But can the fool(ish) text do Humanity any Good? Maimonides, Derrida, and Gasche (Part I)

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In his book Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation, Rodolphe Gasche notes, in one of his readings of Jacques Derrida, that a text, like a person, can have a manner.

A manner is a way of acting or bearing.  A manner can also be read as a style.

What is the meaning of Gasche’s description?

This description of the text as a manner has religious resonance.  The reader, in an exegetical manner, must figure out his or her bearing in relation to the text and its bearing.  How does the text appear to the reader and how, in turn, does the reader present him or herself to the text?  Can the text teach us about how to bear ourselves or is it devoid of any such prescriptions for action?

Gasche suggests that the relation to the text is not by way of knowledge so much as by a relation to its way of being (its manner).  Textual relation bears two questions: How do we relate to the text and how does it relate to us?  Does the text turn away from us, as God turns away from Moses in the moment of revelation?

I can’t help but hear Maimonides reading of Prophetic Revelation in Gasche’s claim. In Part I, Chapter 54 of The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides discusses how, when Moses requests to see God’s essence, he sees, instead, God’s actions.  In other words, Moses , according to Maimonides, was only allowed to see God’s manner of being:

When Moses asked for knowledge of the attributes and asked for forgiveness for the nation, he was given a favorable answer with regard to their being forgiven.  Then he asked for the apprehension of His essence, may He be exalted.  This is what he means when he says, “Show me, I pray You, Your glory” (Ex. 33:18), whereupon he received a (favorable) answer with regard to what he had asked for first – namely, “Show me Your ways.”

Although Moses didn’t learn of God’s essence, he was shown God’s “ways” so that he could teach and practice them.  He was given what Gasche would call – in his essay on Derrida – a “reflection without penetration.” Nonetheless, he is given a manner that can make life better for himself and for the Jewish people.  To be sure, for Maimonides, the prophet is a political leader and a philosopher.  Most importantly, Moses, “the greatest of all prophets,” is the only prophet who is a lawgiver.  All three are related, in some way, to God’s ways or manners, which Moses practices.  Practice, it seems, trumps reflection into the essence of things.  The manner of God, God’s ways, bear themselves to Moses.  Not God’s essence.

Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and the later Martin Heidegger, have taught us, with respect to language, that if it doesn’t have an essence that can be known (like God cannot be known), then all one can know of language is not what language is but what language does.  We can only know or describe how language does things.

Maimonides notes how Moses can perfect himself and be the best leader and prophet if, and only if, he imitates what God does – which can only be found by following God’s ways.  Maimonides sees Moses’ practical knowledge as being based on divine contemplation of God’s ways.  Such contemplation can foster love and fear and, most importantly, prompts imitation that promotes ethical and political well being.

The imitation of these manners or ways would do humanity good.  Maimonides tells us that such imitation will help man to perfect himself; moreover, without imitaiton, society cannot perfect itself.  Without a teacher of God’s ways, without a leader who pursues the ways of justice, society will degenerate.

Can we say the same for language?  Can or does language as such – language and its ways -do humanity any good?  Can language help?

Heidegger, near the end of his life, focused solely on “listening” to language.  And Benjamin wrote several essays and notes on language.   Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, amongst others, also call on us to pay close attention to language.

For them, its an imperative to pay close attention to the ways of language.  But do they do this because they believe that following the ways of language will do humanity any good?  Are they miming religion, so to speak, while emptying it of its content?  Instead of the manner and ways of God, do we study and practice, instead, the ways of language?  Are these, as Derrida might say, the way one would practice a “religion without religion?”

To answer these questions, let’s play a game.  I’ll imagine what would be implied if we read the relation of the reader to the text as we would read the relationship of Moses to God.  To know what to do, to act or imitate the ways of the text, we would have to know what a text is doing and how it is doing it:

What is the manner of the text?

Can we learn justice from the ways of language? Or do we just learn its ways?  Are we in the position to imitate its ways or is this a ridiculous question reserved only for religion and theology not language as such?

Reading Gasche, we should like to know if we are going to imitate the text so as to perfect ourselves and society; otherwise, Gasche’s language suggests that we reflect on a manner that is devoid of any ethical or political content.  Does the act of reflection suffice?  Does it help humanity?

If ethics is based on actions and not on knowledge, as Levinas points out in a reading he makes of Maimonides (in one of his essays on Judaism), for language to be ethical, it would have to be prescriptive in some way.   Otherwise, its “manner” would have no ethical content.

If we take Jacques Derrida seriously, we would have to say that a text has the manner of the schlemiel.  It does not know what it is doing.   And language likes to dream and get distracted.  A text can be absent-minded.  But can a text, like a schlemiel, fail?

How would it fail?  In what manner would the text, as schlemiel, fail?

Roldophe Gasche gives us a clue.  In his book, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation, Gashe writes of Derrida’s notion of mimesis.  He reads mimesis through Derrida’s essay on Mallarme entitled “The Double Session.”  There, Gasche looks into the relationship between the text and reflection.  He argues that Derrida’s notion of textual mimesis shows has the manner of a mystical and absentminded kind of consciousness: a “reflection without penetration.”

Gasche’s notion of a “reflection without penetration” is really another name for what is commonly called “absent-mindedness.”

How, according to Gasche, does one, along with the text, become absent-minded?

Is the text, as Derrida might say, always-already absent minded?  And is our manner of reading, always already, absentminded? Through Gasche’s reading of Derrida, I would like to briefly touch on these questions.

To be continued, in tomorrow’s blog…..

The Post-Holocaust Schlemiel (Take 3)

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What happens to the Schlemiel after the Holocaust?

This is a very complicated question.  In one entry, I discussed the end of the schlemiel by way of the story of Menachem Kipinis, a reporter who acted as if he was reporting on the town of Chelm (a real town in Poland, and a fictional town in Jewish folklore). Chelm, as I explained there, is a town of schlemiels.  As the story about Kipinis goes, he, the schlemiel reporter, along with all of the living Jewish members of Chelm, found their end in concentration camps. I suggested, there, that I was here to continue reporting on the schlemiel whose existence now transcends the boundaries of the real or fictional town.

