Walter Benjamin, Protestant Ascendancy and Yeats

Once the object has beneath the brooding look of Melancholy become allegorical, once life has flowed out of it, the object itself remains behind, dead, yet preserved for all eternity; it lies before the allegorist, given over to him utterly, for good or ill. In other words, the object itself is henceforth incapable of projecting any meaning on its own; it can only take on that meaning which the allegorist wishes to lend it. (Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama).

We should also note that what concerns Benjamin is not the particular allegorical symbols and their meaning but the meaning of allegory itself as a form. The governing question is: Of what is the emergence of allegory (as Benjamin understands it) symptomatic? 

“Allegory is the dominant mode of expression of a world in which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meaning, from spirit, from genuine human existence.”

The fact that Sign and meaning, matter and spirit, writing and voice, have all been separated from one another is something that happens not simply as a result of literary evolution. It is a crystallisation of what has already happened in the world itself.

In the 17th century”, writes Benjamin, “the word Trauespiel was applied in the same way both to dramas and historical events”. The Trauerspiel revealed a world in which social rituals were empty, objects “morbidly cold”. The hollowing out of language, the calcification of habitual practices into dead conventions, revealed the work of History.  When, in war or epochal changes, the thread of intelligibility seems lost from events, when once habitual practices are calcified into hollow conventions, or when traditions enter the stages of their terminal decline: it is in such conditions that the “allegoric” is the implicit texture of the world itself, brought to consciousness by literary form.

How might this relate to the example of Yeats? It is first of all obvious that 19^th century Ireland undergoes a series of crises, catastrophes and upheavals. It’s not possible to outline these in the current post. But briefly, we are talking about the Famine, the rise of Irish nationalism and the decline of the Anglo-Irish ruling bloc, the so-called (and self-titled) Protestant Ascendancy. Yeats is of the Ascendancy, he belongs to it by lineage and upbringing, but grows up against the background of events which signalled the end of its domination and the disintegration of its mandate to rule.

A key event in this decline was the 1801 Act of Union, which abolished the Ascendancy-run parliament in Dublin, and transferred power to Westminster. In 1869, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Ireland. The Ascendancy’s legal and symbolic supports were being dismantled. Its legitimacy and “right to govern” progressively removed. Writes one historian: “The Anglo-Irish ruling class were, from the famine onwards, living on borrowed time.”

Elizabeth Bowen, a scion of the Ascendancy, and surely an emeritus at the Academy of the Underrated, provides us with one of the most exact and detailed descriptions of what a class in decline looks like, and how its decline translates into experience, imagination and language. On disestablishment, Bowen writes:

It made Protestants, dislodged from their state-religious position, decidedly more extreme, more evangelical, and it undermined their political dominance.

The word ‘dislodgement’ is one that returns in Bowen. The Ascendancy stay in one place, but are nonetheless dispossessed. And this is because what’s been removed is the mandate, the Symbolic power which was the invisible support of this way of life. Bowen again, on “social rituals”:

Society – which can only exist when people are sure of themselves and immune from fears – was no longer, in the Anglo-Ireland I speak of, in what I called the magnetic and growing stage, it was on the decline, it was breaking up. It could exist in detail – comings and goings, entertainments, marriages - but the main healthy abstract was gone” 

The social rituals are still performed, but they are no longer underwritten by legitimacy and power. It is these which have been subtracted, even if the theatre of appearances continues. And what is true of social rituals is also true of property and architecture:

Dublin exhales melancholy, the past and the sense of an obliterated purpose that no new world activity can exactly renew: an anti-climactic, possibly endless pause hangs over her large squares, long light streets and darkening Georgian facades.

Dublin had signified a Protestant national capital, signified Ascendancy hegemony: but such meanings have been erased. Denuded of its prior significance, Dublin becomes, for some, but an after-image of its former status, a “shell of grandeur”:

As the nineteenth century wore on, ascendancy marginalisation was reflected in their relation to architecture as well as to landowning. Dublin was reduced to echoing, cavernous, half-abandoned public buildings and streetscapes .

