Month: April 2019

Last quarter, I was working with a graduate student on the Picatrix, without a doubt one of the craziest books of the Middle Ages. Translated from an actual Arabic archetype that falsely claims (in some manuscripts) to have been translated from the Greek, the Picatrix compiles knowledge from an enormous range of (mostly?) imaginary sources about the secret harmonies by which an adept can manipulate nature. This is the knowledge that the philosophers have hidden because they feared that the cosmos would be destroyed if it were more widely-known.

In practice, most of what the Picatrix contains is ritual magic of a sort not distinct in form – though much more elaborate in detail – from the recipes contained in the much older PGM. These spells take time and resources to cast; in a lot of cases, you’ve got to wait for an astrologically-defined “right moment.” These aren’t D&D spells, the sort of thing you could use to fight a frost giant or whatever.

That kind of magic, the sort you’d see in any fantasy movie, has more recent roots in a performance tradition that emerged out of carnivals and circuses in the 18th century. You’d go to a faire to see someone disappearing things or throwing fireballs. The “magic” was part of the show; presumably, the performers knew what they were really doing.

As Graham Jones argues in a recent book, one way in which performance magic built an identity for itself in the 19th century was precisely around this knowledge gap. Since an “enlightened” European audience was prepared to admire their skill, but not their supernatural powers (I’m reminded of the Epicureans of Lucian’s Alexander, who know there must be a trick behind Alexander’s wizardry but can’t be sure what it is), “primitive” colonials came to take up the role of the dupe. This was sometimes explictly the case, as when the French magician Robert-Houdin went on a tour of Algeria in order to show up the Isawi Sufis as fakes (or to demonstrate the superior mana of the French?). More generally, however, this opposition was one that inscribed itself in the early history of anthropology, which made hay through the mid-20th century out of the difference between the ethnographer’s rational grasp of phenomena and the native informant’s superstition.

More recently, scholars including Jones have come to doubt whether the indigenous suckers thus postulated really exist anywhere. It’s quite possible – and in many cases well-evidenced – that everyone, everywhere is in on the trickery behind this brand of performative, public magic, which nonetheless can be culturally meaningful in many more cultural registers than that of the Vegas shows and TV specials with which we’re familiar.

I wonder if it would be possible to talk about the kind of magic described by the Picatrix in a similar way. On the one hand, since such magic was often performed on behalf of paying parties by freelance ritual experts (e.g. Charles MacKay’s history of alchemy in The Madness of Crowds or the preface to Ficino’s Three Books on Life) it seems like there ought to be a similar gap between dupes and cognoscenti. On the other hand, what the cognoscenti know (if Picatrix can be believed) is actually just how to conduct the ritual itself; there’s no additional, secret manipulative know-how designed to produce an effect, as in modern magic.

As far as I can tell, the main way in which one of these practitioners would have tried to “put one over” on a client was by producing as elaborate a description of the ritual as possible, either in advance or while performing it. The purpose of that was to create as many “points of failure” as possible, so that, in the event that the ritual was thought to have failed, the magician would have someone to blame other than himself. This was a form of trickery that would by no means have come more easily to a disillusioned practitioner than to a true believer. Here, unlike in modern magic, an effective performance is totally compatible with belief in the efficacy of the ritual.

When ancient critics try to discredit magic, accordingly, they don’t bother claiming that it’s fake. Instead, they focus their attention on the causal agency behind the magic, which is usually – and especially by Christian sources – assumed to be demonic. You can get what you want with magic, the critics say, just at some cost to your soul. The to us more obvious critique – that there’s no such thing as magic – doesn’t particularly occur to them, just as it wouldn’t have occured to magical practitioners at the time.

I wrote about the surrealism of The Little Sister as a way of getting into what really bothered me about the book: its cop-loving politics. Here too, though, I don’t know whether I ought to be bothered or not. The book seems to be doing something different than it explicitly claims to, maybe even something different than what Chandler has in mind.

