not often thought of, even theoretically, outside the bounds of service-provision. While she finds that many enjoy the benefits of living within a community of other service-users and care provision and thus do not view residential independence as a rehabilitation goal, she also observes that service-users often seek self-defined pathways toward independent living.^[47] Pinfold thus recognizes that people have multiple and often conflicting desires that obscure the binary between “independent living” (in a private home) and “dependent living” (in housing that includes service-provision, but is not imagined in the literature as a “home”).^[48]

While studying the reported feelings about “home” of people with severe mental illness living in transitional group homes, Padgett notes that the “[m]arkers of ontological security [are]… constancy, daily routine, privacy, and having a secure base for identity construction.”^[49] Arguably, individuals living in group homes do not have control over any of these. Turnover rates of staff are extremely high, limiting constancy; privacy is extremely limited, as discussed below; and as discussed both above and below, identity construction is often subtly guided toward assimilation and identification with able-bodied, heteronormative communities. Padgett also observes that goal-oriented transitional housing constantly begs the question of “what’s next?”^[50] This creates uncertainty about the future based on service-providers’ constant re-evaluations of whether individuals are “ready” to live independently. This, she argues, is “designed to ensure that [people] are ‘housing ready’ before approval is given for them to have a ‘home.’”^[51] In this way, it is not until people with mental illness (or developmental disabilities) are deemed “ready” under Singer’s medical gaze that they can have access to “home.”

In order to look further into people’s experiences of “home,” it is important to examine people’s abilities to function freely within community-integrated living spaces. Dunn et al. (2010) identifies alarming issues with substitute decision-making in UK group homes. Laws made by non-diagnosed individuals and corporations govern what deems a person with developmental disabilities capable of making decisions for themselves. Those that do not satisfy law-defined criteria may have a service-provider govern all “acts in connection with care and treatment, therefore potentially affecting choices about what clothes to wear.”^[52] While relational substitute decision-making—which allows more input from service-users—is becoming increasingly popular, this kind of control over individuals’ personal lives in their housing spaces evokes concerns about where service-providers learn about service-users. Singer’s medical gaze upon service-users subject to substitute decision-making has a particularly powerful influence on people’s lives, and can greatly constrain the ability of service-providers to form meaningful relationships with service-users. Moreover, substitute decision-making does not have to be in effect for service-providers to exert control over service-users’ social and sexual lives. For example, queer disabled individuals often risk further psychiatric evaluation if they come out to their doctors, who only rarely give information about sexuality (especially about non-normative sexualities) to service-users.^[53]

Noonan and Gomez are particularly concerned with issues of living spaces for people with developmental disabilities, especially those who are queer. Studying community-integrated housing in Australia, the authors find a great lack of privacy amongst residents.^[54] They find that many individuals are not given the chance to choose with whom they live, what daily activities they participate in, nor what clothes they wear.^[55] Sexual and gender expression and activities are also severely constrained, they observe, by a lack of non-suggestive information from staff and family members.^[56] Historically repressive standards of “acceptable behavior” often govern what forms of affection are considered appropriate, as people with developmental disabilities are largely viewed as either asexual children or as dangerous predators because of a lack of control.^[57] The medical and service-providing communities’ infantalization of people with developmental disabilities dramatically inhibits these individuals’ abilities to express cisgendered heterosexuality, let alone any genderqueer and/or sexually queer forms of expression and desires.

Significantly, individuals with developmental disabilities that do not live in community-integrated housing are known to have similar rates of socially-accepted relationships as non-diagnosed individuals. Hall et al. finds that 73% of adult study participants with mild developmental disabilities are married and 62% have children.^[58] Studying a similarly diagnosed group, research by Maughan et al. (indicates that 79.5% of men in their early 30’s were in stable cohabiting relationships and 94.7% of women of the same age were in such relationships.^[59] Despite studies such as these, the regulation of sex and gender expression in people’s living spaces persists in community-integrated housing and in medical care.

Indeed, Pinfold et al. find through a series of focus groups with service-users, that service-users ranked problems with psychiatric services as their main concern, citing the education of children and medical practitioners as an important vehicle to advocate for change. The participants (all of whom were white) in their focus group saw service-providers’ failure to listen to service-users, as well as the power differentials between users and providers, as major problems that need to be changed.^[60] This indicates that issues such as a lack of control of one’s identity, expression, and sexuality within one’s own living spaces are significant problems in the US. Such oppressive, highly regulated living environments certainly do not constitute “home” living. Again, the medical gaze’s penetration into and control of the housing of people with developmental disabilities is seen here with particularly devastating effects on queer individuals in community-integrated housing. Thus, service-providers powerfully constrict the ways in which eroticism can exist within the home-spaces of people with developmental disabilities.

The erotic space of the home may be particularly crucial to queers with developmental disabilities, in that disabled bodies are subject to a great deal of rejection, discrimination, indifference, and policing in many ableist queer communities.^[61] Many queers with developmental disabilities respond to the multiple forms of policing they experience, from both straight service-providers and queer ableist communities, by creating their own dynamic communities.^[62] The potentially erotic spaces provided by housing can be a vital resource for these communities because as Johnston and Valentine point out, “home” is theoretically imbued with privacy, especially regarding sexual intimacy.^[63] However, sexual intimacy is deeply regulated within community-integrated housing, and options for community formation are constrained by forces outside of housing spaces, such as ableism in dominant queer culture and gay bars.^[64] In situations such as these, bodies are forced into imposed norms (of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, for example) even within their own living spaces, marking these spaces as a location in which one sleeps and has services provided, but cannot be called “home.”

Conclusion

Applying queer theory to community-integrated housing for people with developmental disabilities, especially those who are queer, deeply disrupts dominant assumptions about “community,” “integration,” and desire. The overwhelming majority of current literature about community-integrated housing assumes that “community-integration” involves participation and investment in non-diagnosed communities; treats individuals with developmental disabilities as objects rather than subjects; and erases differences (racial, ethnic, sexual, gendered, class, age, capacity, etc.) amongst these individuals. Queer theory allows us to understand these oversights as products of a dehumanizing “medical gaze” on anyone with bodies and/or minds that don’t match expectations of ‘normalcy.’ This limits the ability of service-providers to imagine people with developmental disabilities as capable of controlling their own lives.

In many ways, regulations within community-integrated housing arrangements continue the oppressions of institutionalization for individuals with developmental disabilities (especially queers). Infantalizing regulations of personal affairs, gender expressions, and sexualities within one’s home-space, combined with persistent assumptions about what community “should” look like, has created another form of institutionalization. Here, individuals are not isolated and tortured as they used to be, but are subjected to similarly controlling assumptions and mandates regarding what is normative and what is undesirable. All people with developmental disabilities may not be subject to the unique brand of oppression that was institutionalization, but the very definition of “community-integrated housing” still reeks of the assumption that disability is deviant, and deviance should be sanitized by eliminating differences enough to assimilate people with developmental disabilities into non-diagnosed culture.

Moving forward, access to publishing in academic journals should be made more widely available to people with developmental disabilities, opening opportunities to transform definitions of what constitutes “expertise.” Living goals and definitions of “community” must similarly be created by self-advocates rather than by well-meaning academics and service-providers. Additionally, using qualitative methods like those of Fields and Pinfold to ascertain what individuals with developmental disabilities desire and need can be quite helpful to help academics and service-providers in beginning to truly value the varied perspectives, needs, and desires of individuals with developmental disabilities. This must be done bearing strongly in mind Pinfold’s reminder that her interviews alone constituted an invasion of people’s living spaces.^[65] More broadly, a diversity of understandings of belonging and of ‘disabled’ sexualities should be promoted within housing and academia. This includes breaking down dominant understandings of “home,” while also broadening understandings of “home” to include whatever service-provision may be desired by people who will use it.

Future research needs to focus extensively on queer-specific concerns about control of home spaces, such as comprehensive clothing choices, privacy, sexual health education and care, etc. Doing so will make it more likely that people with developmental disabilities will have much easier access to self-determination, so that recognition of developmentally disabled people as both non-normative and as fully human persons can ensue.

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The post Queering Group Homes appeared first on Z e t e o.

Do you know, is the crab soup vegetarian?

And of what uses are words if their meanings are bent by their use? And could comic philosophy be our last best hope?

By William Eaton

William Eaton is the Editorial Adviser to Zeteo; his further explorations of the here and now appear every Tuesday evening at montaigbaktinian.com.

It could be teasing to begin this way, but . . . The last few months I have been working now and again on an essay about sex and philosophy, and it has seemed to me that the word “pleasure,” if not ἡδονή (hedone, pleasure), needs to be right at the top of such an essay. If such an essay is not fun to write and to read, why bother? But this then raises any number of other questions, one of them being what pleasure is. (Anxiety reducing? Or does it involve a kind of game—anxiety provoking, anxiety relieving?) And how much of these or any other kinds of pleasure could there be in an essay about sex and philosophy? And isn’t the present essay supposed to be about something different—e.g., about whether our crab soup could be vegetarian and, say, about how this question opens a window onto one of the most basic things that Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to tell us? From §43 of his Philosophical Investigations: “[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

To those who may just now be coming to Wittgenstein, I promise that in the course of the present text the meaning of Wittgenstein’s assertion will, slowly but surely, become clearer and may indeed come to seem quite correct. In this opening segment I will note that Wittgenstein was writing at the time of the two world wars and the Great Depression, and in opposition to a Platonic idea: that meanings are connected to fixed essences. From a Platonic perspective, as from many a schoolteacher’s or editor’s, while “pleasure” or the capitalist process of “creative destruction” may be misused, neither such words nor the phenomena they describe should be thought to mean one thing today and another thing tomorrow, one thing at Goldman Sachs and another in 조선민주주의인민공화국 (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), one thing to philosophers and another to people who have sex. If they did, our lives in language—like our lives tout court—would be chaos, the ground so susceptible to shifting under our feet, as to suggest that “ground” was a misnomer.

Luckily, the wisecrack about sex and philosophers makes it easy to come up with a Wittgensteinian rejoinder: Misuses of language are one of the ways in which language is used, and, as a whole, language—like a railroad over a marsh?—may be thought of as an ingenious or futile attempt to pass over the terms of our existence, in which meaninglessness and change play very large parts, and hardly least in our capitalist age. More simply, it is clear that if one person calls being clamped, plugged and handcuffed to a bedpost pleasureful and another person (like me) uses “pleasure” to describe lying on a couch reading Gender Trouble—it is not that our language needs to make room for these two meanings of “pleasure”; it already has. (And isn’t “pleasure,” in the sense of divertissement (diversion), the often unadmitted purpose of every intellectual work?)

In a note reproduced in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein observes, “However queer it sounds, the further expansion of an irrational number is a further expansion of mathematics.” And so, too, we can say, further expansions of the uses of the word “queer” have expanded our ideas of gender, sexuality, and social relations. And—this is where the DPRK chimes in again—clearly there is a political dimension to this view of language. If, as Marx put it, under capitalism “alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft” (all that is solid melts into air); if we come to recognize that nothing—or not even “nothing”—is fixed or eternal, then we are compelled to face the real—pleasureful but frightening, or frightening but pleasureful—conditions of our lives. The present essay seeks to work and find pleasures on both sides of this street, and to suggest that given the human predicament and the paradoxes in which our philosophy and life in language entangle us, some kind of not so much absurdist as simply comic philosophy may be long overdue. To invert a famous line from Spinoza (“Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere”): in the face of struggles to understand, let us not be ashamed to laugh, nor to lament or curse. (And a welcome, too, to those readers who have already come up with at least one objection: Soupy philosophy is not the same thing as comic philosophy, and it’s not much fun besides.).

So now one of those hazy, wobbly images passes across the screen to tell us that we are going back in time. Not too far back in this case. We arrive at a balmy October Saturday, 2012, yellow leaves lying along the brick sidewalks of Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am waiting in a line at Darwin’s Ltd (“Purveyors of Sumptuous Comestibles & Caffeinated Provisions”), a store that makes sandwiches that my mother, a Cambridge resident, likes.

It is simply not possible for me to skip over the fact that this business seems to have been named after the great biologist. I must look in my files of quotations to find the one that seems to speak to the present circumstance. I find the following from Henry Adams’s novel Democracy.

“Why do you want to understand Darwinism?” a Senator asks a young woman. “What good will it do you?”

“Perhaps it will teach us to be modest,” the woman answers.

My mother, aging and bedridden, has sent me to Darwin to get her favorite sandwich (“The Hilliard”: turkey breast, dill Havarti cheese and Dijon mustard), and for myself I am thinking of “The Ash”: Boursin and roast beef with tomato and sprouts. But it turns out a lot of Cantabrigians have similar ideas. The line is long and slow, and waiting in lines makes me feel trapped, claustrophobic. More on a practical than psychological level, something about the experience of waiting to get two of Darwin’s sandwiches brought to mind waiting in the check-in and security lines at a crowded airport, and I noted, too, a seemingly essential difference: When I finally got to the end of the line I was still going to be in Cambridge, and not, say, on my way to the Continent or the Caribbean.

