Three basic principles underlie the post-modernistic critique of literary interpretation (and, by extension, other social sciences).

First Principle

The first is that one should have no compunctions about taking a philosophical approach.  There is no point simply in juxtaposing one text against another.  This does not however invalidate the need for, or the utility of, an attempt at deep analysis beyond the text’s workable surface.  “[T]he most powerful and apposite readings of literary works may be those that treat them as philosophical gestures by teasing out the implications of their dealings with the philosophical oppositions that support them” (Culler, 1982, p. 149).

Second Principle

The second is that the structuralist tradition gives short shrift to other alternative accounts, which simply are different, or potentially even more explanatory.  An unequivocal interpretation of a text is a “privileged reading” that simply “suits our purposes” whereas “to be authentic in (our) postmodern condition” is “to admit the indistinguishable fictionality of all interpretive models” (Waugh, 2001, p. 304).

Paul Ricoeur (1970) originated this critique of structural discourse.  Any attempt to discern the meaning of a text hypothesizes a gap between its “real” meaning and its “apparent” meaning.  Consequently one believes the text “presents us with a challenge to believe that [its] true meaning … emerges only through interpretation” (Stewart, 1989, p. 296).  We become “suspicious” of the text.  What is required in order to alleviate this “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a radical critique of the very possibility of understanding and interpreting the text, to begin with (Gadamer, 1984, p. 73).

Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Heidegger all engaged in this style of analysis.  It leads, however, to another problem, which is that each of them perpetuated singular world-views, inconsistent with the others.  This argument now primarily is associated with Jacques Derrida (1967) and deconstructionism.  For example, Homer schematized persons into “heroes” and everybody else.  Dante’s paradigm was sinners versus saints.  Western philosophy is based on the concept that individuals are “rational,” which entails its opposite; and the Judeo-Christian tradition’s views of all of us as creatures of God.  “All these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle” (Waugh, 2001, p. 354).  None is transferable or for that matter even intelligible to any of the others.  Rather than “adding up” to a composite whole, they “cancel each other out.”  Derrida characterizes this as a “demand for narrative.”  However, “No one inflection enjoys any absolute privilege, no meaning can be fixed or decided upon.  No border is guaranteed, inside or out,” (1979, p. 87, p. 78). (1)

Derrida’s theme has been echoed in the works of philosophers in the British-American academic community such as Richard Rorty (1981).  Says Rorty, both contemporary analytic (e.g., Wittgenstein) and continental philosophy (e.g., Heidegger) offer “parallel deconstructions of philosophy’s traditional claim to privilege, to be the discipline that adjudicates the claims to knowledge advanced by the others.”  There is “no such foundation to knowledge.  Each discipline offers its own way of knowing, and philosophy should not place itself in a position of privilege vis-à-vis these ways of knowing” (Dasenbrock, 1989, p. 9).

In the social sciences, Max Weber averred that nature is blank – a tabula rosa, with universal and unconditionally valid laws. (2)  We then in turn impose culture onto it and culture recursively makes us the types of beings we are.  To continue with the above example, there really were heroes for Homer and there really were sinners for Dante.  The Greeks had heroes (instead of saints) with their respective attributes because that’s what challenged them as they existed in their spatio-temporal environment.  Someone like Odysseus is both a cultural precipitate and a cultural catalyst.  Homer’s template has no inherent or atemporal meaning.  It pertained, to the extent it did, only to the culture he described.  Different cultural perspectives best are regarded as typological categorizations or ways of parsing nature.

As expressed by the Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus:

The Greeks … lived in a moral space that gave direction and meaning to their lives.  In the same way, the Medieval cathedral made it possible to be sinner or a saint and showed Christians the dimensions of salvation and damnation.  In either case, one knew where one stood and what one had to do. … For the Greeks, what showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians, saints and sinners, rewards and temptations.  There could not have been saints in Ancient Greece.  At best there could only have been weak people who let everybody walk all over them.  Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages.  Such people would have been regarded as pagans – prideful sinners who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God.

(Dreyfus, 2008).

Structuralist interpretations, on the other hand, strive to an inherent meaning from the text.  The resulting synchronic paradigm comes at the expense of any plurality of interpretations.  There always is something contradictory about mapping the open and unfolding processes of narrative on to static or circulating structures.  Structuralist analysis of narrative are “like trying to account for a game of solitaire by demonstrating that the pack was organized into four suits of thirteen different values”  (Connor, 2004, p. 64).  Most structuralists prefer their own interpretations, but even as they do, their bias must be based on the prospect that many other interpretations are possible – a possibility they dismiss.

Third Principle

A third problem is that of the author’s “intent,” to the extent it is possible even to hypothesize such a state of mind.  Most structuralist readings depend on extra-textual evidence and biographical facts about the author’s life.  They frequently however do not support the proffered interpretation, or beleaguers it even further because they are inconsistent with the text itself.  Under Derrida’s view the author cannot control the meaning of the text, since it functions autonomously from authorial intention.  A text can have multiple meanings, one of which might be intended, but none of which uniquely are compelled.

Dreyfus’ colleague at Berkeley, John Searle, addressed this issue in the context of his theory of intention.  In his influential debate with Derrida, Searle (1994) says there are two ways to interpret a text: one based on “literal sentence meaning” and another based on “speaker meaning.”  Under the former, “the meaning of the text consists in the meanings of the words and sentences of which it consists.”  The latter is “what the writer intends to mean” (within the confines of the language and background assumptions of which the text is a narrative).  In this second sense one must “insist on understanding the author’s intentions in understanding the text” (p. 652).

