My first semester back in school is winding down to a close, and though I look forward to the winter break I find myself slightly disappointed that I will no longer be in Myth, Symbol, Ritual class, which has been immensely informative and is really reshaping, or reaffirming, the direction of my life.
For my last research paper I decided to look at the Ghost Dance among the Lakota Sioux, which in the first steps of tentative research fascinated me as an example of a ritual response to oppression, as the Sioux at the time of Ghost Dance, in 1890, were terribly distraught over vanishing food supplies, the encroachment and lies of the American Government, and the prohibitions against their performance of their traditional ritual Sun Dance. However, in looking closer at the subject, what began to emerge was this picture in which the Ghost Dance, as practiced by the Lakota Sioux, failed to work. Instead of reviving the earth and promoting peace, as the prophet Wovoka had urged people it would, or bringing about a millennial destruction of the white oppressors, the Ghost Dance only led the Sioux into the bloody massacre at Wounded Knee. This led me to ask, just what in the way that the Sioux had taken up the Ghost Dance was the cause of this ritual failure? How did it draw on their own religious traditions, how did it distort the original, peaceful message of its messiah? Most peculiarly, just where did the doctrine of Ghost Shirts come from, the special articles of clothing worn only by the Lakota Ghost Dancers that they believed would protect them from bullets, and by playing into their warlike nature may have led them into a more active resistance against the US military?
The idea of ritual failure is not one discussed by many theorists on ritual, despite the fact that it is experienced with almost as much frequency as ritual success by participants. While researching the Soma sacrifice in the Vedic rituals earlier in the semester, I came upon one theorist who had suggested that rituals of sacrifice had at one point contained an element of death or danger as their driving force. But by the time many of these practices had become codified in the Brāhmaṇas the only thing the priests had to fear was that they might perform the rituals wrong. For some reason this idea fascinated me, and I began to pay more attention to examples in my own life where a given set of actions didn't go according to plan, and the resulting cognitive dissonance that results. For instance, I ordered a book online last week, and yesterday received the wrong item in the mail. Not that this is a big deal, but it created an extra amount of effort on my part to rectify the problem. Mainly though it seemed a breach of conduct, a situation where something was supposed to happen one way, but then happened some way else, and instead of the smooth system of transaction I'd always experienced before with online shopping I was faced with a moment when the whole system was cast into confusion. How much more disastrous would this feel when the rituals that go wrong are not just something so trivial, but are relied upon to ensure the functioning of your whole reality, the continuation of life as you know it?
I suppose the real source of my fascination with ritual failure comes from an existential situation I call "thwartedness." Last year while trying to organize all the symbols and themes that occur in my dreams, I kept finding situations in which something was supposed to happen but couldn't. The desire to go somewhere but you end up somewhere else, walking down the street but suddenly realizing that you are not wearing any clothes. I was struck by the way in which these dream failures could show something very explicit about just what isn't working in my life (though thankfully this thwartedness has lessened with the years). And after asking around I determined that this was a situation many people found themselves in during their dreams, if not in their waking lives as well. But why would we subconsciously want to thwart ourselves? What is it in that peculiar brew of human desire and fear that continually throws up barriers, self-sabotage? The Lakota adopted a doctrine that they believed would make them invulnerable, but did not test it due to unshakeable belief in the power of the Ghost Shirts. When doctors told one women that they would have to remove her Ghost Shirt to treat her wounds, she told them to go ahead, she didn't want it or believe in it anymore, since it failed to keep her safe.
11.29.2007
11.28.2007
Democracy vs. Reincarnation
In a startling break from century-old tradition, the Dalai Lama proposed that Tibetan Buddhists vote for his successor, instead of seeking his next incarnation after he is dead.
Ironically, China's atheist communist government, which has moved to stifle Tibetan independence since its takeover in 1951, objects that the Dalai Lama's new referendum is "a blatant violation of religious practice and historical procedure." However, Tibetans fear that the Chinese government will take control over the search for the new Dalai Lama, and the current Dalai Lama suggests that this may be a way of granting Tibetans "real autonomy." This raises the question of if or when an ancient ritual practice stops functioning in the way it should in the modern world, just what is the best method of continuing to live in a traditional manner?
And in other news, The Vatican issued a music video starring the late Pope John Paul II, in order to encourage people to vote him into sainthood.
Ironically, China's atheist communist government, which has moved to stifle Tibetan independence since its takeover in 1951, objects that the Dalai Lama's new referendum is "a blatant violation of religious practice and historical procedure." However, Tibetans fear that the Chinese government will take control over the search for the new Dalai Lama, and the current Dalai Lama suggests that this may be a way of granting Tibetans "real autonomy." This raises the question of if or when an ancient ritual practice stops functioning in the way it should in the modern world, just what is the best method of continuing to live in a traditional manner?
And in other news, The Vatican issued a music video starring the late Pope John Paul II, in order to encourage people to vote him into sainthood.
Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"
Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"
Of the various literary devices made use of in Percival Everett’s "Erasure," perhaps the most revealing is that of dream narratives, whereby Monk Ellison, and Van Go Jenkins, the narrator of Monk’s fictional novel My Pafology, dream events which, though not ascribed as “real” events in the narrative, nonetheless carry a significatory weight that can elucidate other aspects of the text. At the beginning of the novel, Monk says, “the society in which I live tells me I am black” (1). He believes that race, and personal identities in general, are purely a social construct of language. But throughout the novel we see that this language of race and identity, as displayed in the cultural acceptance of the ghetto dialect in which Monk writes My Pafology, is the only language his society knows, leading to a conflict where Monk begins to identify with his stereotypical nom de plume, Stagg R. Leigh. Monk’s dreams portray this encroaching conflict of identity, in which his personal interests, education, family dramas, psychological difficulties, and creative intentions are pitted against societal expectations that would violently erase personal identity.
In the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, dreams can tell us something about the identity of the dreamer; either repressed, childhood concerns, or dynamic, self-affirming principles. Regardless of the methodology or theory used, such dream interpretation often relies on knowledge of the individual dreamer’s life, as well as on symbolic archetypes that may or may not exist in all human expression. Though not intentionally created by the dreamer, a dream could thus be taken as a signification of that person’s life, and the individual as the dream’s “author.” We might assume that though the author of a text writes the dream narrative, it is similarly supposed to function as an unconscious or symbolic measure of the dreaming character’s life. Roland Barthes, in his essay, “Death of the Author,” suggests that the history and personality of a novel’s author may not serve as an accurate guide for interpreting their text. Barthes instead posits a scriptor, the narrative voice born in the act of writing itself, which allows interpretation to proceed as a disentanglement of narrative elements within the text. While dream narratives may not signify anything about the actual author, they may serve as textual clues for the interpretation of the scriptors or characters in a book, which are merely aspects of the text. This being the case, it is possible to look at dream narratives, such as those in Erasure, as a narrative layer that can further help disentangle the threads of the character’s identities.
Early in the novel, Monk dreams that his father is telling him stories about certain African-American authors, and then finds himself to be younger, watching a school of fish from a pier. Shortly, Monk discovers, “Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush.” She asks, “‘Did you see him?’ I stopped her and asked, ‘See whom?’ But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject” (41-2). Childhood memories, fishing, and the lives of artists fill a considerable part of Monk’s attention throughout Erasure, and they may be part of his way of expressing his unique identity versus his concerns that, “some people in the society in which I live… tell me I am not black enough” (2). But it is Monk’s relationship to his family that is more significantly explicated in this passage. Though his father is dead, Monk occasionally remembers his father’s pride in the young Monk’s decision to become a writer. Furthermore, this paternal encouragement often separates him from his siblings, who are both doctors, and take offense at Monk’s precocious use of the English language. Monk’s “whom” may reflect his solid education and supportive upbringing, but this personal use of language puts him at odds with reviewers, like the one who is at a loss to understand what his experimental writing, “has to do with the African American experience” (2).
