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?

Gothism Today

GOTHISM TODAY

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Gothism (1) has waned since the mass murder at Columbine High School. The evil doers were involved incidentally in contemporary Goth culture. Gothism's blatantly morbid aspect was no longer merely amusing or reluctantly tolerated by parental authority after the tragedy. Innocent young Goths were deemed guilty by association of having at least a propensity to gratuitously act out imagined scenes of wild and wanton violence. Many Goths old and new went underground. The events of 9/11 sealed the crypt - those obscene scenes were rubbed in American faces every day for months on end as if they were the only real terrifying events in the world because they had occured on sacred American soil - a big blast elsewhere is worth a day or two of cursory coverage.

No, virtual violence is no longer a cool scene in the cultural underground, at least not as cool as it used to be. Hardly anyone in the cowering mass wants to be associated with the cultivation of violence since its obscene realization in the wave of terrifying acts sweeping the world. Of course the highly organized terrorism of the United States, designed to fight fire with fire and to get revenge on terrorists both real and imagined, is quite popular, and violence in entertainment still reigns supreme over love stories.

Unfortunately, few people are aware of the subconscious link between, for instance, the Columbine killings, 9/11, and the bombing in Bali. We have reason to repress what lurks underground, and the more we do so the more real instead of virtual the underground becomes. 

Something must be wrong with the scenic picture of people happily consuming and producing and consuming and producing. One seemingly random act of violence against that fleeting happiness follows another, and the bored media loves it because people love it. Authoritarian governments arise to fight the hydra. Violence spreads until the world is awash in the blood and gore the Gothic kids merely imagined in response to homely authority.

What lurks underground? Contempt and even hatred for the social scene which is supposed to be good, the scene that requires individuals to lie to be good or else be cast out and even to perish. That is, the obscene is a protest against the official scene sometimes referred to as the Big Lie. The obverse of the scene is a spiritual or romantic protest of the 'noble' individual and of 'aristocratic' groups of 'nobles' against the hypocritical social restraints of the materialistic mass, the self-hating, competitive 'bourgeois' or middle class who preach physical and moral hygiene, godly brotherly love, and even immortality; but according to some of our youth they are actually bags of gore who have religiously dirty minds, who love the devil, who hate and murder their brothers en masse, who rot in graves if not cremated.

Since the young are engaged in a struggle to distinguish themselves as individuals, and since that struggle is typically a rebellion against homely authority or small-scale homeland security, we should not be at all surprised or shocked by the postmodern Goth culture which threw the awful truth in authority's face. Each generation has forms of protest, and some forms reappear. Each form has its significance. Gothism in fact is as old as the hills. The experts who deny any link between our recent Gothic youth culture and the Gothic period following the Black Plague are mistaken, and they do a great disservice to the kids who should know about the positive aspects of that period as well as the positive influence of modern Gothic literature on the Romantic. When we went out into the field and interviewed our Goths we did not find Columbine killers; of course we found confused teenagers, many of them intelligent and instrospective, interested in music and literature, potential intellectuals. They were mishandled and seem to have melted into the crowd. Beware, however, when the Sun goes down on the Big Lie.

Yes, young rebels turn to adult culture for their identifications; the more exotic the better; perhaps old enemies of the official religious culture - the Oriental religions. And let us not forget the noble Arab knight whose designation 'arab' means 'noble.' Many Western boys dreamed of participating in desert jihads waged by ruthless freedom fighters on camelback. Indeed, it is with that in mind that social scientists urge the immediate 'modernization' and 'reformation' of Islam, that it might put its god in a transcendental closet too and join Protestantism in bourgeois feel-good faith in Anything Goes - as long as there is a profit in it. If it were not for the religious particularism of fundamental Islam contradicting its pretentions to universality, if the propagandists focused on the general protest against bourgeois, capitalist culture, titanic homeland security would no longer be able to recognize the face of evil and would soon be overwhelmed by the evil empire it conjures up while fanning the flames under the smoke signals in order to fatten its paychecks.

Why did homeland security fail the last time? Because of the Big Lie the Goths warned us about. The patriotic hypocrisy. Patriotism? There was no Pater overlooking his brood with a loving eye. Therefore there was no brotherly love or neighborly love. Indeed, some security agents privately denied that widespread love could even exist. Of course not, for eveything is done for the love of money according to the competitive American Way, where life and liberty is confined to the pursuit of property or its god, the Almighty Dollar.

And not much has changed since the building of the latest bureaucratic Titanic. Security is a little better now that everybody is watching, but the nature of the game is to milk the cash cow dry. Chairs are moving around on the deck. Some will make fortunes while others complain that they do not have basic equipment. People with security clearances continue to live the Big Lie.

Beware.



(1) 'Gothism' has broader implications than 'Gothicism'

Taking Out The Trash

TAKING OUT THE TRASH

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

"Writing is knowing what to throw away," is an old cliche. But I seldom throw away anything. If I trust my initial creative instinct, I know I can somehow salvage almost anything I originally produced, no matter how awful it may seem after I have fallen out of love with it, because I grew tired of it, thought I could do better, or was just in a bad mood. Would one end a marriage or throw away a baby on a fleeting feeling or whim? Many fine manuscripts have been tossed into the fire on a whim much regretted thereafter. I recall rooting around in the garbage on the curb for a manuscript I had deemed worthless the day before, as if my life depended on finding it. Never again, I told myself.

