Three entomologists, three in corduroy

Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly-collecting activities are well known, but not everyone knows that the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and the Franco-Belgian poet Henri Michaux were amateur entomologists.

Erik Satie, Henry David Thoreau, and George Sand were all known for wearing corduroy, but in Satie’s case it was called velours côtelé* and he was not blamed.  (No, “corduroy” isn’t the word in French, though the English word comes from French.) But Americans of that era regarded corduroy as Irish, and ladies were not supposed to wear corduroy or smoke cigars, so the other two did not get off so easily.

*And in Sand’s too,  but only Satie got away with it.

The hypocritical octopus

Recently when reading what Victor Hugo had to say about octopuses (none of it good) in Travailleurs de la Mer,  I came across this line: “The octopus is a hypocrite. You don’t even notice it, and suddenly it unfolds itself.” For Hugo the octopus is murderous — it lies disguised  in ambush, and then suddenly it opens up and gets you! (which indeed it often does,  if you’re a fish). Elsewhere, Hugo writes of the sea itself  “The wave is hypocritical: it kills, hides the evidence, plays dumb, and smiles“.

To me, the English word hypocrite does not simply mean “someone who feigns innocence”, which is how Hugo uses it here. To me hypocrisy is the ostentatious affectation of virtue by someone who is unvirtuous, especially when the hypocrite also loudly condemns someone who has committed the same sin that he himself is committing.

This sent me on a long but interesting wild goose chase through the dictionaries. The consensus seems to be that Hugo, who has never been accused of not being vivid or emphatic enough, was stretching the French language for effect (possibly via an etymological reading of the word), and that his use of the word hypocrite is a bit odd and excessive in French too. Hypocrisy is one of the central themes of his book,  and when the vertebrate hypocrite Clubin is eaten by the mollusc hypocrite at the end of Book One, that’s to be understood as a grotesque irony.

Hugo dominated 19th century literature in French literature, and I started reading him as necessary background for writers I like better. What I’ve read so far has not what I expected: more grotesque, more excessive, and weirder. For me Hugo is an acquired taste, but he’s growing on me.

Here’s a freely-translated prose poem I have extracted from Hugo’s long reflection on hypocrisy in “Un intérieur d’abime éclairé”, in the same way I extracted a prose poem on the octopus from his long chapter on that beast. The hypocrite in question, Clubin, to all appearances had been a good man all his life, but he had been filled with resentment and anger the whole time, and in the novel he had just taken his revenge.

Hypocrisy had weighed on this man for thirty years. He was evil and he had shackled himself  to goodness. He hated goodness with the hatred of a mismatched spouse. Underneath, he was a monster;  the skin of a good man concealed the heart of a bandit. Virtue was for him a stifling thing.

To be a hypocrite is to be a patient in both senses of the word: he waits for his triumph, and he suffers torture. The eternal premeditation of  the cruel stroke, the constant need to put people off the scent, the impossibility of ever being oneself — these are  exhausting.

There are strange moments when the hypocrite thinks well of himself; within the phony there hides an enormous ego. The worm slithers like the dragon and rears up the same way that it does. A traitor is nothing than a failed despot who cannot attain his ends except as a lackey, a petty thing capable of enormities. The hypocrite is a dwarfed titan.

The hypocrite, being wickedness complete, has within him both  poles of perversity. He is a priest on one side and a courtesan on the other. His demoniacal sex is double. The hypocrite is a frightful hermaphrodite of evil.

The peculiarity of hypocrisy is to be cruel in hope. The hypocrite is someone who waits. Hypocrisy is nothing other than a terrible hopefulness, and this lie founds itself on a virtue turned vicious. Strange to say, in the hypocrite there is trust;  the hypocrite trusts in that mysterious indifference of the unknown  which allows for evil.

In the hypocrite there is emptiness, or to speak more truly, the hypocrite himself is an emptiness.

