ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  In novels like The War of the End of the World and The Storyteller—the former set during the Canudos conflict, just as slavery came to an end in Brazil, the latter set among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian rainforest—Vargas Llosa had no trouble juxtaposing native cultures with the conquest’s importations. He has always believed that one tradition can, and does, reinforce the other, but it seems that his belief gutters out when the indigenous becomes the popular. After all, to be an Amazonian chief is to be a legend to your tribe alone, but to be a famous Latin American novelist is to be paparazzied for your foibles. About a week before Notes on the Death of Culture was published, Vargas Llosa left his wife of fifty years for Isabel Preysler, a Filipino-born Spanish socialite, model, and former beauty queen known as the Pearl of Manila, and as the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias. Hola! magazine carried the “exclusive” story, rife with intimate photographs and quotations (the relationship “is going very well,” according to the novelist). My favorite headline read: ENRIQUE IGLESIAS’ MOM JUST BROKE UP THE MARRIAGE OF NOBEL WINNER MARIO VARGAS LLOSA. Since the scandal, his numbers have been up, in English and in Spanish, on the only Amazon that people seem to care about. Culture is how we pass the time between hypocrisies.

  ALL FOISON, ALL ABUNDANCE

  ON FLORIO’S MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE’S FLORIO

  JOHN FLORIO—LEXICOGRAPHER, RACONTEUR, AND SUPPOSED model for Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost—was born in London in 1553 to an unidentified Englishwoman and an Italian Protestant who’d fled the Inquisition. Later that year Queen Mary I reinstated Catholicism, which sent the family packing for France, Germany, and Switzerland. Florio didn’t return to London until the reign of Elizabeth I, and subsequently served as Italian tutor to Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, who gave the Church of England a Bible and so gave English to God. Florio’s posterity consists of twin ironies. The first is that despite compiling the first comprehensive Italian-English dictionary, Florio most likely never set foot in Italy. The second is that his most enduring translation happens to be from the French.

  Florio’s 1603 version of Montaigne’s Essayes survives not because of its writing but because of a single reader—Shakespeare, whose initial encounter with the French philosopher was via Florio’s “enflourishing” eloquence. Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt have annotated selections in Shakespeare’s Montaigne, and the result is a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multiculti study of the development of English, and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence.

  Montaigne’s presence behind the scenes was already remarked upon, and lampooned, in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Ben Jonson’s Volpone proposed a Florio-like Italian writer from whom “All our English writers…Will deigne to steale…Almost as much, as from MONTAGNIE.” By the time the variora of the plays had been assembled, in the late eighteenth century, the influence was such a matter of record that an unscrupulous party forged the signature of “Willm Shakspere” on a copy of Florio’s work and sold it to the British Museum. Emerson, who regarded the signature as genuine, noted that when the museum bought a second copy, for public use, the volume contained the—authentic—autograph of Jonson.

  Approximately 750 words peculiar to Florio’s style show up in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets after 1603 (“apostrophe,” “bellyful,” “consanguinity”), twenty of them used in the Essayes for the first time (or for the first time in English). In “Of the Cannibals,” Florio’s Montaigne writes that the just-discovered peoples of the New World

  hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.

  Compare this with Gonzalo’s fantasy after he’s shipwrecked on the island of The Tempest:

  I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries

  Execute all things; for no kind of traffic

  Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

  Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

  And use of service, none; contract, succession,

  Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

  No occupation; all men idle, all;

  And women too, but innocent and pure;

  No sovereignty—

  …

  All things in common nature should produce

  Without sweat or endeavor: Treason, felony,

  Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,

  Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,

  Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

  To feed my innocent people.

  Jonson’s accusation of theft rings true, but only if the criterion is verbiage. The conceptual usages are crossed. Montaigne’s unexplored utopia is meant in earnest; Shakespeare is poking fun at both his character and his source—at the leisurely, moneyed abstractions of gentleman metaphysics. Shakespeare takes the same approach to “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children,” in which Montaigne directs the aged patriarch to entrust his fortunes to his offspring, who will provide for him, which is precisely what doesn’t happen in King Lear. This is the basest element Shakespeare dug out from Florio’s Montaigne: an innocence, or naïveté, to react to. Because Montaigne was an essayist, he had to state his ideas, which, if they came into contradiction, he had to either acknowledge or resolve. Shakespeare, writing for the stage, costumed each of his characters in the rhetoric of an essayist, and in their conflicts they dramatized ideas. The playwright, who altered histories, bent time, and insisted on locating landlocked Milan, Padua, and Verona on coasts, plagiarized not out of ineptitude but out of vengeance. Each of his quotations is a commentary.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  SENTENCES FROM AN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WORKBOOK FOUND IN SOFIA

  “I go to work on Monday. I work on the second floor. I turn my computer on. The roof is on the ceiling.”

