Misanthropy Page 23
Even as the women’s movement was taking its first faltering steps in America, a great American woman poet was turning away from the human race. From the 1860s onwards, Emily Dickinson decides to speak to her visitors only from behind a door. She refuses to have direct contact with human beings any longer. There is certainly a strain of misanthropic sensibility in Dickinson:
One anguish – in a Crowd –
A minor thing – it sounds –
And yet, unto the single Doe
Attempted – of the Hounds
‘Tis terror as consummate
As Legions of Alarm.59
Hence the importance in her poems of entirely solitary places, settings and situations. ‘I took’, she writes, ‘my Power in my hand –/And went against the World’ (EDP, Poem 660, 2.643). For her principal concern is with her own spiritual life. The masquerade of dying is thus a function of the struggle towards the ‘lonelier thing’ that finally escapes ‘the mind of man’ (EDP, Poem 570, 2.567, Poem 1343, 3.1162).
But the enterprise is clearly laden with risk. ‘Much madness’ may conceivably be ‘divinest sense’, but it is a sense to which the world is not only obtuse but fiercely hostile:
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a chain –
(EDP, Poem 620, 2.613)
This inclines Dickinson, as it were, to conjure with death. ‘Dying like a woman’, performing one’s death, has a logic, and that logic is misanthropic. Dickinson tells us: ‘Living hurts’, but ‘Dying – is a different way –/A kind behind the Door –’ (EDP, Poem 528, 2.536). The poems experiment with that logic in a manner that life itself does not permit. The famous ‘Because I could not stop for Death –’ (EDP, Poem 479, 1.492-93), for example, enacts death as a stately progress beyond all things human in which mortality is paradoxically welcomed as a release from one’s surrounds. In more senses than one, it is about ‘fail[ing] from Man’ (EDP, Poem 568, 2.565).
But the woman writer who looms largest in this context and most completely thinks of ‘dying like a woman’ as both a performance and the logical consequence of sensibility is surely Sylvia Plath:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
(‘Lady Lazarus’)60
Again and again, Plath’s poems rehearse and play out death and the reasons for choosing it. These are various. Her experience had turned her, she said, into ‘a misanthrope … a nasty, catty and malicious misanthrope’.61 But misanthropic knowledge and the will to die have ‘no singular origin’. Jacqueline Rose suggests that the ‘component of psychic negativity’ in Plath is irreducible to a sole explanation, both inwardly and outwardly determined.62 Intimate relations are fraught with horror (‘Father, this thick air is murderous’, PCP, p. 93). Love offers only a ‘golden hell’ (PCP, p. 310). But the vital principle itself is not to be trusted, as mushrooms indicate:
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies.
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
(‘Mushrooms’, PCP, p. 139–40)
In a historical period far more anxious about the future overpopulation of the planet than the present one (not necessarily wrongly), this disquieting version of the life-force self-evidently takes on an extra dimension.
Plath’s Lady Lazarus chooses her art of dying partly because she needs ‘to annihilate’ the ‘trash’ of ‘each decade’ of her life (CP, p. 245). But right from the start, as her juvenilia demonstrate, the poet also dreamt of a more general annihilation:
Then hurl the bare world like a bluegreen ball
back into the holocaust
to burn away the humbug rust
and again together begin it all.
(‘Song For a Revolutionary Love’, PCP, p. 323)
‘Holocaust’ no doubt has more than one meaning here, but the allusion is clearly partly to the camps. In Plath’s later work, the Holocaust of 1939–45 becomes, not an exceptional historical ‘trauma’, but the very core of human history, a historical essence that we cannot circumvent, the ‘gorgon-grimace/Of human agony’, which is the very meaning of history (PCP, p. 83). The ‘thin people’ are ‘always with us’, she tells us. ‘We own no [misanthropic] wildernesses deep and rich enough/For stronghold against their stiff/Battalions’ (PCP, pp. 64–5). Plath was gripped by a compulsion to ‘know the worst’, immediately. It was the only way one could be adequate to history and its numberless lost souls.63 But the compulsion was always likely to end in misanthropy, and because, for Plath, the historical essence is inseparable and inextricable from private worlds, because, as Rose says, subjectivity, history and politics are fatefully intertwined, this misanthropy shuttles indifferently between the public and private domains. Thus mother, grandmother and great-grandmother ‘reach hag hands’ to ‘haul’ her down with them (PCP, p. 70), and father and husband come to embody the Nazi spirit. Plath cannot free her imagination from the fear of authoritarian violence in her personal life any more than in the public world:
I made a model of you
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said, I do, I do.