The landscape which the historian (Roy Foster) paints is a melancholy one, a picture which can be briefly explained. Foster refers to an architecture which, as it were, “intends” the Protestant Ascendancy, its grandeur reflecting and born by theirs. Yeats’s native city could “boast some of the finest Georgian architecture in the British Isles”. And what unifies this architecture is not only bricks and mortar, but the social position of the resident class. To the Ascendancy, the Georgian grandeur of Dublin is its architectural correlative:  its “sense of prestige” or “historical purpose” deposit themselves in such buildings, which are the petrification of social and historical status into matter, into casings, doors and balustrades. But when the Ascendancy way of life declines, its symbolic practices and enshrinements eroded or removed by Westminster edict, these physical structures are surrendered to posterity as a shell to be turned inside out and re-occupied with very different meanings and social functions:

About thirty percent (87, 000) of the people in Dublin lived in the slums which were for the most part the worn-out shells of Georgian mansions

If, in allegory, the significance invested in archaic objects effaces what meaning they originally possessed, and inserts them in a context defined by the present, this process might itself stand as a description of what happens to Ascendancy building: they become emptied of their former meanings. Given over to new uses- though still radioactive with a lost significance - the facades which address North Dublin’s streets are inhabited now with a different daily life: “Georgian Dublin had become tenanted by solicitors’ and government offices”. The bohemian remnant and déclassé products of that history, walk through the fallen streets of a “sordid, poverty-ridden, monotonous... existence in a city whose former greatness seemed in eclipse”.

It’s in this context we can read Yeats’s early short story Rosa Alchemica. The story is set in a Dublin Georgian Protestant house:

A house my ancestors had made almost famous through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships with the famous men of their generations.

These ancestral portraits had adorned the walls, the familial tradition which is also a class portrait. But the narrator has removed these portraits and replaced them with a “tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks” and a range of his own eclectic materials.  It’s as if into the space vacated by family – and class- tradition the narrator has introduced all kinds of semi-private symbols, a range of objects removed from their original context and arranged for aesthetic contemplation:

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace.

This fictional vignette is also a snapshot of history. The narrator no longer invested in or attached to the Symbolic Order of his class, had instead plugged himself into a range of other traditions which express not a collective identity but a kind of “grotto of subjectivity”, a refuge from the flood of history.

I’d like in the next post to talk more about the Ascendancy and Yeats’s particular relation to it.

On Common Sense and Coronavirus

Once when I was a teacher (at an American university), staff were sent an email asking that we “make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.” Apparently, some students had complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class. I wrote at the time:

The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded… A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.

It is difficult, in the English-speaking world, to extract this phrase, “common sense”, from the ideological and political uses to which it is put. Recent examples aside, it’s typically contrasted with intellectual abstraction and employed as a tool of anti-intellectualism. “British common sense,” invariably “robust”, is used in opposition to anything sounding vaguely intellectual or in opposition to bureaucratic measures, especially if originating in “Brussels” of course. Yet there is no reason to think that “common sense” is more prevalent in Britain than elsewhere. There may even be reason to think that it’s less, given that "health and safety" regulations increasingly encroach on areas that, in other countries, are left to judgement and trust.

Not long before the lockdown my family went on a trip to Italy. We stayed in the walled town of Lucca, between Pisa and Florence. The walls are around twelve meters high and extend round the whole town. Many people walk or run on the path that runs along the top of the wall. We were walking along this path when we came to a playground. We took our two boys, 4 and 17 months to play and run about. The playground is itself only a few metres from the edge of the wall and the sheer twelve metre drop. There were a few signs here and there, but no fence or barrier. We remember saying that this would surely be unthinkable in England from a “health and safety” point of view. Where we might expect to find such regulations, there was instead trust, or, if you like, a reliance on “common sense”.

