The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

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The Possible Is Monstrous: A Book Review

by Okla Elliott

[The following review originally appeared in The Southeast Review.]

The Possible Is Monstrous
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Daniele Pantano)
Black Lawrence Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9826228-1-0
$17.00

Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 and died in 1990, meaning he saw WWII, its direct aftermath, the entire Cold War, and the advent of post-modernism. His work can generally be described as experimental, philosophical, and political, with themes that reflect the major world events and European cultural concerns during his lifetime. Dürrenmatt is best known as a playwright and a novelist, but his nonfiction and poetry are equally impressive. Unfortunately, Dürrenmatt’s poetry, which incorporates the historical events of his lifetime as well as philosophical meditations on those events, has been largely unavailable to English speakers—until now, that is.

Given its relative obscurity, most non-German speakers are unfamiliar with Dürrenmatt’s poetry. He is a frequent practitioner of the longer poem, and The Impossible Is Monstrous offers us a sizable sampling of these. What is most impressive about Dürrenmatt’s longer poems is how he maintains movement and breath in a way that makes the poems feel much shorter, despite their weighty subject matter and length. He writes occasionally in rhyme and meter, with the majority of his poems being in free verse. A shorter poem exemplary of his overall style is “Dramaturgic Advice,” reproduced here in its entirety:

Don’t give us any profound talk
Don’t add to the mystery

It’s not the word
Create a shape

Three men at a table
What they say is not important

They want to do right
But the dice are cast

Who boards the wrong train
May run back in it
But arrives where he didn’t
want to go

Here we have the lyric-philosophic tone Dürrenmatt uses in several other poems in the book. We also find another common theme in the book—theatre. Several of the poems are choruses from plays that can be read as stand-alone works, and Dürrenmatt discusses theatre as an art and his own particular theatrical works. Done differently, this could be a weakness, but the way Dürrenmatt handles it only adds to the reader’s pleasure. As we see in “Dramaturgic Advice,” the poem is not limited by its interest in theatre but rather made larger and more interesting, made to carry extra meaning(s) because of it. It is a poem about life, but with that title, it becomes a poem about art, representation, and meaning-making as well.

Dürrenmatt’s free verse poems—their tone, underlying music, and content—come across wonderfully in Pantano’s translations. Pantano also solidly handles the much more difficult task of translating formal verse. For example, in “O World of Men and Murders” (a 50-line poem), the first four lines “O Welt der Männer und der Morde, / Voll Schmach, voll Haß, voll grauser Tat, / Hinunter schlingt jetzt deine Horde / Der Hölle Maul samt deiner Saat” become in English “O world of men and murders, / Shameful, hateful, full of grisly deeds, / Hell consumes your hordes / Along with your seed.” Pantano has changed the rhyme from ABAB to ABCB, which is a good compromise between doing excessive violence to the content in order to retain all of the form or getting rid of the formal aspects entirely and merely doing a prose translation. After those opening four lines, he abandons this tactic for most of the poem (though there is an occasional off-rhyme), and then ends the translation with the same rhyme replacement move. He therefore begins and ends with strong hints of the rhyme in the original and has occasional reminders throughout the poem, yet he does not lose anything by way of content. In another poem, “To Unchain Man’s Chains,” Pantano cleverly orders the syntax of his English so as to have the word “chain” (or some variation on it) end seven of the twelve lines of the poem. Dürrenmatt’s original has six of the twelve lines end with the German equivalent of variations on “chain,” though his poem is more structured and every line has a rhyme (in the pattern ABAB ACAC ADAD). Pantano has, therefore, more or less used the same tactic here again. He retained the word repetition/rhyme so as to reproduce the general effect of the poem, but he didn’t slavishly chain himself, as it were, to the poem’s form, thus allowing him also to reproduce the content more faithfully. And since it is a dual-language book, if you can even just sound out the noises of the German, you can get the exact original music from the German, and then you have the English for the literal meaning.