  A PHRASE THAT MUST BE, BUT IS NOT, ORIGINALLY YIDDISH

  Lies are advice to God.

  INNER SYNTAX

  ON EIMEAR MCBRIDE

  GOD ALONE MIGHT’VE WRITTEN THE Bible, but the Irish provided the punctuation. While the Roman Empire collapsed into the vernacular across the European continent, monks immured inside the cold stone monasteries of that cold stone island hand-copied Latin and Greek versions of Scripture. Their “manuscripts” revived Antiquity’s systems of notation, resurrecting spaces between words and pauses between thoughts, and turned the Flesh of body text into the Word of divine revelation through the sacrament of quotation. The first thing God says to the first man, Adam, is, “Don’t pick the fruit from a certain tree.” Next, God says, “Man must have a partner,” and so He puts Adam to sleep and removes a rib He turns into a woman: a half-formed thing, a dependent.

  A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is the first novel by Eimear McBride, the latest in that illustrious line of Irish typographical reformers (born anno Domini 1976). Her book forgoes quotationmarks and elides verbiage for sense, sound, and sheer appearance on the page. For emphasis it occasionally wreaks havoc on capItalS and reverses lettre ordre. It is, in all respects, a heresy—which is to say, Lord above, it’s a future classic.

  It helps, then, that its plot is among the oldest: childhood, or innocence and its loss. Genesis is narrated in an omniscient third person: Eve picks the fruit and is shamed. McBride opts for a first-person heroine-narrator who drinks, takes drugs,
and enjoys, but is traumatized by, sex. She’s a lapsed Catholic, and always a cowed but dutiful daughter. She tells us all this, obliquely, and never says her name.

  But then, A Girl begins before the name. The narrator speaks from the womb, as she’s about to be delivered to a kind but careworn mother and an absentee father: “Thinking I think of you and me. Our empty spaces where fathers should be. Whenabouts we might find them and what we’d do to fill them up.” The “you” being addressed is not the reader, as it might appear, but the narrator’s brother, two or three years older, and afflicted with a brain tumor. If it’s initially daunting to sift this prose for its relationships and even identities, it’s because McBride insists that familial intimacy inheres linguistically too; this is how we all speak to our own loved ones, and about them to ourselves.

  Here is the narrator speaking to her brother of their mother:

  She was careful of you. Saying let’s take it slow. Mind your head dear heart. And her guts said Thank God. For her gasp of air. For this grant of Nurse I will. Learning you Our Fathers art. And when you slept I lulled in joyful mysteries glorious until I kingdom come. Mucus stogging up my nose. Scream to rupture day. Fatty snorting like a creature. A vinegar world I smelled. There now a girleen isn’t she great. Bawling. Oh Ho. Now you’re safe. But I saw less with these flesh eyes.

  After only a chapter or two, the style is justified, and the reader converted. In a fallen world of banshee winters, abuse, abandonment, and neurosurgery, it’s almost a sin of pride to care about grammar. By the time the narrator’s father dies, life itself can seem like a McBride sentence: a maddened rush to the terminal without comma.

  Endings, finalities, periods, anything that impedes the flow of experience into thought, and of thought into speech: English usage imposes restraints, but then so does the Catholic Church, and even Dublin’s River Liffey has dams to contend with. Throughout A Girl, McBride opposes her narrator’s unbridled fluency, which is her vitality, to the myriad forces—the family, nuns, priests, and men, many men—that would arrest it into clauses, laws, rules, and diagnoses, and it’s this opposition that provides the cohering drama. This is why in a book in which the narrator struggles with her brother’s decline, and with her rape by an uncle, the tragedy that would ultimately enfold them all is the adoption of a conventional clarity: the unambiguous statement, or fact, is aligned with adulthood, and so with death.

  Of course, to be fully formed—to grow up—means to be tainted by this mode of communicating, as the narrator is in a catechism with her mother about their departure for another town: “It’s time to go about our business. What’s that? Moving house. Why? Because he bought this and I don’t want it anymore. But I don’t want to move Mammy. Don’t start. But we’ve always lived here. We’re. Moving. House. Because. That. Is. What. I’d. Like. To. Do. And. If. You. Don’t. Too. Bad. Because. I’m. The. Mother.”

  Later, the narrator will catechize herself, as she recovers an appetite for sex, or power:

  Pimply faces white as never seen the light and crusty lips and dirty hands….Just leave me alone. But he didn’t answer. That voice already burning in what they don’t know for all their talk. What am I? God. Is that right. How would that be? But there’s some bit feels savage. That doesn’t know the wrong from right and sees the way to venge. I might. I am. I will.

