Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  Not that we Jews get a lot of angels, they’re largely the province of the Goyim. I went, reluctantly, to Temple until my Bar Mitzvah provided the desired presents and freed me from further theological obligation, and I cannot recall any talk of angels or devils, though the Old Testament is stuffed with them. But we didn’t care. It is one of the many charms of my religion, weak though my practice of it may be, that it focuses so entirely on this life, and on the moral obligations attendant on being a person in a community. All of that Christian insistence on doing good in order to be rewarded – why not? asks Pascal, what do you have to lose? – strikes me as the very worst reason to live a moral life.

  So when a Jew comes up with angels, they’re likely to be peculiar ones, like Allen Ginsberg’s panoply of angels, Mohammedan, Indian, blonde and naked, mad but sane – hardly angelic at all really, more like Allen in fact, who no doubt thought himself one of them. Such an angel is an emblem of translucent otherness, of the ideal towards which the imagination strives, yet which is only just imaginable. Ginsberg wants the company of angels, in order to escape from the confines of the mundanely rational.

  Keats, after all, had exactly the same concern and he wasn’t even Jewish. Consider the lines from Lamia:

  Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,

  Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

  Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine,

  Unweave a rainbow . . .

  If I had to choose the one philosophical text that most clearly and powerfully exemplifies the hostility of philosophy to poetry, it might well be A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Though published in 1936, Ayer’s text maintains the capacity to shock. I first read it at Penn, and admired its lucidity and bravado, regarding logical positivism (as it was called) as the ne plus ultra of Humean scepticism. Indeed, one of my reasons for wishing to go to Oxford was that I would have a chance to hear Ayer lecture, for he was one of the luminaries of an excellent school of philosophy. Freddy (as he was known, later Sir Freddy) and his foxy motorcyclist wife, the American journalist Dee Wells, were central figures in both the Oxford universe, and that of North London’s intellectual classes. Ayer was media-hungry, anxious to make philosophy widely available. He appealed to the kind of people who read the broadsheets, and listened to the Third Programme, the BBC’s highbrow radio broadcast that began in 1946, and which was sometimes derided as merely ‘two dons talking’ – one of whom was frequently Ayer. Because his philosophical position was radical, surprising, even shocking, to persons of all persuasions – virtually all you needed, to be offended by Ayer, was to have a persuasion – he was much in demand. He was a controversialist, loved to argue, and was a formidable opponent.

  What he opposed were those metaphysical concepts and statements that he labelled ‘nonsense’, and those further propositions – like those of ethics or aesthetics – which he regarded as simply ‘emotive’, and consequently impossible to verify (in effect, further forms of nonsense). The use of ‘nonsense’ as the category into which the non-verifiable was tossed, willy-nilly, was intentionally provocative. God is good? Turner is a wonderful painter? It is better to do good than evil? Steak and kidney pie is delicious? One finds contentment in nature? Any football team is to be preferred to Manchester United? Shakespeare is the best writer? These are not truths, all are nonsense of one sort or the other. It made it impossible to be English without embarrassing oneself philosophically.

  Of course Ayer, a genial and literate man burdened with the normal baggage of belief, who passionately supported both the Labour Party and Tottenham Hotspur, was having some fun with his key concept. He was, after all, in his early twenties when he wrote Language, Truth and Logic, and anxious to make his name. (Isaiah Berlin described him at the time as ‘an irresistible missile’.) He later renounced his major arguments, but it didn’t matter: the book has sold over a million copies, and never gone out of print.

  I was persuaded by Ayer for a time, at much the same age at which he had written and published his book. He seemed so daring, so assured, and so difficult to follow, that he must have been right. But rereading it after many years, the book feels facile and dated, and it’s easy to see how it engendered the parodies in both Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python.

  Even so, one has to find a way to reject one’s inner Ayer without throwing one’s sceptical babies out with the positivist bathwater. Scepticism is a defining quality of intelligence, its free working is essential to democratic culture and education (as opposed to indoctrination) is impossible without it. But you don’t need to label a good deal of man’s deepest and best beliefs ‘nonsense’ to prove yourself a sceptic. You have to be sceptical about your scepticism. After all, as Robert Frost observed, scepticism is merely that sort of inquisitiveness that takes nothing for granted: does it consist of anything more, he asks, than ‘Well, what have we here?’

  Like Finnegans Wake, which Joyce was writing at the same time, Language, Truth and Logic represents both the apotheosis and the reductio ad absurdum of a tradition. After Joyce’s exhausting work, it is hard to imagine what further innovations a novelist might undertake: it is a book from which you can only go backwards. So, too, Language, Truth and Logic defined so clearly the outer limits of philosophical scepticism as to make one back away from it, aware that if such a frame of mind leads to such conclusions, there must be something wrong with the entire enterprise. Ultimately, Ayer is the Holden Caulfield of philosophy, childishly obsessed by phoniness. Indeed, if you throw out the term ‘nonsense’, and replace it with, say, ‘difficult to verify using rigorous criteria’, then the force of Ayer’s argument is greatly diminished.