The inclusion of the German alongside the English also increases the book’s value as a scholarly text, and that’s not the only aspect that makes it useful in this respect. The Possible Is Monstrous also includes a short scholarly essay by Peter Rüedi (also translated by Pantano) on Dürrenmatt’s poetry, as well as a longish editor’s note on his poetry. There are also three pages of end notes to help readers not familiar with German or Swiss literary figures, works, cities, etc. All of these scholarly aspects, none of which are intrusive on the reading of the poems themselves, make the book ideal for the classroom or for research on Dürrenmatt’s poetry (of which, thanks to this volume, there can be much more).

In the final analysis, Pantano has done both scholars and lovers of poetry alike a service with this (long overdue) selection of Dürrenmatt’s best poetry, and his translations are accurate, generally excellent, and, I predict, destined to become the standard English versions. The book is well designed and printed, adding another nice book (as object and as cultural product) to Black Lawrence Press’s growing list. The Possible Is Monstrous is worthy of serious attention and should be in every academic library and on every poet’s bookshelf.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: PEGGY SHUMAKER

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BEYOND WORDS, THIS LANGUAGE
By Peggy Shumaker

The morning I was born
                       you held my hand.

The morning you died
                       I held your hand.


What’s left
                       to forgive?



Today’s poem appears in Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press, 2010), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She’s at work on Toucan Nest, a book of poems set in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press.

Editor’s Note: I recently had the extreme pleasure of seeing Peggy Shumaker read with Amber Flora Thomas and Li-Young Lee at New York’s Poets House, at an event sponsored by Red Hen Press. It was one of the most moving and charged readings I’ve attended, and Peggy Shumaker delivered a deliberate, thoughtful performance. Today’s poem was recited from memory—Shumaker’s eyes locked with the audience—and tears ran down my cheeks.

On my way into the world, my father held me. On his way out, I held him. This was a gift. Being a reader and writer of poems is also a gift; an entry into shared experience, an outlet for the personal.

Want to see more by Peggy Shumaker?
Peggy Shumaker Official Website
Purchase Gnawed Bones from Red Hen Press
Read, Watch, and Listen to Peggy’s work online

What I Have Lived For

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800px-Bertrand_Russell_transparent_bg.png

 

Commentary by Okla Elliott

 

The following is the prologue to Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, which I recommend very highly to any lover of philosophy, twentieth century history, and lively characters. Russell was one of the greatest minds the human species has produced, and he has been one of my heroes since my undergrad years. The following passage is some of the most powerful and accurate language I have had the pleasure of reading. When I first found it many years ago (as a student worker in the university library, where I occasionally read the books I was supposed to be shelving), I felt an immediate kinship with Russell. I have been rereading his work lately, along with the work of his student Wittgenstein, and came across the passage again. I find it strikes home even more today than years ago when I first encountered it.

…

What I Have Lived For

by Bertrand Russell

 

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BONNIE ARNING

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DEATH LONG DISTANCE
By Bonnie Arning

The night you died I tried to find a sign
of your passing. Something obvious:
dry leaves swept up in a dust devil, a spider
the red of your hair. It was you

who taught me to make a bird by hooking my thumbs
and inching apart my fingers. Fitting then,
how your doctor should use that motion
to mimic the tumor as it swooped across your back.

We sent you to die twelve-hundred miles from
your stone bird bath and the chiropractor
who never left his wife for you, hooked
to a mechanical bed scribbling journal entries like,

today I ate an apple and felt my hair sprouts
shift and glow. I should have called—I should have
asked a nurse to hold the phone to your ear
while I sang shantih shantih shantih in a soft voice.

Why didn’t I have the courage to tell you, death
is no betrayal—die when you want to. The chemo,
the injections, the amputated leg: you did it all
for us. Instead of going to your service

I should draw faces on the foam heads
that hold your wigs. I should draw your face
in eyeliner all over my room. Come back—
the trees here are hungry for your ashes.

