Simply put, Sartre’s Carnets de la drôle de guerre made me want to become a writer. (“He writes.”) (“For up to thirteen hours a day”—) (“His favourite occupation.”) As I saw it, writing gave purpose|control|power to Sartre’s existence, temporarily suspended by the Second World War. For me, life was whatever might be the opposite of “suspended” (to do list: find a job, find a room, get to know at least a single soul in the UK), but life could do with some purpose injected into it. Something a bit aspirational (“young genius”), something beyond sheer survival (“germs of later works”).
Unlike Sartre, who found himself stationed at Marmoutier or Morsbronn with soldiers called Pieter or Paul, I found myself working in kitchens, lately with Frank. Like Sartre (“up to thirteen hours a day”), I wrote a lot. Unlike Sartre, I wasn’t already a star in “fictional heaven”. Unlike Sartre, I wasn’t publishing with Gallimard, nor did I expect to be (no sense of entitlement). So why I thought Sartre’s philosophy — existentialism — should make for a fitting analytics through which to think my own writing and experience is beyond me.
“Young genius”, the blurb says. “Young genius” — not educated at Cours Hattmer (an elite private school in Paris) and the École Normale Supérieure. “Young genius”, it says, and “x-beliebiger Soldat” (any old soldier). It does not say, “Jean-Paul’s maman was the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer”. “X-BELIEBIGER SOLDAT” IT SAYS — I just checked!
Euro philosophy has taught me many things, but the way it buries its situatedness, obscures the conditions of its possibility, is problematic. The word “genius” does burying work — in blurbs, and elsewhere. Replace “genius” with “privilege”, I say. Here is the blurb in plain English (German; even French): “The Carnets de la drôle de guerre are the work of a highly educated white man from an extremely privileged background with some talent and a childhood characterized by paternal loss and bullying that gets channelled into literary ambition.” Something along those lines.
White middle-class writing is so normalized, its specificity disappears. Now in my forties, I don’t need an announcement or contextualizing statement. I read two sentences of something, anything, and I see it; it’s all there. But I didn’t see it at twenty, nor at thirty; not really. It’s like having friends in yr mid-twenties who are cash-poor like you. Like you, they are artists or writers, they wear clothes from Oxfam or ASOS. You work in similarly crappy jobs, you share a flat in Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. Occasionally, yr friends’ parents visit the flat. Yr parents never visit. Over time it transpires, yr friends’ parents pay their share of the rent, plus bills. It also transpires that many of yr friends have degrees from Oxbridge. You don’t know exactly what that means, an Oxbridge degree, not in your twenties you don’t. Class plays out differently in yr country of origin (yr deadcountry), so it takes you a minute (years) to learn to interpret British class signifiers correctly, to learn how class works in Britain. When you reach yr thirties, yr friends find themselves in jobs you’d never have access to — you didn’t even know they’d applied! (Did they ever apply?) Their careers take off, and you’re still working in catering, love, in yr mid-thirties. Eventually, you do learn how class works in Britain — from your workingclass peers, reading cultural theory, critical race theory, queer theory. You stop Euro philosophising. Yr ontological takes make way for urgent critiques of power in yr writing. You’re getting a handle on it, now that you’re forty.
I wonder what might have been possible had some brilliant uni professor or hourly-paid lecturer introduced me to theoretical approaches that might have helped me to actually make sense of my experiences, as well as those of my working-class peers? At the very least, it might have made me a better writer, sooner.
The question remains: why did I care about the weatherman in the first place? Why bring the Carnets de la drôle de guerre to London in ’96? Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit) was on the curriculum at the German secondary school I attended (a good state school with a mixed working- and middle-class demographic). Huis Clos had a lesbian in it, that’s why. We didn’t have the internet in the early Nineties — I, closeted, was sold on Huis Clos. Its lesbian, Inès, was one of the first I ever encountered.