(‘Daddy’, PCP, p. 224)
In the personal as in the public world, ‘havoc’ threatens the ‘bankrupt estate’, and the poet is left groping for a ‘ceremony of words’ that might patch it (PCP, p. 21). That is the logic that produces ‘Lady Lazarus’ in particular, and Plath’s performances of ‘dying like a woman’, in general. But such equilibrium as Plath established for herself was at best precarious. On 11 February 1963, she chose to die like a woman for real, placing her head in the oven, with the gas turned on.
Why should one be inclined to take the misanthropy of the woman writers especially seriously? The answer is at its clearest in the case of Sarraute. Sarraute nursed her misanthropy at the very heart of emancipation. Indeed, emancipation enables it. She published her most significant fiction between 1948 and 1963. This is precisely the period, not only of the liberation of France (from the Germans), but also of the emancipation of Frenchwomen, at least insofar as, on 21 April 1944, Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government of the French Republic belatedly granted them the vote. Before the war, Sarraute had worked for the feminist cause, and she was pleased by its success. Yet her work has little or no connection with women’s issues, and she was fiercely hostile to women who wanted to separate off women’s writing from men’s and treat it as a particular case.64 Literature was about the ‘general view’, or it was nothing.
For in between her feminist activities and April 1944 loomed the war. Sarraute witnessed the speedy military defeat of France, the German occupation of the north, the presence of the Gestapo, the proto-fascist Vichy regime, its collaborations, betrayals and denunciations, its persecution of ‘aliens’ and its deportations of Jews (Jewish herself, Sarraute was sacked from her job and went into hiding), its surreptitious outbreaks of civil strife, its inanely vicious propaganda; then the vast confusion of the liberation by the allies; and finally the anarchic, uncontrolled, sometimes random, chronically unjust and even murderous violence of the Purge (of alleged collaborators), bizarrely punctuated by the pompous triumphalism of the new ruling elite. Given this, it is hardly surprising if her imagination, like those of quite a few of her French contemporaries, turned away from the emancipatory hope, which must have seemed singularly forlorn at the time, and towards a misanthropic vision that would supply its own logic of the human catastrophe.
Sarraute no doubt wished the continuing emancipation of women well. But by 1944 her mind was elsewhere, still deeply buried in recent history and its aftermath. Marx’s peculiar
, even quaint, nineteenth-century optimism led him to assert that revolution, Communism and the proletariat would supply human beings with the opportunity to escape what he called their prehistory. By contrast, by 1934, Walter Benjamin is commending Kafka precisely for his evocation of a prehistorical world from which there is apparently no escape. Sarraute reads Kafka in this way too, as describing a world ‘without exit, enlarged to the dimensions of an endless nightmare’ (ES, pp. 1573–4). Her own world, too, is prehistorical, in Marx’s and Benjamin’s sense. With her ‘deep incursions into forbidden, dangerous zones’, she became extremely aware of ‘the often monstrous, hardly believable iniquities’ of which human history is largely made up (ES, pp. 1562, 1591). She lived in an age of suspicion, she felt – not surprisingly, in Vichy and Gaullist France – and there is no one in her fiction who is not open to suspicion. Indeed, for Sarraute, suspicion of the other person would seem to be not only fundamental to us all, but at all points logical and necessary.