  The narrator, approaching her late teens, decides to leave alone for the city, and so becomes briefly legible, if only because she hasn’t brought along her “you.” On her visits home, she regains him, her brother in his failing health and pronoun, but the accounts she gives of her independence—of an independence he’ll never have—are now notably internalized, unspoken: “I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime.”

  McBride herself, at seventeen, moved to London to study acting at the Drama Centre, wrote this novel a decade later, and spent nearly another decade trying to publish it. Once she succeeded, A Girl succeeded, winning a bundle of prizes, and the inevitable comparisons to the Irish tradition—Beckett’s monologues, Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses, and the ontogenetic prose of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—and to the Irish/British female avants: Edna O’Brien, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose. What all that praise had in common, besides that it was deserved, was the sad sense that the English-language novel had matured from modernism and that in maturing its spirit was lost: It was now gray, shaky, timid, compromised by publicity and money, the realisms of survival.

  McBride’s book was a shock to that sentiment, not least because it is about that sentiment. A Girl subjects the outer language the world expects of us to the inner syntaxes that are natural to our minds, and in doing so refuses to equate universal experience with universal expression—a false religion that has oppressed most contemporary literature and most contemporary souls.

  INADVERTENCE

  ON ALAN TURING’S CENTENNIAL

  ALAN TURING, THE BRITISH MATHEMATICIAN, morphogeneticist, breaker of the Nazi’s Enigma codes, and inventor of programmable computing, chose to commit suicide by eating an apple soaked in cyanide. But only after he’d chosen to be chemically castrated by way of estrogen hormone injections in order to avoid prison on a charge of “gross indecency,” a euphemism for the sex he’d had with a man who later burgled his home. Turing’s report of the burglary was what led to the final reenactment of original sin. He was forty-one years old.

  Summer 2012 was the centennial of Turing’s birth and, to mark the occasion, a number of books and, fittingly, ebooks have appeared, granting belated honor to a man who did more to defeat the Axis than Montgomery, Marshall, Eisenhower, Zhukov, or Konev. Turing himself, though, wasn’t satisfied with the deciphering “bombe” he’d built at Bletchley Park, where the British cryptanalysts were based throughout the war, and much preferred the Automatic Computing Engine he designed for the National Physical Laboratory in London in 1945. The bombe was just a glorified, if medievally torturous, calculator, capable of a single function. Turing’s ideal was a Renaissance machine—a computer that could do it all.

  Andrew Hodges’s magisterial Alan Turing: The Enigma, published in 1983 and made available for the anniversary in an expanded edition with a foreword by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, is still the definitive text. Its six hundred pages don’t presume to solve Turing’s life so much as to respect the equation: colonial Indian conception; itinerant boarding school in the English countryside; King’s College, Cambridge; his encounter with the German mathematician David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (“decision problem”), which led Turing to a reformulation of Kurt Gödel’s theory about the limits of what can and cannot be expressed. The Entscheidungsproblem asks whether any proposition can be considered universally valid, which is to say logically derived as either all True or False—the answers are as binary as 1s and 0s. Hilbert’s interest was in whether all propositions could be so fundamentally defined. Whereas Gödel clung to arithmetic, Turing conceived of a more materialist, or mechanized, solution: His propositions would be represented as algorithms, to be sequenced into a machine that would test whether the sequence itself, or the machine’s processing of it, could ever end. At least Gödel’s problem was ended: The answer was neither Yes nor No, but “Undecidable.”

  After publishing his results in a 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers,” Turing decamped for Princeton. Alan Turing’s Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis (ed. Andrew W. Appel) contains, after its sheaf of explanatory material, a facsimile of the document that earned him his doctorate. “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals” addresses “incompleteness,” a suggestive concept in Turing’s sad life but one that, in
a Gödelian context, deals with sequencing propositions that can be “intuitively,” as opposed to only logically, derived. Turing hazarded an audacious hypothesis: Although intuition itself might never be computable, the appearance of intuition was. With this, Turing was able to imagine a humanoid computer, possessed of an “artificial intelligence.” In his formulation—eventually codifed as the Turing Test—this computer would become human if and only if another human recognized “him” as such. (It would seem that, in Turing’s milieu, gay men couldn’t hope for a similar dignity.)

  A last book, a last poignancy. Alan M. Turing: Centenary Edition, by Sara Turing, could only have been written by one type of human—a mother who’d outlived her son. First published in 1959 and since fallen out of print, this memoir of a genius who was also a champion marathon runner, cyclist, and rationalist eccentric (wearing a gas mask to protect against pollen) is now reissued with an essay by Turing’s elder brother, John. Until Turing’s arrest, John had never suspected his brother’s homosexuality; Sara seemed, or attempted to seem, never to believe it, just as she never believed that his death was a suicide. Her recollection concludes: