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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?

St. Benedict was neither the first nor the last to demonstrate the power of magical thinking over the food we eat. Benedict lived in a period (to take Gregory’s word for it) when worry over the sanctity of food was all-pervasive, and he responded to that worry (given opportunities and obligations afforded by his cultural position) in an appropriate, not to say entrepreneurial fashion.

Such concerns might seem to have faded into the background over the intervening 1500 years. This, as I argued, is one major source of the comic effect of Gregory’s Dialogues, written for an audience that believed in demon-haunted lettuce but now read by an audience that does not. On the other hand, it’s no original observation to note that cult-like concerns about purity have become a major factor in food marketing and production over the last few decades. Lettuce may not hide demons anymore, but it certainly can carry artificial genes, pesticides, and E. coli.

I would like to leave aside the question of whether these entities are “realer” than demons. We believe in them for reasons that are as good, or bad, as the ones that led Gregory’s readers to believe in the devil. None of us will ever see genes, pesticide traces, or bacteria with our unaided eyes. We know them in two ways – through their effects, and through the explanatory accounts experts give of those effects – that are strictly parallel to the kind of knowledge that Gregory’s contemporaries had about demons. A modern doctor would probably explain the symptoms shown by the nun who ate the demon-infested lettuce as resulting from food-borne disease; without more, both explanations are equally ad hoc.

By those criteria, though, we can still make distinctions. Food-borne bacteria are associated with regular, dramatic and dangerous consequences; the task of forestalling these falls in most countries to a government agency that regulates the food supply for cleanliness. That makes them a very real entity indeed, by modern standards. The best ancient parallel for these would be, not demons, but heretics and pagans whom the Christians took to be demon-worshippers and who, by the mid-5th century CE, faced capital punishment for carrying on with religious practices that government officials believed posed a clear and present public danger.

Then and now, state regulation delimits a zone of social entrepreneurship. In the 6th century, you could no longer position yourself as a saint by wrestling with schismatics and heretics (as St. Augustine might be said to have done at an earlier date), but you could still show your sanctity by fighting the demons themselves. Likewise, no grocery store makes a special point of advertising E. coli-free produce. The real money is to be made by protecting customers from entities that the government isn’t even sure exist.

Pesticide traces and GMO have human health effects that are only observable statistically across populations, if at all. Yet we’ve been taught to experience them as though they affected us personally and made a perceptible difference to our feelings of wellness. Grocery stores, restaurants and food marketers deploy these properly spiritual entities, much as Gregory did with his demons, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of a certain kind of sanctity. Gregory’s saints, athletes in a spiritual domain, are more powerful than the demons that (via food) oppress their flock, and which they can expel. Whole Foods, e.g., intervenes in an economic domain which has become almost as mysterious to those of us who consume at its margins. It wants us to believe that it’s more powerful than (and can protect us from) entities like pesticide and GMO (or, to preserve the ruse of human agency, the economic interests that produce such entities). Our faith in this notional power and glory is the only thing standing between Whole Foods and bankruptcy.

As with every comparison, the differences are what illuminates. There’s a major distinction between St. Benedict and Whole Foods that I think it makes sense to call theological. For Benedict, as for the Orthodox Christian tradition in general, God makes food and the devil pollutes it; the entities that make our food dangerous are different from the ones who produce it in the first place. With Whole Foods, the situation is different: the entities that cause our food to be dangerous, by taking advantage of pesticides or GM crops, are identical with the entities that produce it. It’s as though the saints are fighting against God himself.

If I were going in for claims about human nature, I’d say this new theology shows us embracing a harsh truth we’ve always suspected, that the food we eat, at the same time that it keeps us alive, is also killing us. Metabolically, thermodynamically, that’s accurate: eating throws the human machine into chaos, busting up our DNA blueprints with oxygen radicals and other disruptive species. The perfect man would be one who didn’t eat, but, outside of legend, that man would also be dead. So much for human nature.

A more modest and plausible interpretation is that, unlike Gregory with his deus absconditus, we know who has mastery over the natural world, and we know that they don’t have our best interests at heart. Chemically-supplemented agriculture has transformed the face of the earth even as it transforms our habits of consumption. The people who profit from this want to profit from this, not keep us alive and healthy. We suspect that the worst we suspect of them is actually a little better than the truth. Given which, who wouldn’t want to believe in a form of economic sanctity that can protect us from the demons who make our food?