Like in a lot of Chandler novels, Philip Marlowe gets tangled up with the cops. This time, they maybe think he murdered some people. Certainly the set up is good: he’s in the room with about four different corpses, including those of elder brother Orrin Quest and ex-gangster Steelgrave which have been produced using bullets, the hardboiled detective’s favorite murder method. Inexplicably, Marlowe ends up getting off. The DA, Endicott, lets him go without even putting the squeeze on him to place his client (the big sister, not the little one) in a sordid plot that would have destroyed her career in movies just by association.

Why? It’s just public relations. “We think of the law as an enemy,” says Endicott. “We’re a nation of cop-haters.” “It’ll take a lot to change that,” Marlowe replies, “on both sides.” “Yes,” Endicott agrees, “it will. But somebody has to make a beginning. Thanks for coming in.”

Who’s this little speech for? If it’s for Marlowe, I just don’t buy it: the national problem of cop-hating is hardly going to be solved by letting a fellow law-enforcement pro off the hook for maybe a quadruple-homicide. That’s liable to make things worse. It’s endorshing a conspiracy of silence among detectives, which really calls for a different speech.

No, the intended audience has to be us, the loyal readership. Endicott has Marlowe dead to rights. When he lets him go, it’s like he’s giving us back a hostage. Marlowe won’t be spending the next ten years in jail; he won’t even get his license suspended. This isn’t the last Marlowe adventure (a possibility that Chandler raises and then drops at the end of practically every novel).

So the fact that a fictional district’s attorney doesn’t throw the book at a fictional detective is supposed to do something to make us less of a nation of cop-haters. “Somebody has to make a beginning.” But it’s not the cops or the public (“civilians,” in the grotesque paramilitary lingo of today’s pigs); it’s the novelist, helping us see the police in a different, kinder light.

That’s what this book, more than any other Chandler novel I’ve read, goes out of its way to do. Sure, Christy French, the long-serving and ulcerated homicide detective, throws a punch at Marlowe – but only after a monolog about how copping has been so hard on his marriage. And Biefus, his partner, catches the punch.

Well, they’re not exactly loveable, especially as long as we’re still seeing them from the criminal’s – i.e. Marlowe’s – point of view. A sympathetic portrait of hostile forces is still, in narrative terms, a portrait of evil.

What can you do about that? Chandler’s pretty wild solution is to let Marlowe hallucinate his own true policeman. Stuck up all night at the station, not charged but unable to go home, Marlowe imagines he’s playing double-handed solitaire with a cop whose delicate finger motions disclose a talent for piano-playing and a case for Mozart.

This isn’t, let’s say, a functional policeman: “I don’t take confessions. I just establish the mood.” It is, however, a model for the policeman as protagonist, someone potentially as interesting as Marlowe. That would be the model followed up by Bones, Dexter, and all the rest – the whole genre that hides the brutal realities of policing behind a set of personal idiosyncrasies.

Chandler knows the real problem with cops isn’t so much that they’re brutal as that they’re boring. Both of those things are “problems,” of course, but only one of them is going to get in your way if you’re trying to sell the public on cops as an entertainment product, which is how, in actual fact, we went from being “a nation of cop-haters” to a nation split between people with thin blue line bumper stickers who would gladly tongue-polish a cop’s boot and people whom cops can murder with impunity.

Part of the usefulness of a book like The Little Sister is that it sets delusion and reality side-by-side. What appeal this particular book has, aside from that usefulness, lies in the way you can’t tell which is which. That’s what I’ve been calling the book’s surrealism, the way it layers one reality over another. In most respects, the novel creates its sense of ending by peeling one layer away and throwing it in the trash. With cops, what Chandler is up to seems less clear: he might really be trying to sell us the delusion. 70 years later, though, at a time when we’re practically living it, The Little Sister instead has the effect of reminding us that you have to be very, very worn out and exhausted before you start hallucinating anything so imaginary as a good cop.