Prior to this dream, Monk eats lunch with his sister, Lisa, in a Capitol Grill restaurant in D.C., and during a conversation about Monk’s writing career and inability to talk to other people Lisa says he is different. “Different from whom?” is Monk’s reply (26), perhaps not only to Lisa, but also to an unknown man who Monk catches staring at his sister, though she claims not to know him, or to the picketers shouting “Murderer!” in front of the abortion clinic where Lisa works (29). The next day, Monk learns that his sister has been killed, presumably by the pro-life protestors, and due to the linguistic similarities between Monk’s dream and the scene in the Capitol Grill, it might be tempting to read Lisa’s dream-question “did you see him?” as referring to the unknown man in the restaurant as her potential murderer. This use of a prophetic dream as narrative foreshadowing may however be a manipulative device of the text in order to conceal what is actually going on in the novel.
After eating with his sister, and before learning she is dead, Monk reads a review of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a distortion of African-American life, and is asked by his editor that he imitate this form in order to be “black enough” (43) for his audience. In light of Monk’s revulsion when he first hears of Jenkins’ book, it is possible that Lisa’s question in the dream instead refers to Monk, and his concern about being an educated, black author whose, “work was not commercial enough to make any real money” (42). If the dream acts as narrative foreshadowing, it is a premonition not of his sister’s murder, but of the eventual birth of Stagg R. Leigh, Monk’s imaginary nom de plume. This stereotypically black, incommunicative ex-con has no identity of his own and is compared by Monk to being as mercurial and immaterial as the character Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Though Monk does not see him now, this dream passage raises the suggestion that there is someone else to be seen, a version of Monk Ellison that would not reply, “See whom,” and who is capable of writing in the ghetto dialect that makes My Pafology a publishable novel.
Out of his disgust with the success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ book, and his alienation after his sister’s death that forces him to move to D.C. and take care of their ailing mother, Monk writes My Pafology, his own take on black stereotypes that is intended to mock We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Everett includes the entirety of this novel within Erasure, and fittingly begins it with another dream. In this passage, the main character of Monk’s My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, stabs his mother to death, claiming that he does this because, “…I love her. Cause I hate her. Cause I ain’t got no daddy” (66). It is this dream that sets the tone for Go’s actions throughout the rest of the novel-in-a-novel, including a fight with his knife-wielding mother and his shooting of Willy, a man who claims to be Go’s father. Go’s excuse for this latter action is that Willy brought him into this world where he “ain’t shit” (124). By describing such violent actions in an extreme racial dialect, Monk attempts to offer a parody of ghetto life.
This parody of black identity and actions is further conveyed in another dream sequence where Go wants to have children with a parade of beautiful women. After imagining what he might name these kids, Go has a startling revelation, “I looks down and I see that my dick ain’t nuffin but a bump” (82), prompting jeers from the women until one of them tells Go that she doesn’t care if he doesn’t have a penis, except that she turns into his mother and Go stabs her over and over again. These two dreams suggest that Monk decided to portray the real problem with such stereotypical “ghetto life” not in terms of socio-economic deprivation, but as a case of Freudian psychological repressions. The “ho” that becomes Go’s mother, his desire to stab her because he doesn’t have a father, bespeak more of castration anxieties and an Oedipus complex rather than a lack of education as the cause of Go’s desires to criminally dehumanize women. Monk casts “ghetto life” as a sense of inferiority bred from a lack of clear family identities and values. With the lack of a strong male role model, does Go’s mother become the mythical black “Matriarch,” who he must stab in order to affirm his self-worth, and in the process stab out at the rest of society?
It is possible that in writing this parody on African-American life in the same style as We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk is assuming the identity of Juanita Mae Jenkins and using her own language against her. However, textual references suggest that Monk may be also referring to his own life in My Pafology. In Go’s second dream sequence, two of the names that he imagines for the children he would have with the dream “hos” are Fantasy and Mystery, names which refer to an earlier conversation Monk has with his sister, where he says, “I come up with shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that” (26). The reality of African-American life that would lead someone to use these two names is too absurd for Monk’s educated sensibilities. Similarly, the castration theme of this dream, where Go’s penis “ain’t nuffin but a bump,” is referenced later in a somewhat disembodied interlude during Monk’s struggle to maintain his own identity despite Stagg R. Leigh’s literary success, where Monk says, “Somehow I managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work… I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away” (257). Monk then says that he cut off his own penis, using a variety of slang words for this member, suggesting that the body which we think of as the most real and personal part of our identity may also be nothing but a construct of language. As Monk struggles to deal with his own mother’s mental decline, his own inability to take care of her, and the absence of a father in his own life, it is possible that the somewhat psychologically repressed dreams of Monk’s character Van Go Jenkins may really be referring to Monk’s own psychological difficulties. The creation of Stagg R. Leigh as the fictional author of My Pafology may not only serve to further the book’s insistence on being a parody, but may also serve to protect Monk from the startling fact that though he and Go have different identities, they are somehow the same: caught in familial difficulties and socially constructed roles that do not allow them to express themselves or their race as they really are.
While events and characters in My Pafology may or may not refer to Monk’s actual life, he certainly insists that he intended the book to be a parody of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and its black stereotypes. By explicitly framing his intentions, Monk may be trying to call into question Barthes’ assertion that a text is not representational of an author’s life and intentions. However, Monk may have fallen for this intentional fallacy himself, as his publisher, reviewers, and audience all end up taking the book as a true statement about African-American life. The text becomes indexical not of Monk’s life and intentions, but of its fictional author, Stagg R. Leigh, an identity that Monk assumes in order get the book published and to promote it on the Kenya Dunston show. This may be an example of Barthes’ suggestion that an author’s identity does not precede their text, but is created from the process of writing, leading to Monk’s final inability to disentangle himself from the fiction that he created.
Between Monk’s appearance as Stagg R. Leigh on the Kenya Dunston show, and the acceptance of Stagg’s book for the National Book Award, Monk has one last dream sequence that suggests the depths of his crisis of identity before loosing touch with reality altogether in Erasure’s climax. In this passage, Monk dreams that he cannot wake up from being pursued by Nazi soldiers. He sees the Germans burn down a house and bayonet a painting of Starry Night, describing that concurrently, “I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it was covered with blood” (255). The soldiers burn Monk through the painting before he finally mows them down with a machine gun, but one wounded Nazi bleeds all the way into his foxhole and speaks, “The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, ‘Wie heißen Sie?’ And I didn’t know” (256).
Two of Monk’s earlier imagined conversations take place between Hitler and Meister Eckhart, who discuss their writings that attack Jews and secure the German race. These fictional dialogues, and Hitler’s rise to power in general, may serve as examples of the danger spread from racial stereotypes and the defining of identity on one’s racial group alone. Within the last dream sequence, Monk’s thoughts on race and identity, as spelled out in the text of these conversations, have re-created him as someone intimately involved in Hitler’s Germany, as someone on the opposite side of the Nazi dialectic of racial affirmation and destruction. However, the imagined conversations between other artists whose work is being burned also lead Monk to identify himself with a work of art, to the point of being wounded along with it, in much the same way that he has so viscerally identified himself with the fictional Stagg R. Leigh. In particular, the painting is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, whose name is referenced in Van Go Jenkins, identifying Monk with his fictional character. By shooting back at the German soldiers, Monk is further identified with Go Jenkins, who dreams of stabbing his mother and goes on a violent rampage at the end of My Pafology, but also perhaps with the unknown murderer of his sister and all those who might perpetuate violence in the name of belief or racial identity.
Monk’s inability to tell just who he is culminates in the dream when the wounded soldier asks, “Wie heißen Sie,” which in English translates as, ‘what is your name?’ Monk no longer knows how to answer this seemingly simple query, and in the novel’s final scene this conflict comes to a head. When his book is given the National Book award and the author is asked to stand up, Monk rises and experiences a sharp break with reality. He is shown a mirror in which he sees the face of Stagg R. Leigh, and finally remarks into a TV camera that he is on television, just as his character Go does at the end of My Pafology. The narrator is no longer clearly Monk Ellison, for he has now also become both the stereotyped author and character whose identities stemmed from Monk’s desire to parody those stereotypes in the first place. However, it is also possible that when the dream-soldier asks for his name, Monk says he doesn’t know not just because he no longer knows his own name, but also because he is unable to understand identity when it is couched in terms of racial dialects or dialectics. Society wants Monk to say that he is a black author addressing black themes, or that if he is black he ought to act out of the same kinds of violent and thuggish stereotypes he is trying to protest, but this is unintelligible and even inimical to Monk’s other identities, as a child, a sibling, a fisher and woodworker, an educated and experimental novelist, and finally perhaps a human being struggling with the same kinds of psychological concerns that plague any other individual.