Existentialism has fag appeal. Must message Frank — Going through my drawer just now — what th fk, I kept the “Existentialism” course booklet. I don’t have a sentimental attachment to things; I tend not to keep things (a defence mechanism I developed having lost everything once). (Should unlearn.) So what th fk made me hold on to a badly photocopied, stapled together booklet containing set readings, over the course of five London moves (Camden, Highgate, King’s Cross, Camden, Brixton, Crystal Palace)? I studied, that’s what. I was a student. I, student. Once, when I was studying (on a six-week adult learning class at Birkbeck —). For a minute, I was a student, and not just self-educating all of the time. I was an actual student, as good as a star in fictional heaven.
Week 1: Introduction. Week 2: Being and Nothingness (An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology). Week 3: She Came To Stay (Novel). Week 4: The Second Sex. Week 5: Photo of young white French philosophers being social, smoking. Week 5: No Exit! Week 6: missing. According to the booklet, the course was called “Sartre and de Beauvoir”, not “Existentialism”. It gives me the name of the lecturer, I go on their Wiki page: They published several monographs on European Philosophy and worked at the Adult Education Department at Birkbeck starting in 1995. “When the courses at Birkbeck were cut as a cost-saving measure in 2010—”
ADULT LEARNING COURSES AT BIRKBECK WERE CUT AS A COST-SAVING MEASURE IN 2010. 2010 is the year the Tories got into government. The year the ConDem coalition government started dismantling welfare. The year the ConDem coalition government capped housing benefit with immediate effect, which meant that the amount paid no longer reflected the rents in Central London, effectively cleansing the capital of the working class. The year the ConDem coalition government trebled tuition fees at university.
What Sartre did share with me — and possibly anyone, say Stuart Hall, who ever migrated from any country to England — was a preoccupation with the weather, and that’s it. It’s obvious that my writing should not be like Sartre’s — nor like the writing of most of my literary contemporaries. My writing should be like Frank’s perfect refusal, like criticality and transparency, like urgency, like asking for it, like getting some, like giving something back. It’s taken me years to figure it out. I blame existentialism.
The Identity of Indiscernibles
Nicholas Blincoe
Martin’s father worked at Fothergills for forty years, and six months after he retired he could barely remember a day of it. Can you explain that, he had asked? Martin had no answer. When his father left the mill, Martin was a Cambridge professor, the author of five books, and two dozen other papers. He had spent more than half his life obsessed with philosophy. Why would that end? How could he turn it off?
Easily, it turned out. He had taken leave when his wife was ill. When she died, there was nothing left in the tank. Martin retired formally, and never thought about the problems that had consumed his career. If he came across old notes in the back of a book, he struggled to remember what the words meant: “rigid designators”, “the indiscernibility of identicals”. He knew, but barely… barely… barely at all.
He was only thinking about philosophy that day because he was meeting Norris. Norris Hammond was the Challis Professor at the University of Sydney, so some philosophy must be fresh in his mind. He was already at the table in La Coupole when Martin arrived; the same man, full of hail-fellow bluster, even fatter than he was eight years ago. They had become friends at Harvard in the Fifties, and remained drinking buddies at conferences. Hooking up for a weekend in Paris was a new experience. The two men hugged: Norris was a hugger. Immediately, he began complaining that it took a series of letters to organise their holiday.
“A fucking letter, Marty! Who needs that? It’s the fucking Nineties, embrac
e it.”
“What can I do? I got out before the advent of electronic mail. What am I missing?”
“Aw, you haven’t got a fucking clue, mate. It’s not just for the departmental goss: it’s the whole of life. Get on to AOL and get an account, so your pals can get in touch without taking three fucking months. I’m serious, mate.” Norris waved at a waiter, simultaneously pointing at his highball glass. The drink was soda pink and filled with bubbles, probably Dubonnet. It looked like Martin was drinking the same thing. When in Paris, do like the fat Australian, etc.
“Listen, mate, I hate to put business before pleasure, but Ruth is desperate to get hold of you. She knows I’m seeing you, and she’s giving me earache. Or locked caps ache, I guess. Email after email after email.”