Yesterday I glimpsed movement in the milk-fire
of your rough-cut healing crystals. Energy
in the palpitating ribbon of distant heat. Wasps
swarm and ride each wave. You—

swarm and ride each wave.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in 2River View, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Bonnie Arning is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently she is pursuing an MFA from the University of New Mexico and acts as the managing editor of Blue Mesa Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Gargoyle and 2River View.

Editor’s Note: My father passed away on February 26, 2012. I had found, and loved, this poem before my father took to his deathbed. Having taken a bereavement leave from this series, upon my return this feels like the right poem for reentry.

Today’s poem reminds me of the many blessings inherent in my father’s passing. That, despite living 2,500 miles away, I was able to be at his bedside in hospice, to coddle and love him on his way out of this world as he did for me, so many years ago, on my way in. That I was able to sing in his ear and tell him, over and over, how loved he was, that “death is no betrayal—die when you want to.”

Bonnie Arning, in her beautiful, simple words and aching truths that emerge from the depths of grief, has shared with the world a poem that allows for communion within a space where communion can feel both critical and unfathomable.

Want to see more by Bonnie Arning?
Blue Mesa Review
2River View

The Jackpot

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The Jackpot

by Letitia Trent

The monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough.
-Adam Philip

We are too flush

our bosky hedge funds
are fecund—
we calculate the slow
growth the return

but let’s try to poormouth
again I’ll be Cinderella
pre-slipper and you
be a cockney starveling

we’ll settle
in the slums together
hold struck matches—
our barren grate

won’t bloom—
against our fingers
where they have purpled
in December

we’ll wolf cold
casseroles of aspic and crackers
afterward still famished

we’ll shake off our
poor white delicates
and glut until surfeited see

how easy
it can be—the slow slide
soft as
a rummage sale t-shirt—

when you have nothing else
to say take me
into your alms
and mean it?

***

Letitia Trent has had work appear in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, and Blazevox, among others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, is available from Sundress Publications. She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. She writes film review for the blog Bright Wall in a Dark Room. The above poem is included in One Perfect Bird and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Robert McAlmon’s Psychoanalyzed Girl and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

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Robert McAlmon’s “Psychoanalyzed Girl”

and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

by Chase Dimock

Last fall, I wrote an article for this journal that argued for renewed interest in the life and works of American expatriate author Robert McAlmon. As a writer, publisher, and connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife and artistic community, McAlmon was at the center of most of the lives and works of the now romanticized era of the Lost Generation in Paris. Yet, for those of you who (like I) enjoyed Woody Allen’s nostalgic ode to these artists in Midnight in Paris, you will notice that McAlmon does not make an appearance in the film. While Woody Allen’s vision of the expatriate community gilds the bars and bistros of Montparnasse as a golden age, McAlmon’s own contemporaneous literary renditions of the era are pessimistic, dark, and cynical. For McAlmon, the Lost Generation was truly lost–morally, psychologically, philosophically, sexually lost artists who managed to brilliantly wring out their despair onto canvases and into novels between bouts of boozing, fighting, and crying.

Early in his period of expatriation, McAlmon wrote “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” as one of several collected vignettes on the characters he met on the streets of Montparnasse.  The story below comes from McAlmon’s first book of fiction, A Hasty Bunch. James Joyce himself suggested the title to McAlmon, commenting on the speed with which he wrote the stories and their roughness. By reading just a few sentences of the story, it is apparent that Joyce’s judgment is well justified. “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” should be considered part of McAlmon’s juvenilia as its awkward phrasings search for the more polished voice of ironic detachment and sardonic wit that would come with his later, more mature work.

Nonetheless what I find fascinating about this piece is its place as a cultural artifact of the influence of psychoanalysis on the Lost Generation of American writers. McAlmon’s opinion in this story is none too favorable. He satirizes the hyperawareness and self-centeredness that psychoanalytic therapy causes in his friend Dania, depicting her as perpetually self-analyzing and becoming progressively more alienated from her own reality as she obsesses over self-knowledge at the expense of self-experience.

Written in 1922, McAlmon’s short story testifies to the sudden rise in popularity of psychoanalysis in America in the 20’s. Freud made his first visit to America along with Carl Jung and others in 1909 and gave a series of five lectures at Clark University to both academic and lay audiences. The fact that psychoanalysis would become widely adopted in America in just over a decade after his visit wildly exceeded what Freud and his contemporaries thought was possible. As Sanford Gifford writes:

“Freud had an abiding distaste for America and a mistrust of Americans. He attributed this, half whimsically, to the effect of American food on his digestion. But his real fears were based on the American propensity for popularization, for  the dilution of analysis with the base metal of psychotherapy and for American opposition to lay analysis.” (631)

Furthermore, Freud initially doubted that psychoanalysis would catch on in America due to its lingering history of Puritanism. In January of 1909, Freud wrote to Jung in a letter “I also think that once [the Americans] discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great.” (as cited by Benjamin 124)

What Freud could not have predicted back in 1909 was the great cultural shift that would take place in America shortly after World War One that would produce the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation of the 20s. Nathan Hale explains:

“In America, rebellious intellectuals supplied an important sustaining agent in the spread of psychoanalysis—an enthusiastic clientele. The writers in the group were the first to publicize psychoanalysis…the Great War provoked a disillusioned turn to their rebellion against traditional American culture…[they] launched attacks on the entrenched American faith in morality and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon race and culture… [and emphasized] the importance of the sexual instinct and the  evils of repression” (Hale as quoted by Benjamin 124).

In the wake of a devastating war that killed millions, the young artists and intellectuals of the 20s questioned the traditional values of nationalism, capitalism, and religion that led to such bloodshed. Psychoanalysis’ anti-moralistic penetration into the repressed regions of the human psyche proved to be a valuable method for understanding the en masse brutality of WWI and imagining alternative social and political structures. Cultural revolution could come from a revolution of the self.

Yet, while some thinkers and writers explored Freud’s theories for the sake of these more noble pursuits, for the majority of Americans, Freud’s scandalous discovery of the sexual libido as the root of all human endeavors was met with a sensationalism that overshadowed the intricacies of his method. Not only did Freud’s fear of American popularization come true by the mid-20s, but he himself became a part of the American popular culture as well. Daniel Akst writes:

“During the 1924 murder trial of Leopold and Loeb, Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormack cabled Freud with an offer of $25,000 or, as he put it in telegraphese, “anything he name,” to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze the killers. Later that year the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn (who called Freud “the greatest love specialist in the world”) offered him $100,000 to write for the screen or work as a consultant in Hollywood.”

Freud rapidly became known as the guru of all things sexual at a time when American popular culture was entering an age of sexual liberation. These attempts to commodify psychoanalysis for popular entertainment only served to reinforce Freud’s conviction that America was savagely materialistic and that its people sublimated their libido through money.

Beyond the fascination with the scandalous, psychoanalysis also gained popularity because its individualizing attention catered to the focus on the self that the rebels of the Jazz Age wished to cultivate. This revolution of the self with an infinitely explorable unconscious gave the individual’s naturally narcissistic sense of self-involvement a wholly new dimension of self to devote attention to that could be justified as the noble pursuit of mental health. There was now more self to fixate upon with varying degrees of fascinated self-love or loathing. McAlmon’s story mocks the results of the American popularization of psychoanalysis with Dania’s claim that she has “the mother, and brother complex.” This phrasing suggests the dilution of the psychoanalytic method that Freud feared where structural analysis of the psyche is replaced with the unqualified diagnosis of a few “complexes” that sound clinical, but ultimately mean nothing.

