Critical Hothouse Intercourse

HOTHOUSE INTERCOURSE

BETWEEN MADAME MELINA AND MISTER TWO EMMAS

BY MELINA COSTELLO AND DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Click here to Read the Book - Timely Intercourse

Dear Mr. Two Emmas:

You are keeping one of the most provocative literary journals on the Internet, and I hope there will be no end to it. Thus far I have especially enjoyed Charlotte Bronte's acerbic critique: it was a resonating bong! amidst all the Austen noise.

Speaking of critics and critiques, I pulled a book written by Alexander Theroux off my shelf. I purchased it at a yard sale some years back, and finally decided to have a go at it yesterday afternoon. The title might pique your interest: An Adultery.

The following reviews appeared on the back cover:

". . . Part cautionary tale, part homage to the great books of the genre by Hawthorne, Flaubert, Tolstoy and James, An Adultery is a novel of linguistic virtuosity and riveting insight--a classic for our time." - Macmillan Publishing Company

"Theroux's new novel is a brilliant piece of work--a psychological masterpiece in which the prose is of classic stature, the imagery just, and the capacity for character analysis immensely sophisticated. . . ." - Anthony Burgess

"A fascinating, eloquent, thoughtful, and wonderfully written book." - Susan Cheever, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

Here an excerpt from page 40 of the book. It is the last line I read before slamming it shut:

"But of course I went, one freezing night following her car in my own to a dimly lit side street on the outskirts of St. Ives where a mock couple, a mimic marriage, we had dinner and listened to music--she played soft jazz over and over--and talked in an anxiety-ridden pre-appointed mood as doubly indistinct as the faint gradations of tone perceptible in the sky outside the large winter window of the living room that brought a constant chill into rooms as sterile and white as the snow outside, a dampness which Farol, constantly feeding logs into the wood stove, sought to buffer in spite of the general caveat there, her husband's upon leaving, that she not waste wood."

I admit the novel could very well have been Theroux's "prose of classic stature" and "linguistic virtuosity" that, upon meeting with my own dull-wittedness, compelled a resounding "ACK!" from my lips. But never mind me, I can see from your discourse on the Two Emmas that you are qualified to make your own critical assessment. I know I would be greatly pleased with it, and I hope you can spare it.

Sincerely,
Madame Melina 

Postscript:

I realize your Emmas are two of the finest creatures devised according to the new Realism of their time, so please forgive me for intruding into your discourse on same yet again. I wish to add to my previous remarks on An Adultery before you come to a definite opinion on same. I do not believe I am impertinent for doing so. I was astonished to see Alexander Theroux flattered with a comparison to the great Flaubert. Alas, literature has decayed since Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert set pen to paper. What passes for fine literature today would cause them to spin in their graves if they could care at all for their own immortality as authors after their deaths. Alas, the art of writing has been degraded to such a confusing post-modern mess that anything that makes sense or sensibility will soon be rendered absolutely incomprehensible. If the tasteless trend continues, people will only think that they're reading and writing, for they shall have lost their ability to think, and therefore to write.

In all fairness to Alexander Theroux, I must admit that, when I first read the line I cited from his An Adultery for your highly esteemed consideration, I was struck with the fact that such an artful array of running sentence fragments could not have been the result of mere accident, say, like falling down a flight of stairs. Instead a marionette, an unwitting subject of deliberate manipulation comes to mind, one bade to posture and tumble down the stairs by virtue of a a higher power, exercised, of course, by the puppeteer.

I do not propose that the arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power has no place in fiction-writing. However, I believe the reader will subconsciously or otherwise perceive and be confused by the ambiguity of Theroux's sort of tyrannical writing. I quote two additional excerpts from An Adultery to clarify what I mean by this. The first quote provides a glimpse of the author's writing style including his tyrannical treatment of his main character, Christian Ford. The second provides a small taste of his "fascinating, eloquent, thoughtful, and wonderfully written book" (Los Angeles Times Book Review):

"I have a tendency to speak with the spasmodic cadences of a person who wants words out of the way in a hurry and along with something of a regional accent have a way of extending my vowels so that I seem to be racing through lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, almost stuttering to get on with an idea."

"I felt her in confidence immediately, a side of her (at complete loggerheads of what is expected in beauty of self-assurance) she ascribed, when I mentioned it, not to what I'd presumed was an unhappy marriage, though this entered into it, but oddly enough to her father, an artist, she from childhood loved far more, she felt, than he her--I thought I heard a therapist's echo--a matter of import apparently in that she admitted to an interest in the arts herself, drawing, sculpting, whatever."

ACK! I say again, but I am but one voice crying out in the Void, which is sufficient reason to be confused. Here then are other voices, no less confused by my estimation, and though I risk boring you with repetition, note the different ways some readers will rationalize their confusion, i.e., perceive the effects of unrestrained exercise of power by the author over their thoughts and feelings. I might add, the latter speaks to Theroux's "literary prowess" (I use the term loosely), otherwise known as the power to dupe:

'Another masterpiece from the other Theroux,' November 5, 1999. Reviewer: from Washington, DC.

"A wonderfully excoriating novel from one of America's greatest authors. Ever. Though not as rich and encyclopedic as the better and better known Darconville's Cat, it is honed and tightly written, and at home among the several great American novels written in the last 30 years. . . . As to be expected, the quality of the language and the vituperation in which it is often adorned is for its own sake worth the effort (and yes, effort is required) and worthy of the cited Frederick Rolfe."

'It grows on you,' October 21, 1997. Reviewer from Ottawa, Canada.

"After getting over the annoyance of Theroux's 'hoity-toity' way of writing, and the largely unrealistic dialogue, this book truly grows on you. You find that you have to force yourself to read the first 1/3 of the book, but after that, you then look forward to what's next. It may not be the 'Psychological Masterpiece', as it has been toted to be, but it is a very heartfelt and emotionally wrenching book." Reviewer: A Reader

'Hard going but worth the effort,' August 6, 1997. Reviewer: A reader.

"I wonder why this was not a best-seller. As usual with this author you need to work at it staying with him. It is sometime repetitious - or it seems so to the unenlightened like me." Reviewer: A Reader

"Ah! To stumble time and time again over impossibly tangled syntax, doze off in the middle of a paragraph--oh, excuse me, I meant sentence--and force oneself to stay the course through thickets of wholly inane, self-conscious dialogue is to be, forsooth, unenlightened. If this is the case, then we must view the following comments made by a Washington reader not as a genuine response to Theroux's An Adultery, but as a testimony to what surely must be her own mental defects: Insufferable characters, June 7, 1999. Reviewer: A reader from Olympia, WA.

"The only thing that prevented me from giving this book 1 star was that there were some good observations - otherwise the characters are annoying, the writing is pretentious, and the general effect is both creepy and pathetic." Reviewer: A Reader

I ask you, Mr. Two Emmas, what is the literary world coming to? I do not consider Mr. Theroux's An Adultery or at least parts of it, to be entirely without merit; any number of its sentences would surely win first prize in the prestigious Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the opening line of the worst of all possible novels. It is no simple feat to write non sequitur, maddeningly involuted prose with a deft hand, and a writer's ability to pull it off should indeed be noted, if only occasionally admired.

Of course, I do not want to unduly influence your opinion, and I certainly hope you will render it as soon as possible.

-------

Dear Madame Melina,

Your letters have inspired me to pen a treatment of constructive criticism!

Reality is the death of me and I can't stand realism for long. I have taken your letters under consideration, and I'm afraid you have left me with the impression that literary Realism has become dog food because of the decadent reality that realists really represent because they live in the animal shelter. The hounds bark hysterically before meals and think they sing ever so beautifully.

Of course I do not speak of the reality of idealism but of the technological materialism that has turned writers into mechanical street-sweeper drivers. They resort to cumbersome formulas at public expense. The public thinks the street-sweepers are doing a lovely job, but once they have passed by, it becomes obvious to refined sophisticates that the dirt, trash and leaves have just been shuffled around to the sides of a broad wet streak in the gutter, thus the process is really a waste of time and money albeit only a few lucid people know it. Whereas the realists of old could not help making a mysterious romance out of reality while actually playing in the mud with humankind.

But I am no critic, Madame. I thank you for considering me as such even though I find critics personally revolting. However, I am a reviewer from time to time: I will be glad to give a friend's book a glowing review at Amazon. And I will honor your request for a critique of the brief excerpts you sent over from Alexander Theroux's book, limiting myself to same since they do not inspire me to look further.

After I received your first communication about this literary gift to the world, it occurred to me that I lack critical criteria for critiques, that I have no standard for praise and blame except my own gut feelings, which depend on the frequency and quality of my meals. I had just eaten a good dinner, and I was not in a mood to do what so-called 'good' critics seem to do best, something that makes of the word, 'critic,' a pejorative expression. Now most of the critics you just cited seemed to be flatterers, and therefore bad critics. I found myself in a quandary, and heartburn was setting in.

It suddenly struck me that I might avoid putting your author down or raising him up, and instead provide a criticism that might flatter me! I remembered Niccolo Tucci's paper, 'On Constructive Criticism' - it appeared in the November 1949 issue of Partisan Review. It so impressed me that I kept a copy. The best way, I thought, to provide you with the critique you want, would be to simply write a superlative paraphrase of the first paragraph you submitted to me - a better paragraph on the same subject!

I retrieved Niccolo's article for better guidance - from under the bathroom sink - it was behind the hardened can of Ajax and the cockroaches, and was still in relatively good shape although stained brown. I sat down on the toilet and read this:

"I wonder if the 'constructivists' have ever paused long enough to consider what would happen in the other fields of criticism if their principles were suddenly accepted. For example, music. Now, when a serious musical critic dismisses as symphony as bad, and gives only the reasons why it does not hold together musically, that is rightly called 'criticism.'

"If the same musical critic announced the next day that he has composed a symphony of his own, that would be rightly referred to as a symphony of his own. But if upon presenting his own composition to the public, he said: 'This music here is a constructive criticism of the symphony criticized by me yesterday,' he would rightly be sent to the unholiest places and criticized, not once but twice: first as a critic who does not keep his place; secondly as a composer who pretends to be exempt from criticism because, until yesterday, he was a critic too."

Niccolo proposed that art museums allow space for critics' paintings next to the paintings they criticize. That is a great idea! I thought, and should be applied to libraries. As it is, we have a few volumes of an author's work on the shelf, followed by volumes of praise and blame. Why not rid the shelves of praise and blame, in favor of volumes of constructive criticism? War and Peace, for example, will be followed by the critics' versions of the masterpiece!

Niccolo pointed out that 'Constructive criticism' was a relative new phenomenon, most popular in the U.S., for it was purportedly 'democratic.' In his opinion, so-called constructive criticism is an attempt to tone down genuine criticism. It is equivalent to a happy ending in the movies. And to demand that a critic, who criticizes a work based on common sense, should be expert enough to do it better, is childishly arrogant and demonstrative of the prejudice that one must be a specialized to be qualified to know the difference between good and bad work. That concept is sheer nonsense and often dishonest - common-sense criticism is so embarrassing to political leaders, for example, that they insist on diplomatic and military secrecy in the "interest of national (their own) security."

Furthermore, the objection that negative as opposed to constructive criticism is destructive hence worthless is cry-baby talk. The negative critic has no duty except to except to negate, and has no obligation to come up with a workable solution.

"It's like advertising," Niccoli wrote, referring to the constructive criticism of the trains going to the death camps. "The world goes to the dogs, everything is dark, but we here at the factory have a new toothpaste that will brighten your smile."

He thinks that constructive criticism is not really democratic but is a despotic attempt at getting critics to show respect for the people and theories they criticize. It was borrowed from masters of that technique: Hitler and Mussolini. It was called "criticism within the system" because it was not "criticism of the system." It got to comic proportions in Italy. He gives this dialogue in Russia:

Critic: We, the Russian people do not want these chains.

Stalin: You are perfectly right. I will give you better ones.

Critic: We don't want better ones, we want none at all.

Stalin: You are a pessimist, a negativist, a destructive critic. You do not believe that I am here to help you. If you tell me your grievances concretely, I may help you, but if you insist on asking for the impossible, I will have to eliminate you.

Well, Madame Melina, Niccolo Tucci certainly made some excellent points, and I was glad I reviewed them. Nevertheless, when I got off the throne, I knew that the best way to criticize the paragraph you sent over was to write a better one. And that I shall do as soon as possible. As you may have noticed, I have been quite busy lately because the world is going to the dogs and something must be done.

And now, Madame, you shall find my constructive criticism directly below the text it criticizes. Since a critic once charged Flaubert with making coffins for illusions, I decided to portray an actual experience realistically in accordance with the new Southern American Realism, hoping that it might pass for good fiction notwithstanding the diction.

"But of course I went, one freezing night following her car in my own to a dimly lit side street on the outskirts of St. Ives where a mock couple, a mimic marriage, we had dinner and listened to music--she played soft jazz over and over--and talked in an anxiety-ridden pre-appointed mood as doubly indistinct as the faint gradations of tone perceptible in the sky outside the large winter window of the living room that brought a constant chill into rooms as sterile and white as the snow outside, a dampness which Farol, constantly feeding logs into the wood stove, sought to buffer in spite of the general caveat there, her husband's upon leaving, that she not waste wood." (Alexander Theroux)

Hothouse Intercourse! by Mister Two Emmas:

I followed Ruby Lee's antique white Volvo home one snowy night in rigid anticipation of what was to come in her husband's absence - I hardly heard my engine roaring and my chained tires crunching up the dark winding road to her secluded home in the woods forty miles outside Atlanta, towards Gainesville. As I pulled up behind her after she parked, she flung upon the door of her car, stepped with bare feet into the snow, stark nude, white against white in my bright beams - except for her glimmering bleached hair above reflecting tiger-eyes, shining red lips, two pinkish spots, and black magic triangle. "Come, leave the lights on, baby, come to me, he's gone, find my hot spot on the hood again!" Ruby Lee sang out, breath steaming in the frigid glare as she swung her hips round low to bump-and-grind Kansas City jazz blaring over bass booms from the new auto stereo Jack had installed for her birthday. "But what about the house? It's warm in there," I panted after I had hustled into her arms and spread her out on the warm hood. "What house? To hell with his house, baby, you set my house on fire, so come on in!"

Most Passionately Yours,

Mister Two Emmas

Click here to Read the Book - Timely Intercourse

Why Go There When God Is Here?

Luigi Faccuito - Never Stop Moving

WHY GO THERE WHEN GOD IS HERE?

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Ortega y Gasset made an obscure allusion to the Doctrinaires, saying they were misunderstood and were well worth studying. He mentioned none of them by name, so I looked them up and read their works. He was right.

I encountered Gustav Flaubert and many others including Albert Camus as a consequence of my studies of the Doctrinaires. Camus was trained in philosophy but he took up writing novels. He remarked in his diary that a good novelist must be a philosopher. I believed by "good" he meant immortal or something of the sort. Camus became one of my favorite authors. I read almost everything he wrote, and, given my distaste for fiction, that proves my fascination with his work - Melville is the only other novelist whose complete works I have read.

That is not to say that I enjoyed Camus' novels - I did not. His writing seemed as dry and parched as the Sahara desert. He is one of several existentialists who denied being an existentialist, and caused me to declare, "Existentialism is a dead end." But I eventually emerged from the other side of the dead end into nothing, and realized that Nothing is perfect.

I perused several marvelous critical assessments of Camus' work. I wondered why the critics were not writing novels themselves, because they certainly made Camus' novels interesting! I came to the conclusion that he was a great master because he laid down true lines for critics to wax eloquent on. Without such creative masters around, critics would not have much to say.

A dance teacher who had a reputation for giving the greatest dance class in New York happened to be the disciple of Luigi, a great master of jazz dance. But once he stopped taking classes with the maestro himself, once he gave up the lines he had learned to follow in his own way, his classes were not worth taking. I should have listened to the maestro in the first place, when he said, "Why go there when God is here?"

I shall reread Camus. Maybe I missed something.

xYx

Social Hygiene

Equinox Gym South Beach Florida


SOCIAL HYGIENE

BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Sigmund Freud is a household name synonymous with sexual liberation while the name of Havelock Ellis is barely known, yet Havelock Ellis along with several liberal lady friends led the popular mode of the sexual liberation that bloomed in the Sixties and is still being fought out today, particularly in the abortion arena. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), a physican and author, challenged Victorian tabus. He fostered open discussion of sexuality in order to dissipate fear and ignorance of the subject. He believed that sex is an expression of love and therefore is good. He championed women's rights and sex education. A judge called his book, The Criminal (1880) "a pretence, adapted for the purpose of selling a filthy publication." His Man and Woman (1894) also broke tabus, but Ellis is best known for Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928), an encylopedia on sexual biology and attitudes, including frank discussions of homosexuality and masturbation.

Female suffragists with the help of their male sympathizers won their cause in Britain and America in the early 20th century. Many of them had associated with the peace and labor movement, but most women sold out to get the vote, and pitched in to win the Great War. As it turned out, the fear that women would vote liberal if given the vote was unfounded: women were as conservative and perhaps even more so than men. Nonetheless, quite a few women were not only tired of producing and raising as many children as their mates happened to bestow on them, they were even more aggrieved that their hard labor was to no avail - sons and daugthers were being ground up in factories; to make matters worse, their sons were serving as cannon meat.

Pacific feminists took up abortion as a means to control the growth of the population, which was tending to 'Malthusian' poverty and neglect during the early phase of the industrial-scientific revolution. Men had been freed, to starve when no work was available, and women were increasingly competing with them for jobs. Unable to find work, some men went home and killled their families to put them out of harm's way. If only women had power over the most important production factory, their own bodies, they might in theory be able to reduce the need to fight over land and other means of production, not to mention the means of bare subsistence. In fine, abortion was viewed by some as a hygienic restraint on the ultimate production facility, the womb, that population growth might be controlled, among other things.

Certain postmodern feminists, perhaps fearing that a male might get undue credit for female revolution, have claimed that dissident women simply latched onto Havelock Ellis to take advantage of his male status and scientific credentials to capitalize their cause. Ellis loved women straight and gay, and they loved him back. It is hard to say who took the greatest advantage of whom.

Havelock Ellis discussed eugenics in his dynamic book, The Dance of Life (1923). The concept is as old as agriculture, but the notion of scientifically cultivating a superior human species was the rage at the turn of the century, and was developed along several paths including the outrageous road to the ovens. He broached the subject in while describing Jules Gaultier's philosophy of Bovarysme. Bovarism is derived from a study of Gustave Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary - Emma Bovary was a fictitious creature whom no man could possibly satisfy yet she was bound to pursue one after another all the same. Emma was, for Gaultier, a pathological case of the human need to become something more than what one presently is; a need for progress necessarily fulfilled by resort to those "illusions" that might be realized under the right conditions given the right effort. In sum, Gaultier's philosophy was a modern, dynamic idealism that repudiated static idols such as Truth. Fixed truths were anti-life as far as Gaultier was concerned, for life must go on, not stand still in death.

Revolutionary scientific and technological advances provided humankind with powerful means to cultivate nature's laws and to modify his circumstances in order to realize his material ideals, yet not much has improved in the invisible sphere. The philosophers sing a broader variety of songs with the same themes. The scientific and technological revolution seemed to make utopia possible for all people, not just for the elite. Communism or some other form of socialism, it seemed, might be possible for the entire human race instead of progress being limited to small groups. The means of production would obviously have to be in the right hands to obtain utopia: the hands of the producers. Woman were certainly entitled to have their production facilities under control; of course those men who thought of women as so much soil, and themselves as the farmers who owned that soil, disagreed.

No doubt there would be plenty of everything to share in an uncrowded utopia. But would material prosperity ensure peace? Ellis and almost every other intellectual doubted it given the reality of man's history, a history of greed and one war after another even in the midst of plenty; some say plenty causes war, because the leisure of prosperity bores humans and makes men especially anxious for violent excitement. For instance, the average German was not rich before the Great War, but he was certainly relatively well off in comparison to his predecessors, and was getting better under Germany's unprecedented prosperity - a bourgeois, effeminate prosperity that disgusted aristocratic-minded intellectuals.

Havelock Ellis, Jules Gaultier, Bertrand Russell and many others believed that man's greed for things and his lust for women - his possessive instinct - could be diverted to aesthetic pursuits: the production and appreciate of works of art. Instead of fighting for the possession of a limited number of things, people could lead an aesthetic life and appreciate representations or impressions of those things, or enjoy beautiful abstractions and the like. Great public works of art -monuments, museums, parks, et cetera - belong to the commune.

We observe in an aside that children were raised by the community in Plato's utopia - we might claim that children are art works in process, and that public education is an aesthetic endeavor. We might also imagine a free-love society where love is an art promiscuously pursued by people freed of the burden of involuntary childbearing and from inefficient child-raising by their parents, a society where mates and children are not possessed as private property.

Ellis quoted the philosopher Santayana: "Everything is a work of art in a thoroughly humanized society."

Another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote Ellis, found two impulses in humankind: a creative impulse, which tends to save man; a possessive impulse, which destroys him. To keep a thing to oneself is to deprive others and even oneself of its enjoyment.

The imaginary life itself rather than belief in idols should serve to restrain the possessive impulse by deflecting and keeping it, via sublimation, in a sort of dream-world where energy is dissipated in the creation of un-reality. Religions and moralities are counter-productive because they invoke menacing images in an attempt to gratify the possessive instinct by enslaving imagination to an alien power. For instance, obey god and get rich, disobey god and lose everything. On the other hand, we might suppose that the aesthete constantly creates his god, never arrives at the eternity beyond time and space; that is to say, Nothing.

"Those who promote life," remarked Russell, "do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal."

Such an aesthetic life would take the pressure off women to produce wage slaves and cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex, provided women were willing to cooperate in the beautification project. Ellis pointed out that the aesthetic instinct is related to morality, and that the aesthetic instinct has been around as long as the egoistic instinct. He opines, I think mistakenly, that the aesthetic instinct, unlike the possessive instinct, engenders neither hatred or obedience; it does not,he claims, compel obedience or inculcate prohibitions. The art-for-art's sake artist does not mix with the crowd and push points of view: he picks out something and reveals the truth of it.

Alas, Havelock Ellis looks around and sees an obstacle to the realization of an beautiful utopia: art and morality are rapidly degenerating. Civilized life has brought about excessive industrialism and materialization, and with it the demoralization of men and corresponding decay of their aesthetic sensibility. Why, if Sun and Moon were within their reach, predators would steal and destroy them. Witness for example beautiful public places such as parks and churches: they must be closed because of the depredations of a "predatory minority."

"The liberty of the whole community in its finest manisfestations is abridged by a handful of imbeciles...." complained Ellis.

What can be done to save our ideal, beautiful world?

In a word, Eugenics.

Ellis quotes Francis Galton: "It is incumbent upon us to eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the unnatural conditions which society in the past had established. That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring and these diseased stocks and in the interests of society. No power in Heaven or Earth can ever confer upon us the right to create the unfit in order to hang them like millstones around the necks of the fit." Furthermore, the humanitarians who ruled the 19th century were "anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of humanity."

Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin's cousin and the founder of modern eugenics, was an anti-Christian evolutionist. He studied medicine but did not practice. Galton coined the world 'eugenics,' and believed it expressed a Greek notion: the basis for his concept of eugenics, which he defined as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally."

Eugenics, Galton insisted, should be studied in school, practiced as a political policy, and "must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion." Galton pioneered new statistical methods, including correlated calculus, and made ample use of the"bell curve." He sometimes took his science of "biometrics" to ridiculous lengths: in Africa he walked around a large-breasted woman and measured her angles with a sextant. He was fond of rating girls for beauty on a scale of one to ten, charting the results.

Galton outlined his views on eugenics in 'Hereditary Character and Talent', an article appearing in MacMillan's Magazine in November of 1864 and April 1865.

"If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle," he said, "what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties..... The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised.... We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old.... No one, I think, can doubt, from the facts and analogies I have brought forward, that, if talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly-bred human race, with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds."

Ellis admits that he has diverged from Gaultier's illusionism, for Gaultier's aesthetic solutions to the vulgarities were more democratic and middle-class: wages should be increased so that the vulgar would have more leisure to elevate themselves to the aesthetic life - of course leisure energy must be mandated to that end.

Ellis also quoted the statement of zoologist A. M. Carr-Saunders (1866-1966), that all people practiced eugenics, via abortion, infanticide, and abstinence, to select and maintain the best stocks of people. Carr-Saunders, who influenced Friedrich A. Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, had authored a popular book, The Population Problem, in 1922. "Human evolution," stated Carr-Saunders, "is nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, revolution." Apparently evolution should be helped along or all hell will break loose, just as the inevitable classless state of the communists should be helped along .

Ellis further bolstered his argument in favor of eugenics with references to the sayings of Jesus the Christ. For example: "The path to salvation is narrow." "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." And, "Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savour.... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and be trodden under foot of men."

We might suppose, after taking certain portions of scripture out of spiritual context, that Christianity was an aristocratic religion or a communist religion - take your pick. As for the abortion debate, Jesus allegedly was a Jew, and we know from sources other than scripture that the Jews frowned on abortion and infanticide. Notwithstanding religious laws, particularly the prohibition against harming a child in the womb, it behooved the tribes to go forth and multiply given their warlike behavior. Romans, who practiced abortion and infanticide, ridiculed the "immorality" of the Jews for not doing the same. Still, Ellis rightly identifies the principle of selection if not the right practice of the principle.

Ellis suggests that civilization might resort to cities of refuge to save the better portion of humanity; that suburban path is now being followed by those who can afford it - perhaps the highway to utopia might be broadened somewhat by socialists.... Not just any withdrawal from the vulgar world will do, certainly not the ascetic flight from reality. Ellis mistakenly claims that the withdrawing Cistercians (better known later as the Trappist monks) produced nothing, "mixing not with men nor performing for them so-called useful tasks." The Cistercians were fed up with the corruption of the current monkish order, so they fled to the woods and set up shops nearby or on streams - things could be cleaned on one end of the structure and the other end could be used to flush away waste. The ingenious Cistercians followed the Benedictine rule dignifying manual labor. Their free devotional labor helped produce an economic boom in Europe. A predatory commercial minority moved in and exploited the Cistercians - some became abbots, purchasing the office in order to take over the productive monasteries.

Eugenics leaves us with a hygienic question few clean and comfortably situated people bother to ask because they already have an answer: Who should be weeded out and who should be cultivated?

The answer would depend on the definition of a "good" human being. When someone says, "It is incumbent upon us to eliminate those ill-balanced and poisonous stocks produced by the unnatural conditions which society in the past had established. That we have to do alike in the interests of the offspring and these diseased stocks and in the interests of society," we might think, for example, of privileged people who by virtue of artificial or "unnatural" civilized society have inherited their power and wealth, or who have obtained it unethically, or who have won it not because of their personal merits but by luck of the draw, so to speak. We might even refer to many of them as the "scum on top of society" since the "dregs of society" has already been taken by the predators at the depths.

