Kundera, Heidegger, values -- an elaboration

No, Kundera doesn’t specify which values he is referring to, but bear in mind that he was mightily influenced by Heidegger.  His “loss of values” could well be considered a rough equivalent to Heidegger’s “loss of being.”   The “loss of being” was a subject Kundera dwelt upon in some of his novels, e.g., “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”             

Note that Heidegger doesn’t specify what is being lost when he refers to “loss of dasein.”   Only when one attempts to put a name to this loss, to specify what is lost  by example, does it become easy to abandon the idea of the loss and focus on the details of what is lost.  Perhaps that is part of why Heidegger avoided specifics.   And yet the people who applied Heidegger couldn’t avoid specifics.  Inevitably, and ironically, they come across as inferior philosophers. 

What I focused upon I  would call the loss of values in the West -- primarily in the U.S.   But picking up the mantle of the Leftist, I could rephrase what has been going on and describe it as “progress.”  I could say nothing is being lost when we abandon whatever it was the founding fathers had in mind in their constitution and bill of rights.  We should not desire to stay frozen in that 200-years-ago time.  We should rejoice that we have “progressed” beyond it.  The Leftists and I might even agree on what has “changed.”  Then the Leftist could call these changes “progress” and I could call them “loss of being,” or “loss of value.”

Someplace else I assumed that Kundera didn’t emphasize authenticity, but I later thought about what I had written and thought I must be wrong.  How could that be possible?  He was heavily into Heidegger and if he could write novels that assumed a loss of being, then how could he not be aware of the need to seek authenticity?  Or maybe he thought the seeking of authenticity was not possible in this modern world.  Heidegger after all must have been disillusioned to some extent about that possibility after the war.  Heidegger doesn’t specify what this seeking after authenticity involves.  But surely it includes the reification of values.  Is this assertion disqualified unless I can enumerate those values?  I don’t think so.  Heidegger advocated a return to tradition, a harking back to an earlier time when things (values?) were more pristine and more widely embraced.  If he could do that for Germany (even though the Germans ignored him and embraced something else), why can’t I hark back to an earlier time in the U.S. and suggest that it would be good to seek that earlier tradition (at least its values)? 

Now, in regard to the elimination of slavery and the advancement of women, probably most of us would argue that these changes were embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  We declared that all men were created equal and then we denied some of them equality.  This value was right, but the laws guaranteeing that value (as well as our thinking on this matter) was flawed.  While we can applaud ourselves for eventually learning to live up to this value: “all men are created equal,” we have as I argue launched off into a variety of experiments that embody a decline of being (values).  We might agree, for example, that certain behavior is evil, undesirable, anti-social, etc. And yet we experiment in education by refusing to teach our children to avoid evil, antisocial acts, undesirable behavior, etc.  Throughout the West we are producing teenagers who are predatory sociopaths. 

Now lest we get off onto an “all, ”many,” some” debate I merely wish to draw attention to the teaching experiments that go on and on.  The “little red school house” embodied a good deal of “authenticity” in my view, and the social experiments embody a “loss of being.” 

And we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the fellows claiming military honor without deserving it, for did we not graduate these fellows with academic honors of some sort from our modern (not little red) grammar, intermediate, and high schools?  Perhaps we didn’t teach them to be screwed up.  But surely we didn’t teach them not to be.

 

Disintigration of values, British TV, Heidegger

Someone equated values with a “stage of cultural-intellectual development.”  There was also the implication that change, any change, is good. I am not an intellectual Leftist or Anarchist; so I would like to hear is which values we should give up?  In my previous note I observed that military honor may be on its way out.  Lawyers are arguing that the First Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to lie about military honors.  Someone who has never been in the service can claim to have been awarded the Medal of Honor and that’s okay because the First Amendment guarantees this fellows right to say anything he likes. 

Faithfulness in marriage has pretty much seen its day, as a value.  In fact Marriage itself, that imposition of virtue and open-ended commitments, may be on its way out.

Laws against murder have been severely weakened.  You can’t join the EU, for example, if you as a nation put your murderers to death.   Not that most of our states would ever want to join the EU, but many have given up Capital Punishment and those states that retain it, except for Texas, are very slow to put their murderers to death.

