An Insidious Entrapment

A Woman’s Story and A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux

In an opening smartly reminiscent of the first lines of Camus’ novel The Stranger, the French writer Annie Ernaux begins A Woman’s Story (Une femme), her spare, deeply affecting memoir-novel of her relationship with her late mother, with the simple declaration:

My mother died on Monday 7 April in the old people’s home attached to the hospital at Pontoise, where I had installed her two years previously. The nurse said over the phone: ‘Your mother passed away this morning, after breakfast.’ It was around ten o’clock.

Yet the story she tells in this terse, laconic style, a style she calls écriture plate, is anything but detached, anything but absurd, as she struggles earnestly to see and make sense of her proud, self-sufficient mother, a woman for whom, all her life, she felt a profound ambivalence, a troubling mixture of love, hate, guilt, frustration, and pride. In short it is the story of daughters and mothers everywhere—powerfully, honestly told. 

Having read A Woman’s Story in a single sitting (it is just 92 pages long), I began Ernaux’s novel A Frozen Woman (Femme gelée) that same night and was even more impressed with the story, even more enamored with her style.

In brief, the novel charts Ernaux’s awakening as a teenage girl to the bourgeois realities in store for her as a young woman. Hemmed in at an early age by society’s expectations for her, the unnamed narrator suddenly finds herself a settled, intellectually stifled thirty-year-old woman with a husband and two children, trapped—like a fly in web—in the very life she’d struggled so hard to avoid. It is a poignant, familiar, finally harrowing tale, a twisted Bildungsroman in which, by the end, she can only gape in amazement at the woman she’s become:

"Just on the verge, just. Soon I’ll have one of those lined, pathetic faces that horrify me at the beauty parlor when I see them titled back over the shampooing sink, eyes closed. In how many years? On the verge of sagging cheeks and wrinkles that can no longer be disguised.

 

                                                          Already me, that face."

Peter Adam Nash

Is It A Scandal? An Economic Diversion

The Passions and the Interests, Albert O. Hirschman

The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

Voltaire's Bastards, John Ralston Saul

While nearly everyone is familiar, usually at second or third hand, with Adam Smith's famous justification of self-interest as the most rational way to organize economic life ("It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stock towards the employments which in the ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society," and so forth), fewer readers are aware of this passage, generally ignored by the defenders of free-market capitalism:

"These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. the minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished. To remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention."

I was reminded of this passage in The Wealth of Nations while rereading Albert Hirschman's seminal essay The Passions and the Interests, a rereading prompted by the college-admissions scandal that broke this past week.  The spectacle of wealthy families bribing college coaches, SAT and ACT tutors and anyone else who could advance the chances of their (dull-witted) children gaining admission to America's elite colleges and universities--USC, Georgetown, Yale, etc.--reminded me yet again of how unlikely it is that, despite the optimistic predictions of Montesquieu, Steuart, Smith and other political thinkers of the Enlightenment, human folly will ever by tamed by self-interest.

Hirschman's compact essay relates the history of the idea that human passions--primarily greed and violence--can be redirected into self-interested economic activity.  From Francis Bacon to Adam Smith men who saw in mercantilism an irrational centralization of political and economic power in the hands of absolute monarchs, a compressing of power that resulted, as it must, in constant wars over limited resources, developed what they believed was the antidote: the enlightened, rational, and unregulated pursuit of self-interest.  Adam Smith is the most famous of the proponents of this view, though as the quotation above indicates, he was able to see the moral risks of self-interest more clearly than many of his disciples.

The "inoculation" theory of the social and economic order has never made sense to me. The idea that you encourage individuals to cultivate their worst instincts in a framework that ends up benefiting society as a whole seems as irrational as the Victorian idea that if you have an erotic impulse you either bottle it up or redirect it, usually as violence against dark-skinned people (e.g. Passage to India).  Neither viewpoint places much hope in the possibility of human self-improvement through education, in the potential of a just government to constructively overrule the irrational passions of its citizens, or in the existence of altruistic impulses that might very well be as deeply embedded in human character as greed and vanity.