It was then that a person a little bit ahead of me—a young woman who seemed rather “normal”—blondish hair, a gray or perhaps blue T-shirt, running shoes in all likelihood, and a reasonably relaxed demeanor—leaned over the counter to ask one of the employees if the crab soup was vegetarian. One might say that, for me, this was better than any trip to Paris.

As often, however, I was travelling alone, and I longed for someone with whom to share the remarkable moment. There was a South Asian young man standing right in front of me, and sotto voce I called his attention to the seeming—I am here to propose that it may be only seeming—absurdity of the question. “It depends what your definition of ‘vegetarian’ is, I guess,” he offered.

Or what your definition of “crab” is, one friend of mine has since added. (To say nothing of “normal.”) Another friend called my attention to the cartoonist Al Capp’s Shmoo, an asexual yet highly reproductive creature which loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired. Boil a Shmoo and it came out chicken. Broil it and it came out steak. The only way to happiness is to bring happiness to others, the Shmoo believed, and thus the Shmoo ended up being the greatest menace to humanity the world has ever known. . (Among other things, “Ef yo’ looks at a Shmoo, as ef yo’ is hongry, th’ accommodatin’ l’il critter draps daid outa sheer joy!!”)

A third friend found on a Happy Herbivore blog a recipe for “She Crab Soup (Fat-Free, Vegan),” posted in 2009 by one Lindsay S. Nixon, who recorded that the title would be “more accurately, The She-Crab-Lives Soup because no crustaceans were harmed in the making of this soup!” This comment proved quite helpful as otherwise it would have been difficult for me to figure out why the soup’s name bothered to include the word “crab,” the inclusion of 2 cups of oyster mushrooms, ½ tsp kelp and a dash of Old Bay seasoning being the closest the recipe came to anything aquatic. Wikipedia, at least as of October 2012, was insisting that orange crab roe was a chief ingredient in traditional crab soup, and that while “ingredients may be added to the soup or substituted for others, . . . crabmeat is found in all versions.” (N.B.: “All” and “every” will get you in trouble almost every time.)        About.com answers one of its own questions—“What is a she-crab?”—in roundabout fashion: “Spring she-crabs carry flavorful roe or crab eggs.” And I also read somewhere—in notes I scribbled on a symphony program?—that Scotch-Irish immigrants in the backwoods of South Carolina used to also eat He-Crab Soup; however, notwithstanding the nutritiousness of the substance, its particular bleachy, salty pastiness was found to be off-putting, and the soup never became popular in Charleston. (Did I mention that I am working on an essay about sex and philosophy?)

“When philosophers use a word . . . and try to grasp the essence of the thing,” Wittgenstein writes in the Investigations, “one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way . . . ? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” Problems can be solved “by looking into the workings of our language . . . in such a way as to make us recognize those workings—despite an urge to misunderstand them.” (Italics in the original.) It is certainly possible to go to a vegetarian restaurant and order a “burger” and have it be clearly understood that one means a “veggie burger,” with no meat in it. And as regards how we are now using “vegetarian,” a few minutes on the Web has revealed to me that, in addition to The Simpsons’ level 5 vegan who doesn’t eat “anything that casts a shadow,” there are: “lacto-ovo-vegetarians” who eat eggs and dairy products; “pescatarians” who eat seafood; and “flexitarians” who eat a mostly vegetarian diet, but occasionally eat meat. This makes room both for a pescatarian vegetarian crab soup, complete with crab meat, and for a lacto-ovo variation that includes roe but no meat. (However, absent the invention of Post-Laying She-Crab Soup, there would need to be a dispensation from the rabbi to allow the overlooking of the killing of mother crabs so that we can put their eggs in our soup.)

Further, my friend Stuart noted that a cow is a vegetarian, and perhaps a crab is too. This led him, after several ruminations, to propose that perhaps the real question is what do we mean by “is.” Which made it impossible for me to skip over the most famous statement ever made by President William Jefferson Clinton. He was testifying to a grand jury, responding to Office of the Independent Counsel prosecutors who had been empowered by Republican Party leaders eager to disempower the President and distract the American public from other, perhaps more essential matters. A lawyer with the Office, investigating Clinton’s relationship with his former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, asked Clinton whether a statement his own lawyer had made—that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with Lewinsky—“was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?” According to the sixteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Clinton answered, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if “is” means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” (I.e., if use of the present tense of the verb “to be” makes the question about whether “I” am at present having sex with Ms. Lewinsky, the answer is no. If what is in question is my past behavior, well, that’s another story.)

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

We shall get to George Orwell soon enough.

The blondish woman’s exact phrasing, as I have come to remember it, was: “Do you know, is the crab soup vegetarian?” In fact—and does this make the question less or more remarkable?—comments like this particular woman’s are being made daily in food stores and restaurants all across America. In my notes from a year ago I find a similar though hardly as inspiring a question, which was posed in a Manhattan restaurant by a man in his sixties: “Do you have sugar-free syrup?” (We understand why purveyors are eager to be able to sell sugarless products under the name “syrup” and crab-less products as crab, und so weiter. More curious is why a consumer would cling to these names if s/he did not want the most essential quality of the thing named: e.g., the sugar in the food traditionally called maple syrup, and often made of corn.)

In reflecting on the crab soup question, I have come to think that the “do you know” lies at the heart of its remarkableness. It makes it an epistemological question, as if the customer had asked—as I believe that, from one perspective she did—“Is it possible to know if the crab soup is vegetarian?” And as if a cousin of mine, waiting beside me, might then have piped up, “And if we cannot know this, can we know anything at all?”I will answer the first of these questions in my own roundabout fashion, approaching a Wittgensteinian answer at the end. First, a factoid, likely from the Science Times: French children apparently “know” a great deal less than American children about the nutritional characteristics of what they are eating, but what French children eat is thought, by experts in both countries, to have a much higher nutritional value than what the ostensibly more knowledgeable American children eat. (Here we would seem pressed to expand further our idea of “knowledge.”) Secondly, the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, in a work published in English under the title Understanding Human Nature, observed that we human beings are forced to compensate for our weakness by forming alliances and cooperating, and these activities, far from relieving us of our feelings of deprivation and insecurity, embody them. And thus—I am proposing—we should not be surprised that language, which provides us such an extraordinary means of socializing, should be similarly awash in insecurity and alienation, and in a kind of hoping against hope for understanding. Which understanding, the children would seem to suggest, will be at its best unconscious.With this as a backdrop, is it surprising that Wittgenstein, a great student of language, was also a grand dichotomizer and lover of optical illusions? The Investigations includes sketches of a duck/rabbit, a convex/concave step and of what Wittgenstein, hinting at underlying emotions, calls a “double cross”: a white cross on a black ground that could as easily be a black cross on a white ground. Similarly, in the internal dialogue of the text he accompanies many of his assertions with their inverse.

The [ostensible: pointing] definition of the number two, “That is called ‘two’”—pointing to two nuts—is perfectly exact.—But how can two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to call “two”; he will suppose that “two” is given to this group of nuts!

(Did I mention that my ideas of exploring comic philosophy were still struggling to get off the ground?)

In any case, returning to the question about whether we can know anything at all, our answer, after Wittgenstein (and Clinton), will be no and yes. If the meaning of such a trivial thing as the name of a dish cannot be pinned down, on what basis are we expecting to be able to answer any seemingly more important questions such as whether God exists or if abortion is murder or love is all there is? With an Iranian scientist visiting the United States from her home in the Netherlands, I found myself discussing “commitment”—the commitment that two potential lovers or parents might make to one another. It took us not ten seconds to agree that the word “commitment” has come to mean something quite close to nothing. Cf., Plato’s Lysis: “For our hearers will carry away the report that though we conceive ourselves to be friends with each other . . . we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend.”

But we might, with Wittgenstein’s encouragement, turn Socrates’s comment around and note that even though we do not know what we mean by “a friend,” we have friends. And we may learn another lesson from Wittgenstein’s remarks regarding pain and the language of pain, or from an old torch-song line: “Something here inside / Cannot be denied.” In spite of the limitations of our life in language, there is something all the same accompanying the use of the words “God,” “love,” or “commitment.” There is something tangible or almost tangible, let’s call it; something that guides us into making judgments of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, so good and so bad. And without this feeling of “tangibility,” of our being able to talk with one another about our experiences and longings, we would not keep trotting out the old locutions, nor keep inventing new ones, such as the “crap soup” with which a 12-year-old of my acquaintance, (mis)hearing from a back seat, renamed the Darwinian product in question.

From this (torch-song) perspective, certainly we can know—we do know—that a given soup is or is not crap and that sugar-free syrup is not really syrup. Many in the Cambridge soup line would have laughed, or at least perked up, if the woman had leaned over the counter to ask, “Do you know, is the orange juice vegetarian?” See Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, §464: “Was ich lehren will, ist: von einem nicht offenkundigen Unsinn zu einem offenkundigen übergehen.” In other words: My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

And nicely, the brief Wittgensteinian riff of the previous paragraphs could lead to a chorus of Wittgensteinians of one sort or another snorting that I have totally misread the master. My Wittgenstein has as little to do with the “real Wittgenstein” as the Happy Herbivore’s she-crab soup, or the sperm soup of the backwoods “crackers,” has to do with real crap soup. The real Wittgenstein, it has been proposed, opposed scientism and theory construction and argued that philosophy should be “confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead.” That from the New York University philosopher Paul Horwich (or from “Horwich’s Wittgenstein,” as his reading has been called). And I pluck this from O.K. Bouwsma’s wonderful 1961 essay, “The Blue Book”:

The object [of Wittgenstein’s investigations] is to assist some individual, always an individual, to help him discover what misleads and has misled him. And what misled him is to be seen only when he is no longer misled. When he says: “Now, I see” and breathes a sigh of relief, even though it may be a bit sheepishly, that is the moment to which the art is directed.

As regards both my own reading and these others I would underscore that from a Wittgensteinian perspective the meaning of a text is its use, and, as with “misuse” and “use,” so too misreading is a kind of reading, and likely the most popular if not the only possible kind. Wittgenstein’s Investigations begin with a misreading of Augustine’s Confessions, and there is little Darwin has been so much as misread. And misread, I will pause to add, not only by his opponents on the Christian right, but also by many of his putative followers among the “Liberal Establishment.” And nicely, too, these misreadings reflect and promote an unwavering commitment to Christian teleology, to there being a purpose to life (“reproductive success”)—which purpose informs, inter alia, the behavior of genes and inspires (can I say?) the corruptions of strings of proteins in the course of reproductive processes.

Those in line for an essay on sex and philosophy essay might also pick up Elisabeth Lloyd’s The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, which proposes that female orgasms have developed despite their not serving any adaptive purpose. Rather, Lloyd, who shares my Steven-Jay-Gouldian understanding of evolution, argues that female orgasms are a byproduct of the parallel development of nerve and tissue pathways in male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life. Subsequently the males develop a penis and the potential to ejaculate (orgasmically), while “females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan.” And thus we might say that, for a Homo sapiens sapiens female at least, sexual pleasure can, potentially, have a greater purity than a male Homo sapiens sapiens’ sexual pleasure, since the female’s orgasm could (ideally) serve no purpose but pleasure. And as a reader of the Science Times and Nature I would ask: Has the meaning of the word “pleasure” evolved rather dramatically of late, so that it now means—and perhaps most fundamentally—a certain level of neurochemical activity in the sensory cortex as recorded by electrodes or by an MRI taken at the time of a potentially pleasureful event? Or could a schoolteacher please come forward to remind us that the meaning of “pleasure”—and of “orgasm,” “evolution,” “Wittgenstein”—should not lie only in its abuse? (Btw: I suspect that Wittgenstein was, however unwittingly, working in Marx’s shadow—the bottom line here being that if “theory-oriented investigations” going by the name of empirical research (or serious philosophy) can be sold for more than the cost of the labor required to produce and sell them, then no amount of derogatory comments will avail. And the same dynamic applies to the possibility (or inevitability) of vegetarian crab soup.)

In La structure du comportement, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that the relations of a given individual and his milieu are dialectical, and dialectic leads to new relationships. This has the virtue of making the social nature of language and its plasticity, both in general and under capitalism, seem quite simple and understandable. And I take the Investigations’ corrective to this Merleau-Pontyian perspective to be findable somewhere between §167 (“Think of the uneasiness we feel when the spelling of a word is changed”) and §384 (“You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language”). This is not just a matter of intellectual observations; we are talking—or trying to talk—about our lives here, our feelings. And I would underscore that this is hardly an easy subject to talk about, and in at least two senses of the word “easy” (easy intellectually, easy emotionally). For example (a father notes), a child coming into a new world, with its new technologies and social relations, is prepared to accept and even embrace this world as normal. But how will the child feel as he ages, and tries to solidify, and the technology and social relations keep changing and he begins to realize, subconsciously at first, that the norms are themselves so plastic as to have no normative value? (We are like corks on the ocean? Corks which, as our pathologists know well, are themselves 75 percent water.)

Nor is it easy to accept that from one perspective, which for me is a Wittgensteinian perspective, we never learn to express ourselves, if such expressing would be that of an autonomous individual. From an extremely early age we are colonized by language—by our “mother tongue,” our national languages, the languages of facial expressions, of body posture, of fashion and sex, u.s.w. In a sense we get to our most private pains (and joys!) first by being taken outside of ourselves, into the circle of language, from whence we return to something we have learned to call our self and imagine that we are having quite personal experiences and trying to communicate them to others who may or may not be able to imagine what we are talking about. “But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!” (Investigations, §253).