If Compton-Burnett, Rhys, Sitwell and Plath still have a serious reputation and the ideologues whom I cited at the beginning of this chapter, both suffragist and anti-suffragist, do not, this is not because they cede any ground on women’s equality with men, any more than Sarraute did. The point is axiomatic for them. None of them assume, however, that its political, legal and cultural embodiment actually has anything to do with progress. (In 1944, Sarraute must have seen this all too starkly). What is so arresting about the women’s misanthropy is that it has nothing of defensive conservatism about it. It both resists the very enlightenment the writers value and in which they would want to believe and, at the same time, is paradoxically integrated within it. They are prepared to think the unthinkable: that feminism can be right, and yet its triumphs make no difference, at least, beyond a disturbingly unimaginative and restrictive historical and political conception of the world, one deaf to the sheer magnitude of suffering beyond the finite scope of a specific political trajectory. They recognize – there is no other way of understanding them – a profoundly retrograde element at work in human life that is grimly refractory to any significant progress, any decisive resolution of human predicaments. From this retrograde element we have never had any conception of how to emancipate ourselves. We need not give up on the emancipatory projects for that reason, but it does have implications for their tone. The next chapter will make it very clear what I mean.
6
MISANTHROPY AND THE NEW WORLD
But Sarraute seems obviously to be another case of a misanthropy produced by particular historical circumstances, a misanthropy that can presumably therefore also be eclipsed by changes in them. This hardly seems an adequate basis for exempting the misanthropy of modern women from the historicist stricture. There is at least one recurrent problem, however, with granting historicism any absolute or final purchase, in that it tends to give too much credence to what Georg Jellinek called ‘the normative power of the factual’. By this he meant, not the power of fact as opposed to fiction, but the human drive ‘to assign normative authority to existing states of affairs’, states of affairs that are immediately present and to hand.1 People respond to the vagaries and vicissitudes of history by confining their imaginative orientation to the latest historical set-up, to which they grant a superior reality because it is the latest and their own. Historicists might seem not to do this. But there is actually a more or less conscious drive within historicism – certainly within contemporary historicism, perhaps above all in its language and style – to withdraw imaginative weight from what for the past were its essential truths, in assuming the privilege of a present whose concrete fullness, better wisdom, greater meaningfulness and more conspicuous virtue the historicist does not appear to doubt. It is only very rarely that historicism is doubtful or humble about the perspective its own historical position supplies. It rarely seems aware that its own historical authority is possibly negligible. Michel Foucault was an exceptional example to the contrary.
Art and philosophy, however, constantly raise doubts about ‘the normative power of the factual’ in both its present and, by implication, its future forms. The Greek Cynics, again, are an excellent example, particularly in Foucault’s description of them (in Le Courage de la verité).2 Foucault describes the Cynics as putting contemporary schools of thought into radical question. For the schools turned out to be incapable of structuring the life around them according to principles or moral precepts that might raise it to the level of the philosophical life. Though the Cynic has no answers to the questions at stake, he refuses to detach his thought from philosophical or properly moral principles, however scandalous and abrasive a figure it may make him. This functions in effect as a powerful Cynic (and misanthropic) riposte to the historicists. In historical terms, it means seeking to avoid engaging with history through a contemporary filter. The misanthropist finally poses his or her question of ‘the factual’ in all its forms. The modern women writers decline to award automatic prestige to any present that has no obvious intellectual and moral right to claim it, that cannot plausibly counter their negativity. Why not misanthropy, in effect, the misanthropist might ask, if the best conceptions of the good proposed to us have only the interests of a given present at their root (and not, we might add, the perhaps compelling interests of the future, or indeed the past)? Thus certain kinds of misanthropy actually start to whittle away at the historicist challenge. They share the historicist’s sceptical attitude to the grip of past truths, but don’t allow us to suppose that the truths of any present should automatically seem more persuasive.