I read through all the big Raymond Chandler novels in a single summer, about a decade ago. I thought that was it, but I was definitely wrong: there’s a lot of Chandler out there that hasn’t been canonized by Vintage Classics. I recently came into a pile of this, old paperbacks that trigger my dust allergy, and I dove into it with great expectations. Having just finished The Little Sister (a Marlowe adventure so second-string that it never even got a straight film adaptation), I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or not.

The main thing that distracted me were the cracks showing through in Chandler’s style. A lot of what looked like attitude when I was reading The Big Sleep ten years ago looks like greasepaint now. I don’t know whether to blame this on the author or credit it to myself as a more mature reader. Consider this description of a police-station lady typist:

“The orange queen wrote without looking up. To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.”

This is a vaudeville bit. The point, I suppose, is to show that Marlowe maintains enough ironic detachment from this (and every) situation to crack wise in his head, but it’s still vaudeville. The punch-line/setup structure belongs to a different era of stand-up comedy, and that’s why its modular character now seems obvious. It’s a building block of narrative, as wordpress so irrelevantly calls the paragraph. Any number of other building blocks – any one at all marked positive for “joke”- would have worked just as well.

Chandler’s style in The Little Sister is modular throughout. You can’t ignore it, and it makes the book harder to enjoy than it might be. You could say something similar about the characters, too, since they’re all types as well – the gangster, the sultry Mexican seductress, the small-town girl – in a way that the main players in The Big Sleep, to my recollection, weren’t. Except that Chandler knows it, and, if the stock characters with their stock dialogue are a sign of being pressed for time or money, he makes a virtue out of necessity. The gangster is a victim, not a menace; the Mexican turns out to be from Cleveland; and the small-town girl sells her own brother’s life for a thousand dollars. In Chandler’s only Hollywood novel, the point seems to be that the types are all fake; the eponymous little sister, whose older sibling has made it in pictures, turns out to be by far the better and deadlier actor of the two.

In combination with an odd, almost garish treatment of setting that’s also not what I remember from the big three Chandler novels, this gives the whole book an air of un- or surreality, like the whole thing itself might be a movie or a pre-death hallucination on Marlowe’s part. Everyone’s mask might just come off at any moment. Reality is elsewhere – in particular, Manhattan, Kansas, the weirdly misnamed town from which several of the protagonists hail. That’s where, as the novel wraps up, we imagine little sister squabbling with mother about how to divide up the money the former earned by selling out brother. Reality is sordid; reality is about what people will do for a little bit of money.

Marlowe himself is even more above monetary considerations than usual. Chandler makes much of the little sister’s repeated, failed attempts to compensate him for his work; he ends the book by incinerating a series of incriminating photos whose blackmail value probably exceeds his annual income, which is not made out to be very great (“I had a client once…”) From that point of view, Marlowe turns out to be probably the most fantastic character in The Little Sister, a Socratic type who never earns any money but somehow gets fed just the same. The dreamwork behind the book’s apparent surrealism would be that Marlowe gins up a cast of characters just as unbelievable as he is; his job, to protect them from Kansans, is basically also to protect them from reality.

Reading Lacan to help yourself is kind of like using a physics textbook as a car repair manual, and the fact that I keep trying to do it is probably itself a symptom of mental illness. Most of Lacan’s lectures on anxiety went over my head, as usual and not entirely through any fault of my own. Lacan teaches using a scientistic vocabulary that probably served a mnemonic function for long-time participants in his seminar but which hopelessly confuses the casual reader. What one gets out of reading Lacan tends to be fragmentary insights, difficult to connect into the kind of overarching theory which Lacan is usually thought to have produced.

What I took from the lectures on anxiety is that the titular affect registers something wrong with the object (petite a), its unreliability or lability. The object of our desire is like a mirage that disappears when we get too close to it; anxiety is our awareness of this fact, a constant reminder that the only certainty in our desire is that it’s bound to remain unsatisfied. That’s the sense in which Lacan describes anxiety as “that which does not deceive.” Living with that truth is a miserable experience: we need a little deception to keep us going.