Confronted with the religious zealotry that may have killed his sister, the education and authorial intentions that distinguish him from other authors, the stereotypes of “ghetto life” that make best-selling novels, and the uncertainty of the role of art to the most real aspects of life and personal identity, when Monk is finally asked to define himself on society’s terms, both in the soldier’s question and in claiming authorship of My Pafology, he cannot answer. Unable, or unwilling, to turn to the violent responses of Go, his sister’s murderer, or of the soldiers in his dream, that are necessitated by the dialectics of race and belief, Monk’s identity itself becomes a dream, and he states in Latin as the book’s last line, “hypothesis non fingo” (265), ‘I do not form a hypothesis.’ By the end of Erasure, the text seems to suggest that Monk’s personal identification is irrelevant to how he is perceived, and that if social constructs, stereotypes, and language itself were to become erased, then identity could not exist.
Of the various literary devices made use of in Percival Everett’s "Erasure," perhaps the most revealing is that of dream narratives, whereby Monk Ellison, and Van Go Jenkins, the narrator of Monk’s fictional novel My Pafology, dream events which, though not ascribed as “real” events in the narrative, nonetheless carry a significatory weight that can elucidate other aspects of the text. At the beginning of the novel, Monk says, “the society in which I live tells me I am black” (1). He believes that race, and personal identities in general, are purely a social construct of language. But throughout the novel we see that this language of race and identity, as displayed in the cultural acceptance of the ghetto dialect in which Monk writes My Pafology, is the only language his society knows, leading to a conflict where Monk begins to identify with his stereotypical nom de plume, Stagg R. Leigh. Monk’s dreams portray this encroaching conflict of identity, in which his personal interests, education, family dramas, psychological difficulties, and creative intentions are pitted against societal expectations that would violently erase personal identity.
In the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, dreams can tell us something about the identity of the dreamer; either repressed, childhood concerns, or dynamic, self-affirming principles. Regardless of the methodology or theory used, such dream interpretation often relies on knowledge of the individual dreamer’s life, as well as on symbolic archetypes that may or may not exist in all human expression. Though not intentionally created by the dreamer, a dream could thus be taken as a signification of that person’s life, and the individual as the dream’s “author.” We might assume that though the author of a text writes the dream narrative, it is similarly supposed to function as an unconscious or symbolic measure of the dreaming character’s life. Roland Barthes, in his essay, “Death of the Author,” suggests that the history and personality of a novel’s author may not serve as an accurate guide for interpreting their text. Barthes instead posits a scriptor, the narrative voice born in the act of writing itself, which allows interpretation to proceed as a disentanglement of narrative elements within the text. While dream narratives may not signify anything about the actual author, they may serve as textual clues for the interpretation of the scriptors or characters in a book, which are merely aspects of the text. This being the case, it is possible to look at dream narratives, such as those in Erasure, as a narrative layer that can further help disentangle the threads of the character’s identities.
Early in the novel, Monk dreams that his father is telling him stories about certain African-American authors, and then finds himself to be younger, watching a school of fish from a pier. Shortly, Monk discovers, “Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush.” She asks, “‘Did you see him?’ I stopped her and asked, ‘See whom?’ But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject” (41-2). Childhood memories, fishing, and the lives of artists fill a considerable part of Monk’s attention throughout Erasure, and they may be part of his way of expressing his unique identity versus his concerns that, “some people in the society in which I live… tell me I am not black enough” (2). But it is Monk’s relationship to his family that is more significantly explicated in this passage. Though his father is dead, Monk occasionally remembers his father’s pride in the young Monk’s decision to become a writer. Furthermore, this paternal encouragement often separates him from his siblings, who are both doctors, and take offense at Monk’s precocious use of the English language. Monk’s “whom” may reflect his solid education and supportive upbringing, but this personal use of language puts him at odds with reviewers, like the one who is at a loss to understand what his experimental writing, “has to do with the African American experience” (2).
Prior to this dream, Monk eats lunch with his sister, Lisa, in a Capitol Grill restaurant in D.C., and during a conversation about Monk’s writing career and inability to talk to other people Lisa says he is different. “Different from whom?” is Monk’s reply (26), perhaps not only to Lisa, but also to an unknown man who Monk catches staring at his sister, though she claims not to know him, or to the picketers shouting “Murderer!” in front of the abortion clinic where Lisa works (29). The next day, Monk learns that his sister has been killed, presumably by the pro-life protestors, and due to the linguistic similarities between Monk’s dream and the scene in the Capitol Grill, it might be tempting to read Lisa’s dream-question “did you see him?” as referring to the unknown man in the restaurant as her potential murderer. This use of a prophetic dream as narrative foreshadowing may however be a manipulative device of the text in order to conceal what is actually going on in the novel.
After eating with his sister, and before learning she is dead, Monk reads a review of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a distortion of African-American life, and is asked by his editor that he imitate this form in order to be “black enough” (43) for his audience. In light of Monk’s revulsion when he first hears of Jenkins’ book, it is possible that Lisa’s question in the dream instead refers to Monk, and his concern about being an educated, black author whose, “work was not commercial enough to make any real money” (42). If the dream acts as narrative foreshadowing, it is a premonition not of his sister’s murder, but of the eventual birth of Stagg R. Leigh, Monk’s imaginary nom de plume. This stereotypically black, incommunicative ex-con has no identity of his own and is compared by Monk to being as mercurial and immaterial as the character Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Though Monk does not see him now, this dream passage raises the suggestion that there is someone else to be seen, a version of Monk Ellison that would not reply, “See whom,” and who is capable of writing in the ghetto dialect that makes My Pafology a publishable novel.
Out of his disgust with the success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ book, and his alienation after his sister’s death that forces him to move to D.C. and take care of their ailing mother, Monk writes My Pafology, his own take on black stereotypes that is intended to mock We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Everett includes the entirety of this novel within Erasure, and fittingly begins it with another dream. In this passage, the main character of Monk’s My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, stabs his mother to death, claiming that he does this because, “…I love her. Cause I hate her. Cause I ain’t got no daddy” (66). It is this dream that sets the tone for Go’s actions throughout the rest of the novel-in-a-novel, including a fight with his knife-wielding mother and his shooting of Willy, a man who claims to be Go’s father. Go’s excuse for this latter action is that Willy brought him into this world where he “ain’t shit” (124). By describing such violent actions in an extreme racial dialect, Monk attempts to offer a parody of ghetto life.
This parody of black identity and actions is further conveyed in another dream sequence where Go wants to have children with a parade of beautiful women. After imagining what he might name these kids, Go has a startling revelation, “I looks down and I see that my dick ain’t nuffin but a bump” (82), prompting jeers from the women until one of them tells Go that she doesn’t care if he doesn’t have a penis, except that she turns into his mother and Go stabs her over and over again. These two dreams suggest that Monk decided to portray the real problem with such stereotypical “ghetto life” not in terms of socio-economic deprivation, but as a case of Freudian psychological repressions. The “ho” that becomes Go’s mother, his desire to stab her because he doesn’t have a father, bespeak more of castration anxieties and an Oedipus complex rather than a lack of education as the cause of Go’s desires to criminally dehumanize women. Monk casts “ghetto life” as a sense of inferiority bred from a lack of clear family identities and values. With the lack of a strong male role model, does Go’s mother become the mythical black “Matriarch,” who he must stab in order to affirm his self-worth, and in the process stab out at the rest of society?
It is possible that in writing this parody on African-American life in the same style as We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk is assuming the identity of Juanita Mae Jenkins and using her own language against her. However, textual references suggest that Monk may be also referring to his own life in My Pafology. In Go’s second dream sequence, two of the names that he imagines for the children he would have with the dream “hos” are Fantasy and Mystery, names which refer to an earlier conversation Monk has with his sister, where he says, “I come up with shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that” (26). The reality of African-American life that would lead someone to use these two names is too absurd for Monk’s educated sensibilities. Similarly, the castration theme of this dream, where Go’s penis “ain’t nuffin but a bump,” is referenced later in a somewhat disembodied interlude during Monk’s struggle to maintain his own identity despite Stagg R. Leigh’s literary success, where Monk says, “Somehow I managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work… I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away” (257). Monk then says that he cut off his own penis, using a variety of slang words for this member, suggesting that the body which we think of as the most real and personal part of our identity may also be nothing but a construct of language. As Monk struggles to deal with his own mother’s mental decline, his own inability to take care of her, and the absence of a father in his own life, it is possible that the somewhat psychologically repressed dreams of Monk’s character Van Go Jenkins may really be referring to Monk’s own psychological difficulties. The creation of Stagg R. Leigh as the fictional author of My Pafology may not only serve to further the book’s insistence on being a parody, but may also serve to protect Monk from the startling fact that though he and Go have different identities, they are somehow the same: caught in familial difficulties and socially constructed roles that do not allow them to express themselves or their race as they really are.