The young McAlmon recognizes the roots of pop-psychology, in which psychoanalysis would be progressively reduced to a few simple, memorable phrases for one’s own self-diagnosis and self-fascination. This was the “selling” of psychoanalysis in America via the reification of method and analysis into portable vocabulary. Under the belief that constant self-analysis is helping her to know herself intimately, Dania is instead presented as becoming more estranged from herself. Replying to Dania’s complaint that she cannot compel herself to pursue a handsome man that she sees everyday, the narrator states,  “Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist? You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.” McAlmon calls attention to how constant self-analysis creates a substitute for one’s own existence. Instead of the risk of participating in her own life, she settles for the pleasure of commenting on herself from a distance. Pop-psychology satisfies the basic human will to knowledge, in which the satisfaction of having neatly identified and labeled our “complexes” is confused for the real benefit of actually working through them. She “enjoys her unhappiness”. McAlmon’s psychoanalyzed girl is the alienated subject of modernity who fetishizes her estrangement from her own existence at the expense of her ability to act upon it. Whether or not he knew it, McAlmon’s story in truth satirizes Freud’s nightmare of popularization and not the true psychoanalytic method itself.

 

The Psychoanalyzed Girl

By Robert McAlmon

 

Dania wasn’t in the room five minutes before she was telling whoever it was that sat near her that, “I am all tangled up psychologically. I have the mother, and brother complex.”

She was a strange girl, Dania, that is to a person not used to strange girls, and people who live in “Bohemian Quarters”. In Paris she could be seen walking about the Montparnasse district with a Paisley shawl thrown over her shoulders, a many-colored beribboned hat, mauve stockings, or pale green—some exotic colour always—and the skirt that showed beneath her coat made of Paisley shawl was generally a corded silk one with red, white, and green, broad and thread, stripes.

Needless to say people noticed her as she went by. They might have noticed her anyway, had she dressed quietly, because her eyes were soft brow, shaded with impossibly long eyelashes; her skin was bronze olive, and days when it might look sallow, Dania knew just how much rouge to put on to give her cheeks a warm glowing appearance. Very narrow shoulders she had drawn up within herself usually. She contradicted her own manner, giving alternately a quiet, mouselike impression, a hard embitteredly sophisticated one, and again an impression of confused, wounded naive childishness.

“I don’t know how to be happy, that’s me; don’t know how to have a good time, and when all these Americans here want me to go around I can’t find any pleasure in the noisy things they do”, she said, one day as I walked down the Boulevard Raspail with her. “There! That’s me. Analyzing myself again. Why can’t I leave myself alone?”

“You are suffering from life rather than from sickness, Dania”, I commented. “Don’t look so hard for happiness, and stay away from the Bohemians at the Rotonde who are neither labourers, artists, nor intelligent—only moping incompetents, scavengers of the art world.”

One day Dania hailed me from across the street, so we joined each other and when walking down the street together. It wasn’t till afterwards that I remembered how artfully Dania managed to stop and ask a direction of a young Frenchman, who was a helper about a piano van-wagon.

After talking about where a certain street was for five minutes, very conscious that his eyes were admiring her with open curiosity and desire in them, she came on saying: “Ain’t he the handsome devil though.”

“There you are, Dania; you say you want experience. He’ll take you on. Look back. His eyes are following you yet.”

The young Frenchman was a swarthy, black-eyed being; with lithe energy. He was wearing a red shirt, and had a red scarf bound about his waist making a corsage for him. Except for Dania, he’d simply have been part of the local colour of the quarter for me. Now I wondered whether he was from the South of France, or of Spanish or Italian descent. There’d been boldness, respect too, in his attitude towards Dania. He must have been Paris bred not to have had some shyness in him.

Another day I ran into Dania, and we passed the young Frenchman again, loading furniture into a van. He looked at Dania, and an expectant look came into his eyes. Dania was returning his glance from under her long eyelashes, and flickered a tiny smile at him, whereupon his entire set of straight teeth showed in a smile.

“He always smiles at me now”, Dania said.

“You pass him often do you?”

“O yes, I usually manage to come down this street at about the same time everyday, when he’s coming in on the van to the storage house to put up the truck…Isn’t it ridiculous though. He catches my fancy, but of course I couldn’t.”

“Rats, Dania, take a chance. Start something with him, if he doesn’t with you; and he will if you’ll bat your eye the right way. Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist. You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.”