Searle invites us to consider a hypothetical case where one comes across a series of marks on a beach somehow comprising the words to a verse of Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”  “[T]hese marks certainly look as if they constituted a sentence composed of English words,” but it isn’t necessary for them to have been produced intentionally (p. 649), unless they were.  “[D]ifferent tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions” (p. 658), some of which might be opaque (as with this particular example).  These different approaches are not necessarily incompatible.  They are not “competing answers to the same question, but noncompeting answers to quite different questions” (p. 655).

Searle can be read as supporting a structuralist program.  If the meaning of a text can be derived from its words and sentences then it may cohere into a single, intra-textual perspective (subject to Derrida’s critique).  One also can appeal to the author’s overt statements and background for evidence as to what he or she meant.  Even on this second definition, though, most structuralist readings fall short simply because the lives of authors have numerous internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

An Example – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

To illustrate these principles further I will consider Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  One way to read Moby Dick is as a critique of monotheism or onto-theology (that is, the idea that the being of specific entities can be explained in terms of other specific entities, such as a god).  “Theology” (θεολογία) is discourse about god or gods – religion, conventionally understood.  Onto-theology defines a god as the originator of being.  In the Judeo-Christian Tradition the God of Abraham and Moses produced or caused everything that is.  Taking a post-modernist view, however, referring to God simply is “telling a story” – tracing one form of entity (us) back to its origin with some other entity (God).

From the post-modern standpoint this conceptual misunderstanding has pervasively infiltrated the Judeo-Christian literary and narrative tradition and its metaphysics (Heidegger, 1955).  Classically, metaphysics (also a Greek word) is the study of “being as such,” the “first causes of things” or “things that do not change” (Ingwagen, 2007).  It “establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is” (Thomson, 2000, p. 297).  Each culture has its own metaphysics.  By “codifying and disseminating an understanding of what entities are, metaphysics provides each historical ‘epoch’ of intelligibility with its ontological bedrock.  And by furnishing an account of the ultimate source from which entities issue, metaphysics supplies intelligibility with a kind of foundational justification that … Heidegger characterizes as ‘theological.’”  Theology “reflects a series of historical transformations in our metaphysical understanding of entities are” (Thomson, 2005, p. 8).

The development and progression of Western metaphysics (since the ancient Greeks and the archaic Israelites) has resulted in a proliferation of distinctions such as “reality versus appearance” and “the rational versus the irrational,” all of which Heidegger rejects.  It is a short step from Heidegger’s definition of onto-theology to include monotheism in the sense of Abrahamic religions (primarily Judaism and Christianity, but also – never mentioned by Heidegger – Islam) (Westphal, 2001, p. 9 – 16; Crowe, 2007, p. 187). (3)

Under this polytheistic interpretation, Melville is against onto-theology.  The primary evidence of this tendency is Ahab’s folly of attributing cognition to an insensate beast.  To set forth several more: there is no single “right” perspective to describe the whale – its image can’t be depicted while it is in its natural habitat (the ocean) and it loses its shape on land (Chapter 55, Chapter 56).  Science doesn’t understand it and is unable to explain its migratory patterns, social behavior or even physiology (Chapter 79).  It moves its tail unpredictably in myriad different directions (Chapter 86).  It is covered with hieroglyphic scars (so for that matter is Queequeg).  It is white – the absence of color (Chapter 42).  Its spout can’t be distinguished against the backdrop of sea and sky (Chapter 85).  The sound it makes when spouting is a kind of white noise.  The whale skeleton of the Bower in the Arsacides (Chapter 102) is both a cathedral and a prison.  The trees surrounding it rustle like a weaver’s loom, the sound of which also is white noise.  We are immersed in it and deafened by it as it obscures the meaning of individual discourse, just like we are blinded by the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42).

Contrasted with the whale’s relentless monochromaticity are various other phenomena suggesting the plentitude of nature.  To cite several examples: Pip hopefully spots a swarm of “multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.  He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (Chapter 93).  When Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast (Chapter 99), each of the sailors has a different perception of its nature as a talisman.  Even the whale’s spout acts as a prism, breaking white light into the colors of the spectrum.  The colors of this rainbow invite a plethora of different explanations.  The Bower of the Arsacides is a colorful carpet, woven by God.  A “weaver God” who “reveals the rainbow” facilitates this polyglot understanding.  By focusing intently on one objective – Moby Dick – Ahab loses visibility of everything else.  The whale is white only for those who want for it to have a settled meaning, which it doesn’t have.  These reference points are evidence of Melville’s endorsement of an essentially polytheistic perspective. (4)

We know as a matter of his biography however that Melville was “nurtured in orthodox Calvinism by his Dutch Reformed mother and minister; yet by the time he wrote Moby Dick, he had not only lived among cannibals and whalemen but had ‘swam through libraries’” (McIntosh, 1986, p. 23).  His interest was not so much to “attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas,” such as polytheism.  Rather, “his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life” (Herbert, 1986, p. 113). (5)  His “revolutionary impact upon the novel form does not derive from Christianity’s absence – a formal experimentalism released from the grip of conventions that have their roots in a defeated Protestant orthodoxy – but precisely from its continued presence” (Franchot, 1998, p. 157) (emphasis added).