I only came to Toilers of the Sea looking for octopuses. I had not really expected to take much  interest in Hugo’s writing as such; I have always found romantic authors of Hugo’s type antipathetic, and I expected nothing more than standard average melodrama.  But either I’ve changed, or I was wrong all along. I found Hugo’s rambling, over-the-top, virtually avant-garde excess almost hypnotic, and while I must reject his Manichaean view of the octopus, hypocrisy will never look the same to me again.

TEXTS BELOW

The etymology of hypocrisy

(Many thanks to my friends at Languagehat.com)

My puzzlement over the hypocritical octopus and the hypocritical ocean wave in Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer led me to an etymological investigation of the words hypocrite and hypocrisy (hypocrisie) in English,  French, Latin, and Greek (but not Hebrew.) It was actually sort of a wild goose chase, but I put in a lot of time into it and one of the privileges of obscure bloggers is to publish anything they want. This is probably my least interesting post ever, since most people aren’t interested in etymology and the ones who are have better things to read.

The word “hypocrite” and its derivatives trace back to the Greek. Neither the word nor the concept is found in Hebrew. The  word does not appear in the Septuagint, the Jews’ own Greek translation of the Tanakh (the Old Testament), though it does appear in a different Jewish translation of the Tanakh into Greek. When the word is seen in the KJV translation of the Old Testament  it translates, and possibly mistranslates, a word that simply means “godless” or “lawless”. (Whether it’s a translation or a mistranslation depends on the degree to which the Biblical Greek word’s meaning had diverged from its classical Greek meaning).

In classical Greek the word “hypocrite” means someone who is pretending to be or acting as someone else. It can be  negative, as in the case of a fraud, or neutral, as in the case of stage actors and public spokesmen.

The word appears many times in the Greek New Testament, often in the words of Christ.  This is problematic, since Jesus did not speak Greek and there doesn’t seem to be an Aramaic or Hebrew equivalent of the word. In only one case does this word clearly have its classical Greek meaning of “pretending”; in the others (and in the exceptional Jewish translation mentioned above) the Greek word seems to have acquired an additional meaning beyond just feigning and dissimulation, something more like “evil”.

Presumably the Greek word had evolved (perhaps under the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic). Conjecturally, if “hypocrisy” in the sense of “feigning” had come to be used mostly in cases when evil people were feigning goodness, then “evil” might become part of the definition.  Thus, “pretending to be good, but really evil inside” and simply “evil inside”, rather than “feigning”,  might have become the primary meaning of the word. However the restricted “feigning” meaning probably never quite disappeared — Godefroy cites an instance from Old French.

It seems pretty clear that the common European meaning of the word is derived (via the Vulgate) from Biblical and not classical Greek, though some scholarly writers may have occasionally deliberately reverted to the classical meaning. One source claims that the word came to English via Molière’s play Tartuffe, ou le Hypocrite, and while this is not true and is off by many centuries, it’s possible that in English the limited Tartuffian sense became dominant while the broader meaning survived in France. Even so, Hugo’s application of the word “hypocrite” to an octopus pretending to be a rock and to the murderous ocean wave feigning innocence does seem like quite a stretch.  But Hugo, being Hugo, could lay it on as thick as he wanted.

SOURCES BELOW

“Adopt the attitude of the octopus*”

Πολύποδος νόον ϊσχε    Polypi mentem obtine

The Adages of Erasmus, ed. & tr. William Barker, Toronto, 2001, I i 93, pp.41-5.

Cephalopods are like chameleons, but more so. Not only can they match the color of the surface they’re seen against, but in order to blend into the background they can even match complex and rippling patterns of color and texture. For this reason Victor Hugo describes the octopus as a “hypocrite”, since it pretends to be something that it’s not. (Here, an octopus pretends to be a rock). Erasmus, drawing on classical Mediterranean sources, also notes this capacity, but he treats it much more favorably. Whether this difference is Northern vs. Southern, pagan vs. Christian, or post- vs. pre-Reformation I do not know, but it strikes me as something worth looking into. It may merely be that in the Mediterranean cephalopods are just more familiar and ordinary than they are in the North of France.