In another entry on the post-Holocaust schlemiel, I noted that, for Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi, the schlemiel lives on in America, but not in Israel, because America has not properly mourned the Holocaust and the end of European Jewry.  It lives on in America as a cultural icon; it lives on in a culture dominated by Simulcura.  Here, in America, after the Holocaust, the schlemiel finds its home in Hollywood.  One need only think of Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Larry David, Seth Rogen, etc to get a sense of what she is getting at.

For Ezrahi, the schlemiel takes part in what she calls “Diasporic privilege.”  This privilege is not restricted to the domain of Hollywood and popular culture; in fact, it is found in high, literary, culture.  Regarding this, Ezrahi notes that the schlemiel is bound to a textual homeland not to a real land such as Israel.  It is a figure of endless discovery not, as in Israel, a figure of historical recovery.  It’s trope is the trope of Diaspora not Homecoming.

In today’s blog, I’d like to suggest another route for the post-Holocaust schlemiel; one mapped out by Nathan Englander in his short story “The Tumblers.”  This route takes us into a scenario where the schlemiel lives on, but as damaged by history.

Ezrahi is correct when she claims that, with books like Roth’s Portnoy’s Compalint (and after 1967), American Jews can no longer think of themselves without thinking of Israel.  Jewish identity has changed radically, she says.  We are no longer, simply, schlemiels.  In fact, the American schlemiel battles, as we see in Portnoy’s Complaint, with the Sabra (I will return to this in another blog entry).

However, Ezrahi is not correct on all accounts.  There is a post-Holocaust schlemiel in America, one she doesn’t recognize, one that has yet to be researched.  As I would like to suggest, Englander, someone who has not survived the Holocaust and is far from its origin, recognizes that an American-Jew can’t look to the schlemiel as his predecessors did.  If at all, the schlemiel takes on a new shade.

Englander’s story appears in the book For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.

“The Tumblers” takes place in Chelm at the beginning of the Holocaust:

“Who would have thought that a war of such proportion would bother to turn its fury against the fools of Chelm?”

First off, we learn of the main character, Mendl, who descends from the legendary “Gronam the Ox.”   He inherits Chelm and he carries on this legacy which, as the story goes on, changes.

Before the big changes happen, we learn that “Gronam’s logic was still employed when the invaders built the walls around the corner of the city, creating the Ghetto of Chelm”(28).

This schlemiel logic was used to make light of the difficult things: “they called their aches “mother’s milk,” the darkness became “freedom”; filth they referred to as “hope”(28).  This is the logic of the faithful simpelton (the tam) – who as Rabbi Nachman of Breslav – in his stories – taught is the schlemiel.

However, there is a limit to their substitutions and that limit is death: “It was only death that they could not rename, for they had nothing to put in its place. This is when they become sad and felt their hunger and when some began to lose their faith in God”(28).

At this moment, the narrator tells us that “This is when the Mahmir Rebbe, the most pious of them all, sent Mendel outside the walls”(28).

Mendel, although a schlemiel, goes out to learn what is going on.   We witness how Mendel filters much of what he knows through the mind of a schlemiel.  He struggles with what he sees; none of it makes sense.  When he meets up with an orphan friend named Yocheved, she tells him of how she and he will run away to a farm and eat duck.  Like any schlemiel, he dreams his hunger away.

However, he loses his innocence and much of his dream logic when he sees Yocheved killed by a bullet. The description of her death, as seen through his eyes, is a measure of his incomprehension and his new, liminal sense of existence.  As the narrator points out, Yocheved would not have died had she not been startled by the beating of her uncle.  Her death, both real and represented, is mixed with aesthetics, shock, and religious confusion.

The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest gril might wear.  Yocheved touched a finger to her throat and turned her gaze toward the sky, wondering from where such a strange gift had come. Only Mendel looked back at the sound of the shot: the other had learned the lessons of Sodom. (35)

Mendel is damaged by this memory.  He has seen death.  But he moves on and doesn’t give up hope.

His Rabbi tells him and his group of Hasidim to shave off their beards and to dress like they are secular people.  They all manage to escape and stumble upon a circus train by way of passages built by way of schlemiel logic.

This leads them to the next game they must play.  They are taken to be acrobats by the other circus performs in a train.  They take them for such performers because of their thin, Jewish bodies.  Now, to survive, they must act “as if” they are acrobats.

The rest of the ride to their first performance, Mendel learns how to do a few acts from the other performers on the train and he relays them to his fellow schlemiels.

They learn them as best they can, but when the moment of truth comes, and they have to perform before an audience of high officials, they fail.

However, their failure saves them, since the audience takes them to be acting “as if” they are Jews who “tumble” all over each other.

What bothers Mendel most about all of this is that the world they are performing for – the world the circus performers are performing for – is “efficient” and “orderly” in a violent sense.   In Chelm, where the order was loose and playful, there was no such violence.

Moreover, Mendel realizes that to be ordered, as a performer, one must act as if he or she is something when he or she is not.  He notices that the art of the circus performers is based on a forced kind of duplicity.

At the end of the story, he puts his hands up.  Unlike other schlemiels, the narrator notes that Mendel’s hands are not soft and humble, they are “cracked and bloodless, gnarled and intrusive”(54). These are the hands of a post-Holocaust schlemiel.

Englander ends his story by reminding us that Mendel’s hands, the hands of this accidental entertainer, are different from the hands that have died in the Holocaust:

But there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out of the ghettos; no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks of boxcar floors; no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach out from chimneys into ash-clouded skies. (55)

As a reader, we now know that we cannot think of the schlemiel without thinking of the Holocaust.  This is the novelty that Englander wants us to come to terms with.  This isn’t a Hollywood Schlemiel and it isn’t a schlemiel whose homeland is the text, as Ezrahi claims with so many other schlemiels.