On the other hand, a visionary artist, an artist who has a vision of what he wants to represent, knows what to keep and what to throw away. Surely he would agree that, "Sculpting is knowing what to throw away." He would have an image in mind in the first place. We would not find him scrounging around in the rubble for his Humpty Dumpty; as every kid knows very well, Humpty Dumpty can never be put back together again - one had better start from scratch and build a better cannon to mount on the wall.

Yet here I am trying to patch up and paste together a few paragraphs torn out of another context and pack-ratted away to my miscellanea file because I deemed them mistaken or superfluous to that instant occasion, yet thought they might be good somewhere else. I think I should have thrown them away - let the reader judge by this result. In fact, I believe I will start throwing away more of my work, putting it out of sight and out of mind. I think I have done too much pack-ratting and backtracking with my whole life, and, in the process, I have avoided that life which always wants something new, wants the future goods, not the past mistakes.

I said before that I trust my creative instinct and keep everything I create. Why should I not also trust my destructive instinct and burn the trash instead of saving it? My old roomy saved all his junk mail in paper bags in his bedroom just in case! Here I am rummaging through my private garbage can of miscellanea trying to find the life I threw away. I want to salvage the mistakes, rework them, edit them, and then maybe everything will be all right. Chasing after and trying to correct past mistakes is a dangerous process and can be an even bigger mistake; take Gulf War II just for example - the outcome will shed some light on my dilemma and I hope I live long enough to see it.

I suppose a sculptor should have a form in mind to begin with, and a way to chisel it out of the mass. He begins with the end in mind and has a technique for getting there. There is no question of what to keep and what to throw away. Discipline is required for the painstaking process of reaching a certain end. That has not been my modus operandi; perhaps that is why I have not produced a great work of art or even a life worth appreciating.

Every production is an essay for me; that is, an essai or 'trial.' Only a few come through with flying colors. Many starts are false and more are unfinished. My rebel insists on doing what he wants to do at any given moment - Goal? What goal? Just say "no" to goals! I am always cleaning up after him and trying to make something of his mistakes. Like this one.

A Note to Myself About Writing Novels

A NOTE TO MYSELF ABOUT WRITING NOVELS

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

If writing novels is your calling and you write an ideal novel, you will be not only a philosopher but an artist as well, for only a lover of wisdom and revealer of truth can write an ideal novel. The great 'poets' of old were philosophers, 'makers' not of truth but of revelations - for the truth is always there to be seen after the chisel is applied to mute stone.

Other than writing poetry, what occupation could be more divine than novel-writing? And today the best novel might be a freely styled prose-poem. What? Never mind. You will be the creator, the creating, and the creation, namely, Maya. You will be the author, and, in the process, the several different characters under your investigation. You will be the synthesis of the universal and particular. What could be more godly than this sacred calling?

Do not worry about your lack of credentials. Great novels have been produced with a grammar school education. Mind you, however, that schooling in "grammar," in the broadest sense of the word, means nothing less than the study of the best world literature produced by human beings. If you want good criticism, why seek it from amateurs? Compare your work to the finest work of the best masters. Let the virtual universe of the best discourse be your mother's milk. Then build your mental field and even social scientists will come to play - philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts.

And do not worry too much about your own sanity if you would succeed - but please do stay out of mental hospitals and prisons, and keep yourself tethered to at least one understanding yet realistic friend. It actually helps to be a bit mad to be a productive author. At least if you are mad about writing you will not be constipated by writer's blocks; if anything, you will suffer bouts of logorrhea. Don't throw anything away at first, no matter how incoherent it seems, then find yourself rooting around the garbage can for the good ideas that looked bad because of a bad mood. Let your natural excretions dry out for awhile, come back to them, play with them, mold them into blocks, then apply the chisel - you might wind up with some of your best stuff.

'Madness' might be the wrong word for the writer's motivation, but, my dear Altar Ego, let's not go nuts over finding just the right one. Let us say, to put it euphemistically, that a person must be 'neurotic' to withdraw from reality to make a living writing novels, especially now that the civilized world is filled with competing neurotics and inflated with twin delusions of persecution and grandeur - who would want to persecute a nobody? The world really is out to get you one way or another and will get you in the end. Taste the narcissus for relief and gaze into the pool to know thyself. Don't worry, listen to Socrates: the cosmos is in the microcosm - a global psychology can be found in a single case study. But remember, just say "yes" to the nymphs.

Gustave Flaubert and George Sand

George Sand

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

"Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times. Man has always been like that." Gustave Flaubert to George Sand

We witness a moving dialogue between Realism and Romanticism in the 1871 correspondence between two famous friends, Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. The time was apalling. France was stunned in 1870 by Prussian victories over her forces. Emperor Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner. The people demanded a republic to replace his empire and got one in the bloodless Revolution of 4 September 1870. General Trochu was the chief deputy of the new republic, but its most forceful leader was a young lawyer and radical republican hero by the name of Leon Gambetta, who, as minister of interior and minister of war, continued the fight against the Prussians. Despite his angry objections, an armistice was signed with the Prussians on 28 January 1871.