Adam Smith felt that capitalism was likely to channel our passions into socially constructive modes of economic production, but he also recognized that human material needs are limited, and that most of what industry produces is not needed for survival but instead is a form of personal aggrandizement.  What we end up with under capitalism, what we have always ended up with, are self-interested people who game the system for themselves and who have not the slightest concern for the well-being of others. (Any economic system that could lead a judge--a judge!--to placidly summarize Paul Manafort's life as "blameless" has something wrong with it.)

A cursory reading of history confirms this as a fact, not an ideological pronouncement. One might rationalize this truism (if one is capable of recognizing it as such) by saying something like, "Well, sure, but look at all the good things we have," a view that I think of as the "breaking-a-few-eggs" theory of history. Easy to say if you know you aren't going to be one of the eggs. But why not argue instead that we might have all these good things without breaking any eggs at all? (See below)

It baffles me when the talking heads and editorial writers wring their hands, as they have all week, over the college admissions scandal. (By the way, if you type the word "college" into your search engine the first link to appear will be "college admissions scandal.") Well, what did we expect?  If you set up a system of economics and social life that rewards greed and egotism, how can you be surprised by daily examples of greedy, egotistical behavior? If Masha Gessen were a talking head and offered her view of American higher education, Americans would express shock that such a "radical" perspective was allowed to be aired. Have a look at her article, linked below, and see if her interpretation makes sense.

*** 

That's a picture of Karl Polanyi, whose 1944 book, The Great Transformation has helped me to think more clearly (I hope) about politics, economics, and history.  Contrary to the classical/liberal view that self-regulating markets arose necessarily out of the developing conditions of economic history, Polanyi painstakingly demonstrates that the so-called free market, with its alleged reconciliation of the passions and the interests, was but one alternative, and that many societies have organized production and exchange along social and reciprocal lines, rather than through the deliberate optimization of personal self-interest.  The "great transformation" came when, in the eighteenth century, a particular set of economic and social relations, born in a time of relative peace and described with canonical certitude by Adam Smith and others, became an article of nearly religious faith.  The next time you are relaxing with friends try saying, "the self-regulating capitalist market, far from being the inevitable by-product of economic history, was only one option for organizing production and exchange, and not, as history shows, the best one," and see how quickly you are dismissed as a "socialist" or worse.  Every FOX commentator will tell you that Marx was wrong in seeing communism as the inevitable end of history (as he was), but suggest to them that there is no reason to see the "free market" as any more "inevitable" and you will be called a crackpot or get punched in the nose (e.g. the blowhard Bill O'Reilly on the writings of Robert Reich).

Here's a snippet of Polanyi: 

"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity 'labor power' cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this particular commodity. In disposing of a [person's] labor power the system [the free market] would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes despoiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed." (GT, p. 73)

Human beings are more than their passions and interests.  Remarkable, really, that most economists can't grasp this fact. I suppose every astronomer (as Walt Whitman reminds us) sees human beings as dust, and every cardiologist as a beating heart. Dear Milton Friedman: Communities are more than markets. And culture is more than money. And a good life, as even Adam Smith saw, is more than a totting up of possessions. Dear Lori Loughlin: Why not send your underachieving child to trade school? Better to be an honest electrician than a crooked TV actor or Instagram doyen. Way better.

Speaking of Ms. Lori Loughlin. She wanted her daughter to attend an "elite" university.  Ms. Loughlin and her husband have lots of money and so they did what (I hope) only a very few people with lots of money do--they bought their daughter the credentials she needed to join the elite at an elite university so that, upon graduating (presumably after more bribes and more cheating), she would take her place among the elite (and the rich, it goes without saying).