As I proposed at the outset, however, this essay is working both sides of the street. And thus I will now note that in the Investigations Wittgenstein also urges, again and again, “Don’t think, but look!” To avoid “die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache” (the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language), we should pay close attention to how words are used in everyday conversations and in specific situations. And thus we can (temporarily) set our worries aside and appreciate how easy it was to know, one balmy October Saturday way back in 2012, whether or not Darwin’s crab soup was vegetarian. This was made clear by the fact that the woman behind Darwin’s counter, of whom the question was asked, answered—albeit after a slight pause to get her mind around the question and the fact that it was being asked by a normal-looking person and with, as we say, a “straight face”— In my somewhat vague memory of this part of the experience the answer to the question was, “No, it’s not.”

I would also here take some time to look carefully at what the word “vegetarian” meant to the person using it in a question in that particular place and time. My sense is that it meant two things, both of them good. One was related to “being healthy.” In Cambridge in 2012 to eat vegetarian food was considered an excellent way of promoting one’s physical health, not getting cancer or heart disease, and living a long time, or at least behaving in ways that seemed likely to promote physical health or longevity. Secondly, vegetarianism was thought to eliminate or reduce the harm that a non-vegetarian diet inflicts on certain animals (beings somewhat similar to us).

One of my editors has recalled for me a remark from Snooki, late of the Jersey Shore reality TV show: “I don’t eat lobsters because they’re alive when you kill them!” But neither my editor nor I would make light, or only make light, of the ethical issue being touched on here. Trolling the Web, I was quickly ensnared by a Wikipedia article on “pain in crustaceans,” which, inter alia, informed me that the idea that animals do not feel pain is traced back to Descartes, who argued that animals do not experience pain because they lack consciousness. (We might classify this as a particular logical fallacy: “denying the antecedent.” If p then q, and not p, does not imply not q. The fact that consciousness is or can be painful does not imply that a being lacking consciousness—or, say, nociceptors—feels no pain.)

To save space and reduce confusion, I have severely amputated, compressed and otherwise edited other segments of the Wikipedia article:

Nociceptors, the neurons required for the sensation of pain, have been found in nematodes, annelids, mollusks and in the arthropod Drosophila, despite earlier claims that nociceptors were absent in insects. In 2005, a review of the literature by the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that “it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain.” The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.

Please see Philosophical Investigations, Part II, xi, one of the places in the book where the inner warmth of Ludwig Wittgenstein may be felt even in the coolness of his philosophical shadow: “If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.”

And I quote again from Wikipedia:

A 2007 study at Queen’s University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when the antennae of prawns were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank [and also began talking in shrimpese about the sadism of Homo sapiens]. In a subsequent 2009 study, Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that as hermit crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells.

To date no nociceptor or similar mechanism has been found in plants and fungi, and so there are those who believe it worse to kill animals than plants or oyster mushrooms, and this especially if the killing is unnecessary, if we can survive instead on food from plants and fungi or, say, on milk. (Or on what The-She-Crab-Lives recipe refers to as “plant-based milk.”) And thus a vegetarian may be a “good person,” and a non-vegetarian may be a bad one, or at least bad when s/he eats.

A bit as with a Russian doll, we have been finding nested inside the woman’s soup question quite a few other ones, and we are now seeing that, from the poser’s perspective, the most relevant questions seemed to concern ethics in the broadest sense of this term: What should I do? How should I live? Soon enough I will propose that this ethical focus was or is an illusion (or one half of an illusion?). But certainly we can see that two sets of ethical questions were being posed over that sandwich counter, one set concerning being good to others and the other, being good to oneself. Thus (in our doll opening) we might come to a question such as, “Do you know, would I be doing good (or can I consider myself a good person) if today for lunch I eat your crab soup?” And we might come to another one such as, “Is your crab soup healthy?”

Both of these questions lead to the same core question, and I suspect that this is how most contemporary Cantabrigians would translate the crab-soup-vegetarian question: “Did you use any real crab meat or crab eggs in making your crab soup?” If, as with some of the “crab” served in Japanese restaurants (or some of the “democracy” served up in many countries of the world), there was no “real” crab in Darwin’s soup that day, both the store and the questioner would be off the hook and might sell and eat “crab soup” with a clean conscience and other enjoyable affective states. (Denied, for example, to the purchaser of the “ash sandwich.”)

From this perspective, the answer—“No, it’s not”—may have briefly frustrated the customer and put Darwin’s own behavior in an ethically unflattering light. But, again, I think there is another way of seeing the woman’s real question or concern. Fresh from her run, certainly she wanted to feel that the food she was about to put in her hungry body would be both good for her and not harmful to some other beings. But it was equally the case that, from where she stood, a Saturday afternoon was hardly the time for confronting the molten complexities, unknowabilities or psychological needs underlying her or anyone else’s desires. She just wanted a “good” lunch for God’s sake. Her studies at Harvard or MIT may have been breathtakingly complex, but this was all the more reason she did not want a store employee—such as I or, say, Socrates would have been—to ask what she meant by “good” or “healthy” or whether beings without nociceptors could also be harmed. At that moment, and likely in many other moments, not just on Saturday afternoons, she wanted to be able to ask (seemingly) simple questions and get (seemingly) simple, yes or no answers. And, I am proposing, there is a sense in which she was demanding such simplicity along with information of a more ethical or culinary nature. And I am ready to say further that this is a major aspect of a lot of the information we ask for, generate and disseminate (e.g., as advice, policy recommendations, empirical data, and conclusions): to assure ourselves, or maintain our assurance, that the world and life are not so complicated after all.

From this perspective we can see that the response of the woman on the other side of the counter, for all it was superficially negative, was also quite satisfying. Underlying her just saying no was a very big Yes. Yes, you and I can know if a given soup is both healthy and has not caused harm, or undue harm, in its making. (I am reminded of the color-coded “sustainability ratings” Whole Foods puts in front of its fish. It may not do much for the fish, but what a comfort for we shoppers—to be able to so clearly distinguish right—and even shades of right!—from wrong.)

My editors have urged me not to further shag an already shaggy dog of an essay with a lengthy discussion of Plato’s encounters with the unknowability of right and wrong, or of the good—i.e., with the unknowability of what we should do or, say, of what I should write or not write right here and now. But, as touched on in the introduction, Wittgenstein’s Investigations is in vigorous dialogue with a certain set of readings or misreadings of Plato. (Cf., Alfred North Whitehead’s comment in Process and Reality regarding “the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from . . . the wealth of general ideas scattered through” Plato’s writings.) Thus I will here recall a few relevant moments from these writings. In The Republic Socrates speaks of the importance of being able, as we say, to separate the wheat from the chaff (the gluten from the gluten-free?), and of knowing how “always and everywhere” to make the best choice “to the extent possible.” One might respond that this “to the extent possible” reduces Socrates’s teaching to nonsense; most anyone and everyone can say, and many do, that they always and everywhere make the best choice to the extent possible. And, indeed, in one of the most influential (and quite variously translated) passages in all of Plato’s work (Stephanus page 505 of The Republic) Socrates says, or admits: “[W]e have no proper knowledge of the form of the good. And if we don’t know it, though we should have the fullest possible knowledge of all else, . . . that would be of no use to us”. In other dialogues, Plato explores various possibilities, with the good—or what we have come to call “the good life”—appearing to be or to stem from a “mixed life,” a combination of hedone (pleasure) and phronesis (wisdom), or with the good not being this or any particular mix, but rather mixity itself: the true mean, compared to which actions, works of art and so forth may come up short or go too far. The latter approach might seem to vastly simplify the problem by making knowledge of the right thing to do a simple matter of good cooking or mathematical calculation. Alternatively, it might seem to simply offload The Republic’s problem of our ignorance of the good onto The Statesman’s problem of our ignorance of the mean, without knowledge of which we cannot know the true value of things, actions, ideas, soup.

Nonetheless, it can be said that Plato’s dialogues reinforce the idea that, even if we can never know what the good is, as we can never know the mind of God, still it or S/He exists in some sense, at least in many of our minds. And so, too, from certain Platonic texts, most notably from the “Seventh Letter,” which we cannot be sure that Plato wrote, we have gotten the idea that behind all our words—to include “crab” and “vegetarian,” but also “the good,” first and foremost—there are eternal essences (eide: ideas, forms). The names we give to things spring not from how we happen to use words, but from these essences, and thus we can ask, as Plato’s Socrates does repeatedly, compulsively, in many dialogues, what [the Greek words we translate as] “courage” or “virtue” or “love” really mean.

It is important to recognize that as regards vegetarianism or, say, the morals we teach our children, this is hardly a trivial point. If words trace the evolution from what we have previously wanted them to mean to what we would like them to mean now, then the ground is constantly shifting under our feet—or we are constantly shifting the ground under our own feet—and, as for Humpty Dumpty, the only question is who is the master. Who on the playground gets to decide what the rules are and how they will be interpreted. Who in the universe of particle physics gets to decide what qualifies as an object and what does not. (See also, Carl Schmitt, the great Nazi philosopher, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” There is, for example, the person or institution that decides that, while an individual who has sold a little coke on the street or robbed a convenience store should be sent to jail, the bank staff and executives who have been involved in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for narcotics traffickers and “terrorist” organizations should not even be prosecuted.)

In the Platonic idea of essences, ethics and ontology merge, and we may find our belief—our hope!—that there are some things that are true under all circumstances and independent of those circumstances (of how much money or power a person or corporation may have, of our historical moment, culture, gender, genes, etc.). Thus we tell our children (in our words, though less often by means of our deeds) that lying, cheating and hitting or killing others (without provocation) is always bad, and that love, charity and forgiveness are always good, and this notwithstanding that “love” and “lying,” for example, might prove harder words to define than “crab” and “vegetarian.”

“Man könnte sagen: Die Betrachtung muß gedreht werden, aber um unser eigentliches Bedürfnis als Angelpunkt.” One might say: the axis of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need. (Investigations, §108) And from the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics:

If you talk about essence, you are merely noting a convention. But here one would like to report: there’s no greater difference than that between a proposition about the depth of the essence and one about a mere convention. But what if I reply: to the depth that we see in the essence there corresponds the deep need for a convention.

In the opening pages of La pensée sauvage Lévi-Strauss, reviewing others’ anthropological field work, calls attention to the extraordinary taxonomic capacities of a range of technologically unadvanced societies and insists that all of Homo sapiens’ seemingly primitive or seemingly sophisticated pursuits of knowledge are motivated by a common psychological need: to impose some order on the chaos of our perceptions, of the world outside our sciences. This yes, that no; this healthy, that unhealthy; this philosophy, not that philosophy. This need to classify and organize to an absurd, or almost absurd, degree comes before (Lévi-Strauss argues) any other practical uses to which the knowledge (or systematization) might be put. E.g., it comes before using botanical classifications as a way of finding more food or medicines, or before using Galilean and Bohrish models of physical processes to increase projectiles’ destructive success.

For my part, I have imagined a not-quite-kaleidoscope that is, in fact, an ever-changing and hardly circumscribed motley of colored shapes, no two colors or shapes quite the same, no seeming boundary lasting more than an instant. A death-fearing, love-seeking eye, constantly confronted by this confusion, would almost immediately begin to find patterns and consistencies, and a mind, or a collection of minds, of people all colonized by and contributing to the same spoken language, would come to have words for the patterns and consistencies. Instead of ephemera, there would be more or less stable objects. And consistencies in the pronunciation and spelling of the names given to these not-quite-existent objects would solidify the observers’ sense that they were indeed seeing more or less stable objects. And the observers might even reach a point where their categories, for all they were rooted in anxiety as much as in anything else, began to themselves shape the shapes, as the idea that dreams have meanings give meanings to dreams. And this would be comforting, these assurances of consistency and of meaning!

Philosophers might on the sidelines debate the possible existence of two distinct if connected realms (e.g., the noumenal and phenomenal; some “real world” and the world of our perceptions.) Social scientists might write of the pace, creative destruction and alienation of modern life and how stressful all this is. Meanwhile the comfort of having classification systems, science, philosophy, psychology, sociology would—magically, as it were—further confirm the existence and stability of the objects and of the patterns that would now be becoming as (temporarily) clear as they were welcome.

Observing all this from afar—with an objectivity to which we are not entitled—would we wish to say that these kaleidopic people were yet further confused by their desire or need for stability and for relief from anxiety? We are mistaking our liquid world and selves for solids, or, say, seeing a universe of objects notwithstanding the fact that our scientists have been insisting for some time now that it is a universe of relations or of vibrating invisible string? Or would we say that what is not confusing in all this—the greater truth, if you will, the unvacillating object—is this need for stability and comfort, for release from meaninglessness, and for something that begins to approach “love,” commitment, touching and holding, the desire to understand and communicate with other human beings?