In the Dialogues, food-borne contamination is always reversible: if you eat a demon, St. Benedict can exorcise it. The threshold between outside and inside is well-defined, and the saints can police it. We might not now be so lucky. Our bodies, permeated from birth by synthetic chemistry, might also be understood as objects of cultivation; we have no “pure” inside to protect from external pollution. What Whole Foods and its ilk are most of all selling is the delusion that we do.

A lot of miracles aren’t too good. On the bottom tier are a couple by St. Benedict, the founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino and notional author of the famous rule of St. Benedict. Gregory the Great gives us our fullest account of Benedict’s life in his Dialogues, a collection of edifying stories that also illuminates the (otherwise rather obscure) social life of ordinary Italians during the period of Ostrogothic rule. Actually, Benedict is supposed to have come face-to-face with the last of the Ostrogothic kings, Totila, respecting whom many of th Western sources are outstandingly hostile. The Dialogues show him in a comparatively favorable light. At first given over to cruelty and sin, he mends his ways after receiving a prophecy from Benedict about the course of the rest of his reign: “Et quidem Romam ingressurus es, mare transiturus, novem annis regnas, decimo morieris.” Benedict just about nails it, though we may recognize “mare transiturus” as a typically Delphic amphibole. Will Totila go over the ocean to conquer his enemies or (as it turns out) while fleeing from them?

That’s a pretty good miracle. Others that Gregory introduces into his life of St. Benedict under the same rubric (Benedict’s spirit of prophecy) are less impressive. For example, Benedict can tell when someone who’s come to share a meal with him has already eaten. A monk on an errand encounters the devil (he was everywhere in Italy back then), who offers him food. Since the monk is fasting, he refuses; as the day and the journey stretch on, however, his hunger gets the best of him and he relents before his travelling companion’s repeated entreaties to eat. Back at the monastery, Benedict catches him out: “malignus hostis qui tibi per conviatorem tuum locutus est, semel tibi persuadere non potuit, secundo non potuit, ad tertium persuasit, et te ad hoc quod voluit superavit?” The monk blushes and begs forgiveness: “se cognivit etiam absentem in Benedicti patris oculis deliquisse.”

Why include this astonishingly trivial incident (and a few others like it) in Benedict’s catalogue of miracles? It may be a matter of furnishing enough examples to show posterity that Benedict did indeed possess the gift of prophecy, but I suspect that the matter at hand would not have appeared quite so trivial to Gregory’s contemporaries as it does to us. A full survey of the miracles included in the Dialogues in fact suggests that issues of food, drink and their consumption loomed large in its author’s mind. This can produce a humorous effect, as in an incident (also discussed by Erich Auerbach in Literary Language and its Public) involving a young nun who becomes possessed after eating a lettuce leaf over which she has forgotten to make the sign of the cross. Again, I suspect that the humor here is an effect of anachronism; Gregory’s contemporaries would probably have taken the threat of unhallowed lettuce leaves rather seriously.

Part of the reason for this is probably economic. The Italy Gregory describes is an austere one, shocked by scarcity after centuries of being supplied from the whole Roman Empire. Also on the bottom tier of Benedict’s miracles are a series of magical extractions from a lake: among other things, he pulls out an iron pruning-hook that has been lost there by a stupid (“poor in spirit”) Goth. A century earlier, replacing that pruning-hook would have been a simple matter; during Benedict’s lifetime, perhaps the only remaining source of iron available to Italy was the nearly-exhausted mines on Elba. Many are the saints in the Dialogues who prove their merit by miraculously extending scanty supplies of oil or wine during famine years, thus satisfying at once the hunger of their fellow monks and the skepticism of these latter about whether god will really provide.

The double-function of those famine miracles highlights another dimension of the nexus between eating and holiness. If scarcity raises food to a level of dignity and importance that we have a hard time understanding, then food also becomes a fruitful field for demonstrating something which is, it seems to me, the chief aim of the Dialogues to prove: the usefulness of sanctity. Gregory’s saints are positioned as indispensible intermediaries between the natural world and human bodies: to attempt to do without them is to open a gateway for sin. They process the food their flock eats in order to remove the taint of the devil from it. Vice-versa, laymen can re-introduce sin into consecrated food by misappropriating it: thus the many stories Gregory tells of snakes found in wine-barrels that have been stolen or embezzled.