Self-Defense is under severe attack as a value.  Many people in the U.S. who defended themselves against rapists, murderers or robbers (one doesn’t know precisely which because they were killed by home owners before they got to do whatever it was they intended) have been sent to prison because their “self-defense” was deemed improper in some way.   Also, Esch-type organizations exist to take the means of self-defense out of the hands of the common citizen.

Self-defense in the larger sense is also under attack.  Many people don’t believe a nation should ever defend itself against attack.  These people aren’t in a majority in any nation as far as I know, but they are very vocal.  Defending one’s nation might involve killing someone and it is better to cease to exist as a nation than do that.

And beyond that, some are now asking the question, “do we deserve to survive as a species”; which turns self-defense on its head.  These people are at the farthest extreme from taking it as a “given” that everyone has the right to exist.  They want evidence that our species, homo sapiens, deserves it.  They imply that we do not.  The British and Canadians may be a bit ahead of us in this – if one can judge by the recent TV Series Battlestar Galactica (I don’t know precisely who is responsible for this, but there was a predominance of British and Canadian actors in it), Doctor Who, and Torchwood.  

Here in the U.S. we have the series “24” in which the hero, bends and breaks all sorts of laws in order to defend the U.S. which is assumed (by the series’ writers), to be worth saving.   We also have a popular series, Dexter, in which a Serial Killer has been conditioned such that he only kills murderers.  I can’t imagine Dexter being picked up in Britain.

In Torchwood the question was frequently raised, is the human race worth saving?  In the last episodes, a series called “The Children of Men” a superior race demands that the world give up one tenth of all its children or the world will be destroyed.  The children are to be used as a source of “pleasure” in the sense of a drug.  Jack Harkness told them he would fight them and not one child would be given to them.  At stake as far as he knew was the life of everyone on earth.  The aliens said very well and sent a poisonous gas into the building where they were.  The side-kick of the bisexual Jack Harkness was killed and Jack mourned aloud that he would renounced his challenge if he could; which in effect would have meant the willing sacrifice (on Jack's part) of one-tenth of all the children if Ianto would be saved.  Later on the last day, as the children are being collected he sacrifices his own grandson in order to.  One life sacrificed for the salvation of millions of children is considered by Jack worth it on Day Five.  But on Day Four he would change his mind if he could.  He would have let the children be taken rather than lose Ianto.

I am not that far into Dr. Who yet, but already the matter of the destruction of the human race is well to the fore.  A group of aliens want to destroy the earth, turn it into radioactive slag and sell it to other aliens who have a use for such slag.  Their contempt for the human race is clear.  And the Human Race, at least that portion of it in White Hall seems largely deserving of destruction.  It is the alien Dr. Who that saves the human race. 

Questions pertaining to the survival of the human race might at first seem distant from the disintegration of values, but if all the values which in the past were admired because they encouraged purity, courage, self-sacrifice, humility, love, loyalty and the like have been discredited and largely abandoned, then the question gains legitimacy:  Is the human race without these values worth saving?   Without them we might with the writers of Battlestar Galactica and Torchwood decide in the negative.

Is all change, even change that destroys our values good?   Surely not.  And it is not too late to return in some sense to our traditions and find the authentication that Heidegger recommended.  We humans have always had it in us to be as evil as the British TV series portray us.  The Bible is replete with descriptions of evil-human-nature.  Recall also Diogenes who believed humans should be virtuous and spent his time exposing corruption in society, and Dante who had levels in hell for the corrupt individuals he knew of.  But recall also that societies dealt with these evil-inclinations through education.  It has long been understood that children who are educated to be virtuous will be more inclined to be virtuous than those who are not. 

But those interested in “change” have abandoned the teaching of virtue and have incorporated a variety of experimental ideas into our education system.  Diogenes could have told them that the result would be fewer virtuous people, and Dante could have told them that they would be filling the levels of hell to abundance with the outcome of their experiments. 