Marx noted that religion is both a response to alienation and a source of it. Similarly we might say that a normal person’s insistence that a given soup be vegetarian or not, and that meanings of words are not or cannot be in flux: this is both a response to anxiety and a source of it. It places demands on language and on life—for permanence and meaning and psychological relief—that language and life are not able to meet, and which are therefore all the more pressing. Indeed, could this insatiable anxiety explain why, at this late stage in our evolution, we are becoming increasingly allergic if not quite to life itself, then to what we used to call the “staff of life”—to wheat, milk, nuts and the (mis)named peanuts?

And so we have come back to an aspect of the discussion that interests me, and indeed all of us, greatly—and which must also bear some responsibility for the intellectualizing that I, and others, engage in. This is the emotional aspect, the anxiety—how close to nonsense, or madness, glimpses of the nature of our life in language can make us feel. Or is it, rather, how close to nonsense or madness we in fact are, with our elaborate classifications, our fiercely held but evanescent certainties, our syrupless syrup, nuclear weapons, our rapid draining of the Great Plains’ Ogallala Aquifer, on which we depend for much of our food . . . 8,681-word essays on vegetarian crab soup. At times—don’t think or look but feel?—it’s like a chill draft coming from we’re not sure where. Julian Jaynes and others have proposed that our distant ancestors, the Homeric-era Greeks included, lived in a world of hallucinations. “It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans,” Jaynes wrote in The Origin of Consciousness, and I wish to ask what this felt like for Achilles, to be so porous and malleable, as perhaps all of us humans and demigods still are?

It is at this moment that I am ready to propose that our real text here may not be a verse from Homer’s Iliad or Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen, nor a handful of sentences from Augustine’s Confessions or Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, lurking in the Afterword just ahead, nor even quite a seemingly innocent question posed on a sandwich line. Perhaps the text is from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie.”

Of course no more than the essence of crab soup can we know what our real text might be, who is reading the right Bible or has indeed heard from God and interpreted His or Her words correctly. And if anything is clear at the present moment it is that we are prey to more texts, more words than we can possibly fend off successfully. And it is here again that Orwell comes to a kind of rescue, proposing we make thought crimes impossible by reducing every concept that can ever be needed to exactly one word (“anxiety”? “death”? “love”?) We might each use Twitter to lobby for our favorite words. And when we get to this point, we will (thank God?) have lost not only the capacity to ask, but also any interest in asking whether our crap soup is or is not vegetarian. In one of his notes published posthumously in Culture and Value, Wittgenstein wondered if “science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will [one day] unite the world—I mean condense it into a single unit”.

But where is the fun here? In the very opening paragraph I proposed that this essay should be, must be fun to read, but when we get into a subject like the deformations of language for nefarious political, or commercial, purposes . . . the fun kinda goes out of the balloon. So that the members of the family living in Vienna would not be sent to the “camps” and their “showers,” the Wittgensteins “gave” the Nazis, inter alia, 1.7 tonnes of gold. In return they were given a word, a name. Instead of “Jewish” they became officially Mischlinge (mixed race), a name which could be used unofficially to describe most every human being on the planet, and particularly since race is a social construct, a classification with more economic and political than taxonomic significance, a word whose raison d’être is not some linguistic, philosophical or biological essence, but a deep human need: to divide and conquer.

I am one of those kinds of people who when insulted or mistreated have a tendency to react at first by laughing or seeing something fascinating about the situation, the next day realizing how I have been treated and by whom, and getting in touch with a whole ’nother set of feelings about the event. And so am I now—nearing the end of this kitchen sink of an essay—suddenly realizing—I really meant what I was writing about anxiety—the young woman’s hardly abnormal question may have been less amusing, absurd or not-absurd than it was disturbing. Are we (and am I?) in the throes of doublespeak, and to include even when we try to buy a little lunch somewhere near the dense center of American higher education, Cambridge, Massachusetts? (Or is my hometown not that at all, and hardly such a black hole, but rather, and particularly on a balmy October day, like the pleasant gardens of a sanatorium?) Did Orwell, overly affected by the example of the Soviet Union, present as a possible dystopia or as a situation to be avoided what has been in fact the day-to-day, and inescapable, reality of Homo sapiens under capitalism or perhaps since time immemorial: We simply cannot know, except in the most ephemeral, absurd sense, whether crab soup is vegetarian; or whether our leaders are telling us the truth or know whether they are or not; or, say, whether she loves me or I her? As the Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine wrote, “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, we might say that the fabric is the overalls of the protagonist Winston Smith’s girlfriend. In the sex scene, Winston pulls the fabric aside and studies “the real” (we’ll call it): Julia’s “smooth white flank.”

In the old days, he thought [ignorantly? sexistly?], a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred [and “gender”]. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

So much for the purity of female, or male, sexual pleasure? And is what we call pleasure (ἡδονή, hedone) above all a reaction to rage (to include at our cosmic impotence, and the instability of names and of things) and to confusion? Orwell and all the rest of us have fought chaos and fear with language and so—surprise, surprise—our language, if it expresses anything, expresses this fear and speaks of the chaos—e.g., a world in which everything has a name but none, or almost none, of the names mean what they say or say what they mean. From a cosmic perspective we seem to be next to nothing, and so it would be rather surprising if our names were more than next to nothing too. When Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was being published, Wittgenstein apparently told the editor that the book had two parts: the written part and the unwritten part, “And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.” And the written part includes the following proposition: “[O]nly in the nexus of a proposition [or, say, in a particular sandwich counter question] does a name have meaning.”

For the umpteenth time I recall what seems to have been one of the most formative experiences of my Cambridge childhood. I was playing in a sandbox off Upland Road (a bit north of Mount Auburn), and I and the other kids there (8 years old and younger) got into one of the spiraling arguments we used to specialize in, larger and larger numbers being invoked—one child claiming to be a thousand times smarter or stronger or righter, the next a million, a billion, a googol, a googolplex. In the middle of all this—and, I assume, feeling as frustrated as I used to feel—failing to get my point across, forced to talk with such juvenile ignoramuses—a next-door neighbor boy, who, on another occasion, less inspired, smashed my sister’s lip with a shovel, now rose up, as it were, from the earth, and shouted: “For all you know you could be a chocolate cake!”

Afterword

________

By way of conclusion, and in a less culinary mode, I note that neither would this essay have been written, nor, in a certain sense, would a woman have asked an employee of Darwin’s if the crab soup was vegetarian, had I not been at the time editing a book review of my friend Stuart Johnson’s, a review of University of Chicago historian Alison Winter’s intellectual history of the idea of memory in the twentieth century. Briefly, what Johnson and Winter present is a case study of how one seemingly quite basic word, “memory”—a word that we often imagine referring to something rather concrete within our brains—is in fact rather more fluid, “a social and intellectual construct,” as Stuart puts it. Thus, for example, in the late twentieth century ideas of memory were transformed by the appearance of “recovered memories” of adult survivors of sexual or otherwise violent abuse. And Johnson, after Winter, also writes about a man who in a courtroom in 1906 retracted a murder confession on the grounds that, as Stuart puts it, “the police questioners had so pressured him that they had implanted the memory of committing the murder in his mind.” In 1977, with the help of Kodak, we can say, two psychologists from Harvard proposed the concept of “flashbulb memories.” E.g.: Where were you when you got the news that Kennedy was assassinated or that the World Trade Center had imploded? “The importance of photography to record ordinary family life,” Stuart writes, “highlighted, or even created, a sense of the importance of the captured ‘moment,’ and it reinforced, with the power of relentless corporate advertising, the sense that memories were moments to be captured and stored.” (And that memory involved capturing and storing.)

Reading and responding to Stuart’s drafts, I was reminded both of Wittgensteinian ideas and also of Augustine’s idea of memory, which, interestingly, for all it differs from our current “scientific” definitions of the word, yet seems to retain some common sense (and might help deepen our understanding of recovered memories). Interestingly, too, for all Philosophical Investigations are grounded in a (mis)reading of three sentences from an early chapter of The Confessions, three sentences in which Augustine is relating a memory of his childhood . . . Nonetheless, Wittgenstein seems not to have read or given much thought to Augustine’s various and well-known discussions of the phenomenon of “memory” further on in The Confessions and in On the Trinity. Herewith a little bit from The Confessions, as translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin and with my underscoring:

In my memory, too, are all the events that I remember, whether they are things that have happened to me or things that I have heard from others. From the same source I can picture to myself all kinds of different images based either upon my own experience or upon what I find credible because it tallies with my own experience. . . .

Could we, anachronistically, describe this as memory more in the sense of a PC than an Instamatic? That is, as it is possible for me to have on my hard drive pictures that I did not take and of people I never met (e.g., Augustine? a woman with her overalls pulled aside?), so from an Augustinian perspective we may remember events that either never occurred to us or that we did not record and retain at the time of their occurrence. Thus, for example, in The Confessions Augustine states that at least some of what he “remembers” from his childhood comes from having in adulthood observed other children. This strikes me as perfectly normal, as a realistic view of one aspect of human memory.

It may be asked, however, what this has to do with crab soup, besides the fact, which is not insignificant, that I would not have been so struck by the customer’s question had I not at the time been ruminating in a Wittgensteinian way about how the meanings of words (e.g., “memory”) lies in their use. And it so happens that at this time, as part of my Platonic exploration of relationships between sex and philosophy, I had also begun re-reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, which begins by touching on what defines a given human being as a woman and whether, as a result of the advance of feminism, women (as a what? a sex? a gender? a race?) might die out. For example, de Beauvoir offers a stereotypical observation of people she refers to as “connaisseurs,” but who we might call “womanizers.” Those are not women, such people say of certain others (aggressive businesswomen? Olympic sprinters or weightlifters? lesbians in short hair and overalls?). Those are not women, even though they have a uterus. De Beauvoir goes on to ask, “Is womanhood secreted by the ovaries? Or fixed in a Platonic heaven [i.e., in the realm of eide or essences], and brought down to Earth with the simple rustle of a petticoat?”

Could this be the place to mention that the English word “kaleidoscope” was formed from the Ancient Greek καλός (kalos, beautiful, beauty), εἶδος (eidos, idea, form), and σκοπέω (skopeo, to look to, to examine)? Albeit without reference to these words—nor to Darwin, Hegel or, say, Frederick Douglass—de Beauvoir goes on to propose that the biological and social sciences no longer believe in the eternal woman, or Jew or Negro: entities once thought to be fixed once and forever and to have an immutable set of characteristics (e.g., frailty, miserliness, laziness).

Hardly had I read two pages before I was e-mailing Stuart:

One would like to think that some nouns did in fact name essences—e.g., “memory,” or better yet “woman,” an adult female of the human species. De Beauvoir is reminding me that these names, too, are in flux. Then today, and with a rather more laughable result, I was standing in a line to get a sandwich at a sort of Leftish, Cambridge, Mass., food place, and one of the “women” ahead of me asked an employee behind the counter, “Do you know if your crab soup is vegetarian?” (There’s a whole little essay of mine right there. Nine words. No need to say anything more. Do you know if your crab soup is vegetarian? End of essay.)

Links

Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo. (The Overlook Press, 2002). First copyright dates to 1948.

Darwin’s Ltd., Purveyors of Sumptuous Comestibles & Caffeinated Provisions, 148 Mount Auburn Street and 1629 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA.

Elisabeth Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. (Harvard University Press, 2000).

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Plume, 1983).

Gerald A. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed. (Continuum, 2007).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation. (Blackwell, 2001).

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Each issue of Zeteo is put together with you in mind. It is not an easy process. It involves pushing writers and scholars, often intensely focused on a particular subject, to recast their work and translate technical terminology so that the work speaks to generalists. The result, we hope and trust, is a set of pieces that you will enjoy reading, and which may lead you to wish to be involved in contributing to the Zeteo project in the future.

For this Spring 2013 issue, what do we have for you?

• Richard Berrong shows how Gauguin’s Tahitian canvases were in quite direct dialogue with a bestselling French novel of the time, Pierre Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti.
• Lama Zuhair Khouri, an Arab-American mother and psychotherapist, responds to the Boston Marathon tragedy, writing about what it feels like to be viewed as the enemy.
• Jennifer Polish writes about improving community housing for people with developmental disabilities, addressing heteronormative ableism and the limits confronting both queer and non-queer residents.
• Jeffrey Allen Nall presents two major reasons for not giving in to fatalism, for continuing, no matter the odds, to take action to address moral problems.
• Aaron Botwick argues that we should not give Hitler posthumous victories by leaving Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice solely in the hands of post-Holocaust interpretations.

As for my own piece, in each Zeteo issue I try to explore new and different ways that we might write for you, our generalist intellectual readers. This issue’s piece was inspired by Wittgenstein and a question posed on a Darwinian sandwich line: “Do you know, is the crab soup vegetarian?”