Universal suffrage elected an extremely conservative National Assembly, monarchists outnumbering republicans two to one. Adolphe Theirs, the old man of the Orleanist faction, was chosen as chief executive officer of the Third Republic - it replaced the Second Empire. A humiliating settlement was negotiated with Bismark. The National Assembly cancelled the pay of the National Guard and it rebelled in collaboration with the republicans in Paris. An army was sent to put down the uprising, but the troops refused to kill their countrymen. The Paris Commune was therefore established but its defenses were weak and it was eventually crushed: twenty thousand people were massacred - so much for the worker's movement. But several socialist parties would arise from the ashes. Karl Marx, the Internationalist, would make a myth of the Paris Commune for the propagation of modern communism.

We find Flaubert at Croisset, near Rouen, at the time, and Sand at Nohant. She is his senior. He addresses her as "master", she calls him "my trobador." They are just close friends - he is not one of the New Woman's serial lovers. A few lines from their many letters provides us with a taste of the Realistic and Romantic flavors of the times:

"As for the Commune," writes Flaubert in an 1871 letter, "which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. The very last, let us hope! I hate democracy (at least the kind that is understood in France), that is to say, the exaltation of mercy to the detriment of justice, the negation of right, in a world, antisociability. The Commune rehabilitates murderers, quite as Jesus pardons thieves, and they pillage the residences of the rich, because they have been taught to curse Lazarus, who was not a bad rich man, but simply a rich man. 'The Republic is above every criticism' is equivalent to that belief: 'The Pope is infallible!' Always formulas! Always gods!

"The god before the last," Flaubert continues, "which was universal suffrage, has shown his terrible farce by nominating 'the murderers of Versailles.' 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. The only reasonable thing (I always come back to that) is a government by mandarins, provided the mandarins know something and even that they know many things.... It is of little matter whether many peasants know how to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and be listened to! Our safety is now only in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than numbers....

"For the moment Paris is completely epileptic. Result of the congestion caused by the siege.... That folly is the result of too great imbecility.... They had lost all notion of right and wrong, of beautiful and ugly. Recall the criticism of recent years. What difference did it make between the sublime and the ridiculous? What lack of respect; what ignorance! what a mess! 'Boiled or braised, same thing!'

"All was false! False realism, false army, false credit, and even false harlots.... This falseness (which is perhaps a consequence of romanticism, predominance of passion over form, and of inspiration over rule) was applied especially in the manner of judging...."

Flaubert is obviously opposed to the incipient communism of his day - the socialist radicals were called 'republicans.' On the other hand, Sand was sympathetic with the republican cause; she had openly supported the revolution of 1848, although she adamantly eschewed violent means to achieve its moral ends. And now she expresses her disillusionment:

"What will be the reaction from the infamous Commune?" she asks Flaubert in an August letter. "Isidore or Henry V. or the kingdom of incendiaries restored by anarchy? I who have had so much patience with my species and who have so long looked on the bright side, now see nothing but darkness.... I imagined that all the world would become enlightened, could correct itself, or restrain itself.... I awaked from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy and delirium tremens!"

Now if we follow the socialist movement from the French Revolution - which was really a series of revolutions - onward through the nineteenth century, we see that the revolution really belonged to the rising middle class, a class more interested in economic principles than in noble moral principles - money was replacing both metaphysical and sentimental values. Flaubert was willing to concede a bourgeois republic to the middle class providing that it was run scientifically.

"I think, like you, that a bourgeois republic can be established," wrote Flaubert to Sand in July. "Its lack of elevation is perhaps a 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."

To better understand the exchanges between Sand and Flaubert, examine the development of French positivism. 'Positivism' is the application of the methods of natural science to society, and is, as a political ideology, the replacing of 'subjective' or 'romantic' or 'metaphysical' or 'idealistic' principles with the 'objective' principles of natural science.

Flaubert expressed the principle of French positivist ideology conceived by the ideologists who helped Napoleon Bonaparte seize power, then opposed his tyranny, whereupon Bonaparte contemptuously dubbed them 'Ideologues.' Their philosophy was much admired by Thomas Jefferson and he included it in the curriculum of his beloved Virginia university as 'Ideology' - Theology was eliminated. Ideology looked to the physical body instead of the astral or spiritual body for its fundamental laws. Its physical concepts were best expressed by Pierre Cabanis, a leading ideologist who was trained as a medical doctor. Dr. Cabanis, instead of practicing medicine, wrote about the principles of physiology, in hopes that those principles would in turn be applied to the political body.

French positivists were positively impressed with the positive results of the scientific-industrial revolution. Many of them fell so madly in love with their social science that they made a religion out of it. For instance, the Saint-Simonians - followers of Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon was an aristocrat turned radical, a crackpot, a scientific buffoon, and a genius. At age seventeen he served as a line officer with the Touraine Regiment in the War for American Independence. His tour included combat in the Antilles, at Yorktown with Washington, again at St. Kitts, and he was interned by the enemy in Jamaica after being hit by a cannon ball. He returned to France where he speculated with a Prussian investor's money in church property and mansions of guillotined or emigrated nobles. He managed to evade the Terror and hang onto a substantial fortune, which he proceeded to squander on lavish parties for scientists, intellectuals, and politicians. Count Redern, his investor, showed up, and was duly concerned with the slippage, so a settlement of accounts was negotiated and the fortune was split between them. Before long Saint-Simon had spent his share of the fortune, whereupon he begged from his friends of better days; of course they ignored his pleas - now that he was broke and their positions secure, who needed him?