While events and characters in My Pafology may or may not refer to Monk’s actual life, he certainly insists that he intended the book to be a parody of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and its black stereotypes. By explicitly framing his intentions, Monk may be trying to call into question Barthes’ assertion that a text is not representational of an author’s life and intentions. However, Monk may have fallen for this intentional fallacy himself, as his publisher, reviewers, and audience all end up taking the book as a true statement about African-American life. The text becomes indexical not of Monk’s life and intentions, but of its fictional author, Stagg R. Leigh, an identity that Monk assumes in order get the book published and to promote it on the Kenya Dunston show. This may be an example of Barthes’ suggestion that an author’s identity does not precede their text, but is created from the process of writing, leading to Monk’s final inability to disentangle himself from the fiction that he created.
Between Monk’s appearance as Stagg R. Leigh on the Kenya Dunston show, and the acceptance of Stagg’s book for the National Book Award, Monk has one last dream sequence that suggests the depths of his crisis of identity before loosing touch with reality altogether in Erasure’s climax. In this passage, Monk dreams that he cannot wake up from being pursued by Nazi soldiers. He sees the Germans burn down a house and bayonet a painting of Starry Night, describing that concurrently, “I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it was covered with blood” (255). The soldiers burn Monk through the painting before he finally mows them down with a machine gun, but one wounded Nazi bleeds all the way into his foxhole and speaks, “The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, ‘Wie heißen Sie?’ And I didn’t know” (256).
Two of Monk’s earlier imagined conversations take place between Hitler and Meister Eckhart, who discuss their writings that attack Jews and secure the German race. These fictional dialogues, and Hitler’s rise to power in general, may serve as examples of the danger spread from racial stereotypes and the defining of identity on one’s racial group alone. Within the last dream sequence, Monk’s thoughts on race and identity, as spelled out in the text of these conversations, have re-created him as someone intimately involved in Hitler’s Germany, as someone on the opposite side of the Nazi dialectic of racial affirmation and destruction. However, the imagined conversations between other artists whose work is being burned also lead Monk to identify himself with a work of art, to the point of being wounded along with it, in much the same way that he has so viscerally identified himself with the fictional Stagg R. Leigh. In particular, the painting is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, whose name is referenced in Van Go Jenkins, identifying Monk with his fictional character. By shooting back at the German soldiers, Monk is further identified with Go Jenkins, who dreams of stabbing his mother and goes on a violent rampage at the end of My Pafology, but also perhaps with the unknown murderer of his sister and all those who might perpetuate violence in the name of belief or racial identity.
Monk’s inability to tell just who he is culminates in the dream when the wounded soldier asks, “Wie heißen Sie,” which in English translates as, ‘what is your name?’ Monk no longer knows how to answer this seemingly simple query, and in the novel’s final scene this conflict comes to a head. When his book is given the National Book award and the author is asked to stand up, Monk rises and experiences a sharp break with reality. He is shown a mirror in which he sees the face of Stagg R. Leigh, and finally remarks into a TV camera that he is on television, just as his character Go does at the end of My Pafology. The narrator is no longer clearly Monk Ellison, for he has now also become both the stereotyped author and character whose identities stemmed from Monk’s desire to parody those stereotypes in the first place. However, it is also possible that when the dream-soldier asks for his name, Monk says he doesn’t know not just because he no longer knows his own name, but also because he is unable to understand identity when it is couched in terms of racial dialects or dialectics. Society wants Monk to say that he is a black author addressing black themes, or that if he is black he ought to act out of the same kinds of violent and thuggish stereotypes he is trying to protest, but this is unintelligible and even inimical to Monk’s other identities, as a child, a sibling, a fisher and woodworker, an educated and experimental novelist, and finally perhaps a human being struggling with the same kinds of psychological concerns that plague any other individual.
Confronted with the religious zealotry that may have killed his sister, the education and authorial intentions that distinguish him from other authors, the stereotypes of “ghetto life” that make best-selling novels, and the uncertainty of the role of art to the most real aspects of life and personal identity, when Monk is finally asked to define himself on society’s terms, both in the soldier’s question and in claiming authorship of My Pafology, he cannot answer. Unable, or unwilling, to turn to the violent responses of Go, his sister’s murderer, or of the soldiers in his dream, that are necessitated by the dialectics of race and belief, Monk’s identity itself becomes a dream, and he states in Latin as the book’s last line, “hypothesis non fingo” (265), ‘I do not form a hypothesis.’ By the end of Erasure, the text seems to suggest that Monk’s personal identification is irrelevant to how he is perceived, and that if social constructs, stereotypes, and language itself were to become erased, then identity could not exist.
11.25.2007
There is No Religious "Right"
Religious persecution is nothing new, nor is a religious or ritual response to oppression. Gandhi, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, even, some might say, Jesus Christ, offered resistance to mainstream religious narratives through their faith and preaching of peace and tolerance. Sadly, words become distorted, and the cycle of violence continues. Over the last several days, in Malaysia, the Tamil sect of Hindus protested against decades worth of unfair treatment by the government, and in Tehran, a Sufi monastery was torched by Shiite vigilantes. [via Technoccult]
My teacher, Dr. Fred Clothey, spent many years working with the Tamil, both in India and in various diasporas here in America, trying to promote religious discussion and peace. As he put it, most religious intolerance occurs out of a fundamental inability to take the other person's point of view into consideration, and that it is perhaps not possible to even understand our own beliefs until you've been able to directly empathize with those who believe something entirely different.
My teacher, Dr. Fred Clothey, spent many years working with the Tamil, both in India and in various diasporas here in America, trying to promote religious discussion and peace. As he put it, most religious intolerance occurs out of a fundamental inability to take the other person's point of view into consideration, and that it is perhaps not possible to even understand our own beliefs until you've been able to directly empathize with those who believe something entirely different.
11.20.2007
On the Death of the Critic (or the Rebirth of Intention)
When I first read Roland Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author” I thought it reeked of repressed Nietzschean overtones to somehow kill off the exact creator on which literary criticism thrived. As a writer myself, I felt that my intentions did indeed matter to what I was trying to say, regardless of how a reader might take my utterings. Of course, the question really comes down to the motivations of modern critics, who in positing the Intentional and Affective Fallacies have effectively neutered both the writer and the reader as essential to the meaning of a text and instead instilled themselves, and the techniques of The Academy, as the sole judges of interpretation. If the Author’s life were important to the meaning of a text, then it would be impossible to understand their work without getting somewhat of a biographical or psychological sketch, which a critic is perhaps less qualified or driven to do when they can just sit in their armchairs and ruminate on the text itself. However, looking at the mass of modern literature and art, without recourse to their creators or socio-cultural contexts, it is hard to see any of them as being all that meaningful. Stereotypically flat doctors, lawyers, and detectives abound, but they seem to say more when considering that these are modern cultural hero-types that ultimately sell. One thing that can be said about the authorial geniuses of the 1900s is that they could actually write, and not being burdened with fears of actually being attached to their work, poured their hearts onto their pages.
Literary criticism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such should be compared to other forms of textual interpretation, especially hermeneutics, which dates back far beyond divine medieval auctors to Greek attempts to interpret ancient mythologies. One of the biggest challenges that arises in interpreting myths, symbol systems (or perhaps any given literary text), is just how much the meaning is derived from the socio-cultural context in which the story was originally told. The fantastic exploits of gods and demons make about as much sense as modern comic book superheroes outside the cultural givens in which every act and symbol might offer some reflection on the beliefs of the culture. Through centuries of use in interpreting religious texts, hermeneutics eventually emerged within a broad philosophical framework that attempts to do justice to a work’s origins, to take a people seriously whose words might be otherwise meaningless or inconsequential to modern, Western perspectives. The Authors may be long dead, but what they intended is perhaps of a much greater importance, and texts can tell us an infinite amount about those who created them. Certainly an Author’s words can be misunderstood, but just because we can choose to ignore their intentions does not mean that what they meant for their writing does not also have some validity. Furthermore, this hermeneutic approach also requires the interpreter to empathize with the authors, to enter into an emotional dialogue that truly wants to understand them, and to do the ethnological, historical, and psychological work that is necessary to achieve any true understanding of a text, instead of hiding lazily under the dust-jackets.