Rather, Englander teaches us that we American-Jews who live in the shadow of the Holocaust can no longer think of the schlemiel in the same way; regardless, he knows that the schlemiel, Mendel, lives on.  But, as Englander shows us through his creative fiction, he lives on in shame.

His irony – the irony of the schlemiel – is no longer fictional; it is historical.

Minimalizations or Schlemiel Revelations ((Snap))

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The other day I had what Walter Benjamin might call a “profane illumination” of minimization.

I read (or rather ‘saw”) an article, which appeared on the demilked website, on the New York Based artist Danny Evans.  It addressed a series of photos in which Evans looked to portray the stars as (or photo-morph the stars into) “ordinary people.”  I call this an act of miniaturization as it makes stars, larger than life beings, small.   It makes cultural heroes into schlemiels.  This act creates what Walter Benjamin would call a “double-image.”  In these images we see stars who are not stars.  And this creates a kind of schlemiel-effect.

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Hollywood Stars live the dream while schlemiels dream the dream.  These images put both together by what I would call a miniaturization technique.

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The photoshopped images of Pitt and Jolie or West and Kardasian wake us from the dream, so to speak, by showing us “our” dream.  To be sure, the way of miniaturization is the way of the schlemiel.  They may dream big but they are small.  Underlying all of this is the fact that a schlemiel is really a simpleton – a schlemiel is an ordinary person.

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But these “double images” state something a little more complicated.  Its not that Jay Z, Johnny Depp, et al thought that they were stars when they really weren’t (which is what these photos seem to be betraying).  Rather, the joke is on us.  Perhaps it is our dreams that don’t match up with reality and those dreams – the dreams of America – are the stars.  Perhaps our schlemieldom consists in our desire for stardom and to believe we can be like them, larger than life, when we are all just ordinary people.

Perhaps this is what Walter Benjamin was thinking when he realized, in his Vestibule dream, that in Goethe’s house (the house of a literary and cultural hero), he was a schlemiel.  His dream, a double image of sorts, was a miniaturization.   And not only did he know it, he lived with it.   Can we live with miniaturization? Can we live with being schlemiels?  When we chuckle at these photos, are we laughing at them or ourselves?

 

Destroying Toys With Jacques Derrida and Charles Baudelaire

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In “The Philosophy of Toys,” Baudelaire writes of how the “overriding desire” of children is to destroy their toys so as to get at the soul of each toy:

The overriding desire of most children is to get and see the soul of their toys, some at the end of a period of use, others straightaway.  It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends the length of life of a toy.  I don’t find it in me to blame this infantile mania; it is a first metaphysical tendency.  When this desire is implanted itself in the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength.  The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it bumps it against walls, throws it on the ground….

But in the midst of destruction, Baudelaire tells us that there emerges a question:

But where is the soul?  This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom.

Contrast this to the celebrated French Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s portrayal of his “overriding desire” – in his book The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud to Beyond.  It brings him into contact with toys which he, like Baudelaire’s child, destroys:

In effect I believe that the idea imposes itself, this is indeed the word, in any event imposes itself upon me and I want it (want it horribly, flight, no, to enclose myself in a book project, to deploy all possible ruses and a maximum of consciousness, intelligence…while remaining…enclosed in this puerile (and masculine) enclosure of naivete, like a little boy in a playpen, with his construction toys.  That I spend the clearest part of my time taking them to pieces and throwing them overboard changes nothing essential in the matter.  I would still like to be admired and loved, to be sent back a good image of my facility for destruction and for throwing far away from me these rattles and pieces of tinkertoy), finally you will tell me why I still want all this.

Derrida’s destruction of toys is different from Baudelaire’s child.  He destroys them because he wants to be loved in “your” absence.  This “you,” in this passage, sounds like his mother.  He relates to her absence, to his desire for her, by destroying toys.  And he wants this as his image.  He wants “to be sent back a good image of my facility for destruction and throwing far away from me these rattles and pieces of tinkertoy.”

He says that he destroys toys for her “in order to prepare in your absence what I will give you on your return, at the end of time. What is it?”

Yes, indeed, what is it?  What will he give the absent mother when she returns?  It seems as if he has destroyed all of the toys she has given him.

What could this imply?  Is the destruction of the toy-gift a destruction of that which distracts the child for the mother’s absence?  And, on the contrary, wouldn’t the destruction of the toy do the opposite?

Instead of preparing the child for the mother’s absence, the destruction of the toy would expose the child to the mother’s absence.  And when I hear Derrida ask, regarding what gift he will give her upon her “return at the end of time,” I cannot help but hear a man-child’s impotent rage.

It seems as if Derrida is being very sarcastic and angry here.  Instead of Baudelaire’s child who sinks into melancholy and gloom, Derrida-as-man-child becomes mad.

Juxtapose this Derrida to the Derrida who celebrates play, the Derrida who plays with texts as if they were toys, and what you might find is the other – less playful – side of deconstruction.  Madness, it seems, is the remainder of this exercise in toy destruction since it is the mother, after all, who gives Derrida the toys to play with in her absence.  And now there is nothing – that is, there is no toy – that can distract him from her “betrayal.”

Derrida is, on the one hand, like the shocked child that Baudelaire sees as exemplary of the Absolute Comic.  But, unlike her, he is not in a stupor.  Derrida is mad.  He knows he has been duped.  And we are reminded of this by the fact that he has broken all of his toys and thrown them outside of his playpen.

And, although this seems different from the melancholy and gloom that Baudelaire refers to in the wake of discovering that the toy has no soul (that the soul is absent), the fact of the matter is that Derrida has ejected broken toy fragments away from him.  Nonetheless, they lay around his crib like melancholic ruins.  What he wants “back” (in return for his destruction) is an image of himself as a toy destroyer.  It is, what I noted in relation to Benjamin, a souvenir of sorts.