As an anxious person and one given to fixating on worst-case scenarios, I felt a lot of sympathy with this analysis. On the other hand, there remained a puzzle: I didn’t really start suffering from anxiety until I got a tenure-track teaching job. Why did picking up that position turn me into a nervous wreck, when a measure of professional success and the prospect of lifetime job security should have done the opposite?

The truth is, as always, that what I was desiring turned out not to be there. I approached professorship as a kind of becoming: the expectation was that I would become my ego ideal, and that professorship would turn me into a different person. As long as I was still trying to find a tenure-track job, I could still desire the person that I wanted to become; when I got one, I found out that that person was really just a fantasy and that I was still myself. I’m a professor, but the name means nothing.

The other way of describing this feeling that one is not what one is would be to call it “impostor syndrome,” which is supposed to afflict academics more than most other professionals. I’ve often wondered if this is true – how, after all, would one find out? – but it’s certainly plausible. Academics operate in a world where clear measures of success are hard to come by, which is not so much the case for other professions. Doctors, for example, either treat medical conditions or they don’t: the signs of success or failure are there for anyone to see. You know you’re a doctor because you cure diseases. There’s nothing to match that in the world of academia. In theory, you could know you’re a professor because students learn what you teach them, but student learning is almost impossible to verify – to say nothing of establishing a causal relationship between someone’s learning something and your having taught it. The substitute criterion that many professors pursue is professional reputation, which is as much as to concede that you’re only a professor to the extent that other people think you are. It’s easy to see how impostor syndrome could run rampant in that kind of work environment.

Impostor syndrome is, as I said, just the feeling that you’re not what you claim (or are claimed?) to be. The name for the feeling is an odd one that captures something of a paradox. Impostor means one who imposes, scil. a deceit of some kind. As an agent noun, it implies a voluntary deception; but impostor syndrome is usually taken to designate a feeling of involuntary inadequacy. That highlights a dimension of the disease that most analyses ignore. The easy solution to the feelings of discomfort resulting from impostor syndrome would simply be to quit your job; when people don’t do this (and most people don’t), that’s when they can charge themselves with the voluntary deception that qualifies them as impostors.

Why can’t we quit jobs for which we feel unqualified? That’s the real question impostor syndrome poses: beyond sad affect, a paralysis of action. One possibility, to follow Lacan’s analysis of anxiety as object loss, is that we find ourselves paralyzed by an awareness that, if by quitting our jobs we move away from the ego ideal that we desire, we’ll just end up finding that fantasy object desirable again. On some level, we’re aware that quitting would be a step backward, another move in an endless game of fort-da that leaves us perpetually unsatisfied either because we want what we don’t have or because, having it, we realize it doesn’t exist.

Though impono can mean “deceive” as early as Cicero, its agent noun, impostor, enters the Latin Language relatively late. The first recorded usage, by Sextus Pomponius as cited in the Digest (21.1.4.2), dates no earlier than 100 CE. The word gained a certain amount of currency among Christian writers (eg. Jerome and Paulinus) at a time when, precisely, it was becoming possible to have the experience of doubting whether you really were a Christian as you claimed. The persecutions had passed, and with them the identity-defining experience of martyrdom. In Africa, the Donatist schism sustained a feeling of certainty that was perhaps fading elsewhere in the Roman World. If there was nothing at stake in declaring yourself a Christian – if you were never going to be called upon to prove it at the cost of your life – how then could you be sure that you weren’t doing so by way of imposture?

Is being a professor like this? In some measure, yes: we’ve become so marginal to modern culture that even our most strenuous political provocations meet with shrugs. On the other hand, there are still avenues of political protest – in particular, anything to do with Israel – that can land you in hot water. Is speaking freely on those topics the way to prove that you really are the professor, like everyone says? Or is that just a manner of passage a l’acte, what Lacan would characterize as an attempt to cut the Gordian knot of anxiety without any hope of success?