All that and more might be remedied by inheritance taxes, and other legislation abolishing the legalization of their "good" fortune and their crimes against humanity. If members of a predatory minority are caught hoarding and amassing unearned wealth, they might receive long prison sentences at hard labor, with regular floggings and appropriate periods in the hole, of course. That would be the humane thing to do, especially if such persons are predisposed by nature to be economic and military predators. If the genetic coding is at fault, genetic therapy could be put to good use. Birth control might be mandatory absent voluntary restraint; failing that, abortion might be a necessary adjunct to the selective breeding of good human stocks. However, evidence from recent primate studies suggest that nurture and not nature is the cause of our social ills:

PloSBiology published a study of a temperamental and tonal shift in a troop of 62 baboons after the dominant males, given to fighting with dominant males from another troop over a tourist resort's garbage dump, were killed by bovine tuberculosis contracted from tainted meat. Subordinate males, females, and children left behind did not catch the disease. The social hierarchy relaxed with a cultural swing to pacifism that has lasted twenty years despite the death or disappearance of the pacific males. Male baboons tend to emigrate, hence the pacific males were sometimes replaced by immigrants, who soon gave up their aggressive habits and adopted the peaceful ways of their new community: mutual affection and grooming instead of nasty fighting. (Kansas City Star, April 18, 2004)

The cause of human violence may not be as natural as some people suppose. Another primate study has come in, this one on bonobos found in the Congo. Bonobos are close cousins to humans, with 98% genetic similarity. They enjoy a matriarchical social structure. Eschewing conflict, they do not fight over territory, and resolve their frictions sexually. Sex play begins at the age of one; there is no proprietary mating; homosexuality is au courant. Human beings are destroying them with their wars as well as eating them for dinner. Claudine Andre, who cares for orphaned bonobos in Kinshasa, said of the bonobos, "It's really make love, not war. It was so sad to see such a pacific animal destroyed by war." (New York Times, May 4, 2004)

Galton was right when he said, "The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised...." (sic). Perhaps our educators need to take the recommendation of biologist H.G. Wells to heart, and make sure that education proceeds with biology. Indeed, good grades in biology, anthropology and the like should be necessary to qualify for leadership. Yet it is highly unlikely that the current leaders will make such provisions for mandatory education in the biological fundamentals.

A radical environmentalist has suggested that a 'Great Defenestration' be held to liquidate the predatory minority, proceeding with supervisors of over ten people and working up to the dominant predators on the top floors - since the windows of skyscrapers are usually sealed, defenestration might be impossible, hence the minority could be hurled from the rooftops by the Topping Off Party. Such a course of action, they hope, will lead to another Renaissance of the human spirit, just as humanity was revitalized after the Black Death destroyed the medieval theocracy.

Top-down social-hygiene methodology assumes that the scum should be scraped off the top, first of all, then the dregs at the bottom can be dredged up. But to start at the top might be immoral: political and religious leaders of the Red Scare warned us that it is just as much of a sin to hate rich people as it is to hate poor people. For the sake of scientific progress, perhaps a Teddy Roosevelt of social hygiene could be engaged to restrain the predators at top and bottom at the same time.

Imagination Betrayed

IMAGINATION BETRAYED

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

"The change will begin with those powers which man ascribes to himself, but which, in reality, he does not possess. This means that before a man can acquire any new powers and capacities, he must actually develop in himself those qualities he thinks he possesses, and about which he has the greatest possible illusions." P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution

Another song for Melina

Madame Bovary is a female Don Quixote. Her adultery was commonplace. The imperial censors were appalled by her novel conduct, but in reality her pastimes would hardly have been novel - quite to the contrary. Flaubert's critics were surprised that he would take up such a mundane subject as adultery in France, and called him a Realist. But adultery was not the point of the novel. Emma Bovary had read too much sentimental trash and took its underlying theme to heart. She also read two of her creator's childhood favorites: the despairing Romantics, Byron and Chateaubriand - as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, "C'est moi.'

In contrast to Marie Antoinette, a real woman who finally abandoned hope of escape on this earth and then faced the reality of The End with resolve, courage, and dignity, the fictitious Madame Bovary betrayed the Imaginary: she tried to make her escape from reality good on earth: she wanted to realize the Imaginary during her desperate flight from finite reality into the infinite possibilities of imagination, hence in absurd self-contradiction she betrayed the 'pure' Imaginary in itself, which is properly employed as art for art's sake and not for the possession of things in this world. Yet, despite her wordly passion, she unconsciously craved Flaubert's Nothing. Flaubert loved Nothing, wanted to write a book about nothing but Nothing. He had faith in Nothing, a Nothing which is, perversely, the positive devoid of negating content - figuratively speaking, absolute space is positive and objects are negations of its infinity.

Reality tasted like ordure to Flaubert; in a sense he was a misanthrope, perhaps so in a special Satanic sense: Satan hated man because he loved God exclusively. Flaubert's Imagination, drawn to Nothing, vanished into infinity. Eternal YUK, young Flaubert's god of the grotesque, transcended Satan and God. Yuk seized the goddess Truth from Satan and plunged into the Abyss, where he (expletive deleted) Truth to death. There could be no beauty, goodness, truth in the evil something, in the world.

Emma represented a neurotic case of the existential impulse towards the infinitude beyond human existence. In her unwitting or 'innocent' moral turpitude, she strove for exaltation into the transcendental realm while wanting it here and now. Freud associated the impulse to Nothing with a destructive principle he dubbed the "death instinct" - his pleasure principle alone was inadequate to man's dual nature. Of course others insist that the transcendental yearning is not a sublimation of a biological urge to return to the womb if not the elements, but is rather a striving towards a positive, transcendental being.

For philosopher Jules Gaultier, Madame Bovary was a pathological case of a healthy, necessary and natural tendency to illusion, a tendency for a woman to always become; that is, to be something that she presently is not. Hence his philosophy of illusionism, or Bovarysm (Bovarysme). Static "Truth" or Reality or Being is the enemy of dynamic life, which always strives, in a creative-destructive process, not to be, but to become.

"The law of a thing in motion and which exists only on the condition of always being divided with itself, is never able to attain a state of repose.... To become other is the law of life," quoth Gaultier.

The failure to realize the possible does not betray the Imagination itself but rather betrays its particular application. There is no betrayal of the Imagination in the failure to realize the impossible; indeed, to strive to realize the impossible is pathological. The pathological tendency comprises an escape to unreality. The pathological effort is a misapplication of imagination to the inertial force of circumstances.

We can sing the ancient precautionary song in several ways: the Greeks simply said "Know thyself." For most of them, that meant, "Know thy limits." To get to know those limits better, some people have pushed the envelope farther than others. One strives to overcome, but to repeat the same mistake over and over again is not rational. In any event, Gaultier advises us to rejoice even in spectacles of failure, for if all persons were perfect hence equal there should be nothing worthy or superior to live for. At the same time, one must be in harmony with the self to the extent that it can grow, for growth is the criterion of change. We certainly need our illusions, our ideals, but we should take care that our striving is efficacious and beneficial; that is, applied to those activities where realization of the illusion is possible.

For instance, Madame Bovary could never find the perfect man in the world, no more than a geometer can find a perfect circle in the world. She had nothing definite in mind, but strove relentlessly to the infinite and found it in suicide. Furthermore, as we are wont to say, people change, hence some variance from our definition of the ideal mate must be suffered and enjoyed. Unity in marriage is momentary: without differences between mates there is no personal identity. Emma Bovary would have been better off doing the best she could do with the man who loved her the most.

XYX

On Pythiatism

ON PYTHIATISM

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Jean Paul Sartre was so inordinately obsessed with Gustav Flaubert that he just had to write a multi-volumn psychoanalysis of Madame Bovary's author - The Family Idiot. Flaubert was not the idiot Sartre supposed him to be. Sartre's description and cutting analysis of the French literary realist's life is more of a subjective autobiographical projection than an objective biography. Sartre proves himself to be a neurotic while arguing that Flaubert is neurotic. Sartre's approach is neither disinterested nor sympathetic, but is rather prejudicial, vindictive, and ideological (Marxist). Sartre will not let up. He gives Flaubert little credit, and uses him to prove his own preconception, that society is sick, and that Flaubert is its sick representative. Nonetheless, there is more than a grain of truth in what amounts to Sartre's representation of his own time; which is, in turn, more or less a development of Flaubert's time. When we speak much about a certain person, we often talk a lot about ourselves at the same time. Indeed, yours truly is somewhat obsessed with Flaubert.

Sartre presents Flaubert as a neurotic whose neurosis is a monastery to which he withdraws, from reality, to live an imaginary life as a novel writer. Flaubert's Imaginary is not, like life, dynamic, but is static in defense, is immutable, fixed. His Imaginary is style, pure style. He keeps his muse, Louise Colet, at arm's length in Paris and writes to her from his sanctuary near Rouen, advising her at a distance to think only of style. But pure style is the formless form of Nothing. Flaubert is engaged in an aimless subjective activity which is ultimately inactivity, or passivity. That preoccupation, according to Sartre, is onanistic, mental masturbation. The rigid response to the environment is an end in itself.