No one has done more to uncover the pretensions and perversions of elitism in supposedly democratic societies than the Canadian political theorist John Ralston Saul.  Claiming access to what is called "rationality," elites have, since the eighteenth century, dominated society.  Because "rationality" is nothing but a neutral sounding word for ideology, access to reason has become the holy grail of economic and social power in capitalist societies.  Graduate from Harvard or Stanford and you have been baptized into the minuscule population of true elites, and you are henceforth immune from the oversight of the masses: "There is no language available for outsiders who wish to criticize [elites]." How can an ordinary person challenge the policies of a pharmaceutical company, of Exxon/Mobil, of his local cable provider, of the wunderkind Wall Street broker who leveraged his house out from under him?  The junior college graduate, or, worse, one of the thirty-percent of Americans who don't attend college at all, has no place to stand, no voice to raise, no words to address those who tower above him in credentials, in contacts, and in social capital.  This loss of public power is what moves the voiceless to the exercise of private power and violence.  And to the support of demagogues.

Those who attend elite universities belong to a club.  They may be nasty to one another, but, in the end, when it's time for cocktails, Donald Trump (Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) will be more likely to be sitting down with Hillary Clinton (Wellesley) than with you or me.

I pity the poor mentsh who works hard, plays by the rules, saves her pennies for the kids' college, goes into debt, who can't afford expensive tutors, and who would be mortified to learn her son or daughter had cheated on the SAT's or faked athletic credentials.  As one commentator, dismissing the seriousness of the college admissions scandal put it: "This is the way the game is played." It's callous to say so, but, unfortunately, he's right.   

   
George Ovitt (Pie/Pi Day, 2019)

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-i-would-cover-the-college-admissions-scandal-as-a-foreign-correspondent?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_031319&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea018c3f92a404693c1681&user_id=17871469&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily

 

Reimagining (later in life) D.H. Lawrence

Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton, editor

Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer 

"The world is as it is. I am as I am. We don't fit very well." (to Catherine Carswell, May 18, 1924)

He fit not at all, not anywhere.  His life was a dizzying procession through temporary lodgings, perennial poverty, ill-health, and flashes of writing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes not so much. The letters--seven volumes of them--are wonderful, better than the novels, none of which moved me when I first read them in college, but all of which have shown me more as I began to reread them in my eighth decade.  (So much is revealed that was kept hidden when we were young; then I read to understand myself, now I read to understand others). Best are the travel books. Lawrence was a keen observer, and his agility in blending objective observation with personal reflection makes his non-fiction more readable than his oftentimes mawkish stories about lust and love.

Here's Lawrence wandering Italy's ancient and sacred hills:

"But gradually, one after another looming shadowily [sic] under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointy hood." (from Twilight in Italy, 1916)

There's more eroticism in Lawrence's descriptions of nature than in the stormy couplings of Gudrun and Gerald.  And far less melodrama.  From Sons and Lovers onward, Lawrence was given to precise, microscopic examinations of his inner life.  To say he was a romantic or that his passions prevailed over his intellect seems false: the letters and the travel books show Lawrence to have been thoughtful, with a remarkable memory for books and ideas, with an enviable ability to blend feeling and thinking.  "I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self. ... Most [men] are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers." (Letter to Rev. Robert Reid, December 3, 1907).  The "laughter" to which men and women are reborn is surely ironic, for while there is pleasure and joy in Lawrence, he is never unaware of life's tragic dimensions. He couldn't be, given his health and the struggle he imposed on himself by declining to live as a comfortable bourgeois. And, frankly, there are some questions to be answered about Lawrence's commitment to "the terrible multitudes of brothers."