Thus also the importance of saintly surveillance like that provided by Benedict. Best would be to establish complete control over the eating and drinking habits of his subordinate monks; next best is to know when they’ve transgressed the rule, so that the damage may be controlled and undone. Against this background, Benedict’s ability to know when someone has eaten outside the monastery looks less trivial. Actually, it’s a backstop that guarantee the efficacy of what is, for Gregory, perhaps the most important function of the saints.

By his own testimony, Richard Burton was the first European to visit Harar. I think it’s unlikely that no one whom we might call “European” by modern standards had visited Harar prior to 1850, but it’s at least possible that Burton was the first such a one in a while. Abutting (and later, some decades after Burton’s visit, incorporated into) the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, Harar’s Islamic religious identity had long connected it to a Red Sea trading network of which it was the privileged inland entrepot. Islamic traders in Africa were generally chary of European competition, especially as (during the 19th century and earlier) this had tended to draw European military intervention in its train. Actually, Burton’s own expedition had only become possible thanks to the recent British conquest of Harar’s seaboard trading partners in Somalia and Yemen – this notionally in the service of the India trade, but producing a colony that was to last until after World War II.

Burton approached Harar via Zeyla, a port with a millennium-long history of its own that was situated on the North coast of Somalia within the ambit of the British maritime empire there. This was a much-traveled route, and Burton would have had an easy time of it if he had made more local contacts or acquired in advance any familiarity with the complex linguistic landscape of Eastern Ethiopia. The are dozens of languages spoken there, belonging to three or four different language families, present a challenge to travellers and nation-states but a rich field of research for linguists. Within this field, Harari is something of an oddity – both for socio-linguistic reasons and otherwise. The language is strongly identified with the city of Harar itself and its inhabitants; these used to consider their knowledge of Harari an aspect of their identity that separated them from the surrounding countryfolk who came to the city to trade.

This state of affairs held in the 1950’s, when the Polish-American Linguist Wolf Leslau was gathering the data that would inform his ethnographic volume on Harar. Now, most Harari-speakers are bilingual in Amharic. This development is probably in consequence of the fact that government business at Harar has for some time been conducted in Amharic, by Christian Ethiopians born well away from the city; they have always formed the interface between Harar and the nation, even though Harari is also one of Ethiopia’s national languages.

Leslau’s informants describe a society in the midst of epochal changes. The nation enforces its laws, so young men no longer fight one another with sticks as they did in earlier decades. The linguistic and ethnic diversity of the community grows, though the landowners still have local genealogies that run back generations (A local saying: “Somalis are distinguished by good manners, Amhara by craft skill; the Harari is distinguished by his noble genealogy.”) Even these are still dealing with the destruction wrought by the Italian colonists who occupied Harar between 1937 and 1941.

Harar becomes globalized in these ways and others. For instance (even though Leslau’s informants report that the younger generation is less pious than their elders), the tunsus or pre-wedding party that had been so characteristic of social life in Harar at earlier periods has now ceased to be celebrated on account of religious rigorism. Harari Islam, an idiosyncratic brew like many “local Islams” before the 20th century, is being found wanting by comparison with the absolutisms of a world religion.

The tunsus had been not only a ritual but also a literary occasion, one at which teenage men would sing the praises of a girl who had seated herself on a kind of a throne (the amir nadaba, one of the permanently-placed chairs characteristic of Harari homes.) From Leslau’s informants’ reports, laced with fragments of poetry obviously known by heart, you can tell that the Harar they knew had a song culture that thrived orally – but not only orally. One of them also mentions a written collection of songs, listed among the monuments of Harari literature alongside several works translated from Arabic. To the best of my knowledge, this collection of songs has never been translated out of Harari (or perhaps even published at all.) Has the manuscript been lost? Or has it survived, a fragment of Harar that remains invisible to imperial eyes?

A late Christmas post, stuck on the Julian calendar etc.

Envy is a problem for left politics, and not just because someone on the WSJ editorial page or whatever thinks that it’s the only possible motive for a redistributive policy platform.  The intellectual debate about this in a sense doesn’t matter, because a lot of people who ought to be a natural constituency for socialism now instinctively feel that it’s a politics of envy.  Since envy is per se a confession of inferiority, and since these people are as obsessed with honor as any medieval viscount, there’s an almost insurmountable psychological barrier between them and a politics that would improve their lives.

Is that because the idea’s been drummed into their heads for so long it seems natural?  Or because their own politics is entirely invidious?  The truth is probably somewhere in between: they believe it when they hear that envy is what drives calls for redistribution because it makes sense to them to think of political objectives in that way.