Literary criticism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such should be compared to other forms of textual interpretation, especially hermeneutics, which dates back far beyond divine medieval auctors to Greek attempts to interpret ancient mythologies. One of the biggest challenges that arises in interpreting myths, symbol systems (or perhaps any given literary text), is just how much the meaning is derived from the socio-cultural context in which the story was originally told. The fantastic exploits of gods and demons make about as much sense as modern comic book superheroes outside the cultural givens in which every act and symbol might offer some reflection on the beliefs of the culture. Through centuries of use in interpreting religious texts, hermeneutics eventually emerged within a broad philosophical framework that attempts to do justice to a work’s origins, to take a people seriously whose words might be otherwise meaningless or inconsequential to modern, Western perspectives. The Authors may be long dead, but what they intended is perhaps of a much greater importance, and texts can tell us an infinite amount about those who created them. Certainly an Author’s words can be misunderstood, but just because we can choose to ignore their intentions does not mean that what they meant for their writing does not also have some validity. Furthermore, this hermeneutic approach also requires the interpreter to empathize with the authors, to enter into an emotional dialogue that truly wants to understand them, and to do the ethnological, historical, and psychological work that is necessary to achieve any true understanding of a text, instead of hiding lazily under the dust-jackets.
Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science
Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science
Scholars have often seen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the most prominent harbinger of modern culture, especially in his Oration’s espousal of the ‘dignity of man’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 163). Frances Yates suggests that Pico reformulated the position of European man as a Magus, who by acting upon the world through magic and the Cabala could control his destiny with science (Yates 116). While this concept of a new relationship between human will and the world may have aided the Scientific Revolution, through its focus on analysis and technological operations, Renaissance magic and occultism were often viewed as illegitimate by orthodox religion, philosophy, and the growing scientific approach to reality (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 262, 280). Pico’s active interest in magic has led scholars such as Lynn Thorndike to dismiss his influence on science altogether (Copenhaver, Number 26). However, Recent studies by Brian P. Copenhaver may show that Pico della Mirandola’s focus on language and hermeneutic interpretation in the Cabala helped broaden the fields of textual analysis, mathematics, and the precision of scientific languages.
Like most Renaissance philosophers, Pico was interested in history, physics, mathematics, and other ‘natural philosophies’ that formed the basis for the Scientific Revolution, but his research did not exclude the more Humanist concerns of poetry, art, grammar, and ethics that were seen as culturally useful knowledge (Copenhaver and Schmitt 24, 28 and Copenhaver, Number 30). Such diverse learning was a prevalent tool in Renaissance philosophy, and Pico saw this eclecticism as an aspect of man’s freedom, with which he tried to construct a broader sense of truth from diverse texts without adhering to any particular philosophy (Copenhaver and Schmitt 59, 167-8). In 1486, Pico wrote the Oration to introduce his 900 Conclusions (Copenhaver and Schmitt 165-6), which were intended to be a total synthesis of all current knowledge (Yates 94), and empower man to transcend his ontological and moral positions in the world (Copenhaver and Schmitt 166-7). Though the recovery of ancient texts and the study of classical manuscripts was a prime concern of Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33), Pico embraced systems of thought rejected by other Humanists and little known to most European Christians (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171). In his Conclusions, Pico attempted to harmonize Plato and Aristotle with the translations of semi-philosophic religious manuscripts called the Hermetic Corpus, as well as Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldeaen, and Cabalistic texts that formed the basis of Renaissance ‘natural magic’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 16, 168).
In 1462, Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus for Cosimo Medici, and his On Arranging One’s Life According to the Heavens served as the most influential text on magic theory for several centuries, giving educated Europeans a philosophical basis for their beliefs in magic, astrology, and the occult (Copenhaver and Schmitt 146-7, 159-60). Philosophical and pious Renaissance Magi replaced medieval notions of disreputable and necromantic wizards (Yates 107), and for Ficino, the aim of their natural magic was to put “natural materials in relationship with natural causes” (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 281). The decline of magic as a legitimate concern of natural philosophy was one of the most important features of the Scientific Revolution, but empirical occultism remained a significant source of natural and historical information for Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 290, 280). This magical world-view also expressed the same impulse of “turning towards and operating on the world” essential to the development of the mechanical and mathematical sciences (Copenhaver, Number 263).
After meeting Ficino in the 1480s, Pico hoped to combine Ficino’s natural magic with his own unified theories, in order to overcome philosophical sectarian discord (Copenhaver and Schmitt 174). However, Pico recommended magic much more openly than did his colleague, in the form of a practical Cabala that could tap the higher powers of the cosmos through the invocation of angels and the names of God (Yates 84). Having studied languages in several different universities, Pico learned of Cabala from Elia Del Medigo while in Padua, and later from the Sicilian rabbi Flavius Mithridates, who translated several thousand pages of Cabalistic texts for the young philosopher (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). Cabala is a Jewish mystical tradition, supposedly handed down from Moses as a source of ancient wisdom, and developed in 13th Century Spain in the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, or “Book of Creation” (Yates 92). For Pico, Cabalism was comparable to the Hermetic Corpus of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Yates 84-5). At the core of Cabalistic doctrine are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Sephiroth, or ‘enumerations,’ the ten names most common to God that were used to create the world (Yates 92). In the Hebrew account of creation, as told in Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, the Cabalists saw the Hebrew words and letters as containing the creative language of God, and they developed interpretative techniques to understand the nature of the world from the text of the Scriptures (Yates 85, 92).
Of particular interest to Pico’s studies on the Cabala were the 13th century commentaries on Maimonides by Abraham Abulafia. This Spanish mystic developed a technique of combining Hebrew letters in endless permutations, called a ‘revolving alphabet,’ which became a primary source for Pico’s textual analysis (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171-2, and Yates 93). At the suggestion of his translator, Flavius, Pico innovated the Cabala by linguistically deriving the name of Jesus from the names of God, as an encoded Christian secret in the Scriptures (Copenhaver and Schmitt 172). He went so far in his Conclusions as to claim that magic and Cabala could give the most scientific certainty about Christ’s divinity, a statement that the Christian Church found heretical, which prompted their refusal to let Pico print his work (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169, 166). But even in his formal Apology to the Church, published in 1489, Pico still defended his magical use of Cabala, by dividing it into a theoretical or contemplative branch and a practical branch that magically operated on the names of God (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169). Pico called this later Cabala the “practical part of natural knowledge,” classified it as a science that could “make practical the whole of formal metaphysics and of lower theology,” and claimed that no magical operation worked without its use (Copenhaver, Number 34-6, Yates 95, and 91).
According to Copenhaver, the importance of these Cabalistic studies, and Pico’s ultimate insistence on their operative use, relies on the last thesis of his Conclusions: “Just as the true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, in the same way Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law” (Copenhaver, Number 25). Pico was fascinated with the idea that the Universe was a vast and original book that could be interpreted through the magical languages of shape and number (Copenhaver, Number 29-30), in much the same way that the Scriptures could be interpreted through the Hebrew Language. Hermeneutics, the Cabalist method of textual interpretation, had taught Pico that nothing in the Torah lacks meaning, even individual letters contained secrets that could be penetrated through specific techniques (Copenhaver, Number 52, and Copenhaver and Schmitt 172), such as linguistic abbreviation or transposition, called notarikon and temurah (Yates 93). The most complex technique that Pico used in his practical Cabala was gematria, a system in which numerical values are assigned to each Hebrew letter. Through the intricate linguistic arithmetic of gematria, calculations between numbers and words could reveal “the entire organization of the world in terms of word-numbers” (Yates 93 and Copenhaver, Number 41), a revelation that was bound to appeal to Pico’s explicit goal of synthesizing all knowledge.