Such a program hardly can be interpreted as anti-onto-theological.  “Melville’s quarrel with authority was a complex affair, and to strip his profoundly symbolic writings down to theological allegories … is reductive” (Bezanson, 1953, p. 268).  He rejects the “simplifications, reductions and isolations” of dualisms such as monotheism versus polytheism.  In its place he substitutes a “language of wonder” that preserves a “fascination with the particulars of the natural world” while simultaneously embracing and critiquing our assumptions about it (Luck, 2007, p. 5).  This enables us to see outside of our “traditional ways of thinking about religion and spirituality” (Coffler, 2006, p. 112).  In addition to encountering the “realm of the transcendent,” Melville also wanted to “dramatize [both the] parallel failures of human striving (Ahab) and knowing (Ishamel)” (Buell, 1986, p. 61) (emphasis added).

The ideal culture Melville envisions is one that permits these different perspectives to cohabitate, or in which they become entirely irrelevant.  Melville is not an “individualist” or “personality driven.”  Nor is he some kind of a latter-day ecologist, concerned only with man’s depredations against nature. (6)  He is far more concerned with achieving a balance between purposeful human action and the world that constrains it – including not only nature, but also human culture, history and conventions.

Culture is produced by human social interactions such as the squeezing of the hands (Chapter 94).  On such occasions we attune ourselves to social practices and become sensitized to the corresponding intuitions they evoke.  They are created, manifest themselves, and we are aware of them (to the extent we are) only within the space of this “clearing.”  They are a precipitate of dwelling, standing against the homelessness of wandering and an individualistic stance towards the world. (7)

Although not referring to Melville, two modern social theorists have expressed this idea with particular clarity: Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor.  In his essay “Civil Religion in America” (1967, p. 175), Bellah elaborated on Rousseau’s definition of “civil religion,” redefining it as “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity.”  It is “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.”

According to Taylor (1989, p. 512), “We are now in an age in which a publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings is an impossibility.” (8)  As a result, we have “tended to displace in importance the sense of belonging to large scale collective agencies” (Taylor, 2007, p. 484).  This is contrary to our nature, because “to make the demand for meaning is not an optional stance.  It is central to our humanity” (p. 584), and cultural institutions are an “indispensable matrix of civilizational order” (p. 491).  Any contemporary definition of self “requires answers totally dependent on cultural or moral contexts, frameworks, or orientation – human categories of personal and social action, of value” (Tauber, 2006).  This is appropriate because (man) is “a self-interpreting animal.  He is necessarily so, for there is no such thing as the structure of meanings for him independently of his interpretation of them; one is woven into the other” (Taylor, 1987, p. 46). (9)

The outcomes envisioned by Bellah and Taylor do not imply an anti-onto-theological critique.  They do not iterate a rigid monotheism or an anti-onto-theological opposition to it.  As if anticipating Bellah and Taylor, Melville does not fault monotheism per se.  All religions “employ a controlling hierarchy; with narrow doctrines that restrain and control people’s choices and lives.”  But Moby Dick should not be read as depicting a “battle between good and evil with Ahab as the human hero trying to destroy the symbol of evil in the whale.”  Ahab may be a “madman who is convinced that he has the right and the power to pursue his personal goal as symbolized in Moby Dick, a mere creature in nature that has little or no interest in humans.”  But this isn’t Melville’s point.  What is wrong is any form of religion that structures the world “in such ways as to be available to empower an Ahab, who believes that he has the knowledge of good and evil and may act for the rest of his society, nation, or the world” (Elliott, 2005, pp. 190 – 191).  In juxtaposing Ahab against Moby Dick, Melville “forces the reader to contemplate the Absolute suddenly placed in what appears to be the ordinary contingencies of life, and then to consider the consequences” (Obenzinger, 2006, p. 181).  All of which illustrates Melville’s conception of a dynamic clearing situated beyond the categories of faith. (10)

Melville also suggests a resolution of the apparent impasse between monotheism (as embedded in the Judeo-Christian Tradition) and the more “authentic” understanding of being.  In this respect, while it is (trivially) true that “no single artist … can ever represent an entire culture,” there is a profound sense in which Melville is “truly representative of the kind of humanity that gives meaning to culture (Bryant, p. 4).  Moby Dick “conceives one last and greatest quest for a whole vision of a whole world” (Grenberg, 1989, p. 93).

Endnotes

(1) In fairness to Heidegger some commentators disagree with Derrida that Heidegger should be lumped into the same category as Marx and Freud.  Heidegger does more than simply “attempt to relinquish philosophical ties to the past.”  He calls for a “fundamental reinterpretation of them” thereby allowing for “reinterpretation at a revivified ontological level constantly in view of the question of being” (Mei, 2007).  Dreyfus (1991, p. 36) recognizes this dynamic in the structure of Being and Time (MacAvoy, 2001, p. 463; Russell, 2008, p. 97).

(2) Seen in this light a better interpretation of the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42) is not the absence of color or the embodiment of malevolence.  Our inability to classify it is symptomatic of our own ontological confusion (Werge, 1969, p. 96).  We are confused because of the ambiguity of the interface between man and nature.  “Melville’s careful disorderly reading of antiquity’s inscription of the whale attests to myth’s ambiguities.  His use of the whale in classical myths confirms the persistent permeability of myth’s borders and Melville’s celebration of that permeability.  The mythical whale-man and the recorder of tales remind us that myth grants us complexity and, in its variations, compounds the complexity of narrative’s desire.  The cumulated variations, the diversity of competing accounts of any myth, preserve and safeguard contradictions.  For Melville, myth-maker, selective reader, and purposeful natural historian, these variations extend a chase on ancient waters beyond a three-day pursuit of Moby Dick toward the ever-receding horizon and the morphing shape of the whale” (Djelal, 2006, p. 53).

