critical theory Archives

Herewith a brilliant, provocative, obstreperous essay outlining ten reasons why we should burn books. Yes, yes, this seems vaguely counter-intuitive, Numéro Cinq being a literary magazine and all. But two things need to be said at the outset. First, book burning and books, together, have always been the signal marks of an emerging modernity. They co-exist as sign and substance of the new. This is why, of course, there is a book burning in Don Quixote; Cervantes had his finger on the pulse. In my book The Enamoured Knight, I make a side argument that, in fact, book burning is one of a “basket” of themes that supply the discourse of the novel as a form. And, second, inversion is perhaps the most elegant of rhetorical devices; instead of arguing (tediously and correctly) for the right, you take the opposite view and find occasions for wit, comedy, and trenchant critical thought. In this case, our author, Noah Gataveckas, uses inversion, his own wide reading, and a radical logic born of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to mine the contemporary chaos of our late literate age and say very smart and inflammatory things (which is the point, right?).

Noah was born in Oakville, Ontario, in 1985, and educated at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. After moving to Toronto to work as a DJ in the entertainment district, he rediscovered his love of reading and writing. He is the author of poetry (“Silence”, “The King of the River”), journalism (“Hijacked: The Posthumous Reinscription of a Socialist in Canadian Consciousness”, “Digital Theft in a Digital World”), polemic (“Why Occupy? An Approach to Finance Capital”), theatre (Five Star), and a book-in-progress entitled Symposium: A Philosophical Mash-up. He lives and works in Toronto.

Why do we burn books? or,

The burning question of our movement

By Noah R. Gataveckas

Prologue

The “we” in question refers specifically to the Angry Young Readers Anonymous (AYRA) book club. You know who you are; you know what’s at stake. In order to commemorate our one-year anniversary of successful self-pedagogy, we have dared to consider the inconsiderate: a quaint little book burning, with drinks and snacks being served around 8. This has – understandably – unnerved some of us. After all, Hitler. Enough said. So, to help us understand why we are doing this, I have prepared a list of ten possible reasons why one might justifiably “commit it then to the flames”, as David Hume once put it.^[1] Be aware that they are inconsistent: that is, at least one reason presumes some form of spirituality (3), while others are specifically atheistic (4 and 7), and so on. We don’t need to have the same reasons; de gustibus non est disputandum. This is just a compendium of some of the answers that have been given over the years to explain why some books got fired.

(1) Kill what you love.

We bookclubers—we love books. Do we not? Why oh why are we setting (some of) them on fire when they’re what we’re about?

After all, we more than most people should see their value: think of the many excellent texts that we’ve had a chance to read and discuss this past year, and how these readings and conversations have enriched our lives. Starting with Findley’s The Wars, including Horkheimer and Adorno, Žižek, “Junkspace”, Reality Hunger, Chinua Achebe, To the Lighthouse, Baudrillard, Ondaatje, “The World as Phantom and as Matrix”, Serge Guilbaut, “Politics and the English Language”, The Wretched of the Earth, Melville, The Master and Margarita, Chekhov, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, McLuhan, and so many other texts that I can’t even remember, we’ve learned a hell of a lot this year from books.

Furthermore, they have provided us with the grounds for having excellent conversations. We have applied Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, Žižekian, etc., theories to them in our efforts to maximize our minds. Note that theories apply to their texts like bees to blossoms: once pollinated, they bloom with mucho meanings, full of information and insight. This literary entomophily has rewarded us, nudging us ever closer to Enlightenment.

So how can we turn our backs on them now? They’ve been so generous to us in the past. Why oh why burn books?

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Commons), ch. XII.↵

Herewith a link to dg’s distillation of 30,000 years (give or take) of Western philosophy. The idea for this essay came from reading Witold Gombrowicz’s wonderful little book A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. DG thought six hours seemed a little long and tedious and that he could condense all the important points into about fifty minutes. This essay is a version of the lecture dg gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts last January (in the event, he was not able to get ALL of philosophy into the time slot), including his own incredibly helpful diagrams and sidebar comments which clear up the complicated points.

Plato was right when he said that we can only know what we know already, that knowledge works by identity. What we cannot know, cannot access, we also cannot experience, and yet this unknowable is all around us, lies inscrutable and threatening behind everything we do know, crouches even within our hearts in a place Freud called the Unconscious. Mostly we cannot escape the feeling that it is watching us, waiting to trip us up, or sometimes bless us. At the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein threw up his hands and wrote that we must remain silent about the things whereof we cannot speak, by which he meant a long list of absolutes including God, the Good, Beauty, etc. But that sort of realism has never stopped humans whose imagination is prolific in inventing dream meetings with the Other. The history of our philosophies has been a history of such dreams.

via Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought – The Brooklyn Rail.

I’m still reading Eagleton and have moved into the post-structuralism chapter. I wish I had more time to spend studying theory. I also wish that I had studied it before now. Watching my daughter (she’s in third grade) work on her spelling lessons tonight made me think about the idea of signifier and the thing signfied. There is something very powerful about watching Maggie work out parts of speech, about watching her form the connections with language in this very basic, very primal sort of way. Store. Order. Board. These were some of the words tonight. I was also reading E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel this morning. His humor surprised me, and the discussion of cavemen sitting around listening to the first stories again makes me think about how we (humans) acquire language and how our desires for stories is so deep-rooted in our consciousness. Now it’s time for reading…Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIIMH.