By recommending such linguistic signs as magically operative over natural substances, Pico had to make a distinction between the shape or figure of letters and their linguistic messages, in order to avoid the charge that his magic communicated with demons (Yates 88-9, and Copenhaver, Number 61, 39). As such, Pico built on medieval theories of signification and supposition, as well as on Thomas Aquinas’s semiotic theories in which Scriptural parts of speech mean something by themselves, outside of their semantic content. Pico suggested that there is a difference between God’s original use of language, which signifies the creation of the world, and the priest or Magi’s repetitious and onomatopoeic language, that does not actually signify anything (Copenhaver, Number 39-40). In his Conclusions, Pico states that any speech is powerful if informed by the speech of God, but Hebrew letters were meaningful in themselves as “characters and figures,” like those used to mark amulets in astrology or alchemy, because their shape revealed the shape of God to medieval Cabalists (Copenhaver, Number 33-4, 37). Characters and figures were in the safe realm of natural action because they shared the powers attributed by Pythagorean philosophers to mathematical entities, and this conjunction between shape, number, and word in Cabalism further articulated a magical arithmetic for Pico (Copenhaver, Number 37, 60, and 34). This mathematical use of language, along with Pico’s focuses on the precision of significant speech and hermeneutic analysis of texts, were themes taken up and expanded by later natural philosophers, such as Giambattisto Vico and Galileo Galilei.
Hermeneutics, as a theory of interpreting linguistic and non-linguistic expressions that might have deeper, non-literal meanings, descended from Greek philosophy through Renaissance Biblical studies, and eventually came to include the study of all classical texts. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova of 1725, argued that thinking is always rooted in a specific cultural context, and that textual interpretation, from poetry to technical vocabularies, must involve historical and cultural studies as well as self-understanding (Ramberg and Gjesdal). These ideas have become essential to modern hermeneutical analysis, and may have resulted from Renaissance Humanists like Pico, who modernized the study of classical manuscripts by improving knowledge of ancient languages and specific cultural-historical settings (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33). Furthermore, as a tool for revealing layers of symbolic meaning, hermeneutics shares with scientific languages the attempt to provide a foundation for meaning through a critical attitude and precise terminology (Rasmussen 22-3). Drawing on his Cabalistic studies in which the phonetics of language were more corporeal than the semantic contents, Pico criticized rhetoric as a superficial obfuscation of truth, and stressed that philosophical language must be a tool of clarity, accuracy, and seriousness (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). In this light, Pico’s Cabalist conclusions may have revealed “new tools for understanding nature as God’s creation,” which scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Eugenio Garin believed had methodological, ethical, and epistemological consequences for the development of science (Copenhaver, Number 26-7).
In the last years of his life, Pico della Mirandola wrote a refutation of predictive astrology, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, an attempt to defend human freedom from astral determinism that became his largest project (Copenhaver and Schmitt 176). Downplaying the magical aspects of astrology that interested Ficino and other natural philosophers, Pico argued that the Cabalistic deciphering of shapes in the Torah could teach astrologers how to more accurately read signs in the stars (Copenhaver, Number 61). Not only did this project defend the human importance of finding meaning in nature, but distinguished mathematical-physical causality from astrological causality, and suggested that phenomena could only be understood through experience; themes that may have foreshadowed the works of Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton (Copenhaver, Number 25-7).
Galileo also made the claim that the Universe was a book that could be read in a language of characters through mathematics, which may have inspired Descartes’ coordinate geometry, that was also viewed by its critics as a form of magic using shapes as explanation (Copenhaver, Number 29). Though Galileo’s hermeneutics of reading shape into the stars detached Scripture from nature to form a mathematical science, this development from natural philosophy may not have been possible without Pico’s correlation of nature to text in his work with the Cabala (Copenhaver, Number 61-2). By focusing on textual interpretation, the relationship between form, number, and language, and the need for accurate linguistic signification, Pico was able to transform the mystical system of the Cabala into an operative magic, which became a tool for Renaissance natural philosophers to begin exploring their world in a scientific manner.
Bibliography
Copenhaver, B. “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel.” Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. Eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999
--- “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, C. “Renaissance Philosophy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992
Rasmussen, D. “Symbol and Interpretation.” The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974
Yates, F. “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964
Ramberg, B. and Gjesdal, K. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online. 9 Nov. 2005. Available http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
"One who grasps [written Hebrew’s] … structure deeply and by the roots, and knows how to keep that [structure] fitted to the fields of knowledge will have a pattern and a rule for the complete discovery of anything that can be known."
–Pico della Mirandola (Copenhaver, Number 41)
Scholars have often seen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as the most prominent harbinger of modern culture, especially in his Oration’s espousal of the ‘dignity of man’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 163). Frances Yates suggests that Pico reformulated the position of European man as a Magus, who by acting upon the world through magic and the Cabala could control his destiny with science (Yates 116). While this concept of a new relationship between human will and the world may have aided the Scientific Revolution, through its focus on analysis and technological operations, Renaissance magic and occultism were often viewed as illegitimate by orthodox religion, philosophy, and the growing scientific approach to reality (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 262, 280). Pico’s active interest in magic has led scholars such as Lynn Thorndike to dismiss his influence on science altogether (Copenhaver, Number 26). However, Recent studies by Brian P. Copenhaver may show that Pico della Mirandola’s focus on language and hermeneutic interpretation in the Cabala helped broaden the fields of textual analysis, mathematics, and the precision of scientific languages.
Like most Renaissance philosophers, Pico was interested in history, physics, mathematics, and other ‘natural philosophies’ that formed the basis for the Scientific Revolution, but his research did not exclude the more Humanist concerns of poetry, art, grammar, and ethics that were seen as culturally useful knowledge (Copenhaver and Schmitt 24, 28 and Copenhaver, Number 30). Such diverse learning was a prevalent tool in Renaissance philosophy, and Pico saw this eclecticism as an aspect of man’s freedom, with which he tried to construct a broader sense of truth from diverse texts without adhering to any particular philosophy (Copenhaver and Schmitt 59, 167-8). In 1486, Pico wrote the Oration to introduce his 900 Conclusions (Copenhaver and Schmitt 165-6), which were intended to be a total synthesis of all current knowledge (Yates 94), and empower man to transcend his ontological and moral positions in the world (Copenhaver and Schmitt 166-7). Though the recovery of ancient texts and the study of classical manuscripts was a prime concern of Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33), Pico embraced systems of thought rejected by other Humanists and little known to most European Christians (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171). In his Conclusions, Pico attempted to harmonize Plato and Aristotle with the translations of semi-philosophic religious manuscripts called the Hermetic Corpus, as well as Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldeaen, and Cabalistic texts that formed the basis of Renaissance ‘natural magic’ (Copenhaver and Schmitt 16, 168).
In 1462, Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus for Cosimo Medici, and his On Arranging One’s Life According to the Heavens served as the most influential text on magic theory for several centuries, giving educated Europeans a philosophical basis for their beliefs in magic, astrology, and the occult (Copenhaver and Schmitt 146-7, 159-60). Philosophical and pious Renaissance Magi replaced medieval notions of disreputable and necromantic wizards (Yates 107), and for Ficino, the aim of their natural magic was to put “natural materials in relationship with natural causes” (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 281). The decline of magic as a legitimate concern of natural philosophy was one of the most important features of the Scientific Revolution, but empirical occultism remained a significant source of natural and historical information for Renaissance philosophers (Copenhaver, Natural Magic 290, 280). This magical world-view also expressed the same impulse of “turning towards and operating on the world” essential to the development of the mechanical and mathematical sciences (Copenhaver, Number 263).
After meeting Ficino in the 1480s, Pico hoped to combine Ficino’s natural magic with his own unified theories, in order to overcome philosophical sectarian discord (Copenhaver and Schmitt 174). However, Pico recommended magic much more openly than did his colleague, in the form of a practical Cabala that could tap the higher powers of the cosmos through the invocation of angels and the names of God (Yates 84). Having studied languages in several different universities, Pico learned of Cabala from Elia Del Medigo while in Padua, and later from the Sicilian rabbi Flavius Mithridates, who translated several thousand pages of Cabalistic texts for the young philosopher (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). Cabala is a Jewish mystical tradition, supposedly handed down from Moses as a source of ancient wisdom, and developed in 13th Century Spain in the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, or “Book of Creation” (Yates 92). For Pico, Cabalism was comparable to the Hermetic Corpus of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Yates 84-5). At the core of Cabalistic doctrine are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Sephiroth, or ‘enumerations,’ the ten names most common to God that were used to create the world (Yates 92). In the Hebrew account of creation, as told in Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, the Cabalists saw the Hebrew words and letters as containing the creative language of God, and they developed interpretative techniques to understand the nature of the world from the text of the Scriptures (Yates 85, 92).