(3) It would have been truer to the phenomena Heidegger described if he had not disapproved of monotheism per se.  He should be more interested in opposing the initial juxtaposition of experience into categories such as monotheism versus polytheism, to begin with.

(4) Although he does not mention him, Dreyfus’ account is a more sophisticated version of (and may have been inspired by) Thompson (1952).

(5) In this respect Melville may come close to realizing Derrida’s objective of “going beyond” philosophical interpretation.  Whenever one does so, one establishes a dichotomy, if only to distinguish between one’s own perspective and other less-preferable ones, and to explain why yours is better.  Derrida wanted to establish a vocabulary that is “intrinsically and self-evidently final, not merely the most comprehensive and fruitful vocabulary we have come up with so far.”

In doing so, of course, Derrida himself offered a theory.  Setting this criticism aside as more-or-less trivial (which it is), the move one has to make to get behind the bivalency of interpretation – to  “write about philosophy unphilosophically, get at it from the outside, be a postphilosophical thinker” – is far from clear.  It can’t be “pretending to say the same old thing while subversively putting a new spin on the old words.”

Derrida’s advice is to use “noninferential associations” (such as those suggested by literature) instead of “inferential connections” (such as those demanded by formal reasoning), a process he calls différance, which somehow avoids inter-explicable oppositional concepts.  It is not at all clear it is possible to make such a maneuver to effect such an outcome.  To the extent it is, Melville is within shouting distance of it, because he is not juxtaposing monotheism with polytheism.  Melville’s “quarrel” is not so much with God as with the conceptions of God in the two religious traditions (Herbert, 1977; Sherrill, 1978, p. 325).  Melville can be seen as creating a new discourse that attempts to overreach these distinctions.  Quotes are from Rorty, 1984, p. 5, p. 10, p. 13.

(6) “The interfusion of self and non-self, of metaphysics and earthly domains, resists eighteenth-century rationalism and positivism, which required that nature be objectified and placed at a distance so that it could by systematically studied. … The comprehension of nature as a mechanical system – although at first buttressing eighteenth-century deistic theology – ultimately removed God from the world” (Harvey, 2006, p. 72).

(7) This is not some kind of private mental universe.  Melville “discovered that the universe is an infinite sum of concepts, a universal conceptual brotherhood.”  He realized “that the actual and anonymous universe remains shielded and impervious to man exactly because this opaque net of concepts or masks, like an impenetrable wall, intervenes. … In its anguished effort to perceive the world, [our mind] constantly creates more and more names, weaving thus more and more ‘eyelets’ into that net, and making, thus, its prison even more stifling. … Every new concept the mind invents in order to create itself or to define its identity is also a new disguise of itself, a replacement or substitution of its own self, a new mask” (Christodoulou, 2001, p. 162).

(8) Taylor specifically invokes Odysseus: his homecoming “from the realm of the monstrous, the threatening, of the limit situation, to the joys of ordinary life with its rhythmed flow of time” is “one of the constitutive experiences of modernity” (p. 627).

(9) Dostoyevsky actually accomplished this synthesis in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).  “His religion is Orthodoxy because it is the religion of the Russian people” (Mirsky, 1949, p. 283) (emphasis in original).

(10) Heidegger’s concept of “clearing” also is a better way to understand the Bower of the Arsacides.  Its weaver god is does not suggest polytheism.  It is the integration of nature and human purpose.  Penelope also weaves the shroud of Laertes; her name incorporates the Greek word for “web” or “wool” (πήνη).  She cunningly unravels it each night to avoid remarriage to one of the suitors, just as she interprets the plot of Odysseus’ return.  Weaving is her counterpart to Odysseus’ wandering (though she is more successful in controlling the course of events) (Felson-Rubin, 1996, p. 166).

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Mr. Ulin’s criticism completely misses the point. It’s not so much that Bukowski “was” or “wasn’t” unique. Rather, he spoke in a voice that was tremendously evocative of LA as a place, not as an abstract concept, or even an abstract concept of place. More so than any of these other writers, he was responsible for the “De-Disney-ification” of Los Angeles experience. He substituted a real, gritty world for the fantasy world spoon-fed to us by pop culture and the mass media. It’s the antithesis of the American ideal, because it rejects any kind of juxtaposition between alternatives (i.e., this is good, that is bad). Rather, for Bukowski, the whole menu of alternatives is screwed up to begin with. Instead of choosing between unpalatable options, he simply opts out.

There is no evidence Bukowski ever read Derrida, or for that matter even heard of him, Bukowski, however, took deconstructionism to its lowest-to-the-ground, most-fully-parsed, most atomic level. In an effort to eliminate pretense and artifice from his writing, he arrived at a style that disassembled the world into its simplest, most granular elements. The key to his success was that he had no agenda, no theory to advocate, no aesthetic or point of view. He simply didn’t care. As a result, he was open to experience, and open to whatever happened, in its most unstructured, disaggregated, decompiled form.

In this respect, he was way beyond the beats, with whom he sometimes is compared. The beats stood in antithesis to 1940’s literary formalism. Whereas, Bukowski stands for nothing, not even in opposition to something, or anything. His work simply hits the pavement hard, flopping this way and that, like how a fisherman hits a salmon on its head to facilitate its already-suffocating death.Culturally, he gravitated to the lowest common denominator.

As with Derrida, it is highly unlikely Bukowski ever read the philosopher John Rawls, or for that matter even heard of him. Similarly, though, one of Bukowski’s over-arching themes was that a society – our society – should be judged not by what is the greatest good for the greatest number; but rather, how it treats its most downtrodden, its most unfortunate.