It was useless for me to remark however. The last time I saw Dania, two months after that day, she said, “I’ll have to go back to New York and get psychoanalyzed. I must find out why I can’t have average emotions, and enjoy life just a little bit.”

“Tut, tut, woman. Some of them there will be telling you again that you’re setting out to hurt yourself because of perverse instinct in you when you slip on a wet floor because of new shoes.”

If one could be sure that Dania enjoyed her unhappiness as the only thing she dared permit to give importance to her egotism…But there she is—in Paris—Dania.

 

Image: Freud (far left seated) and Jung (far right, seated) at Clark University in 1909

Existential Echoes: Toward a Genealogy of Ideas in Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”

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Existential Echoes:

Toward a Genealogy of Ideas in Albert Camus’s

“The Myth of Sisyphus”

by Okla Elliott

In the decades since their deaths, much has been made about the rivalry between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but it would be a mistake to forget that before this rivalry—which has become the subject matter for numerous articles, books, and at least one documentary—Camus and Sartre were collaborators and friends. And Sartre at first played the role of mentor for Camus, a fact that comes through in Camus’s work, both when he is offering positions that align with Sartre’s own and when he is responding negatively to them; in both instances, Sartre is the origin of much of Camus’s thought. To illustrate this, let’s look at Camus’s essay-cycle “The Myth of Sisyphus” and attempt to delineate where his thinking is either an echo of Sartre’s or a direct negative response to it.

Sartre’s stature as the most famous French intellectual, and perhaps the most famous public intellectual of the twentieth century, is practically undisputed. His work as a novelist, a philosopher, and a playwright were equally well-known and dominant in the culture of occupied France and in the post-war years. It is therefore almost impossible not to hear the echo of Sartre’s famous description of tree roots from his 1936 novel La Nausée (Nausea), when Camus writes in his essay, “An Absurd Reasoning,” that “[t]he primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us” (11) and that “here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface” (15). As Sartre writes:

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. (126-127)

It is worth noting also that Camus is taking up the Sartrean as opposed to the Heideggerian view of being-in-the-world. Heidegger, in Being and Time, will have Dasein interacting with objects as tools and with care or concern (both of which are inadequate translations of the German Besorgen or Sorge). Sartre’s position is that we do interact with the objects of the world in a ready-to-hand fashion (to use Heideggerian language) but that we initially encounter them as blunt objects, as the en-soi (in-itself) beings they are, before we comprehend them as ready-to-hand tools (or as elements of our projects, to use Sartrean language); and after we are done with them, they revert to blunt meaningless stuff.

We can find several such echoes of Sartre’s thought in Camus’s essay-cycle, and Camus makes several references to Sartre’s work without directly naming him, though anyone in the intellectual milieu of France at the time could not have missed them. For example, Camus writes that “[t]his discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as one writer of today calls it, is also the absurd” (11). Of course Camus is referencing Sartre here, even though he does not name him directly.

Camus also writes that “[i]t can be seen at this point that the initial themes of existential philosophy keep their entire value. The return of consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom” (44).  Isn’t this passage an excellent rephrasing of Sartre’s notion of mauvaise foi (bad faith)? And what are these initial themes of existentialism? It is perhaps both Sartre and Heidegger whom Camus has in mind here. Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity and Sartre’s notion of bad faith have much in common, in that they are both attitudes of truth-avoidance. There are subtle differences in the two ideas, but for our current purposes, it will suffice to say that Heidegger’s inauthenticity and Sartre’s bad faith are forms of self-deception or existential falsity that are to be avoided by keeping one’s eyes open to the facticity of one’s situation and on the possibility/necessity of our death.