Saint Simon wooed wisdom in his desperate poverty. He came up with some curious scientific schemes to save society and himself to boot; he did his best to peddle his social nostrums, becoming a sort of bourgeois propagandist, but to little avail - he wound up in a madhouse for awhile. He recovered his mind and got an annuity from his family. He surrounded himself with brilliant minds, published pamphlets, and he and his social-science ideas gained a modicum of respectiblity. We might sum up his industrial-revolution ideology as a socialist version of liberal capitalism, inasmuch as he would have placed the control of the means of production in the hands of experts such as his industrialist and banker friends, scientists and engineers and the like, for the greater good of the society. Scientists, managers, and moralist leaders would share power at the apex of his Religion of Newton.

Saint-Simon ran short of money again; his acquaintances were not financially supportive enough, so he shot himself in the head, penetrating an eye. But with the help of the doctors he survived for two years, time enough to produce in 1825 his salvation gospel - New Christianity - to save the youth.

Enter August Comte, known as the father of modern sociology, or scientific socialism, was Saint-Simon's pupil. His eventual defection from the Saint-Simonians was a grave blow because he was a trained scientist who was needed to iron out industrial conflicts implicit in Saint-Simon's plans, that the system be harmonious. Comte, who often railed against religion, eventually went off the deep end too, and was converted to his own religion, Positivism. Estranged from his wife, he fell in love in 1844 with a woman of thirty, Clothilde de Vaux, whose husband had deserted her. She died; Comte devoted his life to her worship. Much to the dismay of his fellow scientists, his new religion of Positivism declared Love to be the motive force of society. He was the high priest of the new religion, and his deceased wife, Clothilde, its Virgin Mother - she was somehow superior to him although women in his religion retained a subjugated status.

The altruistic religious doctrine Comte preached was not ridiculous or philosophically absurd. His Great Being was the imminent essence of the best of humanity - the best man has ever been and done. "The least amongst us can and ought constantly to aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being," he said. Humanity is both the living and the dead, or the dead alive in the living. The living lead an objective life; when they die they become subjective humanity. "The living are always more and more ruled by the dead.... Thus man serves humanity as a being during his life strictly so called, and as an organ after his death, which finally transforms his objective into a subjective life."

Comte expected scientists to be social reformers and was chagrined by scientists who wanted to stick to their specialty and analyze things and who did not consider themselves as humanity's high priests. At the apex of society are those who synthesize all the sciences: the sociologists. Progress is the human development of the hierarchical Order found in nature's laws, and Love of the Great Being was love of the highest human order. Order, Progress, Love.

Let us return to the Comptean's predecessors, the Saint-Simonians: After Saint-Simon died, Enfantin was the leader of the cult bearing Saint-Simon's name and professing some of his doctrines. The cult was dedicated to the regeneration of corrupt society - their means included the exaltation of free love to sacred status. They were the illegitimate children of Realism and Romanticism - but romantic revolt was the rule, and against conventional society. Their membership included merchants, stockbrokers, professors, officers of military science - Enfantin was a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique. The Saint-Simonians preached the progress of social love over selfish antagonism.

Their motto was: "Each according to his capacity! Each capacity according to its works!"

Capacity was defined according to a Saint-Simonian hierarchy of expertise, over which priests and priestesses would preside; everyone is expected to voluntarily take up his or her respective position - everyone should fall naturally into his or her proper position. Equality of ownership in property or community of goods (communism) was denounced; inequality was pronounced as the just relation of reward to works according to capacity - hence inheritance must be abolished.

Enfantin was persuaded to become the high priest of the cult. Since Saint-Simon had written that the social individual is both man and the woman, a high priestess was wanted.

George Sand was approached for the position because she was regarded as the model New Woman - sexually emancipated and practitioner of progressive love affairs. She was courted on New Year's Day: sixty-three gifts were presented, including a writing-desk and earrings, a thermometer and intimate under-garments. She had as a matter of fact written the Saint-Simonians a typically gushy letter some time prior, but now that they wanted her for their high priestess, she gave them the cold shoulder. She thought their Saint-Simonism spelled the abolition of private property, and believed the rest of their doctrines to be the result of vanity and spiritual vexation.

"Jesuitical metaphysics, and a pretended system of morality no one really believes," she summed them up.

The interested reader should examine Sand's correspondence with Flaubert with the foregoing in mind. The attitude in Flaubert's letter of 8 September 1871 corresponds with the abstract realism of the positivist rationalists, but he rejects the romantic reaction and identifies Christian and "democratic" sentiment as the expression of anti-socialist immorality. Of course Christianty's "anti-social" behavior was objected to by the ancient Romans, before Catholics stepped in with traditional Jewish good works for the poor and strangers. Christian or democratic sentiment and the close relation between spiritual and material communism is of slight concern today since it has been nearly rendered moot by feel-good faith instead of good works as the most convenient mode of salvation - or just honest atheism.