However, Sartre holds that Flaubert's ejaculations - his work - is not pathological - it is neurotic. He insists that Flaubert's "morbid passivity and pithiatism made him choose the Imaginary as a permanent milieu against the Real." His "directed dream," then, is tantamount to a continuous annihilation of Being; his choice of the Imaginary is a "break" or "rupture" from the Real. Thus he regresses to the preneurotic stage prior to his crisis - a sort of epileptic fit he suffered as a young man - to realize in the relived crisis the theme of his neurosis. Hysteria is Dr. Sartre's diagnosis, not the vulgar, convulsive, rigid hysteria, but a facile, evasive hysteria. Wherefore Art is Flaubert's excuse not to live the dynamic life he fears. Sartre's ideological prejudices presume the social determination of the hysteria. Flaubert is a unique universal-singular or concrete-universal totalizing his sick bourgeois class with his self-centered, categorical individualism. And that is why his work happens to be popular - like all best-selling authors, he affirms his class - neurotic authors succeed in neurotic societies.


Of course from the bourgeois perspective, to be "sane" is to be bourgeois. According to Sartre's Marxist class-conflict ideology favoring the rise of the downtrodden proletariat, to be popular is to be false. In any case, Dr. Sartre's piercing analysis is even more ruthless than the surgical realism he attributes to his analysand - Flaubert the positivist is a doctor's son, a childhood witness, in the hospital where the Flauberts lived, to several remarkable autopsies.

Sartre employs an unusual term for hysteria - pithiatism - and we wonder what it means. We might find it defined somewhere as "luciferous logolepsy" - an obsession with words, and suppose that might amount to verbal hysteria. The term "pythia" reminds us of the possibly drug-induced oracular ranting of the pythias - an order of Cretan nuns - at Delphi in response to questions put to the oracle. The ravings were ambiguously 'interpreted' by male priests, in bad verse, sometimes in accordance with arrangements already made by the priests with the party by who asked the question - hence the fix was in and the temple was paid for. The mutterings may or may not have been the result of suggestions made to the prophetess before she drank the spring water, chewed the laurel leaves, and inhaled the gas from the chasm. The interpretations rendered by the priests, if not arranged for in advance, were ambiguous enough to depend on the subjective disposition of the party concerned, who would no doubt do what he wanted to do in the first place, but seemingly with divine sanction. If the outcome was against him, it was then no fault of the oracle or of the interpreting priest, for it could be demonstrated that the seeker had misconstrued the verse, and that some other meaning more appropriate to the outcome appertained. In any event, the oracle at Delphi was persuasive enough to provide confused people with self-confidence enough to take the course of action they consciously or unconsciously desired to take before seeking counsel.

Turning to the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, we find the following definition:

Psychol. Pythiatism. a. pithiatic. A type of hysteria thought to be amenable to and curable by suggestion. 1910 Lippincott's New Med. Dict. 740/2 Pithiatism, = Hysteria. (Babinski.) Ibid., Pithiatic. 1913 E. JONES in White Jelliffe Mod. Treatm. Nervous Mental Dis. I. viii. 370 Babinski attempts to divide verbal suggestions into those that are unreasonable..and those that are reasonable and beneficial... Treatment by means of persuasion he calls ‘pithiatism’. 1918 J. D. ROLLESTON tr. Babinski's Hysteria or Pithiatism p. xv, Among the various nervous phenomena observed in the neurology of war it is most important to distinguish hysterical or pithiatic disorders. 1930 P. D. KERRISON Dis. of Ear (ed. 4) xxii. 551 Pithiatism implies not only the possibility of cure by persuasion, but also the fact that the disorder may in some degree be called into being by suggestion. Ibid., Pithiatic deafness... is at its inception a veritable deafness, the inevitable sequence of a shock to the perceptive labyrinth, which could have had no other result. 1975 Y. PELICIER in J. G. Howells World Hist. Psychiatry iv. 131 Babinski (1901) proposed the name of ‘pithiatism’ to designate a special condition, where suggestion is able to produce or suppress clinical symptoms.

We find that the term 'pythiatism' is variously employed in reference to both the hysterical 'disease' and to its cure. As verbal hysteria, it may be defined as a flexible and open-ended verbal break with reality without physical spasms. Of course hysteria is no longer included in most scientific nosology. Hysteria in common parlance connotes a strategic break with the reality of the social situation; for instance, the woman who resorts to hysterical behavior instead of a direct violent confrontation with an overpowering force.
 

Here is something pertinent from Ilza Veith's HYSTERIA, THE HISTORY OF A DISEASE, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965:

"Janet's devotion to the word hysteria, and his desire to preserve it even though it had become etymologically meaningless, was not shared by all of Charcot's disciples. Babinski created a new term 'pythiatisme,' which to him expressed its most important features, since it combined the Greek words peitho, I persuade, and iatos, curable, believing that amenability to cure by persuasion was not only the most important characteristic of hysteria but also of diagnostic important. Although the term still lingers in the current medical dictionaries, it failed to become part of the general medical vocabulary.

"Babinsky's great number of publications on hysteria beginning in the early nineties of the past century had made him an authority on the subject. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, concern with hysteria became one of enormous practical importance, since this was one of the totally disabling diseases among the soldiers of all armies. Moreover, the problem of distinguishing the malingerer from the hysteric that had face S. Weir Mitchell and W.W. Keen in the Civil war had become even more pressing in this much larger international conflict.. Actually, it is hard to see how Babinski's 'pithiasmic' concept could have been very helpful in this dilemma, although his discussion of treatment is a very positive and optimistic one.

"The physician's task he saw simply as (a) the prevention of pithiatic disorders by means of hygiene and prophylaxis, and (b) the cure of this disorders once they have developed. Since they were caused by autosuggestion as well as by hetero-suggestion, the best prophylaxis was for physicians, nurses, and visiting friends always to weight their statements when visiting patients so as to avoid suggesting hysterical conditions. Therepeusis, in turn, demanded persuasion and countersuggestion and, above all, an atmosphere of confidence and faith. The confidence in the physician should also extend to his ability to distinguish organic disease from hysterical disorders and to treat it accordingly.

"Needless to say, this point of view struck some of Babinsky's contemporaries, even those who greatly admired his neurological acumen as somewhat naive, and it failed to stir the medical imagination."

The following might help our understanding of pithiatism, from Katrien Libbrect's HYSTERICAL PSYCHOSIS, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995:

"After Charcot's death in 1893 Babinski turns from well-liked successor into the most important protagonist in the crucifixion of Charcot's hysteria. He explicitly takes the side of the (scientific) neurology against the psychological trend of Janet and focuses his research on signs that allow the differentiation between hysterical and neurological (lesional) disorders. In 1901 this brings him to a definition of hysteria in which the capacity of autosuggestion is the determinate element. His definition is purely pragmatical; hysteria is a collection of symptoms that can be produced by suggestion and which may disappear by means of counter-suggestion or persuasion. Charcot's experimental method of research is used here as a diagnostic means.

"Babinsky concludes that certain Charcotian symptoms, including hysterical delusory states, must necessarily disappear from the collection of hysterical phenomena. Hysteria is stripped of every trace of madness.

"The fragmentation of Charcot's concept of hysteria carried through in this was by Babinski is generally adopted. It is, however, not only unanimously accepted, but additionally and erroneously interpreted that hysteria is simulation and therefore does not exist. This was by no means Babinski's original intention since he crowns his definition of hysteria with a new signifier which seems more appropriate to him. He introduces the neologism pithiatism, i.e., curable by persuasion or conviction. His purification of Charcot's major hysteria this way unintentionally becomes the coup de grace of hysteria as such, since the misinterpretation of his view quickly find general acceptance."

Finally, we may approach the subject with excerpts from Mark S. Micale's APPROACHING HYSTERIA, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995:

"Contemporaneously with the advance of neurological medicine and the emergence of a new nomenclature of the psychoses was the appearance of the 'neuropsychoses' as we know them today, the third medical area absorbing elements of the former hysteria diagnosis. Simply put, those portions of the old hysteria diagnosis that were not claimed decisively at this time by either mainstream organic medicine or institutional alienism were up for grabs by a young generation of doctors eager to theorize led the way in this process. Babinski, previously among the strongest adherents to the Salpetrian (Charcot) credo, repudiated his mentor's teachings bit by bit during the 1890s. In 1901, he proposed a new a much narrower definition of hysteria, to be christened 'pithiatism.' After years of deliberation, the Neurological Society of Paris voted to adopt Babinsky's neologism, and officially abandon 'hysteria' as a term of French medical terminology. In La semaine medicale, Babinski celebrated his linguistic victory in an essay that was tellingly subtitled 'On the Dismemberment of Hysteria.' In a parallel development, Janet contributed to the process of diagnostic dismantlement with his category 'psychasthenia.' Babinsky's pithiatism and Janet's psychasthenia are unfamiliar to Anglo-American readers today, but they remained influential in French psychological medicine until the 1930s. Both concepts illustrate clearly the fluid clinical relationship between the 'old' hysteria and the 'new' psychoneurosis."