Furthermore, on the quite crucial issue of God and how God’s existence affects the considerations of existentialism, Camus and Sartre seem to be in close alignment. Camus writes:

The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative: either we’re not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox. (41-42)

This is not the exact wording as Sartre uses on the subject, but it’s not far off in terms of content. In Existentialism and Human Emotions, Sartre writes:

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God does not exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. (51)

But even though they do not use the same wording and Sartre’s claim is bit stronger and clearer in regard to his overall purpose, the basic move by both thinkers is to dismiss the question of whether God exists, because it is not essential to their projects. It is hard to single out whether Camus is echoing Sartre or whether they just happen to hold quite similar views on this subject, but whatever the case may be, their shared dismissal of theological hairsplitting and their shared lack of interest in proselytizing for atheism (despite both being atheists) ought to be noted.

But Camus’s relationship to the work of Sartre is, as I mentioned previously, often one of a negative response; not one of intersection but rather divergence. Later in “An Absurd Reasoning,” he writes the following:

In order to remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing whether or not man is free doesn’t interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of “freedom as such” has no meaning. (41)

This statement is in clear contradistinction to Sartre’s position:

When I declare that freedom in every concrete circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values. (45)

Sartre is positing a universalist position on the nature of freedom as such here, as opposed to Camus’s position, which has a more individualist or particularist bent to it. This, in fact, is a key difference in their methodologies—Camus often privileging the particular and individual, whereas Sartre privileges the universal and humanity as a whole (a difference that grew more pronounced over the course of their careers, but which can already be found in these early works on which I am focusing here). For example, Sartre makes the classic Kantian move of making the universalizability of an action or choice the measure of its ethical status:

When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. (17)

Here again, Sartre is making the move of universalizing what it means to make a choice, to be free and human, whereas Camus wants to focus solely on the individual and the choices and desires of the individual. Sartre clearly states, however, that “[w]e may say that there is a universality of man; but it is not given, it is perpetually being made” (39). Sartre is not attempting to define a fixed or stable human nature by any means, but he does want to define the pour-soi (the for-itself, which his rough equivalent of Heideggerian Dasein)—that is to say, he is very much interested in man as such and freedom as such, which Camus explicitly states do not fall under the purview of his own project. This is a distinction that in many instances is a purely academic one. Whether there are many free men, or whether it is in the nature of man to be condemned to freedom and there exist many instantiations of man, is a matter of mere hairsplitting in most daily matters, but not in all. It does, as we saw above with Sartre’s Kantian move, change the ethical import of human action if we view it as constituting universal man (as Sartre has it), as opposed to a particular man’s actions in the face of an absurd wall (as Camus has it). It is harder to derive an ethics from Camus’s position, which is why he claims that “there can be no question of holding forth on ethics” (66). A final distinction ought to be made in regard to our comportment toward others. For Sartre, we are at least in part defined by and against others, whereas Camus conceives of his “absurd man” as more atomistic. This is ironic, given Camus’s habit of defining himself by or against Sartre.

My purpose here has not been to reduce Camus’s work to a purely derivative status vis-à-vis Sartre’s, but rather to show how Camus incorporates the philosophical insights of one of the twentieth century’s most famous and productive thinkers. There is also something of a genealogical impulse at work here, insofar as I have attempted to show where Camus, one of the best-known and most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century, found the ore and the refinement of his ideas. The initiated readers of the time knew precisely when Camus was appropriating a Sartrean concept and precisely when he was defining a position against Sartre’s stance on a matter. Camus often rephrased Sartre’s ideas into his own language, or when he disagreed with Sartre (which he did more and more frequently as their lives went on), he disagreed specifically with Sartre; that is, one can find traces of Sartre in Camus’s attempts to define himself against Sartre as much as one can find traces of Sartre in those instances where Camus is directly or indirectly echoing his ideas.

***

Bibliography

Camus, Albert and Justin O’Brien. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1967. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Lloyd Alexander, and Hayden Carruth. Nausea. New York: New Directions Paperback, 1964. Print.

My Presidential Endorsement Strategy: Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and the Green Party

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

My Presidential Endorsement Strategy

by Okla Elliott

I have an odd dual endorsement this year for President. I am endorsing both Barack Obama and Ron Paul. Wait a minute, you might be saying, how can you endorse two candidates for President? Here’s how: I am endorsing Ron Paul for the Republican nomination and then endorsing Barack Obama for the general election.