"As long as we do not bow to mandarins," writes Flaubert in favor of expert government, "as long as the Academy of Sciences does not replace the pope, Politics as a whole and society, down to its very roots, will be nothing but a collection of disheartening humbugs. We are foundering in the after-birth of the Revolution, which was an abortion, a failure, a misfire, 'whatever they say.' And the reason is that it proceeded from the Middle Ages and Christianity. The idea of equality (which is all the modern democracy) is an essentially Christian idea and opposed to justice. Observe how mercy predominates now. Sentiment is everything, justice is nothing. People are now not even indignant against murderers, and the people who set fire to Paris are less punished than the calumniator of M. Favre. In order for France to rise again, she must pass from inspiration to science, she must abandon all metaphysics, she must enter into criticism, that is to say into the examination of things...."

Flaubert had retreated into writing his book about St. Anthony, the hermit whose temptations had become Flaubert's life-long obsession when he viewed Pieter Brueghel's painting in 1845.

"I do not look forward to an imminent cataclysm because nothing that is foreseen happens.... That is why I lose myself as much as I can in antiquity," he wrote. He could hardly wait to read a few pages of his St. Anthony to Sand. But she had grown weary of his dismal, pessimistic attitude. She might have been the scandal of orthodox Christianity, which would not let women be priests, but she had not lost her natural religion, her faith in a benevolent god, or her love for humankind. On 14 September 1871, four years prior to her death, she wrote a lengthy letter of protest to Flaubert. It is a death song reminiscent of Chief Tecumseh's advice to braves to compose their death song and have it ready to sing instead of bemoaning their lives at the end. We may read the first few paragraphs here and recommend the rest to all those who find the subject appealing and who understand why so many romantic and realistic women and men wept at the passing of the master.

"And what, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, than humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and always will be so? And you chide my anguish as a weakness, and puerile regret for a lost illusion? You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always hypocritical, the bourgeois always cowardly, the soldier always brigand, the peasant always stupid? You say that you have known all that every since your youth and you rejoice that you have never doubted it, because maturity has not brought you any disappointment; have you not been young then? Ah! We are entirely different, for I have never ceased to be young - being young is always loving.

"What, then, do you want me to do, so as to isolate myself from my kind, from my compatriots, from my race, from the great family in whose bosom my own family is only one ear of corn in the terrestrial field? And if only this ear could ripen in a sure place, if only one could, as you say, live for certain privileged persons and withdraw from all the others!

"But it is impossible, and your steady reason puts up with the most unrealizable of Utopias. In what Eden, in what fantastic Eldorado will you hide your family, your little group of friends, your intimate happiness, so that the lacerations of the social state and the disasters of the country shall not reach them? If you want to be happy through people - those certain people, the favorites of your heart, must be happy in themselves. Can they be? Can you assure them the least security?

"Will you find me a refuge in my old age which is drawing near to death? And what difference now does death or life make to me for myself? Let us suppose we die absolutely, or that love does not follow into the other life, are we not to our last breath tormented by the desire, by the imperious need of assuring those whom we leave behind all the happiness possible? Can we go peacefully to sleep when we feel the shaken earth ready to swallow up all those for whom we have lived? A continuous happy life with one's family in spite of all, is without doubt relatively a great good, the only consolation that one could and that one would enjoy. But even supposing external evil does not penetrate into our house, which is impossible, you know very well [for instance, his house was ransacked by the invading Prussians], I could not approve of acquiescing in indifference to what causes public unhappiness.

"All that was foreseen... Yes, certainly, I had foreseen it as well as anyone! I saw the storm rising. I was aware, like all those who do not live without thinking, of the evident approach of the cataclysm. When one sees the patient writhing in agony, is there any consolation in understanding his illness thoroughly? When lighting strikes, are we calm because we have heard the thunder rumble a long time before?

"No, no, people do not isolate themselves, the ties of blood are not broken, people do not curse or scorn their kind. Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease to live.

"The people, you say! The people is yourself and myself. It would be useless to deny it. There are not two races, the distinction of classes only establishes relative and for the most part illusory qualities. I do not know if your ancestors were high up in the bourgeoisie; for my part, on my mother's side my roots spring directly from the people, and I feel them continually alive in the depths of my being. We all have them, even if the origin is more or less effaced; the first men were hunters then shepherds, then farmers then soldiers. Brigandage crowned with success gave birth to the first social distinctions. There is perhaps not a title that was not acquired through the blood of men. We certainly have to endure our ancestors when we have any, but these first trophies of hatred and of violence, are they a glory in which a mind ever so little inclined to be philosophical, finds ground for pride? The people always ferocious, you say? As for me, I say, the nobility always savage!

"And certainly, together with the peasants, the nobility is the class most hostile to progress, the least civilized in consequence. Thinkers should congratulate themselves on not being of it, but if we are bourgeois, if we have come from the serf, and from the class liable to forced labor, can we bend with love and respect before the sons of the oppressors of our fathers? Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives to the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy. Bourgeoisie, if we want to raise ourselves again and become once more a class, we have only one thing to do, and that is to proclaim ourselves the people, and fight to the death those who claim to be our superiors by divine right. On account of having failed in the dignity of our revolutionary mandate, of having aped the nobility, of having usurped its insignia, of having taken possession of its playthings, of having been shamefully ridiculous and cowardly, we count for nothing; we are nothing any more: the people, which ought to unite with us, abandons us and seeks to oppress us...."