The Hysterical Woman

THE HYSTERICAL WOMAN

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Hysterical symptoms waned as the sexual revolution and the women's liberation movement advanced. We can thank Sigmund Freud for pointing out some of the roots of hysteria in Puritan or Victorian morality and for recommending cures therefor - Havelock Ellis and his lady friends actually deserve more credit than Freud for the sexual revolution that climaxed in the Sixties. We still see public displays of hysterical behavior from time to time in our almost liberated rational culture. Some of the classical symptoms are still observed in mental institutions; they should not be made light of, for the behavior is suffered rather than deliberately intended.

Fainting using to be a widespread form of intentional hysteria, to be cured by smelling salts. Fainting has gone out of style along with hooped skirts - Southern belles still practiced it in the Fifties. During the American Revolution, Peggy Shippen, Benedict Arnold's wife, practiced fainting; she brought hysteria to a fine art with her stellar performance before Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette after her husband's treachery was exposed. However that may be, certainly everyone now living has encountered a hysterical woman or two. But what is a hysterical woman?

The word hysterical, borrowed from a Greek word meaning "uterus," was originally reserved for women only. Nonetheless, various forms of the supposedly irrational behavior denoted have occasionally been observed in males. Yet it is an insult for a man to be called hysterical, for his gender is ideally reasonable (rational). Therefore, "hysterical", when applied to a man, is a dismissive label used to discredit him for expressing himself like an emotional woman. Furthermore, hysterical men are often deemed vain, subjective, selfish, narcissistic, and probably homosexual. But to say a woman is hysterical is not offensive because hysteria, vulgarly speaking, is one of her traditional roles. That role may still be viewed in old films: hysteria was treated with a good slap across the female sex-symbol's lovely face when her hysteria became unbearable to the rational heroes. Heroes are more understanding now that sexpots are muscular martial arts Amazons armed with assault rifles. Besides, thus armed, women are seldom inclined to deploy hysterical antics.

Fine, but what is hysteria? According to modern psychologists, the term "hysteria" is useless for purposes of diagnosis and classification: there is no clear definition of hysteria, no common etiology, clinical picture, epidemiology, or prognosis. Hysteria is not dependent on any known organic or structural pathology. That being said, I opine that female hysteria is a role variously conditioned by sexual politics. Hysteria is one way women learned to behave without getting their heads beat in by men. It is a way of avoiding conflict and expressing anxiety or protest without taking direct personal responsibility. In those ancient cultures where the practice was not frowned upon, a hysterical woman might be an enthusiastic prophetess possessed by a god or goddess. Where it was frowned upon, she was possessed by evil spirits, at least until she became "mentally ill."
The New Encyclopedia Brittanica(1997) provides us with some insight into the meaning of the term and the prejudices attached to it:

"Hysteria, in its clinically pure form, seems to occur among the psychologically naive (!) than among sophisticated (!) persons." Moreover, we find that hysteria is now diminishing throughout the world because of "sophistication", "diminished sexual prudery", and "less authoritarian family structure." Furthermore, we learn that hysteria is anxiety converted to physical symptoms, from paralysis to convulsions, and that it also involves disturbances of the senses. Some of those disturbances were once used as proof of witchcraft. We might as well include here extrasensory experiences and other paranormal (abnormal) phenomema.
The Encyclopedia of Psychology (1994) edited by Raymond J. Corsini also illuminates our subject:

"While it can be said that hysterical symptoms allow individuals to avoid unpleasant situations without assuming responsiblity for their behavior, this hardly distinguishes them from other neurotic (!) behavior patterns that serve the same purpose." Furthermore, we learn of there is "primary gain", or the avoidance of emotional conflict, and "secondary gain", the attention and support of others by virtue of being incapacitated and, at the same time, avoiding unacceptable behavior.

I believe the foregoing supports the view that hysteria can be a woman's tactical response to male intimidation - I make no such inferences here in regards to amnesia, sleepwalking, and multiple personality. Men may believe they have a natural right to chastise and terrorize women for their own good; or they may simply ignore their wishes, and if some protest is made, dismiss them as irrational creatures who therefore have no business in rational politics.

A case of hysteria was broadly televised at the culmination of the famous Elian Case. Elian's mother drowned bringing her little boy to the United States from Cuba. After he was rescued and given refuge with his Miami relatives, a tug-of-war ensued between his Miami relatives, who wanted him to stay in the States, and his Cuban relatives, including his father, who wanted him back in Cuba. Thanks to the free media, Elian soon became the internationally recognized Symbolic Boy who had been saved by Mary, Mistress of the Sea, Our Lady of Sorrows.

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the final petition of Elian's Miami relatives. Although no statement was attached to the refusal, it effectively and finally affirmed the paternal rights and the sanctity of the nuclear family thereunder.The Symbolic Boy was whisked off to the airport forty minutes later and flown to Cuba. Many Americans had strong feelings one way or the other, and many were ambivalent. The polls indicated that the majority of Americans did not care about the Elian Case - as far as they were concerned, it was just another event contrived by the media.

Now witness the hysterical scene in front of the Miami relative's home where Elian had lived for awhile, until he was snatched away by government agents armed with assault rifles. Men in front of the house look angry and sad. They shake their heads somberly. But some of the women are wailing, apparently grief stricken. One woman is frantically ripping down the old protest signs, tearing them up, falling on her knees, getting up, shrieking, crying, and running about madly. A local television reporter approaches her, asks her to calm down and to make a statement, which she now does in plain English, movingly, eloquently, almost hypnotically, while holding back the rage and tears. It takes no priest of Apollo to interpret her speech - that evening, we wondered why we did not hear it again on prime-time news.

Just what did she say? She said that something sinister is going on in the United States. She said that we love money too much here, thinking of only ourselves as we stuff our faces while other people are starving to death. She said we do not respect the mother's will, the mother's rights in our fine country, that we are sending a little boy back to a place where he will be told that his mother is a traitor for trying to give him the gift of freedom. She declared we do not honor all those who have died for freedom, including the boy's mother, and she pointed out that immigrants did not come to America for gold but for freedom. Then she made a prophecy: Elian will grow up to learn the truth, how freedom was given to him by his mother, and then stolen away from him by politicians. As she prophesied that Americans will pay dearly for their greed and carelessness everywhere, the microphone and camera was suddenly jerked away.

Immediately thereafter, a political activist for the Cuban-American community appeared to say, in a monotone, that "although the woman was hysterical, not articulate, and was blaming the wrong people," she was "supporting the right cause." He was cool, calm, collected, articulate, sophisticated - his face was a virtual death mask of political self-control. Maybe that is how it must be amongst men lest they get themselves killed for telling it like it is, for expressing their true feelings with enraged screams and bitter prophecies. Perhaps that is a hysterical woman's job, still today, in this advanced liberal age. At least for a brief and glorious moment, the ancient prophetess had her oracular say in our free country on June 28th, 2000 C.E. through the heart and mouth of a hysterical Cuban-American woman in Miami. In her subjective fit she did not call for men to be more objective and to kill Fidel Castro, invade Cuba and set up gambling joints and houses of prostitution: no, she called them to task for making a decision according to their usual patriarchal prejudice. She did not speak this time for Apollo, but for those of his children who would love to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

2004 Miami

XYX

Liberty Fried Absurdities

LIBERTY FRIED ABSURDITIES

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Life in Downtown Kansas City is such an epicenter of metropolitan absurdities that I have become fond of being eccentric or off center somewhere else; for instance, at Country Club Plaza. The Plaza has something of a French fried flavor which pleases me and makes me want to visit France before I die. Hopefully the muffins in French cafes are larger than the ones at Muddy's.

I reached into my cheap plastic briefcase after I sat down on the bus from downtown to the Plaza the other day and pulled out some old notes I had taken from letters and books that I had perused several years ago. I've been carrying them around ever since. They seemed significant, but I really did not know why until I took up the subject of mystical estate development in Kansas City and proceeded with the creation of my personal doctrines of Absurdism for the Heart of America. Now the notes make quite a bit of sense, or nonsense, if you please. They serve to adumbrate Absurdism as it stood in France over a century and a half ago in the context of the bulging-belly bourgeois revolution against left-wing radicalism and right-wing royalism. Reading them again on a bouncing back seat of the jolting Country Club Plaza bus was similar to gazing at an impression of myself, kith and kin in a rusty mirror:

For instance, on 14 November, 1871, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand as follows:

The good bourgeois is becoming more and more stupid! He does not even go to vote! The brute beasts surpass him in their instinct for self-preservation. Poor France! Poor us!" And this: "We suffer from one thing only: Absurdity. But it is formidable and universal. When they talk of brutishness of the plebe, they are saying an unjust, incomplete thing. Conclusion: the enlightened classes must be enlightened. Begin by the head, which is the sickest, the rest will follow." 