  Great works of literature contain and convey truths, and if the processes needed to understand them are different from those of philosophy, they are truths nonetheless. Otherwise it would be impossible to learn from literature, which certainly contradicts one’s constant sense of enlargement and enhancement in relishing the metaphysical poets, suffering through Lear, or smiling at the modulated ironies of Jane Austen. The ‘truths’ one is exposed to through such reading are not simple ones, and are often, sadly, transmitted by sloppy readers as truisms: gather ye rosebuds while ye may, be kind to your daughters even when they seem difficult, make a good and sensible marriage. Those are truths of a banal but universal sort, and we do not need our great writers to remind us of them, only to make them glow. As George Eliot observed, ‘the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.’ It is the obligation of poet and novelist to invite them back. And you don’t find any of them in Language, Truth and Logic.

  Life was easier without Freddy Ayer, and I became, I think, a more agreeable and less contentious person released from his influence: less likely to reflexively seek counter-arguments, repel ‘emotive’ excess, demand verifiability. In any case, I had begun to believe that verification was an unsatisfactory principle, best replaced by Karl Popper’s insistence that falsification is a more reliable procedure. If you sit, for the first time, under an apple tree and watch the apples falling, it may be some time before you regard it as inevitable that they will continue to do so, and longer still until you posit the law of gravity. But if just one apple goes up rather than down, you will know that there was no such necessity after all, and no such law.

  So: goodbye Freddy? It didn’t turn out that way, not quite. Being infected by radical scepticism is like contracting malaria: you may seem to get over it, but it recurs unexpectedly. It’s in your system, ineradicable. I’d experienced a decade of partial remission when I had a renewed outbreak of the fever, and it wasn’t difficult for me to locate the cause. It was called by various names, but if I say ‘post-structuralism’ you may recognize what I mean.

  It is a difficult term to define: indeed, since none of the associated figures (who included Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida), all responding to and rejecting structuralism, would have described himself as a ‘post-structuralist’. The term is a generic one, and there is no a
dequate single definition, save an ostensive one. You want to know what post-structuralism is? It’s him, and her, and this, and that. And if these writers didn’t themselves have imperialist ambitions, their followers certainly did. These crusaders invaded English departments round the world, uncombatably aggressive, grimacing weirdly, speaking in a hideous foreign tongue, anxious to conquer and to convert.

  All of a sudden, instead of English we seemed to have French, not the mellifluous French of Mallarmé, but an ugly, polysyllabic, hybrid tongue only comprehensible to members of the tribe. Literature was superseded by écriture; the common pursuit of true judgement replaced by a culture in which readers replaced authors, relativism (and an associated multi-culturalism) prevailed. A whole variety of ‘readings’ were suddenly creditable, and the text came to be regarded as a signifier for more important issues that lurked latently behind it. Texts were puzzles, signs and symptoms, cultural artefacts.

  I am, as I have said, an unregenerate practical critic. I believe that the greatest and most rewarding of readerly activities involves painstaking attention to the words on the page. And so it was distinctly uncongenial to me to observe, over a period of years beginning in the late 1970s, that my best and brightest students were increasingly influenced by continental linguists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts whose approach to literature – if they distinguished the ‘literary’ from other forms of ‘signification’ – had nothing of the painstaking particularity that I associate with good reading.

  English Studies has always suffered from a certain methodological softness, and these new writers seemed to offer something harder-edged and more intellectually challenging. There were difficult new concepts to be mastered, and newly problematic ones (like ‘the author’, ‘the reader’, and ‘the text’) to be jettisoned or radically refined. Soon nobody wanted to ‘read’ texts, they wanted to deconstruct them.

  In spite of all post-structuralist argument to the contrary, the reader is not the maker of what he experiences. He is subjected to his author, imposed upon, invaded, possessed. He hears the voices, is totally exposed to the characters of a novel, and has no control over their presence or absence. You can’t simply put a book down or away. Books are peculiarly adhesive. A throng of characters clamorously demand attention, voices rise and fall, fade in and out of our consciousness. We suspend the everyday, ignore the telephone and doorbell, eat with our eyes fixed to the page, overcome, ravaged by the demands of the text. It is no wonder that writers – who are the best readers – claim that books provide them with the best of friends. Dickens refers to ‘the friendships we form with books’, and Charles Lamb regarded books as ‘the best company’. Would Jacques Derrida agree?

  Derrida’s On Grammatology (roughly: the science of writing) was a much-cited example of this radical new line of thought. Here is a representative paragraph, from Chapter 2:

  Now from the moment that one considers the totality of determined signs, spoken, and a fortiori written, as unmotivated institutions, one must exclude any relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or orders of signifiers. If ‘writing’ signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, ‘graphic’ in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted — hence ‘written,’ even if they are ‘phonic’ — signifiers.