Works Quoted:

THE GEORGE SAND-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LETTERS, translated by Aimee L. McKenzie, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921

SYSTEM OF POSITIVE POLITY by Auguste Comte, London (1875)

From Bad Novels to Forbidden Love

FROM BAD NOVELS TO FORBIDDEN LOVE
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Emma Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's anti-heroine, had read too many bad novels and was consequently infected by the overarching romantic illusion, that the ideal world can be realized on Earth despite the tragic conclusions romantic authors often write after their rebellious imaginative flights. After all, those elopements constitute a rebellion against the reality of established social conventions - whose gods they would faithlessly leave to their more discreet affairs in undisclosed apartments - and society is made to overwhelm rebellion.

For instance, Indiana, George Sand's heroine, was disappointed not only in marriage but in her love affair. When she actually leaves her husband, her lover rejects her, and she winds up with her cousin Ralph in exile; he has loved her all along, and they commit suicide, perhaps the only way they can exist happily ever after, if there is an hereafter. As we know, Madame Bovary came to a tragic conclusion as well. George Sand, the foremost Romantic author, protested the institution of marriage with its ban on divorce, while Gustave Flaubert, her friend and, against his will, the foremost pioneer of Realism, mocked the Romantic protest.

The reality that strikes the novel reader, whether he is romantic or realistic, is this, that even if divorce laws had been on the books as they were during the Revolution, the laws would have done romantic love little good given the quality of lovers in those days. For they were lovers who could never be satisfied with the bird in hand for the want of the ones in the bushes. Indeed, one might be led to the hypothesis that romantic love is more likely to flourish if it is forbidden.

If only Emma had lived in the romantic years of thirteenth-century France, regular visits from a devoted trobador under the fond eyes of her husband might have whetted her appetite for ideals while keeping her in bounds where her cravings could be legally satisfied after an evening of wine and song - a few husbands are still familiar with this little known secret of successful marriage. Trobadors preferred forbidden apples in those days, and they rarely touched them because that would dull their appetite. In fact, certain ascetic lovers went out of their way with bands of entertainers to deprive themselves of adulterous consummation - the more they suffered the lack, the more they loved. Besides, as we have duly noted above, the noble gentlemen who provided for the real needs of their ladies attended with watchful eyes and alert ears to the elaborate romantic affairs they had financed for them in their own castles, and this made their mates all the more appealing to all concerned. Of course there were scandalous breakdowns in the romantic system, but they are said to be very few.

That system was in part inspired by frustrated Arab knights who resorted to romantic poetry about war and love. Gossip has it that the Prophet's friend invited him to dinner, where he got an accidental glimpse of his host's unrobed wife and eventually took her away from his friend and made her his own wife. This prompted the Prophet to make a rule for the betterment of the Muslim world, that women should be kept hidden, and that guests for dinner should eat and be gone.

That left a lot to the imagination; and many women did not mind that it be kept there, especially in wife-kidnapping territory where women wore burkas and knights on horseback did not know whether they looking at a sack of potatoes or a bundle of joy - before the fundamentalist schoolboys or taliban seized power in Afghanistan, women sometimes wore mini-skirts under their burkas, and women in some parts of the world still prize a good burka.

Of course European knights had coarser tastes - civilized Arabs could not stand to visit barbaric Europe after grabbing a sizeable portion of it, and had others handle their business there. Europeans liked to eat swine and to get a good look at flesh. Notwithstanding the Christian religion and its crackdowns on public bathing and defecating in dining room corners during meals, the manners of vulgar people in some regions during the Middle Ages were really vulgar, one might say realistic. Today we can be glad that the higher classes were imitated after cheap means for doing so were invented. And we can be glad that the European nobles learned a thing or two from the Arabs about leading a romantic life. The Arabs also saved the Greek philosophy books, applied their magical imagination to the contents, and invented modern inductive science. The Greek way of thinking eventually subverted the Jewish thinking of the Catholic Church. The West got its ball back and ran away with it.

Realism has almost dispelled the Romantic illusions everywhere in the world. Or so it seems.

Postmodern Emma and Indiana have each divorced two husbands. Emma's third husband, a billionaire, died, leaving most of his fortune to her. She lost a quarter-billion dollars on the Internet Bubble. She presently has one hostile takeover eye on Martha Stewart's company, the other on a prominent general - a married man.

Indiana writes best-selling bad novels along Gothic lines. Her characters talk too much - one of them gave a five-page response to "I love you." She recently sued The California Inquisitor for accusing her of incest with her current significant other, and for calling her a nymphomaniac on the front-page banner.

Neither woman is happy, but suicide is out of the question because they believe their dreams will come true.

Ungodly Realism and Adultery

UNGODLY REALISM AND ADULTERY 

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Man created god then killed god and replaced god with himself, wherefore aesthetic Realism - a term originally used with the epithets vulgar and sordid - was an artistic movement constituting the denial or complete abandonment of transcendental values.