There it is: Absurdity. Absurdity is a very stupid thing. Mind you that Flaubert was in a dark mood, and for very good reason. The Franco-Prussian war was disastrous for his country. Defeat led to defeat after defeat. The army and Emperor (Louis) Napoleon III capitulated on September 2, 1870. That was followed by a bloodless revolution in Paris. Thus fell the Second Empire, and the Third Republic began after Bismarck insisted on the election of a national assembly. On January 18, 1871, the Prussian king was crowned emperor of a united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. On February 17, 1871, M. Thiers was appointed chief executive, under control of the assembly. The war would be renewed under the new Republic. The Paris Commune, outraged at the sight of marching German troops, revolted and were put down by troops on May 21, 1871. As for Flaubert's role, he had been appointed lieutenant in the National Guard, but he refused to wear the Legion of Honor. His house had been occupied by the Germans - not much harm was done, however. Several friends had died, including his old classmate, Louis Bouilhet. He was depressed and feeling more misanthropic than usual. But he had never thought much of French society, anyway. Back in September of 1855, he had written to Bouilhet:

"Against the stupidity of my age I feel waves of hatred that suffocate me. The taste of shit comes to my mouth.... I want to keep it there, congeal it, harden it, make it into a paste to daub all over the nineteenth century, as Indian pagodas are gilded with cow dung; and who knows, maybe it will endure?"

Nothing is perfect, and Flaubert had Nothing in mind since the morbid Romantic days of his youth - his culture was somewhat like our Goth culture today. He finished a novel in 1869, L' Education sentimentale, about the degeneration of his generation. Its protagonist, Frederic Moreau, inherited a fortune and decided to move to Paris. His mother asked him what he would do there. "Nothing." In fact his ambition was to achieve Nothing. He loved to wander aimlessly on virtually endless walks about Paris.

Flaubert, in another letter to George Sand circa 1871, begged askance of the social turmoil: "What shall we believe in, then? In nothing! That is the beginning of wisdom. It was time to have done with 'principles' and to take up science, and investigation."

Just say Yes to Nothing, we might say. Let us have faith in Nothing, for Nothing is Perfect, Nothing is Impossible. Nonetheless, as we can observe in the Heart of America, simply beginning with the heads of society does not work. Poor Kansas City! Poor us!

Can we trust to the enlightenment of our civic leaders, the heads of society, as Flaubert supposed when he recommended, "Begin by the head, which is the sickest, the rest will follow." The old heads agreed with the cosmopolitan humanist principles of the Renaissance: humanity must learn the lessons of the ancient world and believe in its own powers. And the enlightened rulers agreed with the rational principles of the Enlightenment: man must emerge from his dependence on arbitrary, superstitious traditional authority, and have the courage to decide to think for himself and to be independent. Then the enlightened heads led the world into irrational orgies of mutual mass murder in the name of metaphysical entities. What good does it do to reason with powerful and wealthy people that their fortunes should be diminished by a just political distribution of power and wealth? "Sapre aude," Take courage to know - so goes the Enlightenment motto, but what good does knowledge do if unapplied?

And what is being cultivated today in the best universities, the universities for the wealthy elite? Ideological stupidity. Listen carefully to the Bushisms of the representative "moron." Society is not being dumbed down, really, but dumbed up, and all in the name of scientific principles.

The fundamental principle of science is skepticism: doubt. Of course the Enlightenment, with its overemphasis on absolute individual liberty and equality, tended to ethical relativism. Instead of looking to the sovereign, who ruled by arbitrary, unimpeachable divine right, the Enlightenment relied on direct experience guided by reason, which is presumably available to all sane persons, and projected the total process onto an imaginary superior entity, the State. The state or the totality (Enlightenment principles imply several forms of government including the totalitarian form) of individual rights and reasons was substituted for God, and that state was believed to be in ideal harmony with natural and social law. All that was in accord with political science, for the laws of society were presumed to be analogous to Newton's laws. Of course many enlightened scientists did not give much credence to divine providence or to a continuous spirit of history, for, once the natural law is known and future effects can be controlled by setting up causes, history, especially remote history, is irrelevant other than as a mode of entertainment or a source ideas for optional ways of living; hence Flaubert, the frustrated romantic, and realist against his liking, was caught in a dilemma when he favored both science and history.

Today politicians want us to forget history, forget their voting record, forget their deeds, forget their lies and hypocrisy, and to focus on the now; to be positively pragmatic, and not principled rational radicals or metaphysical ideologues on the left and right - the original Ideologists of France, who studied Ideology, the "science of ideas", were metaphysical materialists, idealistic materialists, if you will, at the tail end of the Enlightenment. But scientists must doubt every so-called scientific principle which is not experimentally proven - and even then occasional exceptions to the theories are supposed. When applied to politics, the result of the unprincipled principle of political pragmatism is absurd. Without any principles at all, it would seem that society would flounder, would go nowhere at all, would not progress in other words, would slip into Nothing, would wind up dead in the water unless radical revolutionary principles revitalized it.

Now here is something else from Flaubert, whose fictional studies of the bourgeoisie of his day are considered by experts to be historical documents, dated 25 July, 1871, to his favorite agonist, George Sand, the very woman whom Comtean religious positivists nominated high priestess, presenting her with all sorts of gifts including panties (she demurred with an insult), on the subject of principles:

"I think, like you, that the bourgeois republic can be established. Its lack of elevation is perhaps the guarantee of stability. It will be the first time that we have lived under a government without principles. The era of positivism in politics is about to begin."

Perhaps Flaubert should have absolutely adhered to his old faith in Nothing, for his faith in the scientific heads of society and in their willingness to be reasonable was mistaken. Yet he makes a good point about the rage of the Revolution, the concept of absolute equality - most absurdly wed to absolute liberty. That is not to say that blind faith in the presumably innate idea of equality was altogether pernicious or destructive of liberty, for the positive results are prodigious: vast improvements in social welfare include medical advances, criminal justice reforms, care of the weak and needy, freedom of trade craft, freedom of exchange, ethical treatment of colonials, and so on, all in accord with the Enlightenment principles of toleration, cosmopolitanism, rational morality, and so on. Today we prefer to speak of the equality of opportunity instead of absolute equality - we avoid the question by the rationalizations. In any even, even individual Christian democrats and communists know very well that absolute equality is as absurd as absolute liberty - their marriage is absurdity compounded. This, from Flaubert to Sand on 8 September, 1871, is quite fascinating in context:

"Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.... We are floundering in the after-birth of the Revolution, which was an abortion... and the reason is that it preceded from the Middle Ages and Christianity. The idea of equality (which is all the modern democracy) is an essentially Christian idea and opposed to that of

justice. Observe how mercy predominates now." Justice is not only, To each his own according to his conditioned greedy self. A world without justice or contrary to justice, a world that rewards evil and punishes good is definitely absurd - the Absurd is the mental illness of our age. There are some goods and evils upon which almost everyone will agree as to their goodness or badness. Protagoras opined that we cannot do without justice. Everyone must speak freely on the subject of justice or injustice shall be the rule and civilization will perish. Protagoras is wrongly considered to be the Greek father of ethical relativism. In one little fragment of his work, we see that he said, "Man is the measure of all things, those that are, that they are, those that are not, that they are not." Protagoras was of course speaking not of individuals but of the species, Man, humankind; and, he did not mean to say "how" things subjectively are to individuals, for he posited a That, thus acknowledging the objective existence of things. Plato puts relativity in Protagoras' mouth elsewhere, but in Plato's Protagoras, Protagoras opines in his 'Great Speech' that justice is the first virtue that Athenian society cannot not do without, and, by Zeus' decree, injustice warrants exile or the death penalty since its absence is the death of society. Moreover:

"... the Athenians, and mankind in general, when the question relates to excellence in carpentry or any other mechanical art, allow but a few to share in their deliberations.... But when they meet to deliberate about political excellence or virtue, which process only by way of justice and self-control, they are patient enough of any man who speaks of them, as is also natural, because they think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue, and that states could not exist if this were otherwise.... They say that all men ought to profess justice whether they are just or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else. Their notion is that a man must have some degree of justice, and that if he has none at all he ought not to be in human society.... They do not conceive this virtue to be given by nature, or to grow spontaneously, but to be a thing which is taught, and which comes to a man by taking pains. No one would instruct, no one would rebuke or be angry with those whose calamities they suppose to be due to nature or chance; they do not try to punish or to prevent them from being what they are; they but do pity them. Who, for example, is so foolish as to chastise or instruct the ugly, the diminutive, or the feeble?"

As for history again, today we might say that we care a lot about history, but few people really know or care much about any of it, at least not in depth, for they are too busy producing and consuming, taking care of their families, and avoiding painful truths in their leisure time by diverse means of recreation - fortunately, history can be entertaining, so some history comes through albeit grossly distorted for effect. Besides politics and religion, it is uncouth to talk about history in bourgeois society, for almost everyone quickly loses interest, or becomes angry, supposing that some pedant is trying to get one up on them or put one over on them in a show of intellectual superiority. Journalists as well are mostly interested in what is happening now or very recently. Believing that news must be new news, and in their haste to be up to date, they seldom access their databases. For instance, reporters at the local newspaper are relatively ignorant of the history of their own city; as a result, they consistently misrepresent the past rather than look into it. We hear such lazy remarks as, "I have been in Kansas City for ten years, and I have never seen this before." Not realizing how brief ten years is in the scheme of things, they say an event or idea is novel when it is not.