This is part and parcel of the man-child’s “overriding desire.”

I’ll close this blog entry with a 1935 Walt Disney Animation entitled “Broken Toys.”

After the “YouTubeLoop,” What is the Comic Legacy of Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen?

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In yesterday’s post, I made a brief reading of the recent 44 minute video of Woody Allen “stammering” over the span of his career.   The picture I used as a thumbnail for the blog post came from the beginning of Woody Allen’s film Bananas. The reason I chose this image was because it nicely illustrated the mechanistic-slash-comic aspect of the video; in addition, it also illustrated what Henri Bergson believed was the essence of the comic: mechanical repetition. For Bergson, we laugh at the Jack-in-the-Box, or any mechanical repitition, because it is a caricature of life and freedom or what he called élan vital.  Like many in his time, Bergson’s theory is based on an organicist model or what the German’s called Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy). The greatest challenges to life philosophy can be found in meaningless, mechanical habits.  For thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche or Georges Bataille, the source of these mechanical habits was the growing mechanization of society – a society in which everything meaningful or progressive had “utility.”  For this reason, both Nietzsche and Bataille pursued a “vitalism” which looked to act without any meaningful end.  Life, as they understood it, was excessive.  For us to put a determined end on existence, by way of work, mechanism, and habits was, in effect, to say “no” to life.  Saying “yes” to life would be to affirm what Maurice Blanchot would call “un-working.”  Saying yes to life, for Bergson, would be equivalent to saying yes to elan vital and no to the mechanical gesture. To be sure, filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin, who lived in and around the time Nietzsche, Bergson, and Bataille lived and wrote on vitalism, knew that the greatest threat to vitalism and élan vital was posed by technology.    America, with its concept of the assembly line and mechanical mass production, became the focal point for many Europeans (including Nietzsche, Batialle, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and many others) of what is to come; namely, an existence in which the individual is lost in (and to) the machine. And this is the point: life was at stake – life embodied in the individual (the subject) and his/or her freedom. We see this tension between life and the machine comically elaborated in both Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) and in Woody Allen’s repetition of key scenes of this film (with, of course, some variation) in Bananas (1971): Here is Chaplin’s film: As you can see, Chaplin is the subject of the machine.  However, his comic gesturing (and the absurd nature of the machine – a toy of sorts – he is subject to) make him distinct from the machine.  Both his gestures and the absurd nature of the machine give him some kind of agency. Here’s Allen’s film, Bananas: This film does something nearly identical to Modern Times.  The machine and Allen’s gestural responses to it give Allen agency.   As one can see, Allen believes that such responses are still affective and meaningful. Although 35 years and major advances in technology and history separate them, both of these clips communicate the same message about comedy and its challenge to mechanization.  For both, one mechanism seems to be defeating another and élan vital triumphs (comically). It must be noted that, for many thinkers and film critics of the early 20th century, the source of this scenario (of comedy versus the mechanical), which Allen repeats, is Charlie Chaplin. In his book Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars, Tyrus Miller notes that Andre Bazin, the famous French Film critic, wrote a seminal essay in 1948 about Chaplin claiming that Chaplin’s comedy was a means of ‘brushing aside danger’.  Miller goes on to note that Bazin sees Chaplin’s power as the power of “mimicry” which acts by “reabsorbing time and space”(51).  What he means by this is that Chaplin’s comedy wins time and space back for organic humanity and beats the machine at its own game.  Bazin bases his advancement of mimicry on the work of the surrealist Roger Caillois who claimed that insects, like humans, imitate the environment in order to protect themselves from being killed. Miller reads this in terms of the medium of film: Supplementing Bazin’s claim that time reabsorbs space, then, we might say that Chaplin’s organic body becomes a mimetic extension of cinematic technology, which breaks down movement into constitutive fragments, discarding some while isolating others.  Having incorporated the technical principle of montage into his physical movements, Chaplin is able to mirror it back to the camera in embodied form. (52). Sounding much like Walter Benjamin, Miller argues that Chaplin becomes the “very allegory of cinema in its inaugural phase and the changes in experience it will precipitate”(52). The self survives as a “minimal self: as much technical as organic, and held together by the stiffening bonds of laughter”(52). This presupposes that there is a community between the comedian and the audience and that if we don’t have comedians who can mimic the damage wrought by technology – that is, if we don’t have comedy to laugh at, our agency and selfhood will be diminished to such an extent that instead of a minimal self, there will be no self. It’s fascinating to note that Theodor Adorno also suggests this call for comedy and the minimal self in his book Minima Moralia.   Three decades following Adorno’s plea for the minimal self, comedy and the minimal self are evoked by Jean-Luc Nancy in an essay on Baudelaire in his book The Birth of Presence.  But, as I will show in future blogs, Nancy likens laughter to an explosion.  But the question is this: what does it explode?  Does post-modern laughter – for lack of a better word – explode the machine or the person?  If the latter, then we can surmise that Nancy thinks we can no longer protect ourselves from the machine and might as well celebrate nihilism. Regardless of Nancy’s take on laughter, Allen seems to be more on the side of Chaplin.  He has an optimistic view of comedy and sees it as a “defense” against technology and empty, mechanical repetition. In yesterdays video, however, I wondered about the meaning of the mechanically reproduced stammering which has become a micro-stammering of sorts (concentrated into 44 minutes). Did that video testifiy to the obliteration of the self and absorption into the medium or something else?  How, in fact, do we understand ourselves and one of our greatest defenses (comedy) by way of being looped, re-looped and morphed by new technology?  Has Allen’s stammer exploded and been emptied of all its human (organic) content?  Does such a video evince a subject who is powerless and “defenseless” against the ever expanding field of technology (with all its information and audio and video “flows” and “feeds”)? How does comedy and how do “we” – who are “in the network,” who come after Chaplin and Allen’s comic parody of technology and who now come after the “YouTube-loop” of Woody Allen…stammering – “live on?”  

