Posts Tagged ‘dominant classes’
“Invitation to a Beheading” by Vladimir Nabokov
This indirect review is extracted from “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi.
Nafisi had invited 7 of its students to her home “sanctuary” to discuss literature, primarily English books. For two years, the students showed up every Thursday morning, rain or shine, with reading assignment completed and noted down in diaries…
The original Russian version was published in installments in 1935, and the English version was published in 1959.
Nabokov begins with the announcement that Cincinnatus C., his fragile hero, has been sentenced to death for the crime of “gnostic turpitude”: All citizens are expected to be “transparent”for the common “good feeling” of the community…
Worse, a condemned person to death has this “privilege” of knowing the time of the execution. Cincinnatus C was not to have any idea when his time has come. This is one of the many arbitrariness of the system.
In fact, the executioner, Mr. Pierre, is the cell-mate of the hero, and the hero doesn’t know it. The two prisoners must learn to befriend and cooperate in the act of the execution…
Everything in the cell is fake: the windows, the moon, the spider in the corner…The director of the prison, the jailer, the defense lawyer are the same person: They change roles and positions.
The world of the novel is one of empty rituals, celebrated in a gaudy feast: Every act has no significant sense, and death is a spectacle that citizens are invited to purchase ticket to watch the execution…
It is through these empty rituals that Brutality becomes possible. This close relation between banality and brutality is expressed by the term “Poshlust”
Poshlust is not simply the trashy exhibitionist: It is the falsely “importance, beauty, cleverness, attractiveness…” of authority figures, politicians, the dominant classes…that are required to display…
What standout in the novel is this nightmarish quality of living in a totalitarian atmosphere of perpetual dread…The forces of Evils are also frail creatures and ridiculous, and can be easily defeated: This tragedy of total waste…
Cincinnatus C. is fighting with his instincts and he takes refuge in writing as means for escape, an open space: He refuses to become like all the rest in the community.
In totalitarian and theocratic systems, citizens poke fun at their own miseries, in order to survive, one day at a time: There is no knowing when the arbitrary and absurd decision strikes down
You are completely alone in an illusory world, full of false promises, unable to discriminate the savior from the executioner: An acute sense that reality is fickle and frail.
And yet, when all options are taken away, there is this possibility of a boundless freedom: You could invent to be the violin or be devoured by the void in the empty room...(I am reminded of the movie of the Marquis de Sade who wrote erotic novels, and when all options to write were denied him, even with his blood, he used his excrement to write on the walls of his prison cell…)
At the start of the first session, one of the girls shouted “Upsilambda“. This word is Nabokov’ creation , a possible combination of the 20th Greek letter and the 11th letter. It might signify that vague sense of joy, the impossible joy of a suspended leap, a symbol for a sensation that separates the good readers from the ordinary ones…
Nabokov novel is the modern time initiator to many other novels that tried to describe and express what goes on in totalitarian systems, like “1984” by George Orwell or Fahrenheit…
Note 1: Nabokov wrote in the foreword of the English version: “This novel does not offer “tout pour tout”: It is a violin in the void…I know…a few readers will jump up, ruffling their hair…”
Note 2: To Azar, the work of fiction that would most resonates with lives in this Islamic Republic of Iran are:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, 1984 (George Orwell), Invitation to a beheading (Vladimir Nabokov), Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), Persian classical literature, A Thousand and One Night, Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austin), Madam Bovary (Flaubert), Daisy Miller, The Dean’s December, and of course Lolita…
Part one: Twilight of “Love of Knowledge”
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 27, 2010
Part one: Twilight of “Love of Knowledge”
There is this notion that philosophers are after the “Truth” based on the assumption that they have this urge to go to the tiniest details and exhaustive possibilities of a concept. I beg to differ. Once a philosopher starts building structures for his line of thinking then it is the system that tows and guides the “Truth”. It takes an insurmountable character of honesty to shake off the inertia erected by a system for a philosopher to restart his independent reflection in search of truth.
Philosophy from Antiquity to the last century was what is currently called “Ideology of the power to be” of the politico-economic system (the dominant classes of the period). Philosophy was the super-structure or the apologetic social structure of a culture that has been flourishing for decades: philosophy tried to make sense of the mood of the time.
What is striking is that most philosophical systems refrained to include the economical structure aspect into the equation; at best, the economic structure was indirectly referred to. For example, slavery was accepted as a qualitative level in human nature: since animals are difficult to communicate with then it is better to leave it as is. It was if economy was a taboo notion because the class structure could not be altered.
Every politico-economic dominant class needs a valid interpretation of the statue-quo coupled with a rational for the intelligentsia to take stock of the inevitable status that settled in and come along. Thus, philosophers’ interpretations always were phased out by several decades of the “has been reality”.
In periods of alliances between the religious institutions and the monarchy it was required for God to taking center stage: people had to get used to letting God run their destinies. Usually, the philosophical lines of thinking revolved in that guideline; these philosophical trends lasted long because the power was concentrated in the hand of the almighty alliance. Superstition was king and empirical works led the bold experimenters to the fire to be burned alive as witches. Knowledge was built around abstract concepts or the realm of religious dogmas. Religious institutions dictated how the universe functioned and detailed the proper mental activities.
In periods of the rising middle classes (of traders, merchants, and lately the industrial class of entrepreneurs) philosophical systems set man in center stage of the universe. It was important that man regains his place instead of God: The church-monarchy alliance was not to regain political-economic supremacy and control. Consequently, man was to discover and investigate his “backyard” (earth and universe). Scientific knowledge, empirical experiments, discovery, and world adventures were the result of opening up new market for exploiting many more people for added values of merchandises.
Hegel realized the historical interpretation process of philosophical structures as a fundamental aspect of civilization changes; Hegel failed to find the intimate connection with the politico-economic source. The historical dialectic method could make sense of the super structure of “knowledge” development in an a posteriori phase; thus historical dialectics could not forecast the synthesis for the current period since the source of the dialectics (politico-economics) was not within his range of expertise.
It was Marx who realized the power of historical dialectics when applied to politico-economic realities. It made sense from Marx position to declare that history started when class struggle was identified as the catalyst for change and knowledge development. It means that if a “hot” culture wants to understand or create a history for its society then it must invest in gathering artifacts and ancient manuscripts that shed light on the class structures through the phases of its history.
Democratic systems are trying hard to diminish civil administration interference with religions in its habit of demanding religious inputs and backing to political activities and programs. This phenomena is called “separation of religion and civil rules”
Adonis Diaries 