It seems the term Realism was first used in a Paris periodical in 1826, five years after the pioneering master of realistic French literature, Gustave Flaubert, was born. The journalist defined Realism as "a literary doctrine... that would lead to the imitation not of artistic masterpieces but of the originals that nature offers us." The critic predicted the movement would become a major one in the nineteenth century, and it did, picking up steam in the 1850s.

Artistic masterpieces are of course fashioned by artists inspired by gods if they are not demi-gods themselves. Marxist critic Gyorgy Lukacs said that the realistic novel is the epic of a world forsaken by God. I would rather say that it is the epic of an objective god being forsaken by the world, a grand case of adultery. Since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, each man became his own authority with his own conscience and his own private property. He was, ideally, his own little god, and, by divine right, his own little king of his own little castle.

But man's share in this new universal freedom was rendered insecure without the religion he tried to get rid of. Religion worships power and politics distributes it. Patriarchal society is concerned with the control and ownership of the natural generative power. Hence the ownership and control of women is a chief function of religion. Religion shall always have sexual and 'romantic' implications. It is no wonder the novels of Realism so often exposed adultery, the violation of the marriage 'contract' with god-society. Not that Romantic authors such as George Sand, who believed in Rousseau's natural version of god, did not expose and protest the social hypocrisy and the faults of orthodox religion - male realists in those days were wont to privately ridicule and publicly satirize romantic women as unrealistic, pathetic creatures. And, as evidenced by their conduct during the Revolution, downright dangerous!

Men want to protect the generative basis of their power in the primary property - woman. Ideal or romantic love barely entered into the equation at first, at least not openly, since the ideal is a protest against the real and can lead to adultery. In some cultures a man may openly own more than one woman; if he is allowed only one, his affairs are winked at. However, the ideal woman must have no other god before her husband, just as he must have no god before his tribal god - a Church father once identified all sins against god as really one sin, that of adultery, or cheating on god. Of course, the Christian man is advised to love his wife as he loves himself, and she is in turn advised to be his virtual slave.

The virtual murder of the projected god therefore ostensibly removed an effective means of social control and threatened the natural basis of the 'new' ideals - protesting 'old' reals - with their primary interest in the pursuit of happiness contingent on a natural right in private property, the most natural of all property again being wo-man or wife of man. Even in the new godless world of modern protestation against hierarchical authority and its accumulation of the material form of power - property - the traditional mores were still maintained by quasi-religious political organizations or political religions with their political theology designed to conserve the same old forms under the guise of new names.

For instance, the United States is one nation under a god with liberty and justice for all; providing there is a temporary king serving the people-god by divine right of election; the candidates for whom the electors vote are limited to a selection by a minority of a minority in conventicles. As long as there is a president in the White House and god is dead or tucked away in Nowhere because feel-good faith not good works justifies Anything Goes in the name of god, who really needs a god except as an excuse?

Studies indicate that people naturally love authority even when they hate it the most, that seventy percent of those people who enjoy 'vulgar' Realism instead of transcendental idealism will approve of whatever the authority does whether it is right or wrong, and that only fifteen percent of that seventy percent know what is going on - why should they when their god is in the White House? And therefore gods are replicated in each little house in the land organized around that uprighteous phallic principle lately referred to as the moronic principle.

That is especially true with a pseudo-conservative shift to the born-again right-wing authoritarian or 'fascist' form of government, as opposed to the true conservative form whose truth is in traditional libertarian principles. In any event, the profit principle or principle of generative growth will not be yielded, and its natural basis is, again, rooted in the ownership of woman; in our more liberal culture, one woman, and she has a growing counter-claim.The double-standard is still operative but one must be discreet, and especially so during reactionary phases. How can a President of the United States be trusted with the national oval orifice if he cheats on his wife, staining the fundamental private-property relation?

We must not have sordid, vulgar Realism in high places! May God forbid it! On the other hand, people who appreciate Realism for what it is or critics who know what it is whether they approve of it or not would rather not have a god in the White House or in supposedly realistic novels. Realism depends on the suspension of belief in an intervening deity. The reader does not mind if the mechanical forces of nature push the characters around, but he does not want the intercession of god determining their fate. In order to be convincing, the characters of a realistic novel must seem to be working out their destinies without gods, often with tragic conclusions. As Lukacs said, "To the marriage of realism and positivism (or material determinism) there is no obstacle, but realism and fatalism make uneasy bedfellows."

With that in mind, I can better understand Madame Me's complaints about the author who indiscreetly played God with his characters! That is a sin an author of Realism must not commit.

"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." (Madame Me)

The moral of the story for Realists: Let characters appear to do things their way. At least do not let the reader see the awful hand of god - technique is best when unnoticed.

C'est Moi - Flaubert said of Madame Bovary

C'EST MOI

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Flaubert, the foremost apostle of realism, was too realistic for the imperial guardian of propriety. The prosecutor for the Second Empire charged him with offending religious and public morality with his portrayal of Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary - the novel was released in 1857 in serial from.

More specifically, the prosecutor complained that Flaubert had offended the community with "poesie de l' adultere" - the poetry of adultery. After all, Emma Bovary had shed "not a tear, not one sigh of a repentant Magalene for her crime of incredulity, for her suicide, for her adulteries." The judge acquited Flaubert after lecturing him about the extremes of the "vulgar and shocking realism." Charles Baudelaire was not so fortunate that year: he was convicted of similar charges.