Woody Allen and his Jack-in-the-Box-Stammer (x1000)

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Last week, The Huffington Post ran a 44 minute clip of Woody Allen stammering.  The clip puts together stammers that span Allen’s career.

When I saw it, the first thing that came to my mind was the Jewish-French philosopher Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter and, in particular, his words on the Jack-in-the-Box:

As children we have played with the little man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again.  Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher.  Crush him beneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying….Now let us think of a spring that is rather of a moral type, an idea that is first expressed, then repressed, and the expressed again; a stream of words that bursts forth, is check, and keeps starting afresh.  Once more we have the vision of one stubborn force, counteracted by another, equally pertinacious (35).

For Bergson, a recurring force is comic because it is mechanical and repeats itself – unlike real life (élan vital).  Real people don’t “naturally” stammer like Woody Allen:

The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself.  Whenver there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect a mechanism at work behind the living…The deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter (17)

So, what we have here is not simply a stammer but a concentrated one.  But is this mechanical repetition of a mechanical repetition laughable?  Does the clip take the “surprise” out of humor?  Is Woody Allen’s stammer like a “jack-in-the-box” or does this video destroy the toy-slash-stammer?

That, my dear Watson, is the question.

The Schlemiel and Horror, or Zero Mostel on the Muppet Show

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Zero Mostel z”l (1915-1977), in this brilliant segment from a 1977 episode of the Muppet Show, laughs at the Horror genre (or I would argue, getting spooked by crisis theory). What better example do we have of the laugh that laughs at the (satanic) laugh (or smile)?

This is, as my father’s friend David Kaplan z’l, used to say: “Top notch!”

Zero Mostel was one of the greatest stars in the history of Yiddish theater and performance!  He moved hundreds of thousands of people to laughter and tears.  Mostel was certainly a (perhaps ‘the’?) King of Comedy.   He was a real schlemiel whose performances show us how impassioned physical comedy – though caught up in schlemiel dreams – can trump fantasies of terror and catastrophe.  The fantasies he plays with are the fantasies of fear, terror, and transgression; the fantasies that Baudelaire and Poe found so titillating.

By performing 1,001 terrors, filtered through all his “wide eyed” gestures, Mostel caricatures horror, fear, and spirit possession in a matter of minutes.

Instead of tricking us into being horrified, as Baudelaire believed the “Absolute Comic” should, Mostel tricks horror into being ridiculous.  And he does it in the best place one can to placate horror with comedy: The Muppet Show.

Horror is equivalent to formless Muppet dolls attacking Zero Mostel and driving him Mad.

Does Zero Mostel tear us from fear? Does he defeat it?  Or do Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire have the last word?

The Trick is on the Trickster or Comic Self-Destruction: Traumatized Children and A Ruined Old Clown named Charles Baudelaire

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Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin knew very well of the trickster.  To be sure, they saw themselves as tricksters who, in doing their comic tricks, looked to destroy something and find something else (something new) in the midst of ruin.  By way of shock, they both believed they could arrive at some kind of “hidden” knowledge.  What happens, however, when the trickster is tricked?  What happens when the trickser is the butt of the joke?

As I pointed out in yesterday’s blog, Charles Baudelaire, in his “Essay on Laughter” turned to the horrific moment of a child’s shock at the loss of her innocence.  In the ETA Hoffman short story “Daucus Carota, the King of the Carrots” Baudealire found this moment to be an illustration of the Absolute Comic.   Before he gets to this shocking moment, he intentionally takes on the role of a children’s storyteller.

Look at all those scarlet figures, like a regiment of English soldiers, with enormous green plumes on their heads, like carriage footmen, going through a series of marvelous tricks and capers on their little horses!  The whole thing is carried out with astonishing agility.  The adroitness and ease with which the fall on their heads is assisted by their heads being bigger and heavier than the rest of their bodies, like toy soldiers…(163)

This delightful narration shifts and becomes dark.  Baudelaire’s voice changes.

The unfortunate young girl, obsessed with dreams of grandeur, is fascinated by this display of military might. But an army on parade is one thing; how different an army in barracks, refurbishing its harms, polishing its equipment, or worse, still, ignobally snoring on its dirty, stinking camp-beds!  That is the reverse of the medal; the rest was but a magic trick, an apparatuses of seduction.

Baudelaire notes that the girl’s father, a magician (“a man well-versed in sorcery”), tricks his daughter and robs her of her childish innocence.

Then it is the that the poor dreaming girl sees all this mass of red and green soldiery in its appalling undress, wallowing and snoring…In its night-cap all that military magnificence is nothing more than a putrid swamp.

Baudelaire, no doubt, sees himself as a Satanic magician, much like the father in the story.   He delights in tricking his reader (his child) into thinking they get one side of the coin and then he flips it.  This trick, for Baudelaire, is at the core of the Absolute Comic.

As I pointed out, Baudelaire in his May 13, 1856 journal noted that he will have “conquered solitude” when he has inspired “universal horror and disgust.”  To be sure, this is the job of the magician-slash-writer who can flip the coin and shock his readers.  In other words, Baudelaire saw his task as destructive and magical.

As we noted yesterday, Baudelaire identified with Poe’s destructive spirit insofar as he saw in Poe’s destructive drive a vitality that was repressed by civility.  Baudelaire turned this destructive drive on his view of children and fools.  Moreover, I would like to suggest that this was done in an experimental manner and, as I noted in a previous entry, this act of Spleen was aimed at producing a souvenir.  In other words, the magic of Baudeliare was to destroy something yet to cling to what remains.

Notice that for Baudelaire, the “coin” is still there.  It is just turned over.  Baudelaire doesn’t destroy the coin (that is, the child).  She remains but as a damaged child.  And this shock, according to Baudelaire, illustrated the essence of laughter.

The poet, in other words, is a Satanic kind of trickster.  He fools the reader into seeing something he or she does not want to see.  Yet, the revelation of what he or she doesn’t want to see gives the reader some kind of secret knowledge that can only be garnered through destruction.