Of particular interest to Pico’s studies on the Cabala were the 13th century commentaries on Maimonides by Abraham Abulafia. This Spanish mystic developed a technique of combining Hebrew letters in endless permutations, called a ‘revolving alphabet,’ which became a primary source for Pico’s textual analysis (Copenhaver and Schmitt 171-2, and Yates 93). At the suggestion of his translator, Flavius, Pico innovated the Cabala by linguistically deriving the name of Jesus from the names of God, as an encoded Christian secret in the Scriptures (Copenhaver and Schmitt 172). He went so far in his Conclusions as to claim that magic and Cabala could give the most scientific certainty about Christ’s divinity, a statement that the Christian Church found heretical, which prompted their refusal to let Pico print his work (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169, 166). But even in his formal Apology to the Church, published in 1489, Pico still defended his magical use of Cabala, by dividing it into a theoretical or contemplative branch and a practical branch that magically operated on the names of God (Copenhaver and Schmitt 169). Pico called this later Cabala the “practical part of natural knowledge,” classified it as a science that could “make practical the whole of formal metaphysics and of lower theology,” and claimed that no magical operation worked without its use (Copenhaver, Number 34-6, Yates 95, and 91).
According to Copenhaver, the importance of these Cabalistic studies, and Pico’s ultimate insistence on their operative use, relies on the last thesis of his Conclusions: “Just as the true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, in the same way Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law” (Copenhaver, Number 25). Pico was fascinated with the idea that the Universe was a vast and original book that could be interpreted through the magical languages of shape and number (Copenhaver, Number 29-30), in much the same way that the Scriptures could be interpreted through the Hebrew Language. Hermeneutics, the Cabalist method of textual interpretation, had taught Pico that nothing in the Torah lacks meaning, even individual letters contained secrets that could be penetrated through specific techniques (Copenhaver, Number 52, and Copenhaver and Schmitt 172), such as linguistic abbreviation or transposition, called notarikon and temurah (Yates 93). The most complex technique that Pico used in his practical Cabala was gematria, a system in which numerical values are assigned to each Hebrew letter. Through the intricate linguistic arithmetic of gematria, calculations between numbers and words could reveal “the entire organization of the world in terms of word-numbers” (Yates 93 and Copenhaver, Number 41), a revelation that was bound to appeal to Pico’s explicit goal of synthesizing all knowledge.
By recommending such linguistic signs as magically operative over natural substances, Pico had to make a distinction between the shape or figure of letters and their linguistic messages, in order to avoid the charge that his magic communicated with demons (Yates 88-9, and Copenhaver, Number 61, 39). As such, Pico built on medieval theories of signification and supposition, as well as on Thomas Aquinas’s semiotic theories in which Scriptural parts of speech mean something by themselves, outside of their semantic content. Pico suggested that there is a difference between God’s original use of language, which signifies the creation of the world, and the priest or Magi’s repetitious and onomatopoeic language, that does not actually signify anything (Copenhaver, Number 39-40). In his Conclusions, Pico states that any speech is powerful if informed by the speech of God, but Hebrew letters were meaningful in themselves as “characters and figures,” like those used to mark amulets in astrology or alchemy, because their shape revealed the shape of God to medieval Cabalists (Copenhaver, Number 33-4, 37). Characters and figures were in the safe realm of natural action because they shared the powers attributed by Pythagorean philosophers to mathematical entities, and this conjunction between shape, number, and word in Cabalism further articulated a magical arithmetic for Pico (Copenhaver, Number 37, 60, and 34). This mathematical use of language, along with Pico’s focuses on the precision of significant speech and hermeneutic analysis of texts, were themes taken up and expanded by later natural philosophers, such as Giambattisto Vico and Galileo Galilei.
Hermeneutics, as a theory of interpreting linguistic and non-linguistic expressions that might have deeper, non-literal meanings, descended from Greek philosophy through Renaissance Biblical studies, and eventually came to include the study of all classical texts. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova of 1725, argued that thinking is always rooted in a specific cultural context, and that textual interpretation, from poetry to technical vocabularies, must involve historical and cultural studies as well as self-understanding (Ramberg and Gjesdal). These ideas have become essential to modern hermeneutical analysis, and may have resulted from Renaissance Humanists like Pico, who modernized the study of classical manuscripts by improving knowledge of ancient languages and specific cultural-historical settings (Copenhaver and Schmitt 33). Furthermore, as a tool for revealing layers of symbolic meaning, hermeneutics shares with scientific languages the attempt to provide a foundation for meaning through a critical attitude and precise terminology (Rasmussen 22-3). Drawing on his Cabalistic studies in which the phonetics of language were more corporeal than the semantic contents, Pico criticized rhetoric as a superficial obfuscation of truth, and stressed that philosophical language must be a tool of clarity, accuracy, and seriousness (Copenhaver and Schmitt 170-1). In this light, Pico’s Cabalist conclusions may have revealed “new tools for understanding nature as God’s creation,” which scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Eugenio Garin believed had methodological, ethical, and epistemological consequences for the development of science (Copenhaver, Number 26-7).
In the last years of his life, Pico della Mirandola wrote a refutation of predictive astrology, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, an attempt to defend human freedom from astral determinism that became his largest project (Copenhaver and Schmitt 176). Downplaying the magical aspects of astrology that interested Ficino and other natural philosophers, Pico argued that the Cabalistic deciphering of shapes in the Torah could teach astrologers how to more accurately read signs in the stars (Copenhaver, Number 61). Not only did this project defend the human importance of finding meaning in nature, but distinguished mathematical-physical causality from astrological causality, and suggested that phenomena could only be understood through experience; themes that may have foreshadowed the works of Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Newton (Copenhaver, Number 25-7).
Galileo also made the claim that the Universe was a book that could be read in a language of characters through mathematics, which may have inspired Descartes’ coordinate geometry, that was also viewed by its critics as a form of magic using shapes as explanation (Copenhaver, Number 29). Though Galileo’s hermeneutics of reading shape into the stars detached Scripture from nature to form a mathematical science, this development from natural philosophy may not have been possible without Pico’s correlation of nature to text in his work with the Cabala (Copenhaver, Number 61-2). By focusing on textual interpretation, the relationship between form, number, and language, and the need for accurate linguistic signification, Pico was able to transform the mystical system of the Cabala into an operative magic, which became a tool for Renaissance natural philosophers to begin exploring their world in a scientific manner.
Bibliography
Copenhaver, B. “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel.” Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. Eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999
--- “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, C. “Renaissance Philosophy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992
Rasmussen, D. “Symbol and Interpretation.” The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974
Yates, F. “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964
Ramberg, B. and Gjesdal, K. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online. 9 Nov. 2005. Available http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
11.08.2007
Narrative Validity
I have an immense respect for other people's narratives and beliefs, regardless if they can be proven objectively true, because what is most important is the way that people live based on these stories.
While working on my research paper about the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent for the Gunwinggu tribe of Indigenous Australia I came upon the belief that if a person ate in secret, spoiled a crying child, cooked on a dangerous riverbank, or generally misused the limited natural resources, the Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod would rise from its waterhole and, causing great storms, drown or eat the tribe. There were no public sanctions against these food taboos outside of the very real fear of a mythic or narrative retribution.
While editing the paper I chanced to comment that this prohibition was somewhat like my close friend's assertion that if she drinks (or uses in general), her whole life would fall apart. This of course upset her as belittling her situation, because for her not drinking is a very real fear that really would have drastic effects on her life. I had to make clear that I completely understood the emotional importance of her claims, and that the Indigenous Australians likewise had very real fears of not having enough to eat. What I had attempted to point out was that in both situations there was no external compulsion or law against a certain behavior, but a subjective story that described what would certainly happen if that action was unfortunately performed. As far as the story works in affecting the way one lives than I am prone to consider it "true," and any objectivity about what might actually happen is entirely beyond the point.