There are two ways to psychoanalyze Bukowski. Both are suggestive, because there is so much evidence in support of each. The first is Freudian – obviously he was deeply conflicted, particularly as a result of his pathological relationship with his father, who beat him constantly. The second is Phenomenologically – he writes as if he had no consciousness, that he fully was at one with his world. In order to participate in that world with him, and to partake of it, we need to understand his loathsome self-image, his mid-career of scrabbling hardship, his alcoholism, and his ability to put all of this into words.Here is why, particularly living in Los Angeles, Bukowski will continue to remain relevant.

1. Once I had lunch with a friend at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As we were walking out, a woman jostled him, and then remonstrated him for not making way for her, as she exited the room. He replied, “In the country where I come from, the only question we ask a woman like you, is how much.”

2. Incidents of road-rage are common. I saw a blue corvette cut off another sports car on Sunset Boulevard. They raced around several hair-pin turns. At a stop light, the guy in the blue corvette stopped his car, opened his door, and pulled out what looked like a small-caliber weapon. I quickly turned up a side street, anxious not to get caught in the melee.

3. I was behind a driver, who happened to be a woman, who was behind a gentleman in a sports car, who in turn was behind a large truck. We all were driving up Laurel Canyon. She honked at the guy in the sports car, evidently because he wasn’t moving fast enough, or (sensibly) didn’t want to attempt to pass the truck on the winding road. He got out of his car, and went to the driver’s side of her car. By this time, another car had come up behind me, so I was stuck. Rather than having an altercation, though, she said to him: “Hey, do you want to fuck?” Not as in, have an altercation, but rather as in, have sex.

4. I saw a driver hit another car in a grocery-store parking lot, then simply drove off as if nothing had happened. The lot was crowded, and I was right behind him. Fortunately, it didn’t even look like a fender-bender; neither vehicle seemed to have suffered any damage. A woman, who seemed to be of foreign extraction, hopped out of the bumped car, and started yelling at the guy, who was in the bumping car. She ran around the entire lot, appealing to other drivers to assist her. I’m not sure in what respect they might have been of aid, as she clearly was not injured. The only thing I could think of is that she saw her big chance at a Southern California-style lawsuit simply driving away.

5. Grocery store check-out lines also seem to be common sites of frustration. I saw a gentleman arguing with the clerk, evidently on the premise the automatic scanner had not correctly calculated the correct discount to which he was entitled as a result of his membership in the store’s club. There was a long line behind him, and somebody started grumbling. He turned around, put up his dukes, and said, “You all better get out of here, ‘cause this is gonna take some time! All of you’d better leave!” He actually approached the person immediately behind him in what looked to me to be a threatening and belligerent manner. At least, I’m sure the guy was happy there was a shopping cart between them. As I left, I saw the clerk taking all of his groceries out of their bags, and rescanning them.

6. I went to a seminar at UCLA that took place in Dodd Hall, home of UCLA’s illustrious Philosophy Department. At some point, I went to the men’s room to relieve myself. The gentleman standing several urinals down commented, “Think of all the great philosophers who have pissed here.” There was a job opening for a new Assistant Professor in the Department, and somebody told me they had over 400 applicants. Ironically, the State of California probably lacks sufficient funding to fill the position.

7. Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills in particular, is known for its many cases of horrifically bad plastic surgery. Although it’s hard to decide, I think what annoys me the most, is the women with the big lips. They flubber, babble and drool, like ducks in a pond. While I don’t know for sure what it must feel like to possess such a physical attribute, I imagine it’s something like the Novocain wearing off after a trip to the dentist. Where in God’s name did they get the idea this was attractive?

These are just samples of the daily indignities, of which Bukowski wrote. He occasionally spoke of how he used to survive on PayDay candy bars, and how much he looked forward to consuming their peanuty goodness. I eat one in remembrance of, and solidarity, with him.

“And then, in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard at the Verdurins’ that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as though he had just woken up.”

Emphasis added. In other words, Swann experiences a condition of sudden dissonance; the conceptual schematic of his world becomes reorganized. His outlook comprises only his expectations and his reactions to events, to begin with; those reactions either do, or don’t, correspond to his expectations, in varying degrees. Odette didn’t “cause” Swann to become disconcerted, by not being at the Verdurins. It would be entirely mistaken to characterize this as her “intention.” Rather, because she is a natural, essentially naïve creature, she just did whatever she was going to do. Only through an act of interpretation does Swann attach meaning, and significance, to Odette’s behavior.

In much the same way, Odette certainly doesn’t make Swann fall in love with her, through the deployment of her feminine guiles, or some such. Rather, he falls in love with her, or, we should say, an idealized version of her. This is all the more ironic, because only her absence, albeit temporary, caused him to recognize these feelings, to begin with. She wholly is a creation of Swann’s imagination, in much the same way James Joyce invented the personage of Nora Barnacle. “To any other writer of the time, Nora Barnacle would have seemed ordinary; Joyce, with his need to seek the remarkable in the common-place, decided she was nothing of the sort,” Ellman, R., James Joyce 163 (1959) (emphasis added). Swann not only thus elevated Odette; the chamber-maids and common women, to whom he usually was attracted, also ascended to a similarly rarefied aesthetic plane.