In my readings of Benjamin, we have seen that this art can also be turned against oneself.     Indeed, Benjamin, in seeing himself as a schlemiel, as duped, traveled down the same road as Baudelaire.  For Benjamin, the trickster is tricked.

Baudelaire understood this lesson very well.  It marks the dark side of the magician who is not simply to be seen as a Satanic devilish poet who lives on vitality.  Indeed, that vitality is often weak.   And the solitude that Baudelaire wished to “conquer” is, to be sure, solitary and pathetic.

Destruction has a negative effect that, for some strange reason, Baudelaire and Benjamin were attracted to as artists.  Solitude has its price.  And in the modern world, the comic – though found everywhere – has no place.

Baudelaire’s prose pieces finely illustrate this.  Today, I will look at “The Old Clown.”

This prose piece, in Paris Spleen, is autobiographical and it teaches us a lesson about the Satanic comedian who is, in essence, a clown.

Underlying the piece is a question: what would it mean to spend one’s life as a clown?  What would happen if, instead of producing vitality, the clown produced nothing?  This is the dark side of Baudelaire’s venture and we see it in this prose piece.  Perhaps the “old clown” has “conquered solitude” by, in his very existence, inspiring “universal horror.”

To emphasize vitality and the end of vitality, Baudelaire starts off the piece with a major emphasis on the life of the carnival:

Holiday crowds swarmed, sprawled, and frolicked everywhere.  It was one of those gala days that all the clowns, jugglers, animal trainers, and ambulant hucksters count on, long in advance, to make up for the lean seasons of the year (25).

Baudelaire tells us that on these days people “forget everything” and they “become like children.”

Baudelaire then goes on to give a fantastic and exciting description of the carnival: “There was a mixture of cries, crashing brass, and exploding fireworks…and dancers, as lovely as fairies or princesses, leaped and pirouetted with the lantern light sparkling their skirts….There was nothing but light, dust, shouts, tumult”(25).

But then, in a Poe-like or Hoffman-like moment, the narrator sees the “old clown” and the shock it sends throughout him was uncanny:

Everywhere joy, money-making, debauchery; everywhere the assurance of tomorrow’s daily bread; everywhere frenetic outbursts of vitality.  Here absolute misery, and a misery made all the more horrible by being tricked out in comic rags, whose motely contrast was due more to necessity than to art.  He was not laughing, the poor wretch!…He was mute and motionaless.  He had given up, he had abdicated.  His fate was sealed. (26)

The narrator then describes his own breakdown at the sight of the clown.  He, the recipient of the sad joke or “trick” of reality, doesn’t know what to do:

I felt the terrible hand of hysteria grip my throat, I felt rebellious tears that would not fall, blurring my sight.  What was I to do?

Instead of talking to him or asking him questions, he decides to leave some charity.  He felt that compassion would redeem him.  However, before he can do this “a sudden surge of the crowd, caused by I know not what disturbance, swept me away from him.”

It is the crowd that robs him of his opportunity to give charity.  But now, as he looks back at the old clown, he can reflect on himself.  He sees an emblem of himself in the clown; he sees (or rather creates) what Walter Benjamin would call a souvenir:

I have just seen the prototype of the old writer who has been the brilliant entertainer of the generation he has outlived; the old poet without friends, without family, without children, degraded by poverty and the ingratitude of the public, and to whose booth the fickle world no longer cares to come! (27)

It’s fascinating how for Baudelaire the destruction of innocence and joy is “magical.”  To be sure, he was fascinated with his own failure and with the destruction of happiness in children.  This piece, though tragic to us, fits into what Baudelaire calls the Absolute Comic.  But here he is the butt of the joke.  He, the writer, is a joke.  He is an “old clown.”   He, the entertainer of children, the child who never grew up, is a joke.

We can have no doubt that Walter Benjamin was very moved by Baudelaire’s “souvenir.”  It is echoed in his own vision of himself as a Schlemiel.  In his own s(c)h(l)ocking discovery, Benjamin, like Baudelaire, was able to retain a souvenir out of his own comic, self-destruction.

Baudelaire, Children, and Horror (Take 1)

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As can be seen from many of my previous posts, I have been addressing the work of Charles Baudelaire on laughter and the comic. The reason I have spent so much time on this is because I have been attempting to understand Walter Benjamin’s reading of (and identification with) the comic (in general) and the schlemiel (in particular). To be sure, Benjamin had great interest in Baudelaire’s approach to the comic and, something we have not yet explored, children. Moreover, he was also interested in the comic as it appeared in Franz Kafka’s work.

Jeffrey Mehlman, in his book Walter Benjamin for Children, correctly notes that Baudelaire and Kafka were “nodal” points for Benjamin. This insight can be drawn from Gershom Scholem’s reflections on Benjamin which clearly show that Benjamin was preoccupied with two projects: one with Kafka and the other with Baudelaire and the Arcades Project. Mehlman claims that a close reading of Benjamin’s radio plays for children, which were written between 1929 and 1933 in Germany, can bridge the gap between the Kafka and Baudelaire projects.

Mehlman uses an approach influenced by psychoanalysis to do this. While Mehlman deserves much credit for his bringing these radio plays to the attention of English speaking critics and for his attempt to relate this work to Benjamin’s academic work, his reflections are preliminary. His book has a total of 97 pages and this makes sense since he moves from idea to idea at a very quick pace. Nonetheless, his work is valuable and it provides many entry points for this blog’s (and my book’s) investigation into Benjamin’s preoccupation with the man-child (the schlemiel).

Mehlman addresses the daemonic in his book in relation to Benjamin but not in relation to Baudelaire.  To be sure, it was from Baudelaire that Benjamin became intensely interested in the daemonic.  Mehlman’s reading of the daemonic in Benjamin is worth consideration – and we will do so in another post – but it still overlooks a few key links in Baudelaire.   In addition, Mehlman doesn’t mention any of Baudelaire’s reflections on children or on toys. These gaps need to be addressed before Mehlman or anyone tries to bridge the gap between Kafka and Baudelaire (Benjamin’s two final projects).