Yours in reading and writing,

William Eaton

Zeteo Editorial Adviser

PS: Kant’s “focus imaginarius,” itself a fiction, a “mere idea,” was apparently derived from a passage in Newton’s Opticks which discusses the optical illusion involved in mirror vision, “whereby an object that lies behind one’s back, and thus outside one’s visual field, appears to be in front, just as it would be if the lines of light reflected in the mirror actually proceeded in a straight course.” (I am quoting not from Newton, but from the Kant scholar Henry Allison[*]) In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes that, like objects in a mirror leading to a point behind us that we cannot see, transcendental ideas (the soul, the world, and God) should not be treated as real, but as “directing the understanding to a certain aim, towards which all the lines of its rules converge”.[†]

Kant uses this as an argument for the systematizing of knowledge—for seeing human understanding as converging on one, however imaginary or unknowable, point. While I have, in my turn, used this concept for championing Zeteo’s generalist intellectual, I would note that Zeteo, beginning in interdisciplinarity, is committed to escaping systematization. We might take as our motto an observation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s:

The world of culture and literature is essentially as boundless as the universe. We are speaking not about its geographical breadth (this is limited), but about its semantic depths, which are as bottomless as the depths of matter. The infinite diversity of interpretations, images, figurative semantic combinations, materials and their interpretations, and so forth. We have narrowed it terribly by selecting and by modernizing what has been selected. We impoverish the past and do not enrich ourselves. We are suffocating in the captivity of narrow and homogeneous interpretations.[‡]

(But, we hope, not in the pages and posts of Zeteo!)

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That Troublesome Jew

Shylock and the Corruption of The Merchant of Venice

By Aaron Botwick

Aaron Botwick is completing his Master’s in Liberal Studies at CUNY, writing his thesis on Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. He writes about theater in New York. (See scribicide.com.)

In 1947, the actor and playwright Maurice Schwartz rather audaciously rewrote The Merchant of Venice. The result, Shylock and His Daughter, is a radically philosemitic text, one that throws out most of Shakespeare’s play and replaces it with a kind, Jewish moneylender surrounded by antisemitic, unforgiving Christians.[1] Comic villain had become comic hero. But only five years after 1942—a date that, like 70 CE (the fall of the Second Temple), will be forever seared into Jewish consciousness—this kind of project was not especially outrageous. Shakespeare is largely and rightly considered the greatest poet the English language has ever known, and yet, this sage dramatic personage produced an unquestionably antisemitic play.

Reconciling Shakespeare with Shylock is a Sisyphean task that I do not hope to accomplish. Instead I hope to rescue Shakespeare’s play—and Shylock in particular—from the interpretative monopoly that followed World War II. In 1998, Harold Bloom wrote, “The Holocaust made and makes The Merchant of Venice unplayable, at least in what appears to be its own terms.”[2] This resistance to staging an overtly antisemitic play on its own terms comes from genuine, heartfelt concerns for the good of the Jewish people, but the price is a comedic masterpiece.

Furthermore, by transforming Shylock into a hero, we are scrubbing history clean. Should we not be aware that seventeenth-century England was not friendly to the Jews? A universally tragic Shylock is no better than Huck Finn excised of the word “nigger.” Emil Fackenheim famously stated that Judaism and its 613 mitzvot (laws) could not anticipate the Holocaust—and therefore a 614^th mitzvah was required to address religiosity in its aftermath. Essentially: do not give Hitler posthumous victories by abandoning Judaism. In this tradition, I would like to propose a literary 614^th mitzvah: do not give Hitler posthumous victories by leaving Merchant solely in the hands of post-Holocaust interpretations.

The issue of antisemitism was not one that at first plagued The Merchant of Venice, but instead a single component that would only later become a problem for its admirers. At the turn of the seventeenth century, hatred of Jews was on the rise in England and mainland Europe. Rumors that Jews poisoned wells and slaughtered Christian babies to use their blood for matzot fed into the conception of Judaism as a venomous, anti-Christian religion, and depictions of Jews such as Shylock on the London stage were not uncommon.[3] The character type—a brilliant but evil Jew—was likely borrowed from Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and his play, The Jew of Malta. Barabas, the play’s eponymous character, is a wealthy merchant who finds himself penniless when the Ottoman government strips him of all his assets. Throughout The Jew of Malta, Barabas seeks his revenge on Christians. By the end of the play he is responsible for the deaths of many citizens, including his own daughter, Abigail, who Barabas poisons for converting to Christianity.

Although the play is a tragedy, the treatment of Barabas is rather lighthearted. He is a caricature, prancing around the stage hugging his moneybags and plotting murder, and his description of Jewishness proves a good example:

We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please;
And when we grin we bite, yet are our looks
As innocent and harmless as a lamb’s. (II.iii.20-3)

This is the villain of children’s fairy tales, a two-faced seducer whose depth is negligible and whose intentions irrelevant. Though Marlowe does offer some reference to the persecution Barabas suffers—“they call me dog” (ibid., 24)—he is never given a real moment of sympathy. Instead, he confronts his fate (death) with a sort of shrugging acceptance, only concerned with making sure his enemies are aware of his crimes:

Know, Governor, ’twas I that slew thy son; I framed the challenge that did make them meet: Know, Calymath, I aimed thy overthrow, And had I but escaped this stratagem, I would have brought confusion on you all. (V.v.80-4).

Hardly an unsettling conclusion. In Ben Jonson’s Volpone, “the victims are merely inept versions of the villain,” and more or less the same thing is going on here.[4]

In contextualizing Merchant, Bloom summarizes the character perfectly:

Barabas is a kind of wicked bottle imp or Jew-in-the-box; he is always jumping out at us, the audience. We cannot help enjoying him, since his outrageousness is so cartoon-like. . . . Its [the play’s] Christians and Muslims come off far worse than Barabas, since they would be just as wicked if they could but lack Barabas’s genius for evil. Marlowe’s Jew is simply Christopher Marlowe gone all out into lunatic zest and diabolic energy, overturning all values and sending up everything and everybody.[5]

Shylock, on the other hand, has gone through many renderings in his four hundred years, from comic villain to absolute villain to heroic villain and finally to tragic hero. It is important to track the evolution of these changes and the reasons for various historical interpretations of the character in order to understand how we have reached our contemporary conception of him. The comic villain of Elizabethan England became something much darker to the Nazis, while post-Holocaust philosemites were quick to push depictions of the moneylender in a radically different direction. Unfortunately, the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall on virtually every contemporary performance of Merchant, and no working director or actor seems interested or brave enough to return to the original material, to the character Shakespeare wrote. Certainly, it is not outrageous to restage Merchant in light of the Holocaust, the pogroms, or contemporary antisemitism—Shakespeare’s antisemitism needs to be addressed—the problem is that this has dominated all readings of the play; what was once a troubled Shakespearean comedy can now no longer escape the shadow of Auschwitz.

I would argue that the Elizabethans had it right, that Shakespeare’s Shylock is in fact rather similar to Marlowe’s Barabas: he is a “Jew-in-the-box,” a clever schemer, and often a cartoon villain, albeit one constructed with more depth. Unlike Barabas, the audience is cut off from Shylock, never given the kind of asides that let us become complicit in his scenes. Nevertheless, the difference between the two is not the quality of character, but the quality of writing: Shylock is Barabas as conceived by a superior talent, a comic villain in possession of humanity. But they are in spirit the same type. Shylock’s descent, then, into a monolithic political tool, and the play’s transformation from Shakespearean comedy into Jewish tragedy, is itself perhaps the truly lamentable aspect of The Merchant of Venice. What is required to restore this classic is a re-appropriation of the play, a re-examination of Shylock and, finally, a liberation from monomaniacal theatrical interpretation.

T
here is no doubt that The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play: Shylock is an unmistakably Jewish, bloodthirsty moneylender, furious with Christian generosity and bent on seeking revenge; he knows no forgiveness and values his money over both his own life and possibly even that of his own daughter—furthermore, it is clear from the text that all these traits arise from his Jewishness. For the Duke, who represents the state of Venice by his office, there is no bargaining with the man, as he is

an inhuman wretch
Uncapable of pity, void and empty
From any dram of mercy (IV.i.4-6).

The notion of Christian generosity is wholly incompatible with Jewish selfishness. After Shylock demonstrates some knowledge of the gospels, Antonio warns his friends, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (I.iii.94), and, indeed, his unwavering malevolence does seem to be summoned from hell: like battling Satan, questioning the Jew is as fruitful as bidding the flood to “bate his usual height” (V.i.72). Despite appearing in only five of the play’s twenty scenes and speaking a mere 79 lines (compare to Portia’s 117, Richard III’s 138, and Hamlet’s 358), Shylock nonetheless steals the show, his searing intelligence and beady-eyed resourcefulness contributing to the misery of the Jewish public image for hundreds of years. As Philip Roth laments in his novel, Operation Shylock, “To the audiences of the world Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew in the way that Uncle Sam embodies for them the spirit of the United States. Only, in Shylock’s case, there is an overwhelming Shakespearean reality, a terrifying Shakespearean aliveness that your pasteboard Uncle Sam cannot begin to possess . . . Mr. Macklin [an English actor known for the part] would mouth the two th’s and the two s’s in ‘Three thousand ducats’ with such oiliness that he instantaneously aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race.”[6]

Still, it is important to contextualize Shakespeare’s relationship with the Jews. It is unlikely, for example, that Shakespeare had ever even seen a Jew: the vast majority were expelled by Edward I in 1290 and would not be allowed to return until 1655, almost forty years after the Bard’s death. It is possible there were small communities of Jews living in London at the time, but they would have had to practice their religion cryptically[7]—no parading of kippot (skullcaps) and tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls)—and most common knowledge about the people would have come from blood libel folklore and plays in the vein of The Jew of Malta.[8] As Stephen Greenblatt points out, references to Jews in other Shakespearean plays prove particularly illuminating: in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick declares his love by saying, “If I do not love her, I am a Jew” (II.ii.232-2); in Henry IV, Part One, Falstaff underlines the truthfulness in his story by declaring, “They were bound every man of them, or I am a Jew else, an Hebrew Jew” (II.v.163-5); finally, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lance, recalling his dog’s callous response to his departure, jokes, “[He] has no more pity in him than a dog. A Jew would have wept to have seen our parting” (II.iii.8-10).[9] The point, then, is that “Jew” does not really refer to the people as they are, but to the people as they are depicted in popular fiction; it is a measuring device, used synonymously with the words cruel, dishonest, or heartless. Shylock is simply an extension, a more in-depth take on this identification device: his Jewishness tags him as a comic villain in lieu of a curly moustache. Rather than summoning a real identity, Shylock’s Jewishness is a narrative cue.

Furthermore, a close reading of the text reveals that not only does Shakespeare generally treat Jewishness as a kind of pejorative, but also that his characterization specifically of Shylock also bears little resemblance to the reality of the people he supposedly represents. He is hardly a Jew.[10] Most importantly, Shylock blatantly ignores the fact that the act of taking another life is strictly forbidden by Yahweh in the Torah, in Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 (both times, “You shall not murder”). But more subtly, we can infer that he is totally ignorant of the practice of shechita, the ritual slaughter of animals. Deuteronomy 12:23-4 reads, “Make sure that you do not partake of the blood; for blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh . . . you must pour it on the ground like water” (emphasis added). Nevertheless, despite his repetition of the word “flesh” (he says it seven times in the course of the play), Shylock never makes the connection, and he is completely floored by Portia’s insistence that when cutting Antonio’s flesh he cannot “shed One drop of Christian blood” (IV.i.307-8). Jewish law is obsessive about the shedding of blood (actually, Jewish law is obsessive about everything), and so a more religious man, no doubt, would have included both the words flesh and blood in the bond, as he does when he cries out, “My own flesh and blood to rebel!” (III.i.30). Portia’s defeat of Shylock in the courtroom, then, is a double blow: it not only deprives him of his revenge, but also reminds him of his own lack of knowledge about the Hebrew Bible.

Additionally, it is important to note that while the Jews certainly don’t get the highest recommendation in Merchant, Shakespeare’s depictions of Christianity can hardly be called generous, meaning that his antisemitism is only part of a full-fledged satire of religion. Antonio, a supposedly good Christian, kicks Shylock like a dog and spits on him when he passes him on the Rialto (I.iii.107-8). This abuse is later elaborated upon by Shylock: “He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned at my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s his reason? I am a Jew” (III.i.46-51). Further depictions of Christianity are no less forgiving: Gratiano, in his attempt to seduce one of Portia’s genteel ladies, fakes piety by carrying prayer books in his pocket; later, during the trial, he takes the particularly un-Christian position that the Jew should be executed for his crimes. All lessons of the day have apparently been lost on this follower, whose successive cries are, “Thou must be hanged at the state’s charge” (IV.i.364), “A halter gratis, nothing else, for God’s sake” (ibid.,376), and, finally, “Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not to the font” (ibid.,398-9). By the end, the line between the barbarous Jews and the benevolent Christians is very hard to locate: in a particularly sardonic moment, Shakespeare has the Jew react to his persecution in a Christ-like manner: “Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe” (I.iii.105-6).