I wonder to what extent this “common sense” depends on or relates to a sense of the common – of shared space, a shared situation, a shared conversation. The idea that we are all involved in a common project. Not a “goal orientated” project, but the project known as life. We are all, equally, participants, commentators, different of course but sharing a common situation, a common set of circumstances or problems.

Again in Italy. We were in a café and our four-year-old was kneeling on a plastic chair with his hands gripping the back. It tipped forward and he fell to the floor. It was like a stone falling in a pond, creating ripples of conversation and exclamations on the adjacent tables. He got up and laughed and the laughter was immediately echoed. It was a laugh, part of the generality of human laughter, a common currency. His fall from the chair was, in other words, immediately a public event. It did not occur in the bubble of “our business” and then awkwardly spill out into the circumference of other people’s bubbles. The bubbles were never there. There was never a question that it was part of the shared conversation, the common project.

I’ve experienced and read lots of instances here in England of people not really taking the lockdown rules seriously, including people being verbally abused for wearing face masks. There’s a certain “it’s all nonsense” hostility you encounter here in certain quarters, or a brusque indifference. And in response to something on twitter, I wondered to what extent this indifference or hostility, as manifest in behaviour, was present in European countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and so on. The replies (yes, anecdotal) seemed to bear out the idea that there is, in these other countries, a stronger sense of “we’re all in this together”, in a way that involves an element of sacrifice and solidarity, and a part suspension of everyday life. I don’t think it’s a question of political conformity. No one can reasonably accuse the Greeks or Spanish of being politically subservient. But I wonder if it’s easier to implement and observe the rules, the universal imperatives, where there’s already a sense of the “common project”, of the collective, a “sense of the common”.

The measures taken to limit and contain the virus are viewed by some as a pretext for political repression. No doubt they will be used as such by a Tory government. But they are international measures accepted with arguably some reluctance by the current government. These measures, implemented with varying degrees of alacrity across the world, are also an invitation to participate in a collective activity to save lives. The virus itself of course came from outside national politics. That it came from the outside made it the best measure of politics. We saw how different political systems metabolised it, used it, assessed it against their political and ethical priorities.  Some of these political systems paused to ask themselves whether saving lives would be good for the economy. But in Greece or Spain and elsewhere there was a recognition that - in this instance - to respect the rules is to respect life, a universal imperative without exemptions. Legally the measures are, finally, unenforceable and have to rely on a sense of public duty, of people not exempting themselves or treating it as a spectacle happening to others. 

Johnson's empty rhetorical reference to "British common sense" was a last-ditch appeal to an exceptionalism already refuted by events. IT also showed an ongoing concern with "managing perceptions" and political presentation which should have collapsed like stacked cards when the virus arrived .

Walter Benjamin: Allegory, Modernism and Yeats

Allegory, in Benjamin, is applied to the field of seventeenth century German Baroque Drama, or Trauerspiel, wherein allegorical figures are literally centre stage. By the seventeenth century, both pagan and Christian symbolism has been endlessly reinterpreted by subsequent forms of life. Thus:

the plurality of pagan and Christian cosmologies that had been amassed in history and preserved in those authoritative texts

Baroque drama comes at a time when the detritus of various traditions, stockpiled, at what was thought to be the End of History, were re-invested with meaning by the allegorist’s fancy. The allegorist exercised sovereign power in the realm of dead objects and remaindered symbolic materials. Half claiming to uncover secret or hidden meanings, half aware that the meanings had been conferred by his or own executive decision.

The reason why Benjamin’s text, dealing with (to most readers in the English-speaking world) arcane and unknown plays and documents, has exercised such fascination for some is, I think, twofold. Firstly, Benjamin’s book is itself a prime example of Modernist writing, perhaps deliberately obscure, circuitous, bristling with difficulty and offering itself as an object – recalcitrant and cross-grained – of interpretation. We might place it in the same category as Joyce’s Ulysses or Heidegger’s Being and time. Written in a highly idiosyncratic style which seems also the signature and indirect portrait of an individual, inviting and spawning imitation from the academic world that belatedly recognised it. On the other hand it is clear that in focusing so intently on obscure 17

For Modernism, or a strain of it, is precisely this practice of amassing the fragments of past traditions, regarded now as a kind of “stockpile” unplugged from their specific context, benefiting from their aura or ghost-lights of significance, but at the same time playfully constructing some new thing from these ruins and remnants, and delighting in the authorial power to create that new meaning.