I have been dealing with this issue by giving an in-depth reading of the Daemonic in Baudelaire and its relationship to laughter. Furthermore, I have shown how it works into Benjamin’s reflections on himself and also Kafka (by way of the Shuvalkin Parable – which Mehlman reads psychoanalytically).

I’d like to continue along this thread. By doing so, we can better understand Benjamin’s conflict with childhood in general and his own childhood in particular. In addition, I think it is imperative for us to approach Benjamin’s reading of Kafka in light of these reflections. Since Benjamin’s readings of Kafka either draw on or reject Baudelaire’s approaches to humor and children.

To this end, I’d like to begin with a quote from Baudealire’s journals about art and horror and relate these reflections to his reflection on children and laughter.

Baudelaire was very interested in horror. To be sure, he imported the work of the master of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, into France by way of translation. Moreover, he introduced Poe to a French audience in his celebrated essay “Edgar Allen Poe: His Life and Works.”

In the essay, Baudelaire shows his utter fascination with Poe’s work. Baudelaire gives a detailed description of the terror and excitement the writer and the reader upon writing and reading horror:

The very fervor with which he hurls himself into the grotesque for love of the grotesque and the horrible for love the horrible I regard as proofs of the sincerity of his work and the intimate accord between the man and the poet. I have already noticed in several men that such a fervor is often the result of a vast store of unused vital energy…The supernatural rapture which man can feel at the sight of his own blood flowing, those sudden, needless spasms of movement, those piercing cries uttered without the mind’s having issued any orders to the throat…As he breathes the attenuated ether of this world the reader may feel that vague distress of the mind, that fear on the brink of tears, that anguish of the heart which dwell in strange immensities. But admiration is the dominant emotion, and moreover the writer’s art is great! (The Painter of Modern Life, 90-91)

In a journal entry dated May 13, 1856, Baudelaire writes a shocking passage which echoes these sentiments:

A man goes pistol-shooting, accompanied by his wife. He sets up a doll and says to his wife: “I shall imagine that this is you” He closes his eyes and shatters the doll. Then he says, as he kisses his companion’s hand, “Dear angel, let me thank you for my skill!”

Immediately following this passage, Baudelaire discovers his task as an artist: “When I have inspired universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered solitude.”

Who inspires this tendency to horror? Baudeliare, in the same entry, describes his style in terms of Poe:

STYLE: The eternal touch, eternal and cosmopolite. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.

The last pair, Rabbe and Poe, is telling when juxtaposed the other two pairs, since Alphonse Rabbe is most well known for his Album d’un Pessimiste which pays homage to pessimism and nihilism. The other two pairs pay homage to culture, philosophy, and religion. The last pair, however, speak to the task of art which is, for Baudelaire, to “conquer solitude” by way of inspiring “universal horror and disgust.”

These reflections on Poe and horror shed an interesting light on Badeliare’s prose pieces on children, toys, and laughter.

To take one example, and I will provide others in our next blogs, Baudelaire when writing on the “Absolute comic,” claims that the European Edgar Allen Poe – namely, ETA Hoffmann – is the best illustration of the Absolute Comic. And the exemplary Hoffmann story that Baudelaire chooses to cite and discuss deals with the horror of a child.

I will end this blog entry with Baudelaire’s intricate description of the story in his “Essay on Laughter.” Notice how Baudelaire’s tone changes when he tells the story: he becomes a storyteller telling stories to children:

In the story entitled Daucus Carota, the King of the Carrots…no sight could be more beautiful than the arrival of the great company of the Carrots in the farmyard of the betrothed maiden’s home. Look at all those scarlet figures, like a regiment of English soldiers, with enormous green plumes on their heads, like carriage footmen, going through a series of marvelous tricks and capers on their little horses! The whole thing is carried out with astonishing agility. The adroitness and ease with which the fall on their heads is assisted by their heads being bigger and heavier than the rest of their bodies, like toy soldiers…The unfortunate young girl, obsessed with dreams of grandeur, is fascinated by this display of military might. But an army on parade is one thing; how different an army in barracks, refurbishing its harms, polishing its equipment, or worse, still, ignobally snoring on its dirty, stinking camp-beds! That is the reverse of the medal; the rest was but a magic trick, an apparatuses of seduction. (163)

The horror comes when her father, “a wise man versed in sorcery,” lifts the flap of the tent to shock her: “Then it is the that the poor dreaming girl sees all this mass of red and green soldiery in its appalling undress, wallowing and snoring…In its night-cap all that military magnificence is nothing more than a putrid swamp”(ibid)

Notice that Baudelaire moves from the childish and the innocent to the horrific and associates this shift with the “Absolute comic.” This shift marks two principle poles for Baudelaire which he travels between.  To be sure, the biggest shocks and the greatest comic revelations – for Baudelaire and for Benjamin – involve some kind of childhood damage.

In the next few entries I will look into this relationship of children and toys to horror and terror. These reflections on childhood and horror will help shed light on Benjamin’s vision of himself as a schlemiel and his vision of Kafka.

Guest Post by Hillel Broder: Attend the Gesture, Await Nothing: “On Playful Non-Action in Benjamin’s Kafka Essay”

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What is particularly playful about Kafka’s texts, Walter Benjamin notes in his foundational and lengthy textual memorial to Kafka (1934), is that they foreground the expressionist, dramatic, or gestural element that underlies human behavior and textual representation. What emerges, Benjamin and Kafka seem to suggest, is a playfulness that generates–and is in turn generated by–both a redemptive patience and attentiveness.