What, then, is this Jew, if not the fantasy of a wildly antisemitic culture? Or, more importantly, what else is he? Clearly, Shakespeare does not entirely subscribe to the wholesale condemnation of Jews practiced by some of his characters, so there must be more to Shylock. The answer: a comic villain, an antagonist, a foil who alternately reveals the virtues of the protagonists while at the same time exposing their hypocrisies. The play, after all, is not about Shylock. The eponymous Merchant is Antonio, and the central drama the love among Portia, Bassanio, and his mentor. Shylock exists to loan Bassanio the necessary money to woo Portia, and Antonio, in love with Bassanio, offers his life as collateral for the loan. If there is a real tragedy in the play, it is one of unrequited love. The first two scenes make this rather clear by introducing those pining for Bassanio, whether they know it or not, in almost identical language: Antonio, perhaps staring out the window, sighs, “In sooth I know not why I am so sad” (I.i.1); Portia, probably doing the same, laments to her lady, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world” (I.ii.1-2). Sixteenth-century England was openly homosocial but not openly homoerotic, and Portia is the natural match for our bachelor, and Antonio’s self-pitying monologue—in which he speaks to Bassanio while facing sure death—rivals even Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech: “Commend me to your honorable wife. Tell her the process of Antonio’s end. Say how I loved you. Speak me fair in death, And when the tale is told, bid her be judge Whether Bassanio had not once a love. Repent but you that you shall lose your friend, And he repents not that he pays your debt. For if the Jew do cut but deep enough, I’ll pay it instantly with all my heart” (IV.i.271-9).This kind of maudlin soliloquy reads like Antonio playing Romeo, and, in truth, once our author has left his villain and his characters have retired to their bedrooms, it is Antonio who remains alone. He does have that in common with Shylock: we half-expect him to repeat the Jew’s ironic, final line, “I am content.” This position is not uncommon in Shakespearean comedy: the ensemble of Twelfth Night, for example, seem rather “content” at the play’s close, but the clown’s song—“Hey, ho, the wind and the rain”—reminds us of how ephemeral, and in fact how tenuous, these connections may be.

So if Shylock is in fact more peripheral than he at first seems, if he is the comic villain and not the tragic hero, what are we to do with him? After all, the character’s presence demands more space than he is given. Played more as the text suggests, he would be an elaborate, ingenious but fatally flawed criminal: though he is perhaps smarter than any other character but Portia, his greediness and dreams of moneybags, in addition to his hatred for Christians, will be his downfall. Only two scenes before his eloquent chance at redemption—the trial scene, in which Shylock attempts to secure his bond, a pound of Antonio’s flesh, but is ultimately defeated by the law and forced into conversion—Shakespeare reminds us of his buffoonery, with Salanio relating his reaction to Jessica’s departure: “So strange, outrageous, and so variable, As the dog Jew did utter in the streets. ‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter, Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats! Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!” (II.viii.13-17). This is not the dialogue of a villainous hero like Richard III, but the straight-faced outcry of a comic villain who conceives of his life as a tragedy, made ever more comic by removing the line from Shylock’s mouth and placing it in his enemy Salanio’s. Malvolio, too, wounded by his role, would probably tell you Twelfth Night is a serious drama, but if we clue into the play as a whole, we can see this is ridiculous.

This take on Shylock is problematized, however, by the “Hath not a Jew” speech, the wrenching apologia in which the Jew protests his humanity and scathingly points out that his behavior is only an imitation of his Christian tormentors:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. (III.i.58-68)

These lines have been seized by those who have turned the play into a tragedy as its most essential moment. What are we to do with this, and how does it fit into the comic mold? If we asked Harold Bloom, he might suggest we simply throw it out, or at least disregard it, as “what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to . . . sociopaths.”[11] Still, it is worth examining. Shakespeare, after all, is a first-rate poet, and even if Antonio and Bassanio think of Shylock as a one-dimensional character, it would be hard to imagine the Bard doing the same. Malvolio once again seems relevant, since he is another villain who is constantly berated and put-down by what seems like his play’s entire cast. Yet, in the final act, we get a moment of surprising sobriety. Barging in on the nuptial celebrations, the old fool gets a moment to voice his own opinion: “Madam, you have done me wrong, Notorious wrong. . . . I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (Twelfth Night V.i.334-5, 385). Considering what he has been through, can we really blame him? Shylock’s speech operates in a similar way and is thus entirely consistent with Shakespearean comic villains. Surely, he is behaving viciously towards Antonio, and the threat on his life is inexcusable. But his hatred is not blind and not without reason. By reciting the list of wrongs that have been done to him, Shylock reminds us that we should not expect a better reaction from such an abused man, Jew or gentile. Shakespeare’s own criticism of Christianity implies he would not disagree with Shylock’s assessment of their hypocrisy: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge” (III.i.58-63). As in any other of Shakespeare’s “problem” comedies, we are not, to borrow Shylock’s word, “content” by the end. Twelfth Night leaves us feeling as if all its lovers are doomed in their hasty love, Measure for Measure does not give us much hope in the agency of women, and The Merchant of Venice leaves Shylock, and by extension the Jews, to rot. These are problems, but they are still, nonetheless, comedies: if we were to move beyond Shakespeare, we would see that most comedic masterpieces reveal a dark core. Whether it is the starvation of the Irish masses in A Modest Proposal or the hollow bourgeois lifestyle satirized by Evelyn Waugh, these works are serious but nonetheless indisputably comic.

H
ow, then, does a sixteenth-century comedy with antisemitic overtones become a full-fledged tragedy by the end of the millennium? It certainly took more than a politically liberal re-reading. Following the ascension of the Nazi Party in Germany, Jewish performers, directors, and authors were removed from the stage and replaced with pro-Nazi artists who produced explicitly antisemitic works: Eberhand Wolfgang Möller, for example, found a great deal of early success with two plays, Der Panama Skandal (1930), produced three years before the Nazis came to power, and Rothschild siegt bei Waterloo (1934). Panama premiered shortly after the Wall Street crash in the United States, and depicted the building of the Panama Canal in 1889 with a Jewish banker as its villain.[12] Similarly, Rothschild perpetuates the myth that Nathan Rothschild made a fortune speculating on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo; its connection to Merchant was so explicit that one critic titled his review, “Shylock on the battlefield,”[13]

However, the Reichsdramaturg soon decided “blatantly propagandistic antisemitic works” were no longer desirable, as the Jewish influence in Germany had already been “completely eliminated.”[14] Therefore, plays along the lines of Panama and Rothschild were not only undesirable from a foreign policy standpoint: they simply weren’t needed. The Merchant of Venice, then, proved the perfect piece of propaganda: overtly antisemitic, but legitimized by its place in the English canon. Shylock was already a major presence in the German theatrical consciousness. In the nineteenth century alone, over one hundred German plays featured disparaging portrayals of Jews “in the tradition of Shylock” as “stereotypes of avaricious merchants and moneylenders abounded.”[15] Shakespeare, too, was an immensely popular playwright in the country, and the German Shakespeare Society (GSS), known in Germany as Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (DSG), worked to naturalize him as an honorary German citizen: in 1936 the GSS president, Werner Deetjen, noted that his “doctrine of the state is clearly Germanic,” while one year later, the Gautelier for South Westphalia, Joseph Wagner, declared, “We Germans still knowingly count him among our forebears, as by blood and by his nature he stands as close to us as any great German poet and thinker . . . We recognize in Shakespeare the same racial fundamental Nordic element from which we have learned to derive the highest values of our own people.”[16] Eugenics-obsessed theorist Hans Günther went so far as to study the Droeshout portrait, one of two that are definitively identifiable as Shakespeare, noting that the Bard had a “perfect Nordic forehead” while admitting, unfortunately, that he had “Mediterranean eyes and hair and chin of a doubtful origin.”[17]

All that remained was a little tweaking. While a superficial reading of the play presented Jews as avaricious and soulless, there was still the matter of Shakespeare’s incidental sympathy and humanity. Portions inconsistent with Nazi philosophy were open to mutilation, and unsurprisingly, the “Hath not a Jew” speech was unacceptable and was the first to go.[18] Jessica’s marriage to Lorenzo was first explained away as a tragic element to the story, with Günther observing that, as a Jew, she had a “paltry inner life,” as compared to Portia, who was noted for her “Nordic-German” qualities.[19] But it eventually became necessary to clarify her “true” relationship to Shylock: she was his “assumed daughter,” not a blood relation.[20] Therefore, her escape to Belmont is liberation from the Jewish tyrant. This mangled Merchant, which emphasized “less Shylock’s avarice and more . . . his lust for blood and power,” became a cornerstone of German education, being taught in both literature and racial science courses.[21]

The result was a masterpiece of manipulation. Unlike Panama or Rothschild, Merchant is not the product of a crazed antisemite, but a brilliant comedy by the most well respected dramatist of all time; furthermore, it was written by an Englishman, suggesting its views were not only endorsed by the Germans, but their enemies as well. By making only a few, mostly subtle changes, the German propaganda machine was able to take the play and turn it into a manifesto on racial purity and the pestilence of the Jewish people. This is no small feat, and yet it was executed with such swift effortlessness that it would not have been so easy to spot in context. Nevertheless, it was a significant contribution to the mindset that permitted the Holocaust,[22] and the power of Merchant’s antisemitism should not be underestimated: Goebbels demonstrated that in the wrong hands, it could prove fatal. Still, we are no longer living in fear of a Nazi dictatorship, and the instinctual reaction to this kind of production—an explicitly philosemitic Merchant—has led to an interpretive monopoly.

Unsurprisingly, the most violent of these interpretations were on the Yiddish stage. Before and after World War II, Yiddish rewritings of the play became very popular. Often, Merchant was drastically cut to make Shylock the protagonist, and instead of being rendered as a comedy, these variations were meant to leave “the audience with the taste of persecution in its mouth.”[23] Many of the greatest Yiddish actors of the time were attracted to the role, and interpretations of the moneylender were often sympathetic: Maurice Moscovitch read the character as “a proud Jew,”[24] while Jacob Adler declared that Shylock was “a true Jewish Jew,”[25] and argued that he never expected to receive his bond, but instead, “The real revenge that Shylock contemplates is not to take the pound of flesh which is legally forfeit to him, but to show the world that his despised ducats have actually bought and paid for it.”[26] Perhaps Rudolph Schildkraut was truest to Shakespeare’s part, as he was unafraid to depict him as “dark and unsympathetic . . . [and without] a drop of Jewishness in him.”[27] Unlike the others, Schildkraut allowed the villainy in Shakespeare’s part to come to the fore.

But of all the depictions of Shylock on the Yiddish stage, Schwartz’s was likely the most bizarre. He considered the character “a quiet, peace-loving Jew, whose mainstays in life are his learning and religion,” and whose life is guided by “the loyalty to the memory of his wife, the abounding love for his daughter, and his inner dignity.”[28] Possibly because he could find no textual substantiation of this opinion, Schwartz’s rewriting of Merchant, Shylock and His Daughter, is an abysmal, philosemitic play that has fortunately been lost in obscurity: copies are hard to come by and performances nearly non-existent. Nevertheless, it proves another useful example of the way in which politics can radically alter Shakespeare’s text to suit various needs which are artistically irrelevant (though this is certainly not unique to Shakespeare): in 1947, it would have been hard to separate Shylock from the still open wounds of Nazi Germany.

This does not, however, prevent Schwartz from hammering his point ad nauseam. As if the shadow of the Holocaust were not already draped across every single sentence, every single word in his play, Schwartz prefaces the published edition by reminding us of context of Merchant, noting that Jewish persecution occurred “during the famed Renaissance period, when art and science prospered,” and yet Jew-hating was not executed with “the same German thoroughness and technique of the Twentieth Century” (7). It is as if George Orwell were taking pains to point out that Animal Farm has an allegorical relationship to communism; not only is Shylock and His Daughter an insipid exercise in rewriting history, it is one that is written as if its audience had double-digit IQs and the interpretive prowess of a poodle. Still, it is a telling example of how Merchant has been manipulated by post-Holocaust artists.

From its opening scene, Schwartz’s rewrite stresses the absurdity of hatred towards Jews and the cruelty of Venetian Christians. Salanio, a guard to the ghetto, demonstrates unthinking prejudice when declaring, “I would not care if all the Jews, together with their Ghetto, vanished one fine morning” (12). Several scenes later, Portia, who, in this version is the loving wife of Antonio, poses a similar question: “Did you ever show a wrathful countenance to anyone? / To none, my dear, except to the Jews.” Enamored with him, she is ready to dismiss this as nothing but a “slight fault” (41). Portia is aware that antisemitism is wrong, but is too in love to hold it against Antonio. In turn, Lorenzo, renamed Launcelot, almost forcibly takes Jessica away from her father; in one of their early meetings, Schwartz describes her as “helpless against his vehemence” (34).

Shylock, given a second soliloquy bemoaning the suffering of his people, cries out, “While on the ship on the way to Rome, the Jewish girls all leaped into the sea. During the bloody Crusades, Jewish daughters stretched out their throats so their own fathers should slaughter them, rather than suffer to be stained by the murderers” (54). Here, Schwartz is synthesizing Jewish history, evoking the Holocaust—as Elie Wiesel did, for example, in his period piece The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)—while illustrating Jewish history as a history of genocide; indeed, during the First Crusade, the killing of Jewish children by their parents was considered “the highest imaginable form of human heroism and the clearest possible proof of the veracity of the Jewish faith.”[29] This is particularly powerful imagery—especially when presented to an audience for whom this type of desperation is completely foreign—but it also points to Schwartz’s clear intent to radically shift the focus of Merchant: Shylock and His Daughter is not so much about Schwartz’s experience of Shakespeare, but of antisemitism.