“Ruth who?”
“Barking Ruth.”
“Ruth Barcan?”
Norris rolled his eyes upwards. “Holy Mother. She is fearsome, mate. She’s got this petition, and everyone has to sign. You know she’s on the board of the American Phil Soc, as well as the Symbolic Logic Soc, and now she’s the President of the International Institute. Trust an ex-fucking-communist organiser to be methodical, right? Everyone has to toe her line. You know her dad was a trade-union leader, right? The United Textile Workers of fucking Brooklyn, I bet.”
“My dad was in textiles,” Martin said. “I think Ruth’s father was a printer.”
“See. You know her. You know what a ball-ache she is.”
“What’s the petition?”
“She wants to stop Cambridge giving an award to that charlatan Jacques La Kak.”
“Lacan? The psychotherapist?”
“No. The other one. The deconstruction clown.”
“Jacques Derrida?”
“That’s the chap. Have you read him?”
“No.”
“Yeah? But absolute fucking codswallop, right, mate?”
“I suppose so. What’s Ruth got against him?”
“She’s saying, if Cambridge hands out this award, it brings the entire profession into disrepute. She’s still angry about the argument Derrida had with John Searle. The pair were supposed to have a face-off but Derrida avoided the debate by making ad hominem attacks and inventing quotes.”
Martin remembered the affair. It was ten years ago, so why rehash it? Martin and Searle had their own history of disagreements. A philosophical argument need not lead to personal ill-will, but Martin was not going to run to Searle’s defence, given a choice.
“What’s Ruth’s problem? Searle is tough enough. If he feels aggrieved, he can take care of himself.”
“Ruth was at Yale when this Derrida joker was a visiting Professor in the English department,” Norris said. “She’s had direct experience of him. He was always sneering, looking down his long French nose at her, and not beyond that genteel European anti-Semitic shit, either.”
Martin thought he understood, now. “So the petition is about racism?”
“No, mate. It’s about bringing philosophical argument into disrepute.” Norris was finishing his second highball. “Listen. This lunch is on me, and we’re having the full spectrum fruits de mer, okay? The set of all possible sets.”
Martin looked across to a nearby table where a three-tier cake stand dripped with lobsters and shellfish. “Fine. But, listen. I’ve never read Derrida. I don’t teach any more. Can you just tell Ruth I’ve gone gaga in retirement.”
Norris laughed. “No way, mate. She wants you. There’s no way out of it.” Norris opened his wallet and took out a long strip of paper like a ticket tape. It held an enormously long telephone number. “Call her. And don’t make a twat of yourself and forget the time difference with New York.”
They drank three bottles of champagne with the seafood feast, on top of the earlier aperitifs, and the later digestifs. As they staggered to the pavement, Martin asked who else had signed Ruth’s petition. Norris reeled off a list of names. The biggest came last.
“She’s even got Van to sign.”
“She’s cornered Van! So why the bloody hell is she worrying about me?”
“Because you’re the Cambridge Professor Emeritus, mate. It’s the politics. Ruth needs a Cambridge man to make the petition stick. She isn’t going to let you get out of this. Remember: her Barcan’s bad, but her biting’s worse.”
Martin woke glumly after a late-afternoon nap. He was hungover, and he felt trampled. He walked down the narrow creaking stairs to book a transatlantic call at the hotel desk.
“I’ve been told to speak to an angry American logician.” He held out the paper with Ruth’s number to the young woman.
“Very good, sir. You can dial direct from your room. You must simply place a zero before the long number to reach the line external.” She picked up the pen on its chain and wrote a “0” at the front of the number. “Like that.”
This felt like an impossible barrier. He knew he was being ridiculous.
“She’s started a petition against a famous French philosopher. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Jacques Derrida?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I don’t expect you know John Searle. Anyway, whatever the effective cause, at bottom it’s the same old conflict between the English-speaking world and the Continent. I don’t know how it looks from your end, but in my circles it’s always portrayed as a fight for stubborn Anglo-American common sense, against a very French tolerance for tyranny and grandiosity.”