There are doubtless obvious and varied examples of this, from Eliot to Pound and Joyce. But I’d like to pause at a very particular example from Yeats, where this duality can be seen very clearly.

The central symbol in Yeats’s early poetry is the Rose. Yeats choses what is perhaps the most over-written symbol in Western tradition. It’s worth noting first of all that the Rose is a textbook illustration of Benjamin’s point about Pagan symbols appropriated by Christianity. The Rose had “had long been the flower of Venus and so of sexual license.”

“Identified with woman from earliest times and the classical attribute of the goddess of earthly love, the pagan queen of flowers reappears quite naturally as the chief symbol of the Christian queen of heaven.”

 

We find it also in Dante:

At the end of his

In the 17

Sufficiently vague, the Rosicrucian flower had certain advantages over its Catholic counterpart.

What the Rosicrucians (and later Yeats) do with the Rose, is to divorce the

Yeats will later add his own Irish gloss to the symbol:

Rose – The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets, and has given a name to several poems both Gaelic and English, and is used in love poems, in addresses to Ireland like Mr Aubrey de Vere’s poem telling how “the little black rose shall be red at last,” and in religious poems, like the old Gaelic one which speaks of “the Rose of Friday,” meaning the Rose of Austerity.

These successive re-drawings significance, over many years, point simultaneously to two different interpretations: 
1.  
2.  

These two understandings of the Rose, as an essence eluding its symbolisation and as a pliable sign open to manipulation correspond to two subjective positions:

1.      The subject is a passive supplicant, supine before a Thing which is utterly opaque and overwhelming, its ‘deep’ magnetism, recurrently eluding his grasp.
2.      The subject actively invests with meaning what is an “inert” and conventional item of poetic machinery, emptied of intrinsic meaning.

The early Yeats tends towards the former two positions (1 and 1). But even in the early Yeats there is a hesitation between, as it were, invoking (ie whatever the Rose represents) and But the ambivalence we find in the early Yeats, but also in much Modernism, has to do with authority. Is authority being lent by Tradition, albeit a secret one, or is it being created by the peremptory force of poetic magic. 

In German Baroque Drama, in Modernism, and in Yeats, this ambivalence is embedded already in history - the subject of the next post. 

Walter Benjamin: Marxism, Allegory and Modernism

In an earlier post, I quoted Theodor Adorno’s dictum that lyric poetry can be read as a “sundial telling the time of history."

The challenge for Marxist and other historicist methods of literary criticism has always been to think through the relation between history on the one hand and literary

When Walter Benjamin was on his way to Marxism (and it’s debatable whether he ever arrived) he wrote a dense and esoteric study of German Baroque Drama, the Trauerspiel. The central motif of the study is a brilliantly eccentric definition of Allegory, as the revelation of history and the historical sense within a specific literary form. 

Allegory for Benjamin presupposes that a sign has broken away from its meaning, that there has been a leakage of significance. The initial meaning has leaked away and therefore the sign or symbol is assigned a different meaning by the allegorist. The example that Benjamin gives is Pagan symbols taken over and recoded by Christian allegorists:

The pantheon of ancient gods, “disconnected from the life-contexts out of which they sprang”, became “dead figures”, standing arbitrarily for the philosophical ideas they has once embodied as living symbols.

Venus/ Aphrodite, for example, once the natural symbol that raised human Eros to the level of divine love, lived on as “Dame World”, the profane allegorical emblem of earthly passion.

Thus, allegorical materials are signs and symbols that have fallen outside their place within a definite Symbolic support system (here, the old pagan world). No longer plugged into their living context, these ruined signs can now be overwritten by a different Symbolic Order (Christianity).

But if Christian allegory is an attempt to recode and ‘contain’ the old gods, their dangerous potency is never entirely extinguished. The exorcism of allegorical re-writing is never complete. Something has escaped, and the allegorist senses this. The

Thus, Allegory recognises a ‘jagged line of demarcation between sign (eg the Pagan objects) and meaning (their true original significance within a particular life-word)’.  What underwrites allegorical signs is the assumption that Meaning – whether that of God or some Other – has withdrawn, leaving only a rubble of cyphers and enigmatic objects. And this leads on the one hand to a sense of melancholy, a preoccupation with the lost inaccessible object, with the labour of interpretation, endlessly deferred, required to bring it into daylight. It involves, it brings with it, an awareness of lost forms of life, the limitations of our own temporal horizon, the time lag between sign and meaning. As a form, allegory is marked by the presence of

Wittgenstein:

There is however, a counterpoint to all this. To recap: the Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Christianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and antique dignity - with a sovereign interpretative and destructive power. Although the allegorist frequently purports to be discovering some deeper or real meaning, what he or she ends up drawing attention to is the ability of the allegorist to

Thus: on the one hand, an attitude of pensive immersion, a serial movement of sign to sign in search of lost or buried significance; on the other, a heightened awareness of the power to invest and assign meaning, often with wilful caprice.

It is this combination which seems to me the defining feature of a certain strain of modernism, in both literature and philosophy [to be continued]. 

Yeats and the Voice

“The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself.” (Hegel)

There is of course a long-standing tradition identifying the voice with the soul, the soul as present in the voice, and the voice – neither quite matter or spirit - as the immediate manifestation of the soul. There is a related - inextricable perhaps - tradition, amply documented, of seeing writing as something secondary and external.

Now it said about Yeats that “From the beginning, he wrote verses meant to be spoken and heard, not written and read.” His written verse aspired to the condition of the voice.

But however true this may be, it is also true, firstly, that Yeats displays a fascination with writing and the materiality of the book, with book design, fonts, iconography. The early books he produces are like grimoires, the poems supported by arcane footnotes deferring sense and demanding the labour of exegesis. 

Secondly the voice in Yeats is not only something to which his poetry aspires. It is a theme and a problematic object within the poems themselves. The presence of voices is one of the defining and salient features of the early Yeats: the disembodied voice, the voice out of nowhere. This voice without body, without obvious speaker, is sometimes called the acousmatic voice. It is typically an uncanny voice, nagging at the conscious mind with intimations of the repressed, forgotten or disavowed. Alternatively, it is a voice that intervenes from outside the frame, as it were, that commands or enacts.

There are both types of voice in the early Yeats. And they may well be related. On the one hand the voice of melancholy: sighs and murmurs floating on the wind or exhaled from the earth, barely audible and bearing the freight of lost significance. One the other, a voice of annunciation – declaring, intervening in some decisive way, prophesising. Occasionally, the one flips over into the other:

I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round,
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West,
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.

“Wind” is of course a bearer of or prelude to the voice. The title of Yeats’s early volume, The Wind Among the Reeds hints at the relation, never straightforward, often uneasy, between the voice – and-or spirit - and the instrument of writing, the graphic mark.

Wind works like a voice but without speech, like “pure” voice, a voice cleared of content, it seems to announce something without speaking: “A violent gust of wind made the roof shake and burst the door open”. If it’s a prelude to speech, it can also be a ghost of speech; not the annunciatory note, but the traces of a spirit expired, the almost inaudible words that blow from the sod over the grave in one of Yeats’s short stories.

To some extent, Yeats vacillates between the melancholy ghost voice, the moan, the inaudible cry, and the stentorian voice of annunciation. But increasingly, the voice of annunciation, typically italicised rather than quoted, becomes the primary object of fascination.