Such casual negligence is a serious matter, for selves and civilizations are memories that can be destroyed by the repetition of mistakes when history is forgotten. Flaubert, although sick and tired of radical, liberal and conservative principles, seemed to abhor revolutionary principles more than reactionary principles. He might warn us, Do not slander or slaughter history again and again with rationalized injustice and merciful ethical relativism (of the protestant humanist-enlightenment?) lest such an imbalance result in a violent reaction of right-wing authoritarian government (fascism: OED). He might then say, Let us not swing back to the unlimited extremes of metaphysical "justice." What? Do we have our tail in our mouth in some sort of vicious circle ala the ancient doctrine of eternal recurrence? Or was Lawrance, my historian friend, right when he said that the ideal will never be achieved, because "History is a mistake?" But if history repeats itself, there is no mistake. Or does the wheel roll forever forward as it turns? In either case, I am beginning to believe the very ground I stand on is absurd, and I do not blame Hamlet, whose name means "stupid," for asking his stupid question.

But to keep the faith in at least Nothing, if not something, I think we should not despair as Flaubert did, and abandon principles altogether, for it is in the liberal moderation between the revolutionary principles and the conservative principles that we live justly and obesely. Of course I too am bourgeois, and I find my belly liberally bulging in the human order, some popular place in between the conservative's godly order and the radical's rational order. In any case, I presume that we should know ourselves well enough in our own guilt to have forgiving hearts and to accordingly avoid extreme punishments that prevent nothing. However that might be, here is something amusing from Flaubert, the reluctant realist who was accused of immorality by the Moral Order's (Second Empire) prosecutor, on the subject of the injustice of mercy unmitigated by justice; we find the morsel in a letter to George Sand, the lady who is, by the way, his contrarian, the bisexual romantic socialist whom he calls "Master":

"The romantics will have a fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? It is always the story of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented. The school of rehabilitation has led us to see no difference between a rascal and an honest man.... They are kind to mad dogs, and not at all to the people whom the dogs have bitten.... That will not change so long as universal suffrage is what it is. Every many (as I think) no matter how low he is, has a right to one voice, his own, but he is not the equal of his neighbor, who may be worth a hundred times more."

On 4 September, 1852, or twenty years prior to his complaints to George Sand, Gustave wrote to his lovely romantic muse Louise Colet (she admired Revolutionary women and dramatically stabbed a famous anti-feminist critic in the back) as follows: "Let nothing distress us: to complain of everything that grieves or annoys us is to complain of the nature of life. You and I are created to depict it, nothing more." Furthermore, "If the sense of man's imperfections, of the meaninglessness of life, were to perish... we would be more stupid than birds, who at least perch on trees." And to Louise Colet on 19 September, 1852, the subject of Nothing emerges again:

"I believe in nothing. I doubt everything, and why shouldn't I? I am quite resigned to working all my life like a nigger with no hope of reward.... Even admitting the hypothesis of success, what certainty can we derive from it? Unless one is a moron, one always dies unsure of one's own value and that of one's works. Virgil himself, as he lay dying, wanted the Aeneid burned. When you compare yourself to what surrounds you, you find yourself admirable; but when you lift your eyes, towards the masters, toward the absolute, towards your dreams, how you despise yourself!"

Furthermore, with Nothing in mind on 16 January, 1852, Flaubert penned a letter to Louise, wherein he effused on his aesthetic ideal:

"What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book depending on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the Earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the close expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction.... Form, in becoming more skillful... leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure.... There is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere.... It is for this reason that there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject - style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things."

We have seen that, after the turmoil resulting in the Third Republic (1871-1914), Flaubert, in reference to practical life, complained of the tendency to equalization due to democratic liberation from moral codes. Yet, earlier, in 1852, during the Second Empire (1848-1852), for art's sake, or Art for Art's sake, he embraces enthusiastically the view that, "there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects."

Life as an artist can be a great escape providing that he is detached from loathsome reality. Anatomically inclined Flaubert, who had as a child observed his father performing autopsies in the hospital where the family lived, insisted that a novelist should be neutral; his personality should be absent; he must be as God, everywhere present in the work but nowhere visible. Today we might say that a realistic author observes the principle of objectivity.

Flaubert wants it both ways. In 1871 he deplored the radical principle of equality, and he ridiculed conservative principles as well, but absolute equality would result in the absence of unwanted principles, for principles are based on differences -modern ideologies deny part of the whole with half-assed principles. In 1871 Flaubert applauds the demise of principles in politics and the coinciding rise of the vulgar or low-minded bourgeoisie with its empirical interest and its pragmatic, unprincipled politics of immediate convenience. Maybe he loves the equality he hates, but that would be absurd. As for the absence of moral differences, which are based on perceptual differences, nothing would remain of the human being as such, and if everything were equal, there would be nothing to perceive. Or Everything, which is to say Nothing. But that is absurd.

Of course men and women do have a perfect right in this absurd world, which is deaf to our logical persuasions, to contradict themselves, to change principles; to suit their conveniences and the changing times; to so tire of principles as to just ignore them altogether or to at least renounce them altogether. Actions, we have often heard, speak louder than words. A human being may intentionally practice reverse hypocrisy: she may divide herself into physical actions and symbolic actions, and let her mind run wild or relatively free of ethical principles while keeping her body out of trouble. In any case, a writer might embrace Nothing in his suburban writing den outside of Rouen, and keep his lover at arm's length, in Paris, with letters about another woman, say, an imaginary woman, Madame Emma Bovary, who always wants to be something other than what she is lest her dream vanish into thin air.

Even Nothing would be better than something, since the real would destroy the dream and make of Emma an everyday adulteress. After Flaubert was charged by the prosecutor after the publication of his scandalous Madame Bovary, his fellow authors wondered why he bothered writing about such a prosaic subject as adultery. Of course adultery was not the underlying subject. Flaubert said, in response to, Who is Madame Bovary? "C'est moi."

Jean Paul Sartre later figured Flaubert for a hysterical man. But how can a man be a true hysteric without a convulsing womb? Please do not answer that question. The famous existentialist's multi-volumn, compulsive-obsessive psychoanalytic criticism of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, addresses Flaubert's aesthetic approach to Nothing, Madame Bovary, as follows:

"When writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert shows (his muse Louise Colet) his deep desire as an artist: to appear to treat one subject but in fact to be treating quite another, quite different in quality and scope, or not to treat it at all, by which he does not mean writing to say nothing, but writing to say Nothing. This is the role of the immediate in Madame Bovary: to symbolize, strictly speaking, to allude to the macrocosm or the void that is its equivalent, and above all to distract attention, to fool the reader, and while the reader is absorbed in reading a contemporary story, to inject him with an ancient eternal poison through style."

Sarte's criticism of Flaubert can, in turn, be criticized as an autobiographical novel of self-analysis. He attributes the genesis of Flaubert's own "pithiatism" (French psychoanalytical term for hysteria-neurosis), his "poison", or ancient original sin, to Flaubert's morbid childhood with its contemporary Romantic inclinations; again, we might compare the youth culture then quite well with today's "Goth" culture - there are many intellectuals including budding authors in their midst. Sartre renders Flaubertian quotes such as, "The earth is the realm of Satan," and "I believe in the curse of Adam," and so on. "In short," Sartre quotes Flaubert, "The worst is always certain, I believe in Nothing.

"Evil is that gnawing contradiction at the heart of being, that discovery in every being, when it invests all its forces in persevering, that it is merely an illusory modulation of nothingness." Moreover, "The extraordinary purpose of art, in Gustave's view, is to manifest the ineluctable slippage of being toward Nothingness through the imaginary totalization of the work; at the same time, its purpose is to preserve indefinitely, by that regulated illusion which is the work, a sense of endlessness in this slippage, fixing it through the restraining power of words whose permanence assures us in the Imaginary that it will never reach its end...."

Now, then lest we become too pessimist to the infinitesimal, nondimensional point of nothingness, at this point we should consider taking up the Imaginary as a positive faculty, and pursue Jules de Gaultier's Madame-Bovary philosophy - Bovaryism. We might, in effect, admit that we live illusory lives, embrace our illusions and successfully strive to be something other than what we are, something much better, hopefully. Perhaps I will do just that after practicing My Absurdism for awhile. I note that I am already becoming bored with my version of Nothing, and have been thinking of Camus again, his point of departure, the Absurd, for a down-to earth morality in between soccer games on sunny days and falling down the stairs with Sartre, drunker than a skunk.


Sources:

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, transl Francis Steegmuller, Picador.

The Gustave Flaubert Letters, transl Aimee L. McKenzie, New York: Boni and Liveright 1921

Dictionary of Literary Biography ed. Catherine Savage Brosman, Detroit: Gale Research 199?