The desk clerk pushed the paper back across the counter to Martin. “The first zero gets an outside line, sir.”
“I’m sorry. I’m using you as a sounding board. I can’t say I understand it myself. Our great transatlantic divide. We talk about it as a cosmic ideological battle, but we ignore just how recent the Anglo-American tradition is. It barely goes back three generations, and we all know each other. I met Ruth at Harvard, when I followed my supervisor John Austin over in 1955. Then, when the poor man died of cancer at just forty-eight, my notes became the basis of his posthumous book, How to Do Things with Words.”
Which then became the basis of all John Searle’s work, though Martin thought it bore little relation to anything that Austin had said.
“Sir. Do you need my help?”
“My point is, the whole lineage is so short. At Harvard, I was part of the circle around Willard Van Orman Quine, and of course Van had studied with Alfred North Whitehead, which explains the Anglo-American thing, because Whitehead had worked with Russell at Cambridge. I eventually became the Bertrand Russell Professor of Logic, of course, so that seals the circle. You could say Austin was my philosophical father, and Van was a kind of stepfather. He is brilliant but really quite a self-enclosed man. I’d say, our relationship was based on a deep cordiality, not the genuine warmth I had with Austin.”
“Sir. Perhaps I could direct you to a telephone in our business centre?”
“Would you? That’s very kind of you.”
He followed her down a passageway beside the stairs. He had chosen a small hotel on the Left Bank, while Norris had opted for a huge five star in Montparnasse. Martin touched one of the heavy sixteenth-century beams set into the plaster wall.
“It’s incredible so much of medieval Paris has survived revolution and war and the grand plans of Haussmann. There’s really nothing comparable left in London. But of course, there was no Paris Blitz; France fell so quickly in 1940.”
This seemed more pointed than he intended.
“I was only twelve years old in 1940, which is really what marks the generations. Van and Austin were both in military intelligence. The work they had begun with Whitehead became the basis of the new field of cryptography, with these astonishing semi-clockwork computers capable of encoding and transmitting messages way beyond anything human. Which led to machine languages, and ultimately to electronic mail. Van is an astonishing figure, really. You know, he basically invented binary languages, so we have him to blame.”
Martin pointed at the Minitel console on the little d
esk, and laughed. The business centre turned out to be an alcove beneath a black timber lintel. The woman spread out Ruth’s telephone number between two long fingers, and began dialling.
“Van had a horror of illogicality,” Martin said. “He would grow distraught if he got caught in a rambling conversation, though he always thought he successfully hid his anxiety. His sanity literally depended upon logic, yet he knew he was imposing an artificial order on the world. Formal symbolic languages are not a part of the world: they are lesser than the world. In the same way that the code is different from the natural language. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a code. The difference sustains the symbolic language, but isn’t expressible in the language. It’s an extra something. A spark of life.”
“The line is ringing, sir.”
She wasn’t at all slow about hurrying off and leaving him.
Martin tried to compose his thoughts, as he sat in what was essentially a cubbyhole. His generation had ignored the difference between the code and the language. Ruth Barcan, Norris Hampton, as well as Saul Kripke, Noam Chomsky and all the others, they broke with Van. Yes, okay, there was a difference between the symbolic language and the target language, but no, this difference was not a difference in kind because the rules passed from one to the other, without obstruction, one level always collapsing and merging into the other.
Ruth answered the phone.
“Ruth? It’s Martin. You were trying to get in touch with me?”
“Martin. At last! It’s Martin Miller.” She shouted this off-phone, perhaps to a roommate, or perhaps to her house plants. “Where have you been hiding this past month? I couldn’t get hold of you, Martin! I didn’t know what had happened. If you had found a rock to crawl under.”
“It wasn’t a rock, Ruth. Just early retirement. Listen, Norris filled me in on this petition…”
“It’s not a petition, it’s a letter. To the Times of London. Let me read the text …”
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