Erasmus’s treatment of this proverb is fuller and in general more favorable than those given to other similar proverbs dealing with changeability and disguise: the chameleon (III iv 1 pp.273-4 ), the fox (as opposed to the hedgehog: I v 18, pp. 87-9), and Proteus (II ii 74, pp. 167-8). In ascending order of dignity, the chameleon is said to represent a dissembler, or  one who is inconstant and adopts any appearance to suit the time. The fox, with his many tricks, is held to be inferior to the hedgehog with his single very effective trick. The versatility and resourcefulness of the divine shapeshifter Proteus (twisting and turning…. hard to pin down…. a cunning fellow and jack of all trades) are treated with a degree of respect, though he hardly seems like someone to rely on. In all of these cases, dissembling and transformation are regarded as defensive tricks primarily useful for someone trying to escape enemies or to keep from being brought under control or called to account.

In polypi mentem obtine , however, octopodal changeability, disguise, opportunism and (as Hugo would say) “hypocrisy” are treated favorably:

The proverb is taken from Theognis, whose couplet about the polyp [octopus] exists today:

Adopt the attitude of the many-colored polyp;

Moving toward a rock, it straightway takes its hue.

This advises us to suit ourselves to every contingency of life, acting the part of Proteus and changing ourselves into any form as the situation demands….On the contrary there is a sensible attitude which makes men comply on occasion with a different mode of conduct, to avoid being disliked or being able to be of use, or else for the sake of rescuing themselves or their households from great dangers.

A further such saying or tag in this book is omnium horarum homo (“a man for all seasons [hours]“: I iii 86, pp 70-1), and it was Erasmus who assigned this epithet to his friend Sir Thomas More. What he meant by it was that More could deal with different sorts of people in various different contexts and was able to be serious when people were being serious and  fun when people were having fun. He contrasted those who have their own code of behavior and do not find it easy to live with anyone else, and made it clear that he felt that the more affable man was superior.

The above may lead one to suspect that Erasmus was an unprincipled opportunist who sucked up to his patrons and went whichever way the wind blew, but that is not the case. In fact, he often spoke out forthrightly against two of the leading powers of his day — the philosophers and theologians of the Sorbonne with their logic-chopping and venality, and the princes and noblemen with their interminable, pointless wars. Furthermore, in his youth he had not been a man for all seasons at all, but one of the stubborn, solitary types that he now warns against:

Indeed, if I had responded to the favors of the important men who had  begun to embrace me I would have made something of himself in literature. But an excessive love of independence caused me to wrestle for a long time with treacherous friends and persistent poverty (p. 383).

Proverbs themselves have the inconstancy Erasmus recommends for a man of the world, at least in  later life, and the five inconstancy maxims we have here do not agree with one another. In two of them, inconstancy is treated mostly as a vice or weakness, in two of them it’s regarded as a strength, resource, or virtue,  and the Proteus maxim is ambiguous. So what we need, then, is an additional maxim telling us when to apply each of these maxims, and one is probably there, along with its opposite, somewhere in the book…. ad infinitum.

The multi-layered inconsistency of proverbial wisdom and folk knowledge has led moderns to try to devise unambiguous sets of rules which can be rigorously applied everywhere, without exceptions, but these attempts have not always been successful, and there may be systematic reasons why in some cases they cannot be successful.

It is my opinion, anyway, that if economists, instead of trying to produce rigorous formal structures and a hard science of economics, had understood their science to be practical and proverbial in nature — as a tool box or bag of tricks usable in various sorts of situations — we could have escaped the present, disastrous “Great Moderation”, which they told us would be a Big Rock Candy Mountain utopia of constantly increasing prosperity, but which seems more likely to turn out to be the Second Great Depression.