Shylock himself, of course, is a beacon of the community, the essence of benevolence. While still a moneylender, the Jew is this time a generous one: Lorenzo urges Antonio to borrow from him as he is has previously been kind to those “in great need” (58), and Shylock, dismissing the merchant’s hatred of him, offers to loan the three thousand ducats gratis. It is Antonio who proposes the notorious bond, remembering that the same security was once used by “a merchant of Genoa, years ago” (73). While Shylock initially refuses, he eventually accepts, unaware that this money will be partially used to steal his daughter away from him: she is, in this case, his one precious possession, a girl so valuable that he does not trust her to any gentile. Instead of the conniving Lorenzo, he has in mind for Jessica a young student of the Torah, Morro.

It is not difficult to see what Schwartz is doing here. Under the guise of historical realism, he argues that the Jews of Italy (and Germany) were innocent victims, the Christians (and Nazis) mindless persecutors, evaporating the complexity of the Holocaust into a wholesale condemnation of Germans; the problem, of course, is that he has given his villains even less depth than Shakespeare gave to Shylock. Gratanio’s line, “[I hate them] because they are Jews” (14), is an unsettling parallel to Shylock’s, “I hate him for he is a Christian” (I.iii.38). Unlike Merchant, which ends on a relatively light-hearted note, Shylock and His Daughter pushes its moral weight onto the audience until the final curtain; this is a rather dangerous move, since this historical revision with a decidedly more serious ambition gives its Christian villains the same one-dimensionality as Shakespeare’s original Jew. His prejudice is more serious, then, because it is being wrought with far more conviction; whereas Shakespeare writes like an incidental antisemite, one who has not met a Jew and is simply inheriting his baseless prejudice, Schwartz has ferociously responded with the kind of black-and-white morality lesson we’ve just seen from the Nazis. Although his implications are never as violent, it is frightening to see such tonal similarities.

As in Shakespeare’s play, Shylock ultimately does not receive his bond. Before the trial, a local rabbi makes his plea: “Do you realize what a misfortune you are bringing on the communities of Israel? For generations and generations, Jews will not be able to free themselves from this horrible accusation” (120). Here, as in an earlier comment made by a doctor—“I must restore the enemies of Israel to health, so that they can persecute my people” (58)—Schwartz is deliberately using a modern word. In 1947, at the time of the play’s premiere, the Jewish homeland was greatly contested, and the use of “Israel” instead of “Palestine” is a telling indication of Schwartz’s political goals, especially after his profession of historical veracity. In this context—that is, at the turn of the seventeenth century—“Israel” would refer not to a land but to a people. A subtle insertion, but nevertheless a glaring indication of the playwright’s intentions: this is not a play about Italy, not really even a play about Shakespeare, but one about restoring the Jewish image, about seizing an old text and using it for a political and not an artistic purpose.

At the end of the trial, in a moment of self-actualization, Schwartz’s Shylock drops his knife and cries out, “I cannot shed blood. I am a Jew!” (145), echoing Shakespeare’s line, “I am a Jew” (III. i.51) in the “Hath not a Jew” speech—notably, Merchant’s most sympathetic scene. Significantly, it is not Christian ingenuity that saves Antonio, but Jewish mercy. It is a heavy-handed ending, no doubt. Shylock’s closing lines are, “I praise thee, God, for thy loving-kindness. Baruch dayan emer” (146), the final prayer one that spoken at a time of great bereavement. Since, in the context of Shylock and His Daughter, this is actually a joyous moment, one in which Antonio and the Jew have finally reconciled after four hundred years of animosity, the tragedy Schwartz is evoking is not any that has occurred onstage, but most certainly the Holocaust.

U
ntil 2004, there was not a single major English-language film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. It is not surprising, then, that when Michael Radford finally broke the silence, the result was tonally quite similar to the Schwartz play. Before the action begins, we get a disclaimer:

Intolerance of the Jews was a fact of 16^th Century life even in Venice, the most powerful and liberal city state in Europe. By law the Jews were forced to live in the old walled foundry or ‘Geto’ area of the city. After sundown the gate was locked and guarded by Christians. In the daytime any man leaving the ghetto had to wear a red hat to mark him as a Jew. The Jews were forbidden to own property. So they practised usury, the lending of money at interest. This was against Christian law. The sophisticated Venetians would turn a blind eye to it but for the religious fanatics, who hated the Jews, it was another matter . . .

The text is dramatically juxtaposed with shots of abuse towards Jews, all scored by a mournful female singer. Most notably, we see a pile of burning Torahs, encouraging a comparison to those other book burners. Radford’s technique is a cheap underestimation of the audience, no better than Schwartz’s preface if slightly more subtle; it is a frame that tells us precisely how we are supposed to feel about the movie’s characters: Antonio is an angry bigot, Shylock a victim who has been pushed into his immoral behavior. In less than three minutes of screen time, we already know how unsophisticated and myopic this rendering will be.

As if this weren’t enough—and in case we haven’t quite got what he’s after—Radford lets Shylock make the first appearance of all the play’s major characters. Instead of entering with his famous line, “Three thousand ducats, well,” he places the Jew two scenes early, opening the entire movie with a moment that is only alluded to in Shakespeare’s play: walking on the Rialto, Shylock passes his enemy, calling out, “Antonio.” Antonio responds, wordlessly, by spitting on him. This is another, “I would not care if all the Jews, together with their Ghetto, vanished one fine morning,” different only because it is in the hands of a more talented writer. Nevertheless, it is unmistakably philosemitic propaganda, another seizing of Shakespeare’s play to prove the same point about the victimization of the Jews and the antisemitism of medieval Christianity—the point, of course, needs to be made, but not at the cost of The Merchant of Venice.

Al Pacino is a first-rate actor, but his Shylock is soaked with twentieth-century Jewish blood, and his performance is more King Lear than Malvolio. He is a gray-bearded, wrinkled sufferer, not an ingenious schemer, and instead of relishing in the proposal of his bond, he just sounds exhausted. There is a lifelessness to the performance, even as he hits the high notes of the “Hath not a Jew” speech, and it is painful to watch as he mimes the pricking and tickling to underline language that needs no emphasis. When he asks his tormenters if he has “dimensions, senses, affections, [and] passions?” I am tempted to answer, No. Later, as he prepares to take a pound of Antonio’s flesh, there is no joy at the prospect of revenge, but an indifferent carrying out of what is owed him. Finally, upon hearing his sentence, there is a raspy acceptance to his answer, “Nay, take my life,” as if this was the result he expected all along. This is an utterance summoned by post-Holocaust hopelessness, and the dialogue is read like a survivor from Auschwitz unsurprised to find himself once again the victim of persecution. Which isn’t to say it isn’t powerful: Radford has put together a movie with incredible emotional force. In the summer of 2010, Pacino would revive his performance in Central Park, and there his director, Daniel Sullivan, added a scene in which Shylock is brutally baptized, his kippah falling off his head each time he is shoved into the water. Wrenching, but unsubstantiated by the text.

How, then, would a comic Shylock be played? Like Bloom’s “Jew-in-the-box,” a comic villain who is the manifestation of Christian Judeophobia. Like Marlowe’s Barabas, he is there to upset the Christian status quo, to challenge the heroes’ conception of their generosity by forcing them to be brutal in their condemnation of him—though unlike The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice leaves us with a more sobering conclusion: a dead Barabas shuffles off this mortal coil cackling at his tormenters, while Shylock exits a thoroughly beaten man. Although Shakespeare does not give Shylock the same connection with the audience as Richard III—arguably, “I hate him for he is a Christian” is his only aside—Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the doomed king seems to me an excellent starting point. Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film, Richard III, is fearless about finding the humor in the tragedy, and his ironic, 1930s soundtrack provides the perfect score for this examination of human failures. McKellen is given an opportunity to ham it up, and his giddy remarks to the camera allow us to collude in his plotting while remaining at a safe distance. Later depictions of Shylock could take a cue from his first aside: “Therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Richard’s death, sometimes played seriously, is here extraordinarily silly: after killing the king, Richmond smirks into the camera, picking up on Richard’s playful asides and suggesting that his rule may not be so benevolent, that the two may in fact end up going “hand-in-hand to hell.” McKellen’s grinning fall into the flames, along with Loncraine’s choice of Al Jolson’s “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” recalls the frivolous ending to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; the green-screen descent is likely a quote of Slim Pickens’ yee-hawing bomb drop.

As for “Hath not a Jew eyes,” this speech was, strangely, best handled by Felix Bressart in Ernst Lubistch’s To Be or Not To Be. Though the film is a comedy, mostly detailing an absurd plot against the Nazis, it nonetheless possesses a certain seriousness: the protagonists, after all, are Jewish actors, victims of the Reichsdramaturg, no longer allowed to perform onstage. One of them, Greenberg, always wanted to star in Merchant, and he quotes the famous monologue several times throughout the movie. The performance is oddly sublime. He allows the lines their own power, reciting them like a man who has been beaten down time and time again. It is a somber delivery, a far leap away from Pacino’s histrionics, and in the context of an otherwise comedic play, would be extremely affecting. When his colleague turns to him and says, “What a Shylock you would have been,” I’m inclined to agree. Had we seen a complete performance, and were this speech coupled with the comic absurdness of Shylock’s other scenes—the equal mourning over his daughter and his ducats, for example—it might have been the ideal rendering; it could work much like Nigel Hawthorne’s Malvolio in Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film Twelfth Night: a man who deserves some of what he has coming to him, but who can still evoke sympathy when he barges in on the play’s closing merriment, a bald, hysterical wreck. After the Puritan, self-obsessed silliness that precedes it, the sharp contrast of his “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack you” is not only affecting, but reveals an unsuspected dignity.

Ultimately, it is not wrong that some Shylocks are played as tragic villains, with some interpretations focusing on the play’s antisemitism. History has certainly invited it. The problem is that they are all this way. There is a kind of artistic monopoly in place, as if political correctness necessarily informs our reading of the text. Like all of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, The Merchant of Venice is a deep and rewarding work, and one whose potential should occupy us for centuries. By stifling the discussion and by playing the same note over and over again, from production to production, we are insulting the richness of Shakespeare’s play as well as our own capabilities of understanding it. Although the Holocaust has and should always remain a part of Merchant’s history, and although the play’s antisemitism has and should not be ignored, we must nonetheless explore all the avenues this great work has to offer us.

Credits

The top image is a still of Al Pacino from The Merchant of Venice.

The second image is from the nineteenth century English artist John Gilbert’s illustration Shylock after the Trial.

Bibliography

Berkowitz, Joel. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2003.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Bonnell, Andrew G. Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism and the German Theatre From the Enlightenment to the Nazis. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008.

Chazan, Robert. In the Year 1096… The First Crusade & The Jews. Philadelphia: The JPS, 1996.

Dundes, Alan, ed. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.

Gross, John. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Kubrick, Stanley. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Perfs. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1964.

Loncraine, Richard. Richard III. Perf. Ian McKellen, Annette Bening. Mayfair Entertainment International, 1995.

Lubistch, Ernst. To Be Or Not To Be. Perf. Jack Benny Carole Lombard. United Artists, 1942.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. London: J.M. Dent, 1999.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Dir. Daniel Sullivan. Perf. Al Pacino. Delacorte, New York. 18 July 2010. Performance.

Nunn, Trevor. Twelfth Night. Perf. Imogen Stubbs, Ben Kingsley, Nigel Hawthorne. BBC Films, 1996.

Radford, Michael. The Merchant of Venice. Perf. Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons. Movision Entertainment, 2004.

Roth, Phillip. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Sarna, Jonathan. “The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Secular Judaism.” Contemplate: The International Journal of Cultural Thought 4 (2007): 3-13. Print.

Schwartz, Maurice. Shylock and His Daughter. New York: Yiddish Art Theater, 1947.

Shakespeare, William. Comedies: Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1997.

———. Histories: Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Simon, John. On Theater: Criticism 1974-2003. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2005.

Endnotes

The post Reviving Shylock appeared first on Z e t e o.

[One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.]

25 April 2013

“If I were to generalize,” the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber said recently to a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education,

I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism is a result of the bureaucratization of the university.

Graeber is perhaps best known for not having his teaching contract renewed by Yale back in 2005, but he is also the author of many works, including the highly regarded and vigorously selling Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011) and a new book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). Active in various protests, including against the World Economic Forum and Occupy Wall Street, he has been unable to secure another teaching job at a US university. The Chronicle article (April 19, 2013, by Christopher Shea) is titled “A Radical Anthropologist Finds Himself in Academic Exile.” Among the Graeber supporters interviewed for the piece is Laura Nader, a Berkeley anthropologist. “You can quote Foucault and Gramsci,” she says, “but if you tell it like it is, it’s a different story.” Jeff Maskovsky, who is a professor of anthropology at Zeteo’s home — the Graduate Center of the City University of New York — is also quoted:

It is possible to view the fact that Graeber has not secured a permanent academic position in the United States after his controversial departure from Yale University as evidence of U.S. anthropology’s intolerance of political outspokenness.