I would recommend to those judges responsible for deciding whether the “right to lie” trumps the value of military honor that they consider what our founding fathers would have thought about this matter.  They fought a revolutionary war for independence and a better way of life.  They thought we in our fledgling states would with the right set of laws be able to adhere more closely to traditional values than the British who wanted to retain us as colonies.   They created a constitution and a Bill of Rights but is there any evidence that they wanted the “right to lie” amongst those rights?  Is there any evidence that they wanted to begin disintegrating the values and rights they considered their inheritance?  I don’t think so.

Heidegger seems to me quite clear about traditional values.  We nations, we ethnicities, have traditional values and if we are to seek authenticity, then we will not neglect returning to them, and then like Diogenes not be afraid to reveal our virtue in action. 

Milan Kundera and the decline of values

On page 49-50 of The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, “The world is [in] the process of the disintegration of values (values handed down from the Middle Ages), a process that stretches over the four centuries of the Modern Era and is their very essence.

“What are man’s possibilities in the face of this process?”

Before getting into those possibilities, consider an article published by Dan Elliot of the Associated Press: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/06/AR2010020601064.html .  He entitles it “Federal law barring lies about medals is tested.”   In 2006 a “Stolen Valor Act” toughened a law that forbids anyone to wear a military medal that was not earned.” 

“Attorneys in Colorado and California are challenging the law on behalf of two men charged . . .”  As I understand it, these men (or their lawyers) are saying they shouldn’t be forced to do the 400 hours of community service and pay a fine of $5,000” because the First Amendment protects their right to lie.  There are screwed-up people everywhere – screwed up in all sorts of ways – and unscrupulous lawyers willing to defend them, but notice in this case that should these lawyers and their deranged clients win, a “value” will be weakened.  We see the “process of the disintegration of values” at work.  Interestingly enough, the defendants complicit in the disintegration of this particular value valued it enough to falsely claim that they possessed it.

Kundera refers to three novels by Hermann Broch: Pasenow, or Romanticism; Esch, or Anarchy; Huguenau, or Realism.  Kundera says that Broch finds three possibilities [in the face of the process of the disintegration of values]:

“The Pasenow Possibility.”  This possibility is to hang onto the values regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.  One gathers that Broch, and probably Kundera, don’t value this possibility as much as Pasenow does.  “Pasenow’s story culminates on his wedding night.  His wife, Elisabeth, does not love him.  He sees nothing ahead but a future of lovelessness.  He lies down beside her without undressing.  That ‘twisted his uniform a little, the coat skirts fell open and revealed the front of his black trousers, but as soon as Joachim noticed, he hastily set things right again and covered the place.  He had drawn up his legs, and so as not to touch the coverlet with his glossy boots, he strained to keep his feet on the chair beside the bed.”

“The Esch Possibility.”  Esch accepts the idea that the traditional values have disintegrated, but surely some new values must be possible and so he searches for some value to believe in passionately. Esch is ready to denounce Nentwig to the police, but upon meeting Nentwig he can’t recall what his complaint was; so instead he denounces Bertrand because he is homosexual. 

“The Huguenau Possibility.”  Huguenau is utterly without values.  “The absence of moral imperatives is his freedom, his deliverance.  There is a deep significance in the fact that it is he who – without the faintest sense of guilt – murders Esch.”

Where shall we put the Attorneys who want their clients to be able to lie about their military honors?   If they are sincere about believing the First Amendment guarantees the rights of their clients to lie about their military honors, perhaps they are in the Esch Possibility.   But if they are just in it to make a buck, they have embraced the Huguenau possibility.

And what of their clients, the defendants who claimed honor they didn’t deserve?  They don’t seem to fit any category.  They are liars to be pitied or ignored.  But their lawyers are participating in the process of disintegration and using them as tools.

Kundera adds two other possibilities to Broch’s three: Kafka’s K who is so devoted to the system that he maintains solidarity with the decision to execute him.  And Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik who gets by by being (or pretending to be) a good-natured fool.