This voice, a voice heralded by and nearly-synonymous with the wind, represents the voice that Yeats ends up appropriating for himself. The role performed by the wind in the early poems, a voice that comes from nowhere, suddenly and decisively, to warn or declare, is exactly, so to speak, Yeats’ own voice in the middle and late poems. In the early poems it is a voice, typically signified by italics, which “intervenes” toward the end of the poem and retroactively changes or defines the meaning of what has preceded it. But what Yeats first embodies and-or experiences as a voice outside him becomes the position of enunciation that he takes up himself. The middle and late poems are full of acts of annunciation, naming, declaring (“I declare this tower is my symbol”). The voice as object becomes the voice of the subject, but always with the sense that it might once again become an external thing,  and therefore has to be commanded by an act of will (“words obey my call”). 

The Dead and Philosophy

The philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness. (Deleuze)For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. (Deleuze)

Deleuze’s image is an idiosyncratic one. It is difficult to imagine J.L. Austin, for example sharing this idea of the philosopher as a figure in transit between two deaths, and for whom death is a condition of his or her possibility. And it is not only death but the dead, as in classical mythology, perhaps, the great numberless collectivity of the Dead.

Thought, for Deleuze, is brought in to being by an encounter with its outside, the presence of something which is not-thought, which is recalcitrant to thought. Something initially unthinkable. Death is perhaps the most immediate form of that Outside that gives rise to thought. An Outside that is also intimate, the death that is present in all of us. It is present in the finitude that organises our experience in the form of hope, expectation, boredom, impatience. All forms of temporal experience are death’s clues and pointers in so far as they are structured by this implicit finitude.

The Dead, conceived as a collectivity are a way of giving body to that Outside. They live on the Outside. Beyond or at the rim and barrier of our experience. If death is present in our finitude, then so too are the Dead present.

There is something covertly utopian about this idea of the Dead, the vast congregation, assembled on the opposite shore. The great collective. For we are not talking about the war dead of a particular nation, invoked for nationalist purposes. The “Fenian dead” invoked by Padraig Pearse to rouse his militia, and countless other examples. If we put aside these uses of the dead, then the Dead have no nationality. They have their own country apart, and the only other country, which they do not oppose, which they do not envy or resent or set themselves against in any way, is the country of the living.

When you pass over to the country of the Dead, you also leave behind your symbolic vestments and investments. In some perverse sense, you enter the human community. This is one point of intersection between philosophers and the Dead. If the Dead no longer have anything at stake in the social order – pragmatic interests, concerns about status, symbolic and actual capital, then this should also be the position of the philosopher. For the philosopher is or should be someone who has removed himself, albeit not entirely, from the symbolic community of which he or she had been part. Its laws, habitual practices, its customs masked as nature. Deleuze again [on Spinoza]: 

[The] full meaning of the philosopher’s solitude becomes apparent. He cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them.The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveller, or boarding house lodger.

He or she is a kind of supernumerary figure. 

What is called life is always, of course, implicated in a cultural and social order. Life cannot, or except at a great price, flourish or express itself outside the codes and conditions of this cultural and social order. Nonetheless, life is never synonymous with those codes and conditions. There is always a surplus, a surplus vitality. Perhaps, then, it is this surplus which passes over into the country of the Dead, when the symbolic integuments are shed. Perhaps it is this surplus to which the philosopher - the Deleuzian philosopher - is also attuned.

Storytelling: Berger, Sontag and Beckett.

This is the kind of thing you used to see on television. A dialogue, a genuine dialogue between Susan Sontag and John Berger on storytelling, on the nature of fiction and much else. That such a program is today inconceivable is itself a whole essay, an essay of lamentation or attack, or both at once. But I wanted to think about an exchange that happens around 18 minutes in. Berger proposes that every story “has its own subjectivity”, a subjectivity which is not that of the writer (or storyteller) or the protagonist or the reader, but an “amalgam” of the three. This, perhaps, is the “event” of fiction, the emergence from the three substances of a semi-miraculous fourth substance, a tremulous subjectivity which moves through and over the text, a creature of our reading, a thing that vanishes when the “collaboration” (Berger’s phrase) ends.