Image (inspired by the season rather than by the response to Graeber) is a photograph of a Pyrenean Lily by Sandy Steinman. See Steinman’s “Natural History Wanderings” blog

26 April 2013

Up in the middle of the night and hearing the wind outside, I was reminded of a line from a well-known Shakespeare sonnet (#18). The line: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” I sent the complete text to a French colleague, and she responded with a spring sonnet (à Marie) from Pierre de Ronsard, who lived and wrote two generations before Shakespeare. Taking out of Ronsard’s poem all the poetry except for the closing lines, I offer this hasty review:

Here, Marie, is a bouquet I have cut for you.
Had I not cut these flowers this evening, they would have fallen to earth tomorrow.
This is a clear example for you: your current beauties soon will perish all of a sudden
Time cuts us all down

Et des amours, desquelles nous parlons
Quand serons morts, n’en sera plus nouvelle :
Pour ce, aimez-moi, cependant qu’êtes belle.

(And as for the love we speak about
It will be old news after we are dead
So love me — you are so beautiful.)

English-language readers may already be appreciating how far we are here from Shakespeare’s view of love and life. From “Sonnet 18″:

. . . every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st . . .

The pen is mightier than the sword of time, or at least it was briefly, while Shakespeare wrote.

28 April 2013

The last sentences on the last page of the May Harvard Business Review are the following lines from Maya Angelou, in answer to a question from the Review about what makes a leader great:

A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.

There are two separate assertions here, one about not being too focused on oneself, and the other about seeing greatness in others. This latter one interests me particularly; however, when I mentioned it to my son, he had what may be called the family response: But what if the others aren’t great? To which I offered, for purposes of discussion, an American response: Faith in the greatness of others, or in any bit of wishful thinking, could prove to be more powerful than greater realism or clear-sightedness. Seeing greatness in others, may bring out whatever greatness they have or inspire greatness where there has been none. And we might note, after Camus, that there can be a sterility in life without illusion.

A sterility, but also a dynamism, une passion, as Camus would have it, a feeling of really being alive, alive to the moment, to others! Heading back the other way, it seems to me that Maya Angelou has long been a kind of brand, or a voice for a particular, considered inspiring view of life. This circumscribes greatly what she is able to say. And furthermore, we might all think of plenty of leaders—or putative leaders, at least—who were quite self-interested and not so impressed by others’ abilities. Another article in the same issue of the Review noted that “the CEO population is on average more narcissistic than the general . . . population is.” A reminder that most of the time, if not always, we humans, however expert we may consider ourselves to be, are simply talking through our hats. “Truth is words and words are talk,” as the Bonzo Dog Band put it ages ago. And yet, I still like this idea of Angelou’s: “A leader sees greatness in other people.” (My emphasis added.)

29 April 2013

Editing an article in which Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) is made much of, I am struck, and not for the first time, that the way many Americans read this book is not the way I, equally American, read it. For many of us this book is not an absurdist novel, but a kind of self-help manual, indicating the right way to live in the face of evil and of evil on a scale that may seem to dwarf any individual attempt to oppose it. The answer, from the book, “il faut, autant qu’il est possible, refuser d’être avec le fléau.” One must try, as much as is humanly possible, to refuse to be part of the plague. And there is the book’s more implicit answer: that in struggle one may find solidarity, community, friendship, and such things are their own reward.

Certainly there are these aspects of the book, whose plague is considered to have been an allegory for the scourge of Nazism. But there is also, if you will, another book here. The book of:

“Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent: ‘Ca ne durera pas, c’est trop bête.’ Et sans doute une guerre est certainement trop bête, mais cela ne l’empêche pas de durer.”

When a war breaks out, people say it’s dumb, doesn’t make any sense, won’t last. And certainly war is senseless, but that doesn’t stop a war from lasting.

The book of:

“Question: comment faire pour ne pas perdre son temps? Réponse: l’éprouver dans toute sa longueur. Moyens: passer des journées dans l’antichambre d’un dentiste, sur une chaise inconfortable; vivre à son balcon le dimanche après-midi; écouter des conférences dans une langue qu’on ne comprend pas, choisir les itinéraires de chemin de fer les plus longs et les moins commodes et voyager debout naturellement; faire la queue aux guichets des spectacles et ne pas prendre sa place, etc.”

Question: How to avoid wasting one’s time? Answer: experience the full extent of it. How to do this? Spend one’s days in a dentist’s waiting room in an uncomfortable chair; spend Sunday afternoons on one’s balcony; listen to meetings being held in a language one does not know; when traveling choose the longest and most inconvenient rail itineraries and, of course, remain standing the entire trip; wait in line to buy tickets for shows and then not use the tickets; etc.

And, from near the end:

On était obligé seulement de constater que la maladie semblait partir comme elle était venue. La stratégie qu’on lui opposait n’avait pas changé, inefficace hier et, aujourd’hui, apparemment heureuse. On avait seulement l’impression que la maladie s’était épuisée elle-même ou peut-être qu’elle se retirait après avoir atteint tous ses objectifs.

All we could do was observe that the disease [the plague] seemed to have gone away much as it had come. The strategy we had employed to combat it had not changed. Yesterday it was ineffective, today apparently a success. All we could think was that the disease had exhausted itself, or perhaps, having attained all its objectives, it had withdrawn.

30 April 2013

I will let speak for themselves these excellent comments from Harvard Business Review (HBR) senior editor Alison Beard:

 The message is simple and provocative: The feminist movement has been so effective in advancing women over the past several decades that the ability of men to thrive—indeed, their fundamental role in society—is now in peril. Strangely, however, most of the people who seem to be promoting, or even debating, the theory today are women. If men are indeed getting stiffed, . . . why aren’t more of them talking about it . . . or strategizing about how to recover the ground they’ve lost?

When I ask the men I know this question, I get one of three responses:

1. The “end of men” thesis is wrong. Men still have the power and won’t lose it anytime soon. . . .

2. The thesis is right, but only for blue-collar men—and they don’t have the wherewithal to respond. . . . When you’re becoming the weaker sex, you don’t want to admit it.

3. The thesis is right, and even white-collar executives are affected, particularly in sectors like marketing or media, . . . [But] no man wants to be branded a whiny antifeminist by the growing sisterhood of leaders who are women. . . .

[I]t’s frustrating [to a woman?] to see men cede a discussion about changing gender dynamics—especially those that affect the workplace—almost entirely to women. . . .

In 2013, are some men . . . dissatisfied with their lot? Justifiably upset with some of the changes feminism has wrought? Or are they . . . [h]appy to become more like women in order to succeed?

For Beard’s full article, “The Silent Sex” (HBR, March 2013) visit the web page. Beard, in her turn, calls attention to some other recent pieces on the subject, to include an article by Stephen Marche that Esquire published last August: The Contempt of Women: The rise of men. And the whining of girls. A wise moment:

The girls in Lena Dunham’s creation [the TV show Girls] are just figuring out that it’s hard to be independent and need other people, and that it’s hard to find somebody to screw whom you also like. To find somebody you want to screw and you like and you respect? Nearly impossible. But it’s been nearly impossible forever.

1 May 2013

From Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (Liveright, 2013).

Usually Marx’s theoretical pursuits had to be crammed in beside far more time-consuming activities: émigré politics, journalism, the IWMA, evading creditors, and the serious or fatal illnesses that plagued his children and his wife, and, after the onset of his skin disease in 1863, Marx himself. All too often Marx’s theoretical labors were interrupted for months at a time or reserved for odd hours late at night.

I know the feeling!

The post Reading 25 April – 1 May 2013 (ZiR) appeared first on Z e t e o.

[One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see
Zeteo is Reading.]

14 April 2013

The post Reading 14-20 April 2013 (ZiR) appeared first on Z e t e o.

[One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see
Zeteo is Reading.]

07 April 2013

I finally had the time to read The New York Times op-ed article from last Tuesday. In “Diagnosis: Human,” Harvard professor Ted Gup takes from his own loss to reflect on the lessons we miss from life, death, grief, and our (im)perfect way of coping with them through medication:

Ours is an age in which the airwaves and media are one large drug emporium that claims to fix everything from sleep to sex. I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition. It’s as if we are trying to contain grief, and the absolute pain of a loss like mine. We have become increasingly disassociated and estranged from the patterns of life and death, uncomfortable with the messiness of our own humanity, aging and, ultimately, mortality.

08 April 2013

Translating and interpreting are two different tasks. Translators interpret written texts, while interpreters translate oral statements (note the term-switching). Certainly, both activities/disciplines demand much audacity, preciseness, and love of language. Why Sofia Coppola decided to title her Tokyo-based movie “Lost in Translation” (2003)—when it captures, really, transferred attitudes and behaviors—is beyond my understanding . . . Nevertheless, the movie’s dialogue is remarkable. Perhaps as I put some of its words on “paper” and you read them, we may amend the movie’s initial act of interpretation and transform it into a true act of translation:

Director: [in Japanese] Mr. Bob-san, you are relaxing in your study. On the table is a bottle of Suntory whiskey. Got it? Look slowly, with feeling, at the camera, and say it gently – say it as if you were speaking to an old friend. Just like Bogie in Casablanca, “Here’s looking at you, kid” – Suntory time.
Ms. Kawasaki, interpreter: Umm. He want you to turn, looking at camera. OK?
Bob: That’s all he said?
Ms. Kawasaki: Yes. Turn to camera.
Bob: All right. Does he want me to turn from the right, or turn from the left?
Ms. Kawasaki: [to director, in Japanese] Uh, umm. He’s ready now. He just wants to know if he’s supposed to turn from the left or turn from the right when the camera rolls. What should I tell him?
Director: [in Japanese] What difference does it make! Makes no difference! Don’t have time for that! [to Bob, in Japanese] Got it, Bob-san? Just psych yourself up, and quick! Look straight at the camera. At the camera. And slowly. With passion. Straight at the camera. And in your eyes there’s… passion. Got it?
Ms. Kawasaki: [to Bob] Right side. And with intensity. OK?
Bob: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.
Director: [to Bob, in Japanese] Listen, listen. This isn’t just about whiskey. Understand? Imagine you’re talking to an old friend. Gently. The emotions bubble up from the bottom of your heart. And don’t forget, psych yourself up!
Ms. Kawasaki: Like an old friend. And, into the camera.
Bob: Okay.
Director: [to Bob, in Japanese] Got it? You love whiskey. It’s Suntory time. OK?
Bob: Okay.

10 April 2013

From one of the best writers and translators that I have ever had the pleasure to read:

There are philosophers who can write and philosophers who cannot. Most of the great philosophers belong to the first group. There are also, much more rarely, philosophers who can write too well for their own good—as philosophers. Plato wrote so dramatically that we shall never know for sure what he himself thought about any number of questions. And Nietzsche furnishes a more recent and no less striking example. His philosophy can be determined, but his brilliant epigrams and metaphors, his sparkling polemics and ceaseless stylistic experiments, make it rather difficult to do so; and to read him solely to reconstruct the work of his ideas would be obtuse pedantry. At least two things should come first: sheer enjoyment of his writing, and then the more harrowing experience of exposing oneself to his many passionate perspectives.

Walter Kaufmann, “Introduction” to The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Group, 1954)

11 April 2013

I have spent the last couple of years reading exclusively in English. This spring, I am back to my first language with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori: 2001), translated into Spanish by Enrique Pezzoni (and dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne!) I will quote extensively from his first pages to avoid chopping up Ishmael’s prayer-like reverence to the Nantucket natives:

Así, esos desnudos hombres de Nantucket, esos ermitaños del mar, salieron de su hormiguero acuático y recorrieron y dominaron el mundo de los océanos, como otros tantos Alejandros, repartiéndose entre ellos el Atlántico, el Pacífico y el Índico, como las tres potencias piratas se repartieron Polonia. Que Norteamérica agregue México a Texas y amontone Cuba sobre Canadá, que los ingleses invadan la India y planten sobre el sol mismo su resplandeciente estandarte: los dos tercios del globo terráqueo son de los hijos de Nantuchet. Porque suyo es el mar: lo poseen como los emperadores poseen sus imperios. Los demás marinos apenas si tienen derecho de atravesarlo. Los navíos mercantes no son más que una especie de puentes colgantes; los navíos de guerra no son sino fuertes flotantes; hasta los piratas y corsarios aunque acechen en el océano como los bandoleros en los caminos, sólo saquean otras naves, otros fragmentos de la tierra semejantes a ellos mismos, sin procurar extraer su alimento del abismo sin fondo.

Amen.

12 April 2013

Again, from Melville’s Moby Dick, now in English:

…consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

13 April 2013

It is of common understanding that whales bonded with native tribes as friends, guardians, and, well, food. Here is what the Museum of Natural History in New York suggests to strengthen the (existing?) relationship between modern men and whales:

Through a variety of interactive exhibits, visitors will experience a re-created dive to the depths of the sea with a sperm whale on the hunt for a giant squid, crawl through a life-size replica of the heart of the blue whale—the largest living animal on the planet—listen to whale croons, and meet people whose lives have been inextricably linked with whales—from legendary whale riders to scientists and former whaling families. (Museum of Natural History, Whales: Giants of the Deep, running March 23, 2013-January 5, 2014.)

Photograph: still image from “Lost in Translation“

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