Throughout the four centuries Kundera refers to, the Christian option has maintained its collection of values.  Let us call it a tradition.  Kundera would snort in disgust at that, but I would hasten to point out to him that he accepted the experimental system called Marxism at one time, Marx who called religion the opiate of the masses.  Marxism has largely collapsed, disintegrated to use Kundera’s term.  If Marxism and other experiments collapse, will that not leave the tradition more or less in tact?  Kundera values Heidegger’s parts of Heidegger’s philosophy, but apparently not the part that values authenticity.

           

Bolano's The Skating Rink

Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink was written in 1993 but wasn’t translated into English until 2009. 

There was a murder in this novel, but it would be a mistake to think of The Skating Rink as a murder mystery.  A skating rink has surreptitiously been built on the premises of a deserted mansion, the Palacio Benvingut, in the town of “Z.”  Z is a dismal place with little in it that could be described as beautiful – until Nuria, an ice-skater who has through no fault of her own run afoul of the Ice-Skating bureaucracy.  She is marooned in Z, the omega, seemingly, of Spain. 

But Enric Rosquelles comes to her rescue.  He is short and fat and the casual reader may think it is because he is that he doesn’t seek a romantic relationship with Nuria, but Nuria, and the Skating Rink are Z’s striving toward something beautiful – and Rosquelles is Z’s agent.  The rink, though located in a Kafka-like Castle is beautiful in the midst of the never-to-be-completed stadium.  Rosquelles works with Nuria, becomes her trainer, and strives to enable her to make the Spain’s Olympic team. 

Second in importance after Rosquelles is Remo Moran, a self-made successful businessman.  In addition to a chain of jewelry stores and a restaurant, he owns a Camp Ground.  He too has an interest in Nuria, but his interest is physical.  Though Moran writes novels and ought to be more interested in beauty, he isn’t.  He and Nuria become lovers.  Eventually Rosquelles finds out, but the discovery doesn’t deter him from his dream of maintaining the skating rink in order to prepare Nuria to make the Olympic team.

Moran’s Camp Ground has ongoing significance.  We see it through the eyes of Gaspar Heredia, whom Moran hired to be one of the camp-ground guards.  He falls in love with Caridad who says little but follows the authoritative middle-aged opera singer, Carman, about.   Carmen is given coins as she walks about Z singing arias.  She and Caridad sometimes go to the Palacio Benvingut where they learn of the Skating Rink, something Rosquelles hoped to keep secret until Nuria made the team.  Carmen attempts to blackmail Rosquelles, and is almost immediately murdered – on the ice in the middle of the Skating Rink.

This happens late in the novel and anyone who has spent time reading detective fiction may be excused for thinking this a murder mystery, but it isn’t.  Rosquelles is arrested and Nuria loses her chance to make the team and while Rosquelles is initially accused of the murder he is not prosecuted.  We learn in the last few pages that it was “the Rookie,” one of the bums who hangs out in the camp ground, who killed Carmen, and he doesn’t even know why.  Moran hears the Rookie’s confession, but it isn’t clear that he intends to turn him in. 

We can see the probably-insane Rookie as a force of Z as Z strives toward beauty.  Had the Rookie been cleverer he would have killed Carmen elsewhere, but doing it in the center of the skating rink made a primitive statement.  Surely we see this and aren’t distracted just because the authorities arrest Rosquelles.  The dream is ended.  Nuria suffers loss of her chance to make the Olympic team, but also another loss.  She is offered the opportunity given in the West to any celebrity, to make money doing interviews but also to make money posing nude for a magazine, and she accepts.  Z’s skating rink and skating star collapse at the same time.

Rosquelles is sent to prison for the embezzlement of public funds.  Rosquelles is not presented as a corrupt man.  The skating rink would have paid for itself in seven years if Z’s bureaucracy could see it.  All they saw was that he had become overcome by an ill-defined passion when he used public funds to build the skating rink.  He didn’t steal for reasons of greed which might have told in his favor.  While in prison he makes friends with the warden and together they write a book on Prison reform.  After that, and probably because of that, Rosquelles is released.  He has lost weight, is now trim and tanned and no one in Z recognizes him. 

