I loved the Persian Letters. It made great bed-side reading. Every night, I read a few letters and fell asleep. I don't mean to dismiss the book. I genuinely did enjoy it. It wasn't a complex or dense argument, but the structure allows it to create an argument in a simple, effective way. Irony and humour are great tools. So is fiction. I kept thinking of the resent movie "Borat" as being a step-child of this book. I'm not sure that any film could have outlined the problems and contradictions of America and the "American Dream" in so concise a form as that movie, and perhaps the same can be said of "Letters" in it's time.
I loved the biting analysis of French culture and politics at the time. Letters 26 and 27 are my favorite in this regard. 26 tells of a visit to the theater where the best performances are the wordless ones from the actors in the boxes who "are visible only to the waist, and as a rule, their arms are modestly concealed in a muff." As for the real actors, they are seen to simply exchange insults with the people on the floor. In the end, he receives a letter from an Opera singer he has met, begging him to take her to Persia so she can escape the shame of her rape and illegitimate pregnancy and make a living better than the one she foresees as an aging actress.
In one short letter, he undermines French culture and high society, and underscores the deep hypocrisies faced by the lower classes and women. It reminds me of the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, which accomplishes the same thing in a heroic tale. But that is the question here, is he really condemning French society? It was discussed in class that the whole storyline of Usbek's problems with his Seraglio were a cautionary tale about effect of the vacuum of leadership and repression of the classes that characterized Louis IV reign. But is it also a reminder of the freedoms available to people, especially women, in French society that don't exist elsewhere. In many letters, like 25, he comments through Usbek in a seemingly derisive tone that the women of France have neither modesty or virtue, but he describes an enviable level of freedom compared to the indentured slavery of the women of the harem. Are they truly lacking in virtue? Like much of this book, the definition of virtue lies squarely in the cultural perspective. With these men as our narrators, we develop a sympathy with their point-of-view, especially when they brilliantly and humorously critique the institutions they are witnessing, like the theater of the the church, or even the intellectuals of cafe society. But is their perspective right?
I suppose this is where the idea of relativity comes in... and it's a very Humean idea too: how do we negotiate the differences between cultures? How do we describe virtues, morality and ethics when we are faced with large cultural divides? It's where Hume fails in some respect in that he describes moral agreement among homogeneous cultures. But how do you describe the rights of women, or argue the moral quality of slavery in the gulf between two cultures as different as the Paris of Usbek's mind and the Persia of Montesquieu's imagination? Religion fails us, the law falls short because if it's necessarily local quality.
Perhaps humor is the only way to describe the differences and to undermine authority. As Arendt writes in "On Violence": "The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (p. 45).ot
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Dislocation
So here's the confession: I didn't read Ali's "Brick Lane".
But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.
What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.
The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.
I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.
And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.
My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.
In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.
In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.
My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.
This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.
It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.
Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.
But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.
What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.
The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.
I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.
And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.
My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.
In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.
In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.
My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.
This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.
It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.
Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Repression
I'm afraid my journal will reveal all too plainly the paucity of time I've had to do the readings. But, I'll continue as best I can. Who knew that two 10 lb babies could absorb so much time and energy? That being said, I'm no longer sleep deprived, only reading-time-deprived and even that is getting better.
I enjoyed the readings in this weeks' theme. Especially Freud. I'd never read him and of course had many of the cliches about his work in my head, but was deeply impressed with what was more than just - although to say "just" about this is a little trite - a theorization of the human psyche. What I saw instead was a "system" for understanding the development of man and civilization. Unlike, say, Rousseau, who's philosophy was based on a romantic notion of the development of man, Freud builds a logical understanding not just of our minds and or social structures, but more importantly of the deep tensions that do and must exist between individual man and the society that he must live in.
Hume's writings come to mind in that he describes in very similar fashion the necessities of civil society and the benefits of their structure, but he doesn't explain the conflicts that arise inside them in a satisfactory way, most likely because he describes a fairly homogenous social grouping. Freud's notion that we must invariably be in conflict with ourselves and with society in order to stay within social structures, families, tribes, towns and cities, is more appealing to me.