I have been an open critic of many of Obama’s policies, but right now, I am much happier with him as President than with Romney or Santorum. I am not, however, happy merely to have more of the same discussion in this country. I want a real debate on our foreign policy. I want a real debate on our civil liberties. On our drug laws. On our money policy. On our foreign aid policy. And so on. If Obama is debating Romney or Santorum, these will not be the issues of the day. It will be more of the same old tired nonsense we hear every election year.

But wait a minute, you might be saying again, what if Ron Paul actually wins? First off, I do not think any of the Republican candidates can beat Obama, but Ron Paul pretty much guarantees that Obama will be re-elected, because Ron Paul is simply too radical for Americans to elect, too old (a problem that hurt McCain in 2008), and simply too wacky on too many issues (like returning to the gold standard in the 21st century). So, not only will Ron Paul not win the general election, he’ll guarantee an Obama victory. But this way, we would get to have a national debate about cutting our military spending, ending our needless wars overseas, repealing the Patriot Act, revising our draconian drug laws, and so on, but we won’t actually end up with a libertarian guy who would close public schools and deregulate everything from lead paint to carbon monoxide emissions.

With the way the economy is (slightly) improving and with the mess the Republican Party has made of itself so far this election cycle, I think Obama can and will beat whichever Republican candidate happens to win the primaries. But if Ron Paul wins the nomination—which he could do, given the proportional delegate distribution the Republican Party is doing this year—then we would get to have a real debate about real issues in this country, instead of pretending things like the Patriot Act are fine and noble, which is exactly what we’ll get if Obama and Santorum are the nominees (since both voted for the Patriot Act and have defended it). And perhaps hearing Ron Paul denounce American militarism abroad and civil rights infringements at home will allow Obama to adopt some of those measures while retaining his willingness to protect the environment, improve our healthcare system, and fund public schools, etc. Minimally, it will make those issues part of the national discussion, which we desperately need.

And so, I am making a call for all progressives and independents to vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primaries, and then to vote for Barack Obama in the general election. It’s a strange strategy, I know, but I think it is one that could yield the greatest results for the country’s political discourse and future.

But since the Green Party is the only political party in the US I truly agree with, I am only suggesting that progressives vote for Obama in the swing states in the general election. Being in Illinois, which Obama will win handsomely (20-25%), I will vote for Ron Paul during the GOP primary and then will vote Green Party for the general election, with a smattering of Democrats and Green Party candidates for the other races. Were I in Ohio, however, I would vote Ron Paul and then Obama. This seems like the right mixture of idealism and practical voting for this year. (In 2008, I was living in Ohio, but since it was clear to any sane person that Obama was going to dominate that election, I voted Nader/Gonzalez for the Presidential ticket and mostly Democrats [and no Republicans] for the remaining races. In short, I believe our voting strategies change election to election, state to state, and candidate to candidate. My above proposal for a progressive 2012 voting strategy is not to be considered a universal rule, but rather my choice of action based on my assessment of the current situation.)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RICHARD HOFFMAN

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

INVENTORY
By Richard Hoffman

What I have given to sorrow,
though I have poured out
all I am again and again,
does not amount to much.

One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.
Another man I might have been.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Richard Hoffman is author of the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, and Emblem, as well as the short story collection Interference & Other Stories, and the celebrated memoir, Half the House. He teaches at Emerson College, and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Editor’s Note: After more than two years as the editor of this weekly series, this past Saturday I neglected to feature a poet here for the first time. I was caring for my ill father, and the rest of the world slipped away from me for a few days.

It is difficult to come to terms with sorrow, but the act and art of poetry can function as a medium for shared experience. Today’s poem is both an outlet and an entry point for communion, a masterful confession that can read like an entry in the reader’s own diary.

Want to see more by Richard Hoffman?
Richard Hoffman’s Official Website
Janus Head
“What Good” in Solstice
“Fruit in Season” in Solstice
ThoughtCast