  And, what is worse, imagine someone less intelligent than Derrida trying to think along similar lines, and then applying their conclusions to English literature. The results were harrowing. I remember sitting through lectures, seminars and presentations by over-excited practitioners of this new art, who were positively writhing with delight at their capacity to play with this new set of linguistic structures, analytic tools, and conceptual categories.

  I tried, oh how I tried. I’d had problems with these aggravating continentals before: Like Freddy Ayer, I’d never got on with metaphysics. What the hell is ‘time’? Or ‘being’? Or, indeed, ‘nothingness’? And who cares? I read the major texts painstakingly, then read them again because I forgot everything almost as soon as I had read it. Even the second readings didn’t stick. (Try reading that Derrida quotation twice, and then make a précis of it.) It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. I was. How can a teacher not be interested in material that excites his best students? No, the problem was that I hated it. Hated as in loathed and detested.

  Hated as in A.J. Ayer: dismissively, contemptuously. ‘Nonsense!’ What a useful concept to revert to, what a terrific rejoinder. I slipped seamlessly into default mode, back to the ludicrously self-assured, judgemental self of my high school years. I had the perfectly annoying habit, at seventeen, of lifting my index finger into the air and announcing – while in discussion or argument – either False! (left finger) or True! (right finger). I thought of the fingers as Holden (left) and Allen (right) and believed that they provided sufficient guidance to make my way through my emotional and intellectual life.

  I thought of these inward voices and their finger-manifestations as opposites. I had need of both: of the capacity to distinguish the phoney from the true, to be both sceptical and enthusiastic. It did not occur to me – curiously, stupidly – that my Holden and my Allen were manifestations of the same impulse. Both were outsiders, keen to subvert established values, unable to enter into a community of like-minded fellowship. It was on the basis of such inward counsel – am I tempted to say, alas? – that I came to live in a foreign culture, to marry a women maximally different from me, to choose a profession in which I was uncomfortable. To make of myself even more of an outsider, and to derive what comfort and amusement I could by observing the distance between my inner world and my surroundings. Though I am now a dual citizen, both American and English, I am also neither, and now feel equally uncomfortable in both cultures, except on those days when I don’t. When I finally came to locate a voice in which I was comfortable writing, I found that whatever my apparent subject, my real subject was me, observing myself, indulging the discomforting ironies of a displaced person.

  Nothing made me feel more alienated, more out of place, than this post-structuralist stuff. It was an example of an utterly unverifiable rhetoric, like a private language, which a clan of initiates speak amongst themselves, like Yeats’s silly theosophists and Rosicrucians. Gibberish, as Evelyn Waugh would have pronounced it, with a hard ‘g’. My students (and their teachers who were given over to this new material) had begun to behave like members of a secret society. They not only talked a different language, their faces registered varieties of self-satisfaction and scorn usually reserved for scientologists. The jargon was appalling, and has been described by V.S. Naipaul as ‘a way for one clown to tell the other that he is in the club’. I began to dislike them – my own students! – and was appalled by my reaction. If I couldn’t overcome it, surely, it was time to go: to become the old that is swept out by the new. I was only in my middle thirties, and it was humiliating to be prematurely tone-deaf, prickly and antagonistic.

  This defensiveness was personal, almost neurotic. I felt offended by post-structuralism, and (as any psychotherapist would tell you) there is something in need of analysis in such heated resistance and denial. Derrida makes the point himself, with uncharacteristic concision and elegance: ‘Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.’ That would be me.

  And yet, to be fair, there was plenty to admire in this new discourse, if one were allowed to pick and choose. From Lacan, for instance, there was the arresting concept of absence, a way of attending carefully to what isn’t there, and is thus present in its very absence. Trivially, like Sartre’s Monsieur Simonnot in Les Mots, whose non-attendance at a party seemed so much more powerful than anyone else’s presence; more provocatively, in Freud’s account of
women, where lack of a penis becomes a defining quality. The further implications of the notion of absence, as applied to Freud, were to become a major topic for me in the coming years.

  From Derrida my major borrowing was the idea of using concepts ‘under erasure’, which is a clumsy phrase that I try never to say, but which has proven conceptually useful. The idea, first mooted by Heidegger, is that there is a set of concepts which one needs, but which are nonetheless inadequate. We have already noticed the process in Philip Roth’s need to use the term ‘self’, while at the same time denying its existence. Derrida’s method is straightforward, if curious: first you write the word which is causing you difficulty, then cross it out, and then you print both the word and the deletion. Because the word is conceptually compromised, you have to cross it out; since it is necessary, it has to be employed.

  Think, for instance, of Women in Love, in which Rupert Birkin professes himself disgusted by the very concept ‘love’, all that merging and mingling, the two-as-one loss of identity and separateness. But, asks his wife Ursula plaintively, ‘don’t you love me?’ And he does. Being ‘imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts’, he has to use what the language allows him. The received word is worn out, inadequate. If he has to use it at all, he wishes at the same time to disavow it. Love? Yuck. Cross it out. Do you love me? Sure. This rings true: we’ve all experienced something similar, though it makes it tricky writing a love letter.