It was the provocative wag Geoff Dyer who forced me to recover from my long disinterest in Lawrence.  Reading his unclassifiable, Bernhard-infected rant/meditation on everything not about Lawrence and just sort of about Lawrence, I knew that I'd lost again.  Hard as I try to put away interests--there's only so much time--someone comes along and writes a book that I can't ignore, and that book leads to another, ad infinitum.  I hope that I am done with Karl Ove, and Founder bios, and Cormac McCarthy, but Out of Sheer Rage has made Lawrence, once again, irresistible.  Dyer, if you don't know his work, is a fabulist, a Restoration wit, an essayist in a league of his own (Zadie Smith meets W.T. Vollman)--funny, self-deprecating, vulgar and refined, lyrical and wise.  His pursuit of the ghost of Lawrence--from Taos to Sicily to Mexico to Eastwood--is evidence of enviable literary obsession.  What's the point of reading books if you don't allow yourself to become obsessed with certain writers? We do it with musicians and hobbies--I know people who "followed" the Grateful Dead for years, a few who are Miles Davis completists, and others who collect beer glasses from every micro-brewery they visit (me).  So why not chase Lawrence around the globe, read his letters obsessively, and spend years thinking of all the ways this unpleasant, brilliant, tubercular neurotic changed your life?

I feel especially engaged by Lawrence due to his having lived, thanks to Mable Dodge Luhan and weak lungs, on a small ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico.  He's buried near San Cristobal, and the letters suggest that this austere landscape meant more to Lawrence than any other. The Lawrence ranch isn't much to look at; he and Freida lived in a ramshackle cabin that looks about to collapse, but the surrounding desert and mountains invite the contemplative viewpoint one finds in the writing Lawrence did during his sojourns in New Mexico.

I first saw the shrine--for that is what it is--in the early 1990's when I was in the throes of my obsession with visiting writers' homes and grave sites.  On a warm summer afternoon, the air still and the sky a blue so deep you sensed, at once, the immensity of the world, there was a holiness conveyed by the plain cross and white-washed memorial that I think Lawrence would have approved. Of course every pilgrimage feels anti-climactic.  We ask ourselves if is this all that is left of the person whose books have so moved us? But if we carry away a memory of the place it turns out to have surprising resilience, and this memory gives the books a depth of feeling we hadn't experienced before.

***

In preparing for a spring visit to Chihuahua in Old Mexico, I have been reading Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico.  It's nearly always summer in Lawrence. As "Paul Morel" he must have tired of the coal-black skies of Eastwood, of England's grimness, and we know for certain that he tired of his fellow Englishmen:

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling,[sic] dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Exterminate them, slime."

Always it was summer, and he bothered to learn the names of the flowers and trees, paid close attention to the birds and to the clarity of the air.  Often we find him sitting still, jotting notes or writing letters--what a loss the end of letter writing has been! He doesn't say too much about what he's eating or drinking or wearing, it's the passing impressions on his lively mind that we are privy to, and to what are often stilted conversations with the "natives." 

Martin Amis, not jolly himself, has described Lawrence as the most ill-tempered of English writers.  We know that Lawrence struck his wife (she was larger and she hit him back). He disliked Jews, wrote cringing sentences about Mexicans (Rosalino, Lawrence's faithful Indian servant in Mornings in Mexico is "a dumb-bell, as the Americans would say"), and was as often unkind and gossipy as not.  He had a Freudian dossier of sexual hang-ups--his is the finest example of an Oedipus complex since Hamlet, and that he loved men more than women is a reasonable inference from the letters and fiction.  

His writing can be overwrought, sentimental, incoherent:

"[Miriam]knew she felt in a sort of bondage to him, which she hated because she could not control it. She hated her love for him from the moment it grew too strong for her. And, deep down, she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her. She had resisted his denomination. She had fought to keep herself free of him in the last issue. And she was free of him, even more than he of her."  Sons and Lovers, Part 2, Chapter 11. 

I find most objectionable the way in which his narrators project themselves into the minds of everyone around them, creating a world that existed solely to mirror Lawrence. A lot of writers do this, but Sons and Lovers and Women in Love feel emotionally claustrophobic, as if there were one voice speaking and everyone else was just moving her lips. This habit imparts a sameness to the novels, a predictability in terms of character and plot.  And Lawrence's women are sexualized in the way a man might imagine or wish them to be,  and they are also, like Lawrence, tormented by sex. His men are austere and predatory, not often admirable.  Nothing wrong with sex, but what seemed tantalizing when I was in the my twenties--this was long before ubiquitous porn or even the tedium of sex-obsessed sit coms--is now boring, even juvenile. There are times when I imagine Lawrence sniggering over his foolscap, shocking the Puritans, working himself up for Freida. (Joyce's letters to Nora are a nice cure for the flowery pudenda and penises of Lawrence). 