Flaubert invested four painstaking years drafting and polishing off his novel. In 1857 he was caricatured by Lemont as a surgical novelist engaged in the meticulous dissection of his anti-heroine.. Lemont sketched him with Emma's heart in his left hand, its blood dripping into his inkwell. Critics classified him as a positivist or scientific thinker; his contemporaries thought of him as a cold-blooded, clinical author. It was not accidental that Emma's cuckolded husband, Charles, was a doctor; he terribly botched a novel surgical procedure on a clubfoot, an operation that he hoped would bring him fame and fortune - his wife was quite hopeful in that regard too, since he was not good enough for her as a small-time doctor. Flaubert the novelist had been raised in a hospital - his father was a doctor - the novelist bragged that he had seen dissections during his childhood....

He said that writing Madame Bovary - now considered to be the first masterpiece of modern realism - constituted an effort to tame his romantic temper with objective realism. That was not an easy task for realism's leading artist: "I loath what people call realism, although I am supposedly one of its pontiffs," he said. Only by sheer acts of persevering, self-determining will was he able to complete the novel in four years - sometimes he devoted several days to rewriting a single page. The affair almost made him vomit at times. "I think that today I would have hanged myself with delight if pride hadn't stopped me. What's certain is that I'm sometimes tempted to say to hell with it all, beginning with the Bovary woman. What a damned cursed idea of mine it was to pick such a subject. Ah! I'll have learned all about the torments of Art!"

Realism disgusted not only its authors but certain members of the upper crust as well - regardless of the incidence of adultery. After all, they said, who wants to read a book or to see a play about what vulgar people do in their hovels? However that may be, the French, as we know very well, are generally romantically inclined despite their notorious materialism. Several distinguished French authors had difficulty adapting themselves to the new realism. For instance, the great critic and historian of the French Revolution, Hippolyte Taine, was an advocate of the "botanical analysis practiced on individuals (as) the only means of bringing together the human and the positive sciences." Taine went further, and applied the analytical or dissecting method essential to physiology to cultures, epochs and races; yet he complained that he had difficulty restraining his native lyrical tendency that he criticized it in his countrymen while praising English literature to no end. And if there is such a thing as romantic realism, his fact-filled history of the French Revolution is its masterpiece; beside it, Carlyle's acclaimed history of same is hysterical bombast.

Taine expressed his dilemma as follows: "I think I have found the root of my ill. Indeed, the fundamental idea has been that one must reproduce the emotion, the particular passion of the man described, but moreover to expose one by one the degrees of logical generation; in short, to depict him in the manner of artists and at the same time to construct him in the manner of reasoners. The idea is true; besides, when one succeeds in applying it, the effects are powerful. I owe my success to this, but it leaves one's brains disjointed and no one has the right to destroy himself."

Flaubert put the disjunction this way: "There are inside me, literally speaking, two distinct fellows: one who is smitten by shouts, by lyricism, by great eagle flights, by all the sonorities of the sentence and the loftiness of ideas; another who probes and digs into the true as best he can, who loves to underscore the little fact as powerfully as the big one, who would wish to make you physically the things he is reproducing..."

Flaubert and Taine were contemporaries. They did not invent realism but were going with the flow of the scientific-industrial revolution. That flow was and still is against the traditional grain which includes considerable variety in cultures and wild seeds as well. Yet society and its critics were swept up by scientism, and positivism - the idea that the scientific methods of the natural sciences can be applied to society to manipulate people for their own good.

Let sceptical Hume deny that there is a law necessarily relating cause and effect until he is blue in the face; still the law of cause and effect is real and it is the ticket to utopia if rightly employed. Since artists are the effective cause of their productions, if those works are offensive to religion and public morals, then it stands to reason that the author generating the offense must be a degenerate or bad author and therefore his works should be censored or banned. It is all very logical. Emma Bovary read too many bad novels, meaning bad authors who caused her to believe that her husband was not good enough for the illusions planted in her brain by diseased minds. And witness the evil consequences of her sins. No social scientist in his right mind would allow Flaubert's Madame Bovary to fall into the hands of the public.

No wonder the realists were tormented by subconscious and conscious reservations in regards to the 'realism' of their day. The censorious line of reasoning is fanatically foolish, not to mention tyrannical, and should be censured. We might as well propose that photographs of cancerous lung tissue in jars should not be released to the public lest people take up chain-smoking and working in hazardous environments in order to have themselves dissected and their lungs put in jars.

As for adultery, that is another question, and people are divided among and within themselves on the issue, an issue that seems to be at the root of rebellious romance and conservative religion. Flaubert had more than one real model for Emma Bovary. The French have a reputation for having affairs notwithstanding their customary discretion in such matters. When Flaubert flaunted adultery, no one was any more disillusioned than before. Indeed, Why would an author even would bother with such an ordinary subject? Maybe the only person still possessed by the romantic illusion was the illusory fictitious personage of Madame Bovary - or maybe not!

Emma Bovary was in part a protest against the realism of the day. When asked who she was, the apostle of realism gave his famous answer:

"C'est moi."