* Octopus (pl. octopuses or octopodes) :  Greek polypodos, Latin polypi, French poulpe. “Octopus” is a Greek word borrowed into Renaissance Latin and then into English — a late coinage, and not the classical Greek or Latin name for this beast.

There will be no more snark at Haquelebac

I have gone through and tagged all of my untagged posts. In the process I eliminated the “snark” tag, which doesn’t seem to distinguish any particular group of posts. “Epigrues”, however, tags the least serious squibs.

Erasmus on the octopus tomorrow, I promise.

Krakens, Basilisks, Clam-monsters

In his book Mirages on the Sea of Time (which I plan to return to) Edward Schafer describes a  monstrous mollusc with many of the traits of Hugo’s horrible octopus:

In imaginative literature, particularly, but also in some soberer sources, the ch’en mollusc acquired more extravagant attributes. It was transformed into a monster lurking in dark lairs — mysterious submarine grottoes — where it assimilated some of the traits of a sea-dragon, frothing at its ambiguous mouth and belching bubbles into the world of man, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the occidental dragon crouched over its kingly hoard and spouting puffs of smoke and fire:

“He worked his jowls and dripped saliva, gaping and sucking, so that people took him to be a veritable sea-basilisk [kraken, giant squid ]  or dragon-clam [clam-monster]“.

Edward Schafer, Mirages on the Sea of Time, California, 1985, p. 81

Oddly, this mythical creature (like the dragon “hid in the deep”, of which it may be a prototype or relative) is not regarded as evil. It’s merely one of the strange creatures living in an undersea Taoist fairyland corresponding to the terrestrial Kun Lun Mountain fairyland, and its most prominent power is the creation of the strange nautical mirages or fata morganas  which sometimes confuse sailors.  Schafer speaks of it as a kind of clam, but it behaves more like a cephalopod, and Schafer probably should have treated it as one (or perhaps, since it’s mythical,  as a hybrid clam-squid.)

Whether the Taoist clam monsters have anything to do with the thetan clams who have left bivalve engrams deep in our psyches, or with the Pirates of the Caribbean Kraken,  is unknown to me.

Thank you, faithful readers.

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Victor Hugo on Cephalopods

To believe in the octopus, one must have seen it. Compared with it, the hydras of old are laughable.

Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make the Chimaera; God made the octopus. When God wills it, he excels in the execrable. And all ideals being admitted, if terror be the object, the octopus is a masterpiece.

Its most terrible quality is its softness. A glutinous mass possessed of a will — what more frightful? Glue filled with hatred.

At night and in its breeding season, it is phosphorescent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour. It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths, spread out in a pallid irradiation, — a spectre sun.

It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. It is flabby. There is nothing in it. It is a skin. One can turn the eight tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh horror! breathes you in. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

(Excerpted from five pages of Toilers of the Sea, II iv 2, “The Monster”: Toilers of the Sea, p. 157; Les Travailleurs de la mer, p. 199)

This passage, which has been cobbled together from the most vivid lines of a long chapter, adequately represents Hugo’s capacity for excess.

For me, Hugo is an enormous nuisance. One of the great writers and public intellectuals of the 19th century, dominant in French poetry for decades, prolific for sixty years or more (he kept on writing after Rimbaud quit), the source of a hundred or so movie scripts, Hugo remains internationally popular to this day. But I find him impossible to read. It’s very fortunate that this post is part of a series about cephalopods in literature and philosophy and not about Hugo. (Aristotle is linked below, and Erasmus is next, and then maybe Melville).

Since Les Travailleurs de la mer was published in 1866, the Guernsey dialect name for the octopus used by Hugo, pieuvre, has replaced the older name poulpe, which is now used only in cooking. Hugo’s book “spawned an unusual fad in Paris: Squids. From squid dishes and exhibitions, to squid hats and parties, Parisians became fascinated by these unusual sea creatures, which at the time were still considered by many to be mythical.“*  Three years later Verne’s 10,000 Leagues under the Sea kept the squid fad alive, and perhaps the origination of the squid dystopia should be added to Hugo’s many other accomplishments. (Hugo’s monster is clearly an octopus, but fads aren’t picky about details.)