Even his description of The Pleasure Principle describes the need for conflict:
"We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things". (p.25)
This idea of living in a state of tension between opposing forces, the personal and the public, will come up again with Kant in a later entry. I quite like the more complex idea of how we must each individually negotiate the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the whole of our societies.
"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." (p.34)
This pertains to Kant as well, but it seems that freedom lies not in the unfettered pursuit of individual happiness, but the choices we make in negotiating the space between personal desire and public necessity. Love and Necessity, the two poles of Freud's dialectic of civilization. However, Freud is very clear that this balance can be dangerously precarious.
"It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive and instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue." (p.52)
There is, of course, more to be said... And I should talk about Conrad, as well. I liked Conrad. But really, it's up there with 1984 and Atlas Shrugged as "books that have been read too deeply by high-school students". But I don't dismiss it. Conrad's imagery and language is quite extraordinary and lush... part of the reason it has lasted so long as a masterwork. But I'd rather leave it alone for two reasons: firstly because I'm so far behind with everything else that I have to become more efficient if I'm going to catch up let alone get ahead; and secondly because like Freud, the book has so deeply informed me in unconscious ways, that reading them both seemed repetitive. Freud, Darwin... we still live in the world that they revolutionized and I have a harder time understanding myself outside the context they provide than inside.
Perhaps that's the best reason of all to be taking this degree: to see the forces that have built me, and possibly allow me to question the things that I presently assume as given. As my old therapist would have said, "awareness is the first step".
I enjoyed the readings in this weeks' theme. Especially Freud. I'd never read him and of course had many of the cliches about his work in my head, but was deeply impressed with what was more than just - although to say "just" about this is a little trite - a theorization of the human psyche. What I saw instead was a "system" for understanding the development of man and civilization. Unlike, say, Rousseau, who's philosophy was based on a romantic notion of the development of man, Freud builds a logical understanding not just of our minds and or social structures, but more importantly of the deep tensions that do and must exist between individual man and the society that he must live in.
Hume's writings come to mind in that he describes in very similar fashion the necessities of civil society and the benefits of their structure, but he doesn't explain the conflicts that arise inside them in a satisfactory way, most likely because he describes a fairly homogenous social grouping. Freud's notion that we must invariably be in conflict with ourselves and with society in order to stay within social structures, families, tribes, towns and cities, is more appealing to me.
Even his description of The Pleasure Principle describes the need for conflict:
"We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things". (p.25)
This idea of living in a state of tension between opposing forces, the personal and the public, will come up again with Kant in a later entry. I quite like the more complex idea of how we must each individually negotiate the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the whole of our societies.
"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." (p.34)
This pertains to Kant as well, but it seems that freedom lies not in the unfettered pursuit of individual happiness, but the choices we make in negotiating the space between personal desire and public necessity. Love and Necessity, the two poles of Freud's dialectic of civilization. However, Freud is very clear that this balance can be dangerously precarious.
"It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive and instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue." (p.52)
There is, of course, more to be said... And I should talk about Conrad, as well. I liked Conrad. But really, it's up there with 1984 and Atlas Shrugged as "books that have been read too deeply by high-school students". But I don't dismiss it. Conrad's imagery and language is quite extraordinary and lush... part of the reason it has lasted so long as a masterwork. But I'd rather leave it alone for two reasons: firstly because I'm so far behind with everything else that I have to become more efficient if I'm going to catch up let alone get ahead; and secondly because like Freud, the book has so deeply informed me in unconscious ways, that reading them both seemed repetitive. Freud, Darwin... we still live in the world that they revolutionized and I have a harder time understanding myself outside the context they provide than inside.
Perhaps that's the best reason of all to be taking this degree: to see the forces that have built me, and possibly allow me to question the things that I presently assume as given. As my old therapist would have said, "awareness is the first step".
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