Of course, I can recognize, albeit slowly, that it is extremely difficult to talk to people about their deeply held beliefs in an objective or intellectual manner, or to compare them to other beliefs. For my friend, this story of her life falling apart if she uses is a very real, important matter that she lives with on a daily basis, and to suggest that it is a narrative (not, mind you, a fictive narrative), removes it from the emotional importance it needs to be effective. I imagine that that the Indigenous Australians may have been similarly outraged if a visiting anthropologist tried to tell them that the Rainbow Serpent was only a myth. For them it was a very real creature living in the local waterholes that really would drown them if they broke certain taboos. I am inclined to take their words for it at face value, while recognizing that there is possibly a deeper psychological mechanism at work. Granted, there are vast differences between these two kinds of stories, but in trying to respect that I think there is some value in pointing out the similarities of how people use narratives in their lives.
I know for a fact that I have done the same thing for a long time (and perhaps this is something many people do in order to determine their lives), telling stories of my social or familial roles, or perhaps more relevantly, using archetypal figures from my dreams as examples for how I lived. Some of these stories were very true for me, and if questioned I too would probably have responded with some amount of hostility. It took me a long time to realize that my personal narrative of the world ending if I didn't go on some deep personal quest to save it was, objectively, just a story. Not even to mention my real beliefs in meeting an angelic anima figure that haunted my dreams for years; but that actually happened, which is another story altogether. I think what I finally learned, though I think I knew it all along, is that on one level it is vitally important to have stories to describe how we want or have to live, but on another level it is perhaps just as important to recognize that these are in fact just stories we tell ourselves, that they have the most valid weight for us alone (unless of course they are mass political stories like those that have caused many of the world's atrocities), and that if our particular stories are no longer working to narrate our lives properly than we can change them. Of course, changing one's beliefs is extremely difficult as it often calls into question everything else about our lives, but sometimes, I think, it is necessary to do just that.
While working on my research paper about the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent for the Gunwinggu tribe of Indigenous Australia I came upon the belief that if a person ate in secret, spoiled a crying child, cooked on a dangerous riverbank, or generally misused the limited natural resources, the Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod would rise from its waterhole and, causing great storms, drown or eat the tribe. There were no public sanctions against these food taboos outside of the very real fear of a mythic or narrative retribution.
While editing the paper I chanced to comment that this prohibition was somewhat like my close friend's assertion that if she drinks (or uses in general), her whole life would fall apart. This of course upset her as belittling her situation, because for her not drinking is a very real fear that really would have drastic effects on her life. I had to make clear that I completely understood the emotional importance of her claims, and that the Indigenous Australians likewise had very real fears of not having enough to eat. What I had attempted to point out was that in both situations there was no external compulsion or law against a certain behavior, but a subjective story that described what would certainly happen if that action was unfortunately performed. As far as the story works in affecting the way one lives than I am prone to consider it "true," and any objectivity about what might actually happen is entirely beyond the point.
Of course, I can recognize, albeit slowly, that it is extremely difficult to talk to people about their deeply held beliefs in an objective or intellectual manner, or to compare them to other beliefs. For my friend, this story of her life falling apart if she uses is a very real, important matter that she lives with on a daily basis, and to suggest that it is a narrative (not, mind you, a fictive narrative), removes it from the emotional importance it needs to be effective. I imagine that that the Indigenous Australians may have been similarly outraged if a visiting anthropologist tried to tell them that the Rainbow Serpent was only a myth. For them it was a very real creature living in the local waterholes that really would drown them if they broke certain taboos. I am inclined to take their words for it at face value, while recognizing that there is possibly a deeper psychological mechanism at work. Granted, there are vast differences between these two kinds of stories, but in trying to respect that I think there is some value in pointing out the similarities of how people use narratives in their lives.
I know for a fact that I have done the same thing for a long time (and perhaps this is something many people do in order to determine their lives), telling stories of my social or familial roles, or perhaps more relevantly, using archetypal figures from my dreams as examples for how I lived. Some of these stories were very true for me, and if questioned I too would probably have responded with some amount of hostility. It took me a long time to realize that my personal narrative of the world ending if I didn't go on some deep personal quest to save it was, objectively, just a story. Not even to mention my real beliefs in meeting an angelic anima figure that haunted my dreams for years; but that actually happened, which is another story altogether. I think what I finally learned, though I think I knew it all along, is that on one level it is vitally important to have stories to describe how we want or have to live, but on another level it is perhaps just as important to recognize that these are in fact just stories we tell ourselves, that they have the most valid weight for us alone (unless of course they are mass political stories like those that have caused many of the world's atrocities), and that if our particular stories are no longer working to narrate our lives properly than we can change them. Of course, changing one's beliefs is extremely difficult as it often calls into question everything else about our lives, but sometimes, I think, it is necessary to do just that.
11.05.2007
Triangles of the Gods
Late last night Sophie and I were laying around talking, and she asked me to explicate a point I had tried to make about dreams being much more related to art than to science, as she knows I expressed uncertainty about being back in school and being able to make clear arguments vocally in class. This lead into a much larger discussion about the roots of psychology and science in the ancient philosophers, and I was surprised to discover how much I was able to tie in points I had learned in class, as if I am actually already learning this stuff. It made me realize how much I miss good intellectual conversations, which seem so few and far between in my life right now but have never really drawn on source material the way I will be expected to do for school.
For my history of philosophy class, Magic Medicine and Science, I was asked to read Plato's "Timaeus," the ideas of which are perhaps pivotal to the modern view of science and medicine, but what immediately struck me was how much it sounded like a load of hogwash. Full of Demiurges and half-formulated mathematical theorems, an attempt to explain the creation of the world in terms of the four elements which would be laughed down if published in the modern world, and yet still held such an impact on all trains of rational thinking that followed. I felt that with his preponderance on just how the Demiurge created the world, the soul, and all the creatures, the "Timaeus" read almost more like a creation myth I would discuss in my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, although with the supernatural beings replaced by the peculiar triangles of the Platonic solids. And yet I could still see how it was the root of logic, that it attempted to offer an explanation of the processes of the natural world without recourse to a pantheon of gods. It is kind of difficult to wrap my brain around the fact that Plato existed simultaneously with the myths of Zeus and his pantheon, despite the hoakiness of his theories it seems like two entirely different views of reality.
Of course, amidst all the elements cutting each other to create color and getting mixed about in the 'Receptacle' of reality, there is still some very practical wisdom that seems almost forgotten in this modern age. Particularly, Plato suggests that psychological disorders are a result of an imbalance of attention and of bad education, and recommends that if one is sick due to intellectual overbalance to go do some gymnastics, but to resort to medicine as the last course, as it will fuck you up more than it helps you. As much as science, psychology, medicine drew on these ancient philosophies it seems to have overlooked such obvious sense and instead we have the pharmaceutical industry.
For my history of philosophy class, Magic Medicine and Science, I was asked to read Plato's "Timaeus," the ideas of which are perhaps pivotal to the modern view of science and medicine, but what immediately struck me was how much it sounded like a load of hogwash. Full of Demiurges and half-formulated mathematical theorems, an attempt to explain the creation of the world in terms of the four elements which would be laughed down if published in the modern world, and yet still held such an impact on all trains of rational thinking that followed. I felt that with his preponderance on just how the Demiurge created the world, the soul, and all the creatures, the "Timaeus" read almost more like a creation myth I would discuss in my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, although with the supernatural beings replaced by the peculiar triangles of the Platonic solids. And yet I could still see how it was the root of logic, that it attempted to offer an explanation of the processes of the natural world without recourse to a pantheon of gods. It is kind of difficult to wrap my brain around the fact that Plato existed simultaneously with the myths of Zeus and his pantheon, despite the hoakiness of his theories it seems like two entirely different views of reality.
Of course, amidst all the elements cutting each other to create color and getting mixed about in the 'Receptacle' of reality, there is still some very practical wisdom that seems almost forgotten in this modern age. Particularly, Plato suggests that psychological disorders are a result of an imbalance of attention and of bad education, and recommends that if one is sick due to intellectual overbalance to go do some gymnastics, but to resort to medicine as the last course, as it will fuck you up more than it helps you. As much as science, psychology, medicine drew on these ancient philosophies it seems to have overlooked such obvious sense and instead we have the pharmaceutical industry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