* This citation has been doubted and is probably junk wiki. It’s been labelled “citation needed” for at least 18 months by now. Like every other wiki article it has spammed the internet.  

Hugo was a pioneer radical Catholic, along with his friend Lamennais, and his horrible novelistic octopus is often thought to be symbolic of  the insidious and irresistible power of capitalism:

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….

ARISTOTLE ON THE SEX LIFE OF THE SQUID:

“New Republic” not funded with fascist money

A bemused Martin Peretz contemplates homelessness

A rumor has been circulating that the money Martin Peretz used to fund The New Republic was inherited by his wife Anne Labouisse Farnsworth from a fascist gold bug grandfather who tried to overthrow the U.S. government during the 1930s.  This is incorrect; the fascist in question was Peretz’s wife’s great-uncle, and based on what we know at this time, the grandfather from whom she inherited the money was not an active fascist.

It has also been rumored that the money inherited traces back to the inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Merritt Singer. While the money does trace back to the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Isaac Singer did not invent the sewing machine, and Peretz’s uxorial nest egg traces back to Edward Clark, Singer’s patent lawyer, who was granted a full partnership in return for wresting the sewing machine patent away from the actual inventor, Elias Howe.

It is also not true that Peretz is a grandson of the Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Yiddish author of whom Peretz is the grandson was Isaac Leib Peretz. No Isaac Singer of any description has been implicated in Peretz’s operation.

Peretz and his wife are now separated, and Peretz has sold TNR. It is not known whether Peretz dumped his wife when the money ran out, or whether his wife dumped Peretz when the money ran out. If you run into Martin, I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you bought him a meal and lent him a couple of  bucks.

The Discovery of the Bourgeoisie

The Bohemians, Joanna Richardson,  A.S. Barnes, 1969

The 1830 Revolution in France, Pamela Pilbeam, St Martin’s Press, 1991

Bourgeois doesn’t mean a citizen with the rights of the city. A duke may be bourgeois in the indirect sense in which the word has been used for the past thirty years or so. Bourgeois, in France, means roughly the same as philistine in Germany, and it means everyone, whatever his position, who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them. Once upon a time…. it was enough to be pink-cheeked and clean-shaven, with a square shirt-collar, and a stove-pipe hat, to be apostrophized with this injurious epithet.

(Theophile Gautier, in Le Moniteur universel, Dec. 31, 1855;  Richardson,  p. 52.)

Before Marx were the bousingots.  According to Pilbeam, the political factions of the 1830 revolution were not class-conscious, and to the extent that class lines can be detected between them, they did not match the distinctions described by Marx.  She also concludes that the streetfighters who made this and later 19th century revolutions happen were never the beneficiaries of the revolutions. Gautier’s anti-bourgeois convictions were not political, and the political bousingots were not really progressive.

The bourgeois and the bousingot are enemy twins, and, and you can’t have one without the other. The bousingots usually lose, and the cagy ones  jump ship (as Gautier did). But the bourgeoisie always produces more of them.

Gautier’s bouzingos (his spelling) were mostly just literary dissidents. The slightly later street-fighting bousingots were urban artisans and undifferentiated political rebels.  Their enemy, the newly-discovered bourgeoisie, has pretty much dominated France ever since.

We miss that in the United States, because what we go to France for is avant-gardists, not  ordinary folk. Two generations of American college students have learned that France is populated primarily by existentialists, surrealists, symbolists, Marxists, decadent aristocrats, bohemians, and so on — but no!. The petty bourgeoisie dominating France is the pettiest of them all.

“Bousingot”:  not in your dictionaries.