“To seek the remarkable in the common-place.” That’s a good description of Proust’s project, too. For, at heart, Proust is a phenomenologist. Swann’s Way entirely comprises its veneer – a high-gloss, lustrous, but entirely superficial, patina. [How appropriate, then, its topic is the artificiality of manners and bourgeoisie Parisian society.] A philosopher like Edmund Husserl would call this “flowing conscious life,” Husserl, E. (tr. Cairns, D.), Cartesian Mediations 31 (1970). It is “the orientation of any perceptual experience referring to the reality of the world. There is no way to grasp the world prior to reflection when we discuss the natural attitude, but that attitude is precisely pre-reflective and enmeshed in a naïve living of its own experience – a life immanently grasped as real,” Natanson, M., Edmund Husserl – Philosopher of Infinite Tasks 20 (1973).

But Proust is not content merely to rest upon pre-cognitive flights of efflorescence. Rather, as with Husserl, he “can at any time direct his reflective regard; he can contemplate it and, in respect of its contents, explicate and describe it,” Cartesian Meditations 31. In this way, “the straightforward acts become accessible to us,” 33. Husserl calls this a process of “natural reflection.” For example, “I remember having heard this melody,” 34 – an apt example, in light of Proust’s interminable digressions on Vinteuil’s “Sonata for Piano and Violin.” Over the course of many pages, Proust transforms the simple sensation of vibrations in the auditory canal, comprising the hearing of the Sonata itself, into a complex metaphor for his relationship with Odette.

For the phenomenologist, there still is another step, which “is not to repeat the original process, but to consider it and explicate what can be found in it,” Cartesian Meditations 34 – a kind of reflecting on the “process of reflecting,” itself. One must “inhibit or suspend (put out of action, ‘turn off’) all belief in existence that accompanies our everyday life and even our scientific thinking. Instead, concentrate on the concrete phenomenon in all its aspects and varieties, intuit its essence, analyze and describe it without any consideration of its reality,” Spiegelberg, H., The Phenomenological Movement – An Historical Introduction 134 (1971). “Reflection frees the world as intended from a certain opaque power of absolute existence which impregnates experience at the same time that it devours me, its witness. But in ceasing to sink into and to lose itself in lived and living experience, the ego splits itself correlatively: an ‘uninterested’ impartial spectator wrenches itself away from ‘interest in life,’” Ricoeur, P. (tr. Ballard, E. & Embree, L.), Husserl – An Analysis of His Phenomenology 94 (1967).

And there can be no question, Proust does exactly this. He is, in the first instance, like a bird seeking bright shiny objects for its nest, or a bee flitting from flower to flower. All surface textures intrigue him immensely; the ways light reflects, colors combine, and perceptions blur. Proust’s descriptions of visual objects remind one (not surprisingly) of an impressionist painting – his colors are limpid, pastel. In much the same way, his descriptions of music remind one (again, not surprisingly) of impressionistic French music, for example, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Faure, or Saint-Saens – his notes are languid, held in a kind of gossamer suspension.

But, after making these observations, Proust invariably analyzes his characters’ reactions to same, and their reactions to their reactions, and so forth, in a seemingly endless spiral. Every little thing, no matter how trivial, prompts a pause, followed by a digression to comment on it, its meaning and significance. “The phenomenologist can, at will, through an act of reflection, change the intentional correlate of his act into an object of a second-order act. He can think of the thought rather than the object he is thinking about, and he then becomes aware that the thought was present all along. He can also reflect on the second-order thought by which is attention was directed to the first-order thought, etc. On reflection we can thus discover something thought in each act of thinking, something wished in each wishing, something judged in each judging, etc., whether the object of these thoughts, wishes, and judgments exist or not” (emphasis added), Dreyfus, H., “The Perceptual Noema,” Dreyfus, H. & Hall, H. (eds.) Husserl – Intentionality & Cognitive Science 101 (1982). “We are to ‘bracket,’ or abstain from positing the existence of, the natural world around us. That is, we put out of action the general thesis of the everyday ‘natural’ standpoint, our background presupposition that there exists a world independent of our experience. We will then, Husserl holds, be in a position to describe ‘pure’ consciousness, abstracting from its embeddedness in the world of nature. … The use of the method of bracketing implies that such attention involves no concern for whether these objects really exist” (emphasis added), Smith, B. & Smith, D., “Introduction,” Smith, B. & Smith, D. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl 11 (1995).

As both Prof. Dreyfus and the Profs. Smith observe, as part of this process, the real-world existence of the object of thought essentially becomes irrelevant, just as it is for Proust. Swann could care less whether Odette “actually” exists; it is enough for the thought of her to be his muse, to pique his aesthetic imagination, to provide him with an endless stream of data, upon which to ponder. While there are many examples of this, the most noteworthy is when Swann contemplates whether or not to travel to Pierrefonds to see Odette, where she has been spirited away for the day by the Verdurins. “For, after all, the time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that at eight o’clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous; an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified the labour and expense of stoking the engines.”

Swann goes on to imagine the various ways in which he might encounter Odette, were he to venture forth to Pierrefonds. They might meet at a restaurant, or on a walk, or an excursion through the district. But actually seeing her isn’t the point; rather, the thought of seeing her brings Swann the most satisfaction. “Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil where, not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her suddenly appearing.” In fact, if he was to find her, “he would have hastened away at once with studied indifference, satisfied that he had seen Odette and she him, especially that she had seen him when he was not, apparently, thinking about her.” Swann, in short, is “in love with being in love,” an almost narcissistic state of self-reflection, verging on self-mortification. As if to contrast the relative mind-sets of the two, Proust goes on to observe Odette, on the other hand, “had never given him a thought.”

The eminent critic Wallace Fowlie characterized Proust’s description of Swann’s reveries as “no ordinary introspection or day-dreaming, but the kind capable of leading the artist into a form of ecstasy where he has access to intuitions of reality. Proust explained on several occasions, notably in the final chapter of his novel, that his work came from a revelation, a profound intuition,” Fowlie, W., A Reading of Proust 60 (2d. ed. 1975). In this way, Swann learns “the first great principle Proust the novelist wants to demonstrate: that the soul is not an impenetrable and forbidding void, but the container of a great richness,” 71. “Time is the force that slowly and inexorably destroys everything. But memory is time’s only deterrent, the one staying factor, the one force for permanence,” 72. One might as well add, a great richness, each and every aspect of which Proust feels obligated to explicate in detail. In addition to remembering experience, Fowlie might have added: and also writing it down, as did Proust, so it can be preserved for later analysis and reflection.

So what’s the problem? We have Proust the phenomenologist, excelling not only at describing surface textures, but also the process of reflection, the wheels of thought slowly grinding in his characters’ heads. Correlatively, however, the reader becomes ever more bored – for the simple reason there comes a time, when you no longer care what these people are thinking, it’s gone on for so long and to such little point. Furthermore, in a subtle but pervasive way, Proust implies Swann’s perceptions somehow are “better,” or at least more vivid, than Odette’s; in fact, Swann thinks Odette is stupid. I for one would have enjoyed hearing her side of the story, which Proust ignores completely.

I don’t contend this is the inevitable result of a phenomenological-novelistic technique; only, Proust fails to iterate it satisfyingly. Ulysses by James Joyce certainly deploys the same procedural methodology, with all of the action (more accurately, in-action) crammed into a single day, albeit from the perspective of multiple characters. In fact, in some respects Proust adopts what I would characterize as a pre-Joycean style or technique. Odette is a kind of proto-Molly Bloom, though evidently without Ms. Bloom’s evocative mental life; it is difficult indeed to imagine Proust writing the “Penelope” chapter, closing Ulysses. In the final analysis, though, Joyce utterly fascinates, whereas Proust does not.

More recently, writers in the style of the nouveau roman, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, have taken up the cudgel for phenomenological description/reduction. Novels like The Voyeur and Jealousy juxtapose objects and the characters’ perceptions of them; “objects are described with an application apparently out of all proportion to their insignificant – or at least purely functional – character. … His writing has no alibis, no resonance, no depth, keeping to the surface of things, examining without emphasis, favoring no one quality at the expense of another. … [H]e establishes the existence of an object so that once its appearance is described it will be quite drained, consumed, used up,” Barthes, R. (tr. Howard, R.), “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet,” 5 Evergreen Review (Summer 1958); reprinted as an introductory essay to Robbe-Grillet, A., Jealousy (1977 ed.). While Husserl most certainly would approve, I’m not so sure about Proust.

…to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”

Thomas, of course, was the apostle who doubted Jesus’ resurrection. As recounted at John 20:24 – 29, Thomas had to feel Jesus’ wounds, before believing he had risen from the dead. It has to be said that Dostoyevsky gives Thomas short shrift; by saying that it was “most likely not” the miracle that forced Thomas to believe, in a way, Dostoyevsky short-circuits his premise. A more natural reading of the Thomas incident is that Thomas, initially a realist, then became a believer, upon experiencing the miracle. He wasn’t a believer sub silentio, all along; the whole point of the passage is to emphasize the force and strength of the miracle, especially when juxtaposed against Thomas’ doubt. While it certainly is true that Thomas would continue to doubt “but for” the miracle, Dostoyevsky adopts what we might call an “ultra-realist” point-of-view: that even people who genuinely believe they have experienced a miracle, and even when those people start off being first-class doubters, they still probably haven’t “actually” experienced a miracle, they’re just predisposed to think so, or somehow became deluded into thinking they had, when in fact they hadn’t.

This fits in with Dostoyevsky’s over-all belief structure: as a realist himself, he wants to eliminate, or at least drastically curtail, the role of miracles in religious belief. This would include not only Christ’s resurrection, but also others such as the virgin birth, the loaves and the fishes, and dozens of others in the New Testament.

Dostoyevsky does not come right out and say it quite this way, but there is plenty of evidence for this conclusion, in the text. In particular, he uses the Grand Inquisitor as a foil for his own beliefs – the Grand Inquisitor himself holding down both sides of the dialog, i.e., his own beliefs versus what he imagines to be Christ’s belief’s (he has to do this, seeing as Christ remains silent throughout the entire chapter).

For example, as the Grand Inquisitor observes, Jesus didn’t climb down off the cross, even though he had the power to do so, because he did not want “to enslave man through miracle, but to obtain faith in Thee freely and apart from any miraculous influence.”

He also hypothesizes the reason why Christ did not turn stones into bread [Matthew 4:3] is because it would transform man into a condition of dependency: “this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing ‘bread,’ Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity–to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”

The Grand Inquisitor, on the other hand, believes that man cannot “remain without miracles, so, rather than live without, he will create for himself new wonders of his own making.” Although not stated by the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky also is willing to say the converse also is true – for example, during their meeting at the tavern, Ivan observes to Alyosha: “I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

Ivan takes this up again in his remarkable chat with the devil, far later in the book, in the chapter entitled “Ivan’s Nightmare” — clearly intended as a counterpart to the tale of the Grand Inquisitor. Whether the devil exists — as opposed, for example, to being a figment of the imagination, or a social construct — is Ivan’s main issue, throughout the entire book. Ivan may have been suffering from what (interestingly) is called “brain fever.” The devil appears before him, not with fire and brimstone, but rather, in ordinary guise. He states:

“[W]hat’s the good of believing against your will? Besides, proofs are no help to believing, especially material proofs. Thomas believed, not because he saw Christ risen, but because he wanted to believe, before he saw. Look at the spiritualists, for instance…. I am very fond of them… only fancy, they imagine that they are serving the cause of religion, because the devils show them their horns from the other world. That, they say, is a material proof, so to speak, of the existence of another world. The other world and material proofs, what next! And if you come to that, does proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God?”