The novel ends with Rosquelles asking “Was I tempted to visit the Palacio Benvingut?   Well, the simplest answer would be no, or yes.  To tell the truth, I did drive out that way, but that’s all.  There’s a curve in the highway on the way to Y, from which you can see the cove and the palace.  When I got there I braked, turned around and drove back to Z.  What good would it have done me, going there?  I would only have been adding to the sum of pain.  Besides, in winter it’s a sad place.  The stones I remembered as blue were grey.  The paths I remembered as bathed in light were strewn with shadows.  So I braked, made a U-turn and drove back to Z.  I avoided looking in the rearview mirror until I was a safe distance away.  What’s gone is gone, that’s what I say, you have to keep looking ahead . . .”

I’m tempted to see Rosquelles prison experience as cathartic.  He  was willing to sacrifice himself for the Nuria and the Skating Rink.  By the time he gets out of prison Nuria has dwindled to a center-fold and the Palcio Benfingut, despite its ice rink, has once again been abandoned.  Though slimmed-down and better looking, he won’t try to find Nuria.  All that is behind him.  “What’s gone is gone.”  Remo Moran wonders if it isn’t time for him to move away from Z.  The camp-guard Heredia and his girl friend Caridad now have enough money  to leave Z and go to Mexico.  But what of Rosquelles who has “to keep looking ahead”?  Don’t worry about him, Bolano would probably tell us.  He is extremely talented and is sure to find something to do – but it won’t be another quest for beauty.

 

Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (2)

The second half of this “novel” is good, but I had a few problems with it here and there.   Beginning with “Speculative and Science Fiction” he writes several vignettes about U.S writers.   They are clever but not as impressive as when he writes about characters in Argentina or Chile.   He doesn’t have a solid block of U.S. vignettes – as if to indicate that we are all (South and North America) one screwed up entity.  The U.S. writers J.M.S. Hill (who writes science fiction) and Zach Sonderstern who wrote a “Fourth Reich Saga,” the opening pages of which introduce “a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies.” 

But the fourth novel (of the Fourth Reich saga) is entitled The Crystal Cathedral.  Did Bolano know there was an actual Chrystal Cathedral in Orange County California?  Surely, he did for he centers Sonderstern in Los Angeles, but he describes The Crystal Cathedral as being “a story about God, fundamentalist preachers and the ultimate meaning of life.”  Robert Schuller, the founder of the Chrystal (not the spelling used by Bolano’s translator, and presumably Bolano) Cathedral is the very opposite of a fundamentalist preacher.  In fact the fundamentalist preachers, and they are in abundance in Orange County, have been critical of Schuller for being too liberal.  So if Bolano intended something interesting in this allusion, it fell flat – at least for someone who used to live in the very city (Garden Grove) where Schuller.

And to some extent I have the same complaint about his other vignettes about U.S. writers.  His section on “The Aryan Brotherhood” is an example.  The Aryan Brotherhood is a prison gang (in reality and not just in Bolanoity).  The Whites against the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerillas . . . or more recently the Aryans and Mexican Mafia against the Black Guerillas, but names intending to be intimidating.  This gang has little to do with the German or Italian Fascists.  They like invoking the Nazi image in order to scare those that might challenge them, but do they have anything to do with what Hitler believed?   Don’t be too quick to say “racism,” because Hitler wasn’t a racist in U.S. terms.  His greatest enemies were the Russians, who are “white” and therefore acceptable to the Aryan Brotherhood.  Nazi, after all, stands for “National Socialism.”  Hitler believed the Germans and not a “white race” should rule Europe, if not the world.  I’m sure the real Nazis would have shuffled those Aryan Brothers off to the nearest crematorium if they had encountered any of them. 

The concluding vignette on “Carlos Ramirez Hoffman” was further developed in Distant Star, the story of an Allende assassin who (on orders) kills twin girls, one of whom he is in love with, is a fighter pilot who writes poetry in the sky, and is finally killed by a Chilean assassin (also on orders).  I read Distant Star back in 2007 and so don’t have it vividly in mind, but it was written after Nazi Literature in America; so I assume the story fascinated him so much that he sought to develop it further.  It is 25 pages in Nazi Literature in America and 149 pages in Distant Star. 