The transience of this subjectivity and its fragility might tempt us to compare it to a ghost, or something ghost like. But a ghost is typically a trace of something that has been. The subjectivity that Berger speaks of, if we agree with him (Sontag doesn’t), is born and lives with the text, or the act of storytelling.

We disappear into it, yet we are part of the amalgam.

I wonder who has written about this subjectivity - impersonal, or transpersonal, unattached to a body, a flare over the marshes - and what significance it has in terms of subjectivity more generally?

__

Berger’s idea that there is a kind of subjectivity – more than a Voice but less than a person – born with the text, with the story, existing only on that particular “surface”, makes me think of Samuel Beckett. 

In Beckett, we have speakers who are, as it were, aware of this. Beings which exist only on stage or only on the page, out of nowhere, and find themselves existing on stage, on the page, surprised sometimes, to be thrown there with meagre resources. It is a "subjectivity" that knows what it is made of. 

The Desire not to be English

Alan Bennet:

“22 August. There are different ways of being English, one of which is not to want to be English at all. I doubt if anyone French is ever ashamed of being French – however deplorable the government might be. Disaffected though he or she may be, to be French is still the best thing in the world.”

It is curious, this peculiarly English desire not to be English, to escape not just England but being English. Admittedly, it is only a small minority, usually artists and writers. But I wonder what it consists of. Martin Amis is an example. He’d rather not be English, he famously said, and cited the continuing existence of the royal family and the public’s obsession with celebrity. Bennett himself once confessed he was ashamed to be English at the time of the Iraq war. There is a kind of shame on behalf of the Others, the Others who support the war, defer to Royalty and the ruling class, read the tabloids, consistently elect a Conservative government etc. One is exempt from these things but experiences shame nonetheless.

If one genuinely is exempt from these things, which are traits of the Others, then we might ask a naïve question. If one is generally happy with one’s tastes, habits, relationships, desires, then what does it matter whether one is English or not? Is it not an external classification? What makes this classification so adhesive? Is it perhaps based only on a misunderstanding of that tricky word "being"? If Amis is a republican, and a man of letters; if Bennett is vocally opposed to the war, if I am a socialist, then why am I implicated in or by what the Others do?

It is in part a discomfort with the way one is perceived by the non-English, the disfiguring gaze of non-English others, who see you inevitably through the filter of the general category. It is in some sense also you they are talking about when they laugh at English emotional repression, monoglot insularity, political conformism, comically misplaced exceptionalism. In feeling shame, one has already identified with the gaze of these Others, and become a kind of ambassador apologising on the English’s behalf.

This apologetic shame may itself be “very English,” as perhaps is (as Bennett intimates) this desire not to be English itself, the stubborn and problematic self-dislike, the futile grumbling against the unchangeable fact of birth and upbringing, as if it were a fatal malady, an inescapable curse.

John Berger, over the years, cited a number of reasons for leaving England and moving to a village in the French Alps, but one of them was that the English found him “a bit too intense”. I wonder if, in the imaginations of the writers and artists who have left,  "English” is in part a codeword for this intensive deficit. And the desire to be not English is in effect a desire to experience the world in a qualitatively different way, a way incompatible with staying in England.

There is the suspicion that to be English is not to be replete with a national character, with a living culture that one can then reject, but a recognition that these things are absent:

“The English, of any people in the universe,” wrote Hume “have the least of a national character, unless this very singularity may pass for such.” If pressed, and asked in what their national character resides, they will reply in clichés, such as “fish and chips” or “the Queen” or “a sense of fair play”, tourist gimmicks, shells of received wisdom, the signs and shows of a national character which does not exist.

If this is right, or nearly, then perhaps the desire to be not English is not simply symmetrical with a desire not to be French, to use Bennett’s example. Not the recognition of a set of positive values, a sufficiency of culture, but the heady sense of an absence, an insufficiency, and an imperative to reinvent oneself.