Whatever the particular bases of this delusion, it’s widespread enough to cause real problems for a left politics that also wants to be a mass politics.  And certainly also it might, in some cases, turn out to be true.  This is something we need to worry about subjectively, too: how can we hate the rich (as is absolutely proper) without involving, as fantastmatic supports for our hatred, the objects that the rich own and notionally enjoy (which means envying the rich and thus positioning ourselves as losers in advance)?

On the level of political, the answer is clear.  We’re interested in changing systems: the things those systems misdistribute, and which need to get redistributed in order to change the system, are only secondary.  Psychologically, though, that answer doesn’t satisfy.  Anger makes revolutions, and no one’s ever been angry at a system, not really.

For us as subjects to steer clear of envy means getting into the old-fashioned (and unfashionable) field of ethics.  Ethics, as Aristotle recognized, isn’t always about wanting the right thing.  Good and bad people alike, for instance, want to be healthy and wealthy, so that fact that you want health or wealth says nothing about your character.  What’s important is rather the way (or the why) in which you desire: what do you want health or wealth for, with what fantasmatic image in mind do you desire them?  Only the good is an end in itself; everything else falls under this pros ti modulation.  It would be possible, then, to desire a state of affairs in which the goods of the rich had been redistributed under a number of different descriptions.  One could desire it as a way of injuring the rich and stealing their happiness – the invidious position.  Or one could desire it as forming part of or a stepping stone on the way to “the good,” whatever that is.

In Aristotle, the distinction between those two descriptions blurs a little because of the identity he sets between pleasure and happiness.  The pleasure one receives from bringing down others may be a real component of happiness: the good may contain envy, provided that that envy is (successfully) acted-upon.  Lacan usefully supplements this argument by suggesting that envy can never be successfully acted-upon: the pleasure we think we’re stealing from someone else, the enjoyment we think they have, turns out to be no such thing once we get our hands on it.

For Lacan, the question is a broader one of goods versus The Good.  Particular goods exist in a field of hostile neighborliness, of mimetic desire in which we covet what our neighbor has because our desiring it proves that we, too, are people.  The alternative is to desire straightforwardly The Good, which is the “thing” that would actually give us jouissance.  On Lacan’s analysis, however, we can’t actually desire The Good (because the “thing” is that which, for us, escapes symbolization) and, if we did manage to find it, the experience of real jouissance would probably destroy us anyway.  So we’re thrown back into envy as the only possible form of ethics.

What we can do – perhaps the only escape from this Lacanian conundrum – is try to guess at the true desire of the other and enjoy at second-hand the jouissance that constitutes The Good.  We do this all the time in two fields – sex and gift-giving, Merry Christmas – which are the major ethical occasions of modern American life outside of politics.  Not coincidentally, these are also relations in which envy has no authentic place.

In both situations, we occupy the position of the “wild analyst” whose aim is to make the patient enjoy by any means necessary.  Sometimes this means (on our part) cruelty or even sadism.  But what we want, for sure, is not any good in particular; we want The Good, if not for ourselves then of one of the infitine alter egos out of which a polity gets made.  Could a polity actually survive the achievement of that aim?  If not, then polity itself has to be understood as a fantasmatic support that keeps us (invidiously) chasing after goods rather than achieving The Good.  Probably, the state needs to wither away.

The point of my saying all this is to suggest that an envy-free and appropriately socialist hatred of the rich would also be a kind of love, one that aimed at obliterating the obstacles – their possessions – that block the rich and the rest of us from our jouissance.  For the left, the best really is the enemy of the good.

 

 

“Ras Momi is a dangerous place. The current runs very strong by the end of the island and all passing ships, sailing by from Suez to India, are warned to give the island a wide berth. The combination of wind and current can drag a ship onto the rocky coast. In addition, this part of the island is invariably covered in cloud and mist, and there are dangerous hidden rocks, extending seaward from the Cape. Many ships have struck these rocks and sunk with loss of life.  Two of the worst shipwrecks occured at the end of the last century.

“In 1887 the North German Lloyd liner Oder struck Ras Momi in the middle of the night. There was a tiger on board being carried to the Berlin Zoo, and when the survivors of the wreck were rescued the tiger was released from its cage. Arabs on the land, waiting to loot the ship, watched the tiger for over a week pacing up and down the deserted deck, becoming thinner and thinner, and howling. When the looters eventually came on board they found the tiger a neat pile of skin and bones on the deck. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the tiger had been allowed to reach land.”