If the strain of misanthropy in Sarraute, Sitwell, Compton-Burnett, Rhys and Plath seems close to Benjamin and Kafka’s insistence that we are not yet out of prehistory, it is in acting as a radical brake on historical buoyancy or self-congratulation. In fact, modern misanthropy has long been serving as a corrective to the facile modern optimisms that begin with Leibniz (and his conception of ours as ‘the best of all possible worlds’), Hutcheson, Shaftesbury and eighteenth-century Pelagianism.3 As we have seen, it often accompanies emancipation, emerges out of a profound alienation, not from the concept of emancipation itself, but from the readiness with which, in declaring new freedoms as promptly as it does, emancipation also repeatedly betrays itself, as though a particular instance of emancipation were anything like a sufficient gain. Here misanthropy becomes cautionary, chronically disbelieving, both a curb, and a gauntlet thrown down.
Just a month before Samuel Beckett’s death, the Berlin Wall was finally dismantled. By then, Beckett was an inmate of Le Tiers Temps, an old people’s home in Paris. Rather than identifying with the celebrants in their cork-popping moment, he appeared to be disturbed. Having watched some television footage from Berlin in his room, ‘he emerged very agitated’ and exclaimed to the directrice, Isabelle Jernand, ‘Ça va trop vite’.4 Beckett had seen the effects of other grand liberations before, in Ireland in 1922, and then, like Sarraute, in France in 1944. He knew what they amounted to, knew that, as usual, the latest one, too, would be followed by a hubbub of voices announcing the advent of a new world order. He had lived through the inception of several old new world orders before, and understood that new worlds were not immediately there for the taking. The rich and various strains of misanthropy in his work serve precisely to combat such delusions. So, too, the stark closure of the women writers’ worlds asserts that any truly significant transformation will not appear as another step forward down the same road, an advance on what is already there. If anything, it will rather puncture or cut dramatically across Plath’s ‘bankrupt estate’, a world hermetically sealed and, more or less unbeknownst to itself, surrendered to death.
There is thus a third category of misanthropy that might give us pause for thought: the misanthropy that grows in the shadow of boosterism. Most nations, societies and cultures are perhaps boosterist, certainly the ones that, in Pascal’s terms, have found their place in the sun. They do not just flaunt the tokens and spoils of their historical suc
cess. They talk themselves up, keep on telling themselves and others how good and indeed pre-eminent they are. They do this routinely, unthinkingly. They boast their own virtue, their modus vivendi, the superiority of their systems of knowledge and value and their own unique means of arriving at happiness and truth. The most vigorous boosterism naturally tends to emanate from power and wealth, for it is only to be expected that the wealthy and powerful should be boosterist about a world that has done handsomely by them, and to which all their immediate interests commit them. But the tone can also emerge in other domains, the academy, for example, and may be, and often is, deeply populist. One obvious contemporary example of it, part of the ‘normative power’ of our particular ‘factuality’, would be the language of advertising, a language usually inflated, that habitually banishes litotes, talking itself up as and through the seemingly infinite cornucopia it dangles before our eyes.
The misanthropy in this chapter radically disputes such a mindset. It might seem easily confused with the misanthropy in Chapter 4, and indeed the misanthropists here, too, may well partly identify with the interests of the historically defeated and disempowered. But they do not belong with them, and their principal concern is not historical injustice, nor are they always reacting against a progressivism. They call in question a culture of which they are a part, but that they present as in thrall to boosterism, which means opening up differences with a semiotics, a rhetoric, a language that tints Hobbes’s inanis gloria in the garish colours of an inanis euphoria and involves a failure of mind, seriousness (though also humour) and aesthetic taste. Here intellectual and moral persuasions become inseparable from one another, and from questions of style. To the misanthropists, in their fervent attachment to their goods, intellectually, morally and aesthetically, boosters have no conception of what might be for the best, and no interest in exploring it, which means that boosterism spells mediocrity. My examples of such misanthropy will come from one of the very greatest and most insidiously absorbing of all misanthropic traditions, the American one.