The relative briefness of the “Carlos Ramirez Hoffman” vignette gives it a different flavor than Distant Star.  I was reminded of the conclusion of Kafka’s The Trial in a way I was not in Distant Star.  But if that was intended, and I am reluctant to accuse Bolano of “not” intending any allusion I think I see, in what sense was Hoffman or (in Distant Star, Carlos Weider) like Kafka’s Joseph K?  Hoffman/Weider both engaged in violent acts in support of a brutal government; so one might say that they didn’t understand the reality of their situation with the proper (or at least ultimate) reality.  They were not guilty in any clear sense.  They acted as agents of a legitimate government.   So that vagueness is perhaps relatable to Joseph K’s crime or sin which is never defined.   Bolano seems to have some sympathy for him.  In Nazi Literature he (Bolano) pleads that Hoffman’s life be spared, but the narrator of Distant Star, while suitably “horrified,” doesn’t plead for Weider’s life.  But Bolano in Nazi Literature seems more an actor in the death of Weider than the narrator does in Distant Star; which made me think of the men in the pork pie hats who came to execute Joseph K.  Someone unidentified determined that Hoffman, Weider, and Joseph K. should be executed, and so they were.

Is Nazi Literature in the Americas truly “a novel”?  Not in any traditional sense, but Bolano is so good we must let him have his way.   After all it must be the writers who write them and not the critics who review them who determine the nature of the “novel.”   But I’m reminded of the poetry of E. E. Cummings and the novels of Kafka here.  Who could write like them?  No one.  I am also reminded of J. R. R. Tolkein who created a whole world of fictitious beings who have taken on a reality that is still with us.  I’m tempted to reread Distant Star, thus getting his stories in their proper order and determine if I still believe what I’ve written here.

Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1)

Rorty in a footnote in his Essays on Heidegger and Others quotes from Byron’s Don Juan, XIII, ii: “Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away;/ A single laugh demolished the right arm / Of his own country; -- seldom since that day / Has Spain had heroes.”

There is no smiling away of German heroism in Heidegger, no “single laugh” in anything I’ve read, but that isn’t true of the Chilean, Roberto Bolano. 

I began Nazi Literature in The Americas wondering what Bolano was up to this time.  He has created a fictitious genre and a series of fictitious poets, novelists and artists, but to what end?  There were Nazis in Chili -- that much is true.  There was even a fondness on the part of many Chileans, indeed many in “the Americas” (Bolano does not restrict himself to Chili) for the Nazis.  But we find no expose – no hint of  the furious malevolence we saw in Emmanuel Faye’s treatment of Heidegger.  In an accumulation of vignettes we often see Bolano “smile.”   His American (largely South and Latin American, but he doesn’t exclude North America) Nazi lovers drift into their affection.  One poet, for example, became a lover of Hitler because Hitler once held her as a baby.  She treasured a photo of that event above everything she owned. 

I don’t mean to imply that Bolano is uniformly humorous – he isn’t uniformly anything.  He seems rather brutal, for example with his  “Silvio Salvatico.”  I noticed before I read the vignette that he was the longest lived of any of Bolano’s “poets” as far as I had read (1901-1994).  Salvatico advocated one outrageous thing after another, and “. . . From 1920 to 1929, in addition to frequenting the literary salons and fashionable cafes, he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems, some of them won municipal and provincial prizes.  From 1930 on, burdened by a disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practiced the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him.  Three titles resulted: Fields of Honor (1936), about semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires; The French Lady (1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers and detectives; and The Eyes of the Assassin (1962), a curious precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties.

“He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.

“His books were never republished.  His manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.”

But “Willy Schurholz” is another matter.  Purportedly raised in the 100% German “Colonia Renacer,” and Willy came to think of his childhood as rather like being in a concentration camp.  Bolano tells us that Willy “. . . had what it takes to fail spectacularly . . .  His first poems combined disconnected sentences and topographic maps of Coloni Renacer.  They were untitled.  They were unintelligible.  Their aim was not to be understood, and certainly not to secure the reader’s complicity.  One critic has suggested that they indicate where to dig for the buried treasure of a lost childhood. . . .”

[Skipping ahead a bit]  “In 1980, with the support of Review of Thought and History, he published his first book.  Fuchler, the editor of the review, wanted to write a preface.  Schurholz refused.  The book is called Geometry, and it sets out countless variations on the theme of a barbed-wire fence crossing an almost empty space, sparsely scattered with apparently unrelated verses.  The fences seen from the air trace precise and delicate lines.  The verses speak – or whisper – of an abstract pain, the sun and headaches.”

[Skipping further ahead]  “In 1985, Schurholz, whose fame had previously been restricted to Chile’s literary and artistic circles, vast as they are, was catapulted to the very summit of notoriety by a group of local North American impresarios.  Commanding a team of excavators, he dug the map of an ideal concentration camp into the Atacama desert: an intricate network which, from the ground, appeared to be an ominous series of straight lines but viewed from a helicopter or an airplane resolved into a graceful set of curves.  The poet himself dispatched the literary component by inscribing the five vowels with a hoe and a mattock at locations scattered arbitrarily over the terrain’s rugged surface.  This performance was soon hailed in Chile as the cultural sensation of the summer.

“The experiment was repeated in the Arizona desert and a wheat field in Colorado, with significant variations.  Schurholz’s eager promoters wanted to find him a light plane so he could draw a concentration camp in the sky, but he refused: his ideal camps were meant to be observed from the sky, but they could only be drawn on earth. . . .”

[Skipping ahead]  “In 1990, to the surprise of his followers, he published a book of children’s stories . . . the children’s stories were scrutinized with disdain and pitilessly dissected.  In his stories . . . Schurholz idealized a childhood that was suspiciously aphasic, amnesic, obedient and silent.  Invisibility seemed to be his aim.  In spite of the critics, the book sold well. . . .”

“Shortly afterwards, amid protests from certain sectors of the left, Schurholz was offered the position of cultural attaché to the Chilean Embassy in Angola, which he accepted.  In Africa he found what he had been looking for: the fitting repository for his soul.  He never returned to Chile.  He spent the rest of his life working as a photographer and as a guide for German tourists.”

COMMENT:  I begin each Bolano novel expecting to dislike it.  Who writes like Bolano?  No one.  He writes nonsense as though he is doing journalism or literary criticism.  And yet I am inevitably surprised to discover that he has created something . . . it would be a disservice (as well as an impossibility) to attempt to reduce what Bolano does to what that something is.  To borrow Heidegger – or perhaps Rorty – one can see Bolano writing of one aspect of Chilean (and American) history thus far.  What we find isn’t an “essence” (Heidegger, by contrast, seems to come close to describing the “dead serious” essence of the German spirit), but something of this history – the naïve attraction of Chileans and others for the Nazis.   Heidegger wouldn’t laugh at this, but we can, and because we (of the Americas) can, perhaps we have given up, or are in the process of giving up our ability to produce heroes.  One thinks of Nietzsche’s “last man.”  Nietzsche, and Heidegger after him, don’t find this “last man” humorous.  But Bolano often does. For Bolano the last man isn’t an untermensch in Nietzschean or Heideggerian terms.  He isn’t subhuman or uninteresting.  Bolano’s poets are uniformly untalented.  There isn’t a Holderlin among them, and the “literary salons,” “fashionable cafes” and literary publications don’t give evidence of caring.  Perhaps we can group all of these Bolanoen characters together and conclude they are “last men,” but Balano would deny that they are uninteresting.  They are worthy of our interest and laughter –  when Bolano describes them to us.

Rorty and Heidegger: Narrative and Essentialism

In his essay, Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens (page 69 of Essays on Heidegger and Others), Richard Rorty writes, “. . . In 1935 Heidegger saw Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s America as ‘metaphysically speaking, the same.’  In 1945 he saw the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as two instances of the same phenomenon.  As Habermas puts it, ‘under the leveling gaze of the philosopher of Being even the extermination of the Jews seems merely an event equivalent to many others.’  Heidegger specializes in rising above the need to calculate relative quantities of human happiness, in taking a larger view.  For him, successful and unsuccessful adventures – Gandhi’s success and Dubcek’s failure, for example – are just surface perturbations, distractions from essence by accidents, hindrances to an understanding of what is really going on.