In my last discussion of Lucian’s Alexander, I characterized it as an early instance of a journalistic genre that’s now common enough: the longform treatment/exposure of a con job.  People write those articles now for polemic reasons, but mostly because there’s money in it.  Nothing makes us feel smarter than seeing a fraud laid bare, and that’s a feeling we’ll pay for.  The journalist’s job is to give us that feeling by telling us about all the dopes that fell for a scam which we, thanks to inside information that the journalist herself has helpfully provided, recognize at once for what it is.

We would like to believe we’re that smart.  The journalist’s perspective is kind of a prosthetic in this regard, and not only because it gives us the information that keeps us from being fooled.  It also provides an apparently objective judgment that the thing in question really is a con, which is a level of certainty we practically never get in daily life, where so many of our friends, acquaintances and coworkers might well be defrauding us in ways we’d never pick up on (or probably acknowledge if someone else dumped the evidence in our laps).  That’s the condition of modern capitalism, Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees brought to life: cheat thy neighbor shall be the whole of the law.  Journalistic exposures of con men are at least a symptomatic cure for the thoroughgoing paranoia generated by this state of affairs.

For all these reasons, the work of bringing scams to light strikes us as a far more titillating quest after truth than, say, research into the proper taxonomy of earthworms.  The truth about long cons is an operative truth: unlike the earthworm family tree, it makes us happier in all sorts of ways.  It provides a direct and immediate ego satisfaction.

It occured to me that this couldn’t be the explanation for what Lucian does in Alexander and also in De morte Peregrini.  For one thing, the genre just wasn’t a popular one in the ancient world.  Where texts reveal the truth about a con, they almost always do so as part of a larger religious polemic; the uncloaking isn’t its own goal, as in Lucian’s work and in its modern successors.  For another thing, what it meant to be “intelligent” in the Roman Empire was also a little different from what it means to be “intelligent” nowadays.  To be smart meant to know a lot of stuff, much of it marvelous and possibly untrue; that one should have a critical sense about these things always seems to have been a minority position.  Finally, people were worried about getting swindled, but not so pervasively as nowadays.  Back then, at least, if someone got caught running a scam they’d be punished – not held up as a model capitalist, and certainly not elected president.

This is why, at the beginning of the Alexander, Lucian does something that modern journalists almost never do: he apologizes for the sordid character of his subject matter.  “αἰδοῦμαι μὲν οὖν ὑπὲρ ἀμφοῖν,” he says: I’m ashamed of you, Celsus, for asking me to write about this fellow, and of myself, Lucian, for taking your request seriously.  Alexander doesn’t so much deserve to be the subject of a learned disquisition as to be torn to pieces in the amphitheatre by apes and foxes.

Yet Alexander attains to a certain majesty of evil just insofar as he’s managed to infest the whole world, not just Asia Minor, with his thefts and his piracies.  In this respect, he resembles his famous namesake, Alexander the Great, who conquered the world using more straightforward means some 500 years earlier.  Alexander of Abonouteichos merits remembrance as the kind of world-conqueror that it’s possible for a Greek to be under the domination of Rome – as a Greek virus that returns to infect the space of the Empire.

That’s one way of justifying Lucian’s interest in this so discreditable figure.  Another, also pursued by Lucian, is to treat Alexander as a monument of shit, an Augean Stables from which Lucian, being no Heracles himself, can only bring out a bucket or two of dung.  That’s an early invention of what you might call the sleazy sublime.  Alexander doesn’t really need Lucian’s help to be remembered: he’s already a monumental structure on the Greek cultural landscape.  Lucian’s interest is only in showing what’s inside.

To be aware of the nature of Lucian’s interest in this project should also, of course, be to read the essay differently.  Would we, for instance, have noticed otherwise that Lucian even talks up Alexander’s capacities above our own?  What else is the enargeic staging of the snake-god Glykon’s debut (Alexander 15-17) but an account of how we ourselves would probably have been fooled if we’d been exposed to Alexander’s magic without Lucian’s mediation?  Even an Epicurus or a Democritus, Lucian coyly concludes, would probably not have been able to see through the scam if he had been standing in the place of Alexander’s Paphlagonian audience.

From this point of view, Lucian is not so much interested in exposing the truth as he is in demonstrating the power of the lie.  That the essay still ends up reflecting poorly on Alexander is owing to another set of Lucianic interests entirely, which I’ll discuss in my next post.