—Richard Farrell

Over the weekend I read Michael Slater’s tiny 104-page biography of Charles Dickens. In the same mail delivery, I received Peter Ackroyd’s 1144-page biography of Dickens. I spent a lot of time just looking at the two books side-by-side on my bed (where I read) wondering about the disparity between the two. I haven’t finished the Ackroyd book yet (check out his novel Chatterton). I also read Theodor Adorno’s essay (in his books of essays called Prisms) on Kafka which was brilliant as usual and made strange sense out of Kafka’s desire to have his papers burned and to remain obscure. And then I read a dreamy, odd, surprising William Faulkner story “Red Leaves” about Indians (probably Chickasaws), slaves and human sacrifice. (For an interesting thematic variation, see D. H. Lawrence’s human sacrifice story “The Woman Who Road Away.”) I had earlier read something about this: the Chickasaws were one of the Five Civilized Tribes forced to move to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson in the Trail of Tears episode (as in how America invented Ethnic Cleansing). The Chickasaw had African slaves which they took to Oklahoma with them. After the Civil War and Emancipation, the Chickasaw refused to give up their slaves since they believed they weren’t governed by American legislation. If I remember correctly, the actor Don Cheadle had an ancestor who was a Chickasaw slave. This is mentioned in Henry Louis Gates’s book In Search of our Roots.

I finished reading the essay last night. A touch of hopefulness at the end.

“In a world or brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one [life] and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity.”

I too am admirer of decadence, of mixed form, parodies, anatomies and Menippean satires.

Now I am reading Lives of the Animals by Robert Wrigley, a book of poems mentioned by Cheryl Wilder in her graduate lecture at the last residency. The epigraph is from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Ghosts.”

“And as the dog with its nostrils tracking out the fragments of the beasts’ limbs, and the breath from their feet that they leave in the soft grass, runs upon a path that is pathless to men, so does the soul follow the trail of the dead, across great spaces.”

I am still reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler.

Jonah and I went to see The Book of Eli Saturday night and then last night, pursuing our quest for the roots of dystopian movie-making, we rented Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. The Mad Max movie was infinitely superior–wittily baroque and light at the ending with great 80s music (sounded like Maurice Jarre). The weirdly touching ironies of the “tell” are parodic, human and funny (the girl framing each cave drawing with sticks tied together at the end of a pole). Both movies have the same plot: stranger wandering through dried up, post-apocalyptic landscape comes to a town run by evil-doers and adventures happen. Both strangers are really good at fighting. But The Book of Eli is a violent pseudo-Christian strangeness. It reveals the paranoia, selfishness and self-righteousness behind some (not all) recent threads of Christian discourse (surprising to a Canadian who grew up in a country where Christian-based political parties fired the push for universal medical care in the 1950s). Denzel, intent on his mission (to save the book), can’t stop to help a woman being raped and murdered by a bunch of motorcycle thugs. Whereas Mel as Mad Max gets into trouble repeatedly for showing pity and forgetting to save his own skin. There are no children in The Book of Eli, but Mad Max is surrounded by innocence. (Both movies make young women look great in animal hides and rags.)

I’m not sure what this has to do with Adorno except that in my head I keep thinking about how he tells us the culture industry has rolled over for the unnameable powers of repression contained in our late stage capitalist so-called democracy, pouring out infotainment, reality tv and comforting or distracting folk tales which lull our pulverized synapses. All the modern dystopian, end-of-the-world movies have happy endings, often sneakily Christian (remember the “arks” that save the world at the end of John Cusack’s latest).

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome doesn’t escape unscathed by Christian symbolism. The cave painting of Captain Walker is Christ on the cross. What does this mean? The Bible is a paradigm of a novel with a happy ending? The Biblical message has turned inexplicably dark between the 1980s and 2010?

I spent too much time reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler’s Decline of the West in the middle of the night and now I feel like I am in a serious decline myself. As a general rule of thumb, I would advise against reading Adorno in the middle of the night and, especially, Adorno on Spengler.

So Jacob read Madame de Lafayette’s novel The Princess of Cleves yesterday and noted how it clearly influenced Madame Bovary (a sort of instruction-book idealized version of love set against the real thing). Then his lecturer this morning mentioned that a precursor of The Princess of Cleves was Marguerite de Navarre’s 16th century short story collection Heptameron which contains, coincidentally, the first account of how a young French woman was marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence–which is, yes, the story on which my novel Elle is based. A sample title from the Heptameron: “The wife of a saddler of Amboise is saved on her deathbed through a fit of anger at seeing her husband fondle a servant-maid.”

I will stop mentioning Jake (well, probably not). It’s just that he’s reading more than I am (myself I am grinding slowly through Theodor Adorno’s essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”) and we have these fascinating conversations that get my brain going. This was a surprising little loop of a conversation.

I’m not sure how much time I will have for this as the semester wears on. But I will try. As RichH noticed I did briefly have a post up about Theodor Adorno. I was reading his essay on Thorstein Veblen through the residency, a few lines at a time. I finished that the other night in the wee hours. Then as I was adding more things to the resource file-sharing site for you guys, I was rereading some more recent pieces on Shklovsky who is undergoing a surge (that word) of in the U.S. because my publisher Dalkey Archive is bringing out more and more of his books which were hitherto mostly unavailable. But then I happened upon a blog (American Airspace) by Michael Berube (I can’t figure out how to get accents on the letters, sorry) who is a culture critic I met years ago when I gave a talk at a university somewhere in Missouri (the name is out of my head). Michael later did a really nice piece on my novel The Life and Times of Captain N for the magazine Lingua Franca. Anyway I liked his blog post on Shklovsky although I can’t quite get my mind around some of his objections to Formalist theory–more on that another time. In any case, the whole blog itself is fun to read.