“Heidegger’s refusal to take much interest in the Holocaust typifies the urge to look beneath or behind the narrative of the West for the essence of the West, the urge which separates the philosophers from the novelists.  Someone dominated by this urge will tell a story only as part of the process of clearing away appearance in order to reveal reality.  Narrative is, for Heidegger, always a second-rate genre – a tempting but dangerous one.  At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger warned against the temptation to confuse ontology with a story which relates beings to other beings.  At the end of his career he takes back his earlier suggestion that what he called ‘the task of thinking’ might be accomplished by narrating the History of Being, by telling a story about how metaphysics and the West exhausted their possibilities.  In 1962 he cautions himself that he must cease to tell stories about metaphysics, must leave metaphysics to itself, if he is ever to undertake this task.

“Despite this suspicion of epic and preference for lyric, the ability to spin a dramatic tale was Heidegger’s greatest gift.  What is most memorable and original in his writings, it seems to me, is the new dialectical pattern he finds in the canonical sequence of Western philosophical texts.  I think that his clue to this pattern was Nietzsche’s interpretation of the attempts at wisdom, contemplation, and imperturbability by the people whom he called ‘the ascetic priests’ as furtive and resentful expressions of those priests’ will to power.”

            COMMENT:  Rorty disagrees with Heidegger’s belief that the West has fallen, or collapsed, or become exhausted.  Earlier, Rorty writes, “Heidegger and, more generally, the kind of post-Heideggerian thinking which refuses to see the West as a continuing adventure, I want to put forward Charles Dickens as a sort of anti-Heidegger.”  I sort of see what Rorty has in mind by using Dickens.  Although I would prefer a more modern example, Dickens’ oeuvre fits the West as Rorty’s “continuing adventure.”

            Heidegger would have enjoyed Battlestar Galactica.  The collapse he envisioned in his philosophy is graphically illustrated.  Technology turns against humanity with a vengeance.  And as humans continue to squabble amongst themselves, we are reminded in each episode, of the small number of humans who remain in the Universe.  Despite that, the Cylons, the robots who “evolved” have more attractive personalities than the humans.  The end of the series is near (as far as I’ve watched) and the number of Cylons has also been reduced.  If I had to choose just one set of beings to save (based upon what the writers of Battlestar Galactica have shown me), I would select the Cylons.  What does about the philosophical beliefs of these writers?

            The Battlestar Galactica writers anthropomorphized Technology, but Heidegger reified it, as he did “The West.”  The West cannot be literally reified.  I know people do, or think that they do, but they create imaginary images that bear no reality.  Someone disagreeing with me could say the West is this and this and this, and go on enumerating whatever it is that he would put in a category he considers “the West,” but then it is no longer a unity.  There is no essence to it.  Why stop with such an enumeration?  Why not go on and list everything that has ever existed?

Is there a definition of “the West” we can all sign up to?  I think of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations at this point.  Would he disagree with what I have written?  He refers to the various civilizations, but if we read what they are, they prominently include “religion,” for example. The Orthodox Civilization was shaped by Orthodox Christianity and the West by Catholic and Protestant Christianity, but is that not the “Narrative” of the West rather than its “Essence”?   Huntington was not interested in establishing essences of the various “civilizations,” only narratives, only where they have brought themselves by the point in time in which he wrote his book. 

Who in America today could read Spengler’s or Heidegger’s narratives of “The West” and recognize themselves or their beliefs?  Which American could read Heidegger and say, “wretched man that I am, who can save me from this narrative of failure and collapse?”   No, we won’t say that.  We may very well say “those people over there have caused lots of trouble.”  If we could only render them inactive we could move ahead smartly and progressively, but we are a long way from failure or collapse.  And Rorty would interject at this point, “and don’t you see?  That is the continuing adventure of The West.”