Henry Miller mirrors Lawrence's preoccupations, his fear (?) of women, his narcissism.  There might be a scholarly book comparing the two, something richer than Sexual Politics, but if there is, I don't know about it. Miller grew beyond the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, but he remained a dirty old man right to the end of his long life. Both writers were strange, isolated men who appeared to yearn for companionship and yet disdained those who provided it. (See Miller's letters to Anais Nin). Both broke the rules and challenged taboos that now seem incomprehensible. Both had to go to Paris to get their books published, as if that were a hardship!

***

John Middleton Murry, second husband of Katherine Mansfield, flogged Lawrence in his book D. H. Lawrence (1930).  Lawrence called Murray "an obscene bug sucking my life away," and Murry repaid the complaint, finding Lawrence domineering and self-centered. Murry and Mansfield both showed up in Lawrence's novels, and the Frieda/DH/Murry/Mansfield quartet is the subject of a group biography by Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius that I hope to read soon. Since Murry's book, Lawrence's reputation both as a man and as a writer has undergone several transformations.  I find much to admire in the writing, but, with some reservations, I have to agree with Amis--Lawrence is a difficult person to warm up to.

"Sheer rage," Dyer's title is from Lawrence's Letters, and it's a phrase that turns up often in the correspondence. From rage comes art, of a kind. Would that his sheer rage been leavened with some of Frieda's exuberance, or Geoff Dyer's playfulness.  Lawrence wrote in order to be saved--I believe he was religious, despite his protestations to the contrary.  And he found his version of the divine in "nature" though not of the romantic's sort. He appears never to have made his peace with other people.  He was a stranger wherever he went, an emigre Englishmen looking askance at the "wogs," an uptight libertine, dry and judgmental. But, for now--he's fascinating. 

  


George Ovitt (9 March 2019)

‘The Most Surreal Place on Earth’

The Mexico City Reader, edited by Rubén Gallo

Mexico, D.F., La Ciudad. The oldest capital in the Americas, contemporary Mexico City is a sprawling megalopolis that all but beggars description, spread out, as it is, over 579 square miles and home to some twenty-one million people, speaking a mixture of Spanish, English, Nahuatl, Otomi, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mazahuaare.

In The Mexico City Reader, editor Rubén Gallo has compiled an urgent and eclectic anthology of croncias—short hybrid texts—from the last thirty years about life in one of the world’s most vibrant, chaotic, delirious cities, a city André Breton called the most surreal place on earth. Writes Gallo: 

The writers included in this selection not only live in Mexico City but have made it one of the most prominent themes in their work. They are avid flâneurs, persistent explorers of the most recondite corners of the capital, even at a time when highways, expressways, and periféricos have left many parts of the city inaccessible to pedestrians. This collection of varied texts about life on the city’s streets aims to replicate the experience of walking through the streets of Mexico City, where one’s five senses are constantly bombarded by the cultural contradictions that make life in the capital unpredictable.

 

The history of the Mexico City flâneur is as old as the city itself. From the poems of the pre-Columbian poet-king Nezahaulcóyotl to the reflections-observations of Bernardo del Balbuena, Fanny Calderón del la Barca, and Alexander Humboldt to the brilliant, sometimes darkly stirring testimonies of Artemio de Valle-Arizpe, Salvador Novo, Carlos Fuentes, Gonzalo Celorio, David Lida, and Francisco Goldman, the city has long been a source of fascination for writers—native and foreign alike.

 

Covering topics as varied as neighborhoods, the Metro, monuments, eating and drinking, maids, urban planning, corruption and bureaucracy, waste disposal, and the morgue, The Mexico City Reader represents a complex, humane, nearly kaleidoscopic perspective on what is surely one of my favorite cities in the world.

 

Peter Adam Nash