This gestural “law of the theater”, as Benjamin terms it, is tucked away in the central conceit of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” in which an ape reports his transformation into an intelligent and articulate being: “I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason”. Acknowledging that humans might also be as imprisoned by their learned behavior, Benjamin then offers a brief gloss of the end sequence of Kafka’s book-length work, The Trial:

Before the end of his trial, K. seems to have an intimation of things. He

suddenly turns to the two gentlemen wearing top hats who have come for him and asks them: “ ‘What theater are you playing at?’ ‘Theater?’ asked one, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a mute struggling to overcome a stubborn disability.” The men do not answer the question, but there is much to indicate that it has hit home.

Indeed, Benjamin is rightly aware that Kafka acknowledged—through a subtle but brilliant literary feat—the theatricality of his own characters by allowing them, as it were,brief insight into their own artifice as fictive play-actors.

While disturbing, such self-illumination of character construction also allows for a certain release—or, even, redemption. While explicating the gesture in Kafka, Benjamin first traces repeated uselessness as experienced by characters in Kafka’s texts, and then relates such purposelessness to what he calls a Taoist usefulness that somehow transcends the binary of useful/useless, finally relating this to what Kafka was “after” in describing the desire to simultaneously “hammer a table together” and “do nothing” at all:

Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful–that is, to the Tao. This is what Kafka was after with his desire to “hammer a table together with painstaking craftsmanship and, at the same time, to do nothing–not in such a way that someone could say ‘Hammering is nothing to him,’ but ‘To him,hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing,’ which would have made the hammering even bolder, more determined, more real, and, if you like,
more insane.” (813)

While in the essay’s context Benjamin is, in fact, citing Franz Rozensweig on the Tao, Benjamin himself uses the general term “Tao”, which appears both in the title of Lao-Tzu’s foundational philosophical work and in the work’s first teaching:
“The tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao. / The name that can be named / is not the eternal Name.” (Trans. Stephen Mitchell), as a gesture that is both full and empty, something and nothing. Those familiar with Taoist philosophy will note that he is actually unknowingly referencing the particular Taoist tenet “wu-wei”, generally translated as “action-non-action”—that is, an action that is active despite its in-action.

While a full treatment and exploration of this Taoist tenet, Kafka’s awareness and employment of Taoism, and its usefulness in exploring the modernist aesthetic of theatrical gestures replete in Kafka’s work is well beyond the scope of this post (it was the subject of my M.A thesis), I do think it important to note the playfulness that underlies such an insight in Kafka’s writings. Whether it is the “childish” relation to the law that Derrida highlights in his reading of Kafka’s great parable “Before the Law” or the childlike “stratagems” of wax and chains that Kafka’s Odysseus employs to mimic silencing an imagined siren scream that was, in Kafka’s reading of the myth, truly silent, dancing about the abyss of signification’s impenetrability was far more critical than striving to reach it. For Kafka, what was at stake was nothing less than a primary Fall—and exile from Paradise:

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return. (87)

-Franz Kafka, Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way

Patience, as seen in the above aphorism excerpted from a series of re-readings of Genesis, is the realization of return: for, paradoxically, impatience to return is the very same affect that generates exile—it is the lack of presence—the absenting from presence—that is the very source of exile. Being present and being in-active—doing something while doing nothing at all—would be the very reversal of such a Fall.

Drawing attention to the gestural, to the surface of both text and character, to the simply expression, is both deeply disorienting, but such attentiveness generates a patience for what is, as opposed to what should, could, or might be. In Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, it is this very attentiveness that will be the slight shift from a pre-messianic to a messianic consciousness:

In Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, the gesture is the “distortion”—it is the center of a parable that resists interpretation, but cultivates an attentiveness that is its very “purpose”. The prototype of such an aesthetic in Kafka’s fiction, according to Benjamin, is  Odradek, the distorted and forgotten wooden creature in his “Cares of the Family Man” that enacts the “form which things assume in oblivion”. Yet, awareness of such distortions, or as Benjamin sees in Kafka, “hunchbacks” is a child’s work. The child’s prayer, Benjamin suggests–

When I kneel upon my stool

And I want to pray,

A hunchbacked man is in the room

And he starts to say:

My dear child, I beg of you,

Pray for the little hunchback too

–demonstrates a child’s uncanny awareness: precisely at the moment that he engages in prayer, the child is surprised by another’s presence lurking in his own quarters: the little hunchback. Yet the hunchback entreats the child, at the moment of the child’s prayer, to “pray for the little hunchback too”—to consider the hunchback in his prayers as well.

Benjamin continues:

So ends the folksong. In his depths, Kafka touches ground which neither “mythical divination” nor “existential theology” supplied him with. It is the ground of folk tradition, German as well as Jewish. Even if Kafka did not pray— and this we do not know—he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called “the natural prayer of the soul”: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.

Regardless of Kafka’s actual prayer practices, his inclusion of those distorted figures lost to oblivion in his writing, his preoccupation towards a total awareness of the “hunched backs” in his texts, be they actual figural distortions in his characters or literary lacunae in his texts—that is, the gestures that, are, also, what Benjamin terms opaque “cloudy spots”—is unmatched by ordinary men. This quality of attentiveness to the problematic loci that Kafka brings to his writing and reveals in his characters is akin to “the natural prayer of the soul”, which is, in profound simplicity, the contemplative exercise of noticing things in their entirety.

For Benjamin, only a child can be attentive in such a critical manner; for Kafka, reading for and writing as gesture can generate such attentiveness, from which, in turn, might emerge a certain critical patience that might, in turn, might allow for even more playfulness in reading:

There is no need to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you. (98)

Of course, knowingly or unknowingly, Kafka echoes the Tao Te Ching here:

Therefore the Master / acts without doing anything / and teaches without saying

anything. / Things arise and she lets them come; / things disappear and she lets

them go. / She has but doesn’t possess, / acts but doesn’t expect. / When her work is done, she forgets it. / That is why it lasts forever. (Trans. Stephen Mitchell, 2)

Hillel Broder is a Graduate Student in the English Program at the CUNY Graduate Center