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The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a useful guide to current publications. It may not always be as easy to read as it could be, but the general level of thought and writing is pretty high. On the other hand its lapses fall pretty low. Here are three of them.
Maurice Bowra
On the front cover of the issue for September 16 2005 is a drawing by Osbert Lancaster of the classical scholar and Oxford wit Maurice Bowra. On the back of the same issue, in color, is a specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Sir Maurice is certainly extinct, and according to reliable observers has not been seen since at least 1971. The ivory-billed woodpecker of America was thought to be extinct, but dedicated ornithologists are now convinced it is not, and that it survives somewhere in the vicinity of New Orleans (or did perhaps until recently).
Both are properly described as rare birds. But if you were given a choice, which rara avis would you actually want to survive—the Oxford wit on the front or the woodpecker on the back?
In the opinion of the editors of the TLS, a piece of humorous verse by Bowra deserves to be rescued from the recondite archives of professorial pedophilia, featured, annotated, and explained (“Cosy Corner was a working-class bar on Zossenerstrasse, where boy prostitutes plied for trade; a favourite haunt of Christopher Isherwood and his friends”) and then given all the space and honor a famous literary review can bestow.
Its second verse is as follows:
I will arise and go now and go to have a pee,
Way down in Innisfree.
That’s where I wish to be
With a corporal on my knee.
Oh is it town or gown or tousled hair,
A tousled boy-scout’s hair
Inside the WC?
The ivory-billed woodpecker is said to have a distinctive call, but recordings are few and unclear, and only experts could say for sure whether its woodnotes wild were better or worse than the above. Of one thing we may be sure, however: unlike those of Sir Maurice, no matter how exalted the woodpecker’s warblings prove to be, they are unlikely to be announced on the front cover of the TLS.
Jacques Derrida
A reader writes:
In the issue for 2nd December 2005 there’s a review of the last published work of Jacques Derrida. Some months before his death he gave a series of interviews to Le Monde, now published in book form as Apprendre à vivre enfin. Derrida, who died in October 2004, and is regarded by some academics and not a few journalists as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, was one of a band of charlatans and intellectual frauds that included Michel Foucault and Paul de Man.
These inventors of “logocentrism” and “phallogocentrism” have wrought untold damage among the semi-literate populations of many western humanities and social science departments—Derrida himself being the last and probably the most influential of these maîtres à penser.
Reviewer Ramona Fotiade was given a full two-page spread in the middle of the TLS to quote copiously and uncritically from his final lucubrations. Her own thick and witless prose is every bit as insufferable as her master’s. What could most TLS readers think?
Obscure, verbose, and pretentious, Derrida at this late stage (he was dying of pancreatic cancer) was now preoccupied with the meaning of life and death. But he still regarded any such quest as impossible, just as throughout his life he thought the search for the meaning of anything to be impossible, logic to be a malign Western tool, and “writing” something that took precedence over oral language.
Here is Fotiade:
If ‘waging war’ against oneself is to be taken as a constitutive ‘gesture’ of the deconstructive method, can life be thought of not only outside its binary opposition to death, but also other than in its conceptual interrelationship with ‘spectrality’ and ‘survival’?
One is tempted to ask what understanding of life has been allowed to resurface after the deconstruction of the old conceptual accounts of the subject, as well as of non-systematic notions of the living subject?
One is also tempted to say, even as flames threaten Paris, that French intellectuals and their cars deserve whatever they get.
* * *
There are a number of things to be said about Derrida and his dreadful compagnons de route: Paul de Man, the Belgian-American who concealed his youthful Nazi past from his Leftish US admirers; Michel Foucault, the frequenter of San Francisco bath-houses who died of AIDS after keeping his disease a secret to the end; and Derrida’s early protector Louis Althusser, the “Marxist philosopher” who admitted never reading Marx and who ended up in jail for strangling his wife.
How did men like this rise to intellectual hegemony in a country like France? More pertinently, how was this hegemony transplanted so successfully to the campuses of the USA? That France, la grande nation, should exhibit decadence is unsurprising. That there should be signs of the same thing in America is disturbing. So is the fact, pointed out by Raymond Tallis and other opponents of deconstructionism, that seeing “writing” as a condition of speech is now almost a commonplace in some circles.
Deconstructionism in France followed the collapse of Sartre’s existentialism. Both aberrations were essentially attempts by a mentally exhausted élite to escape from the intellectual fixations of the Parti Communist Français, the strongest of its ilk outside the Soviet world. But where are the American parallels? Why should American academics continue to be seduced by the anti-Americanism and patent absurdities of French charlatans?