In other words, the devil is just like God, in that his existence depends upon people believing in him. But he also plays a more significant role, because without the devil, people might not recognize God, to begin with. The devil states:

“Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out, I was predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not atall inclined to negation. ‘No, you must go and deny, without denial there’s no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one ‘hosannah.’ But nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, the hosannah must be tried in the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style. … Well, they’ve chosen their scapegoat, they’ve made me write the column of criticism and so life was made possible. We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you. If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There would be no events without you, and there must be events. So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course… but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious.”

In other words, just as suffering lends piquancy to life, so the devil is a necessary correlate, or even a reciprocal, to the concept of God. Incidentally, as shown by these passages, Dostoyevsky also may have solved the age-old problem of “why is there evil in the world.” There is evil, because only by reference to what is evil, can we define what is good.

This leads, however, to a peculiar kind of solipsism. The devil asks Ivan to imagine a kind of tabula rosa, a clean slate, without presupposition, where man can inquire anew whether God exists.

“As soon as men have all of them denied God … the old conception of the universe will fall of itself … and, what’s more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave’… and so on and so on in the same style.”

The devil asks Ivan if this period will ever come. Even the devil himself is dubious — “owing to man’s inveterate stupidity,” it may not come about “for at least a thousand years.” However, there is a solution to the dilemma. “[E]veryone who recognises the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense, ‘all things are lawful’ for him.”

“All things are lawful” — another one of Ivan’s themes. As if to demonstrate how dangerous it is, though, Dostoyevsky has Smerdyakov cite this exact proposition, as partial justification for killing Fyodor Pavlovitch. Smerdyakov does not do so, however, in an intellectual or “philosophical” way — one gets the sense he’s just parroting something he heard from Ivan. Perhaps this illustrates the danger of complex thoughts for simple people, and hence the need for miracles as a more rudimentary kind of proxy.

Ivan’s devil is very believable. In attempting to explain him to Alyosha, Ivan says he is a “simple devil and not Satan, with scorched wings, in thunder and lightning.” Ivan further characterizes him as a “paltry, trivial devil.” Just like Christ in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, he visits Ivan as a wholly ordinary, mild-mannered type of person. While I don’t know for sure, I think Dostoyevsky may be trying to say that spirituality, and even religion, may be found all around us, even in the trivial and commonplace. It doesn’t have to come and announce itself as religion per se. In this respect, in the final analysis, Dostoyevsky may be a naturalistic pantheist, along the lines of someone like Spinoza.

These exchanges pretty much sum up Dostoyevsky’s over-all take on the issue, which is, that enlightened or knowing belief is preferable to simply believing, without knowing why. Indeed, this is the very reason why the Grand Inquisitor rejects Christ – because he (i.e., the Grand Inquisitor) does not believe the people of the earth can accept the freedom offered by informed choice. At least, this is his proffered reason; he probably also is worried about the diluted authority of the Church, in the event there is some kind of wholesale revisionism to the canonical Christian text.

Indeed, this is why he commands Christ to remain silent. In a passage that is eerily reminiscent to the closing lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the Grand Inquisitor observes that everything that needs to be said, already has been said, and therefore to say anything more, would be meaningless. The Grand Inquisitor also surely knows that the ancient Israelites were prohibited even to speak the name of God, so instead they adopted the syllables YHWH, which we now translate as “Yahweh.”

Father Zossima, of course, is the counterpart to the Grand Inquisitor, and in many ways picks up where the Grand Inquisitor leaves off. In his reminiscences, as written down by Alyosha, Father Zossima states his belief that the people of the earth in fact are up to the task imposed by the Grand Inquisitor, that is, to accept the freedom offered by informed choice. Father Zossima says: “Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and their meekness. * * * Fathers and teachers, watch over the people’s faith and this will not be a dream. I’ve been struck all my life in our great people by their dignity, their true and seemly dignity. I’ve seen it myself, I can testify to it, I’ve seen it and marvelled at it, I’ve seen it in spite of the degraded sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not servile, and even after two centuries of serfdom they are free in manner and bearing, yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious.”

What’s most interesting about Dostoyevsky’s approach is that miracles present an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one. Miracles are more a problem of having enough evidence, than anything else. In this respect, it’s interesting to juxtapose the story of the Grand Inquisitor against the Biblical story of Job. Job continues to believe, despite plenty of evidence that he no longer should. This is every bit as puzzling as its reciprocal, that is, not believing when there’s plenty of evidence you should, which is Dostoyevsky’s perspective.

You almost want to ask Dostoyevsky: “Would there ever be enough evidence for you to believe in a miracle?” If in reply he says, “No,” as I’m afraid he would, then something suspicious is going on; for, he also then should assent to the proposition that believers should continue to believe, regardless. This means they are not susceptible to rational persuasion, or any quantum of contrary evidence; which contradicts his original premise that miracles should be regarded skeptically.