Mixed Grill:
In a Far Room
4 February 2015
Two further but convergent thoughts inspired by the Charlie Hebdo massacre — both of them opposed to the editorial policies of that publication.
First: Why are images considered speech? Confucius never said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when we consider the immediate emotional impact of images, the proverb is a gross understatement. Since the Charlie Hebdo killings, it has often been noted, mockingly, that the attack was launched not against serious policy makers who might influence and even shape socio-political circumstances but against cartoonists, the implication being that nobody takes cartoonists seriously. If this is literally true (and I believe that it is), then what is the virtue of protecting images from legislative prohibitions intended to prevent graphic insults to religious beliefs? All kidding aside!
Second: In the United States, insulting speech is judged preliminarily by the public standing of the victim. The idea seems to be — and I find it an eminently sensible one — that people who step forward into public life (not including those who are pushed into public attention by accident) can be expected to bear with a certain degree of mistaken allegations. What is a libel to a perfectly private citizen becomes punishable, if directed at a public figure, only if the statement has been made with reckless disregard for the truth.
The victims of religious libel are, surely, not the long-dead prophets and deities made to look ridiculous, but the private citizens who observe the religion in question. Making an exception for living religious leaders, I should welcome a ban on the publication of derogatory representations of sacred figures and their associated ethnicities, if any. I cannot believe that anyone would defend the broadcast publication (anywhere but in serious works of history) of any of the numerous, purposelessly disgusting antisemitic caricatures that began appearing soon after Jewish emancipation in the late Eighteenth Century.
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A few weeks ago, the always-interesting Adam Gopnik published a Paris Journal entry in which he wrote up Howard Becker, a sociologist of whom (no surprise) I’d never heard. If Gopnik hadn’t been the author, I’d probably have skipped the piece, as my opinion of sociology is fairly dim. Actually, Becker’s work, of which I now know something, having wasted no time ordering a copy of his new book, What About Mozart? What About Murder? and then having read about half of it, is free of sociology’s worst vice, the persistent search for normal. Becker has developed a method for conducting rigorous if not always “scientific” experiments without a “control.” He divides experimental groups, yes, but in such a way that the behavior of each tells him something that he didn’t know about the other.
In the New Yorker piece, Becker observes that he is more interested in how people come into power than in the fact that some people are powerful. At last, I thought to myself, thinking of my problem with “elites.” People talk endlessly (although not as endlessly as they used to do) about what the “elites” do or don’t do, but nobody seems to be very curious about entry into elite status.
In the book, Becker takes apart the relationship between users and drugs, a relationship that almost always involves permission. He begins with the startling and counterintuitive history of opiate addiction. In the last century, this was associated primarily with impoverished black men. Earlier, however, it turned up far more often among middle-aged white women. What happened? Shortly before World War I, the United States joined an international convention that forbade the unlicensed sale of opiates, that’s what. The women, mostly post-menopausal, went “more or less cold turkey,” while the opium business descended to neighborhoods too shaky to defend themselves from illegal activity. The irony simply could not be richer. There are, happily, few more ludicrous stories of official, “progressive” backfire — except that, if you had told the responsible officials what would probably happen by sharply limiting the sale of opiates, you might have perceived a very wicked gleam in their eyes. Becker is tremendously interested in how the people who give or withhold permission are chosen. To say that permission is granted or denied by “elites” is to say nothing at all.
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An ecstasy of agony: I keep putting off The Blue Flower, and, with it, the last chapters of Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. I cannot believe that I will find it to be Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, so I’m afraid of being disappointed. Everything of Fitzgerald’s that I’ve read — seven of the novels (all but the first and the last) and the collection of wildly different short stories (different in length and setting, but all distinctly Fitzgerald) — is a masterpiece in some way or other. She tells good stories, certainly, but she tells them strangely, so that you dwell on the things she doesn’t tell you. Not that you try to work them out for yourself; it’s more like rubbing the gum from which a tooth has been extracted — an obsessive, haunting sensation. She spins in the opposite of Wagner time. Wagner’s operas go on for hours, but if you’re in the grip of one, it passes in a few blinks. Fitzgerald time vastly prolongs the experience of rather short books, not by making them feel endless to read but by creating the illusion of having read a Victorian triple-decker. As with Jennifer Egan, expansiveness springs from the unnoticed common ground between any two featured episodes. It is enchanted stuff.
On the strength of a photograph in Penelope Fitzgerald, I have shifted my attention to Penelope Lively, a novelist of the next generation after Fitzgerald’s. I’ve read the novel that won her the Booker, the awfully-titled Moon Tiger (graced, in the edition that I found most available, by an equally embarrassing graphic); I liked it, but I much preferred the more recent How It All Began, a roundelay in which the mugging of an elderly woman derails not only her own but at least six other lives. The mugging victim, Charlotte, is an appealing, retired teacher of English, famously gifted at inspiring her good students to be even better ones. Charlotte is dismayed to discover that she cannot rely on her project of re-reading classic novels to ease the tedium of a long convalescence. (Her hip was broken by the tumble.) I’ve read about this sort of thing before, always with profound alarm. Is there really a point at which good fiction no longer has anything to say? That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard about ageing — which shows you what a spoiled brat I am.
Very curiously, Charlotte finds that she can read Henry James, of all writers, and she plows through What Maisie Knew, in my opinion James’s most difficult book. Sometimes, I simply don’t know what, precisely, James is talking about, while at others the basic scheme of retailing unpleasant behavior through the eyes of an uncomprehending child threatens to collapse from implausibility. That this should be open and available to the suffering Charlotte was very surprising, but while I have my doubts about Maisie, I had none about Charlotte. And then something absolutely uncanny happened. I don’t think that there is anything about How It All Began, aside from a certain fine, dry humor, that would remind a reader of Henry James — except this one tiny detail, which for all its tininess set off an alarm that wailed with pleasure.
The setting is the V & A, and never you mind about the lovers, whom for freshness’s sake, I have rechristened A and B.
The ceramics galleries did indeed turn out to be less frequented. A and B wandered alone past case after case, in which were gathered the crockery and the ornaments from everywhere, and every age, the plates, bowls, jars, tureens, vases, figures. The eye was caught by color, by shape, by glaze, by all this variety and ingenuity. They stopped, time and again, to admire, to comment, and came to rest at last in a far room which offered a comfortable seat from which you could contemplate more homely and local material…
They came to rest at last in a far room. Isn’t that exactly the blend of vagueness and specificity that James patented? How far? Far from what? Answer: the everyday, the ordinary — the licit. Far from “the reality” to which the couple will have to make separate returns. The oeuvre of Henry James was incorporated by sense memory.
Next up: The Photograph, which seems to be Lively’s most popular novel. We had a copy once, and I gave it away, in a fit of pique. Reading the first couple of pages, I was assailed by a sense of déja vu: I had read this before! But I couldn’t have done! There was nothing to do but get rid of the thing. This time round, I have no sense at all of a previous encounter, which underlines how thoroughly unreliable the power of déja vu really is.