Looking at the problem historically we can see that the peculiar nastiness of French intellectuals, driven by ressentiment, goes beyond the defeat of France in 1940 and the collaboration of most of the population with Vichy. It can probably be traced back to the 18th century, since when the French have known little in the way of long-term military success, and have witnessed a sharp decline in the intellectual hegemony they once enjoyed. This ressentiment was the real driving force behind the French intelligentsia taking to communism like ducks to water.
Raymond Tallis
The way we come into the world is both strange and messy (inter urinas et faeces nascimur). Those of an agricultural disposition feel this fully justifies a comic view of humanity, while as for the fact that Eros inhabits the same disaster zone—a notorious moral slide area—this proves that God likes a joke.
It may be conceded however that there is a place for more serious treatments of the matter, and one of these can be found toward the end of Raymond Tallis’s new book The Knowing Animal.
Although hard to characterise in a single sentence, we might begin by describing this original and thoughtful work as an extended philosophical meditation on the Garden of Eden and its consequences. From a secular, and not a theological standpoint, it makes a sustained attack on every 20th century reduction of our distinctive human nature, and of our seemingly unique human consciousness, to the worlds of mechanism, neuroscience, and pure animality—in brief, it challenges every reduction of “the knowing animal” to “the naked ape.”
It may be that Tallis goes too far excluding animals from the domain of human experience. That would seem to this ordinary reader a possibility—partly because of the sorts of things raised by the primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky in the January/ February issue of Foreign Affairs (where there’s a lot of interesting material about baboons), and partly on the basis of my own observations of our tabby. Be that as it may, human exceptionalism, emphasising the gulf between humans and animals, is what Tallis’s book is about.
* * *
In the TLS for October 14 2005 The Knowing Animal was reviewed by Stephen R. L. Clark, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and author of The Nature of the Beast among other books. Clark begins well, and the expository part of his review is unexceptionable:
Tallis’s object is to insist that human beings are radically different from other animals. They alone—though he does occasionally allow that some other primates may have some slight claim—are self aware. And they alone can recognise the existence of a world separate from their own experience. They alone can recognize distinct objects, consider what they have lost or yet may gain, initiate new ways of doing things, or entertain the possibility that they are mistaken.
All other animals are embedded in their immediate experience, and respond stereotypically to stimuli. They have no beliefs, because they cannot consider that they have made an error, nor follow up the implications of what we might imagine they ‘believe’. They have no desires, because they can have no conception of what they might be missing.
Human beings alone are rational animals, doomed to be torn between their individual ‘indexical’ experience (in which ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’ are dominant) and their recognition that they exist as material objects in a ‘deindexical’ world (where no place, no time, no person is privileged); torn also between the immediacy of sense-experience and the etiolated, abstract universe of merely quantifiable stuff…
So far, so good. Any reader of Tallis will recognise the book in his hands from the portrait drawn by the TLS reviewer. But then Clark gets to the sexy bit and flips. Did his glasses mist over? Did the type become blurry on the page? Anyway, in a matter of only a few lines he changes from being a reliable guide to a mischievous traducer. Tallis, he says astonishingly, “supposes that sex is only really ‘good’ when it is degrading to women…”
Now where did Tallis say that?
Between pages 254 and 264 of The Knowing Animal is a ten page philosophical discussion of human sexuality of a more rarefied, idealistic, and (some might say) starry-eyed kind than most of us are likely to read in a lifetime. Along the way, merely to illustrate by counter-example the coarseness of the world of men’s clubs and their humor, Tallis provides a typical joke from that milieu. The author presents this crudity as the antithesis of the moral values he stands for. But the reviewer, either from perversity or something a great deal worse, plucks this out of his text and makes the wilfully misleading claim that it represents what Tallis himself believes.
It would be hard for the editor of the TLS to be so closely acquainted with both the reviews he prints and the books themselves that he can catch every mistake of this kind. But the charge made by Stephen Clark goes well beyond the argument of the book: what this reviewer writes is false, and knowingly false, and inexcusably defames the character of Raymond Tallis himself.
On a more positive note:
Besides the outrageous amount of space given Fotiade/Derrida in the 2nd December 2005 issue there was a distinctly smaller item by Brian Vickers among ‘Books of the Year’. Briefly discussing Theory’s Empire: an Anthology of Dissent, forty-seven essays from the Columbia University Press attacking the cult of Literary Theory, he writes:
“Theory’s Empire is a unique documentation of an intellectual deformation that still affects the way literature is studied, as can be seen from publisher’s catalogues, university courses and the pages of this journal. Everyone concerned with this situation should read this volume for the classic refutations by M. H. Abrams, John M. Ellis, John Searle, Frederick Crews, Vincent Descombes, Raymond Tallis and others [the others including Thomas Nagel]. Younger scholars unpick recent developments. It makes an admirable teaching aid, but to prescribe it will still take some courage.”
January 2006
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