Adorno’s Genuine Liberal…. laydeez

You probably have always wanted to know what a “Genuine Liberal” is, according to Theodor Adorno. He contrasts the Genuine Liberal to such less-desirable liberals as  Rigid non-racists (Communists), Protesting non-racists (neurotic and frigid women), Impulsive non-racists (Lesbians), and Easygoing non-racists (mellow airhead dudes).

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The illustration we give is a girl whose character of a “genuine liberal” stands out more clearly, since, according to the interviewer, “she is politically naive like the majority of our college women”….

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“F515 is a 21 year old college student. She is a handsome brunette with dark, flashing eyes who exudes temperament and vitality. She has none of the pretty-pretty femininity so frequently seen in [racist] subjects, and would probably scorn the feminine wiles and schemes practiced by such women….. one senses in her a very passionate nature and so strong a desire to give intensely of herself in all her relationships that she must experience difficulty in restraining herself within the bounds of conventionality“.

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(From The Authoritarian Personality, abridged ed., Norton, 1982, pp. 383-4. To be clear, the description of the lovely F515 is not in Adorno’s own words, but this is the case history he chose to cite.)

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My Shen Dao book is now available.

Shen Dao: text, translation, and study, John Emerson, $10.95.

It can be picked up at these locations, including Powell Books in Portland, or shipped  at a small additional cost.

 

Chapter 16 of the Daodejing:

2177 words on ~25 words

致虛極，
守靜篤。
萬物旁作，
吾以觀復。
天狀芸芸，
各復歸其根。….

The many variants in these opening lines make this ~25-character passage a very interesting case in textual criticism. While the problems are many, most of them are solvable, and the few which are not can either be accepted as alternate readings, or left as unsolved problems. I have translated only the first six lines of the traditional version of this chapter, which are the only ones included in the GD text. The chain-sequence at the end of the chapter has been moved elsewhere, along with the other four chain-sequences.

The below is mostly based on the Henricks GD (pp.60-62 and 209-210) and the Henricks MWD (pp. 218-219 and 273). The Old Chinese (OC) and Modern Chinese (MC) pronunciations are from Schuessler, and the definitions are from Wang Li. I have ignored the various added / dropped grammatical particles.

If you start by establishing what is common to the WB, MWD A, MWD B and GD texts of these lines, from the strictest point of view this is all you get:

* 虛 *, 守* *. 萬 * * * , * 以 * *. * * * *, 各 * * *.
However, there are many routine or obvious graphic or phonetic substitutions in these four versions. The pre-Qin writing system was not standardized, and even in the later textual tradition substitutions are frequent, but many cases non-standard forms can easily and uncontroversially be converted into standard forms. If you make these routine substitutions, the four texts are now in substantial agreement on three of six lines (though there are interesting questions about 芸芸 in line 5):

致虛極, 守 * *. 萬物旁作, * 以 * 復. * * 芸芸, 各復(歸)其根.

I will deal with the easiest questions first: in every text of the final line but the GD text we see the phrase 復歸, but the GD text only has 復. These two words are not synonyms, but they have overlapping meanings, and the combined form 復歸 fugui “return” (also seen in chapters 14, 28, and 52) is one of the DDJ’s important themes. However, in chapter 16 this two-word phrase destroys the parallelism of the closing lines. It looks as though at some point later point editor, forced to choose between parallelism of the GD text and richness of interconnectivity, decided to choose the latter. This type of variation is common in the texts of DDJ, and as far as I know there is no temporal pattern – sometimes the parallel text is earlier, sometimes it’s later.

In line four the GD variant changes the meaning of the line but does not substantially affect the function of the line in the chapter: “I watch their return” 吾以觀復 vs. “[ I ] sit and await their return” 居以須復.

We now have a fairly readable chapter:

Attain the ultimate in emptiness,
Keep to the …..
The myriad beings are rising beside me
And so I watch their return [I sit and await their return] –
The …. are teeming,
each is returning to its root….

Now, in line five there are two problems. First, the WB text begins with the introductory particle 夫 fu, whereas both the GD text and the two MWD texts begin with the word 天 tian “heaven”. Since 夫 usually is used to introduce new topics or to divide longer discourses into sections, the word seems inappropriate in this short passage, and the better choice would tian 天, modifying the following noun.

In most DDJ texts the noun which follows is wu 物 “beings”, but in the GD text we see an otherwise-unknown graph which has been interpreted both as 狀 “Dao” (based on its right-hand element) and as zhuang 狀 “shapes / forms” (based on its left-hand element). Since “Dao” isn’t plural and doesn’t really teem, I have translated this line as “Heaven’s forms are teeming”. (“Heaven’s beings are teeming” would be OK too, but this new version seems better because of a similar passage in Chapter 14.)

Line two is a bit mysterious in all versions and is also the trickiest textually:

WB 守靜篤 shou jing du
MWD B 守靜督 shou jing du
MWD A 守情表 shou qing biao
GD 守中篤 shou zhong du (=守盅篤?)

All texts of line two begin with the word 守 shou “Honor, defend, keep to”. 情 qing in MWD A is probably a substitute for 靜 jing “stillness”. Probably for taboo reasons, in the MWD and GD texts the 靜 of the WB version frequently is replaced by phonetically and graphically similar words such as 靜. At the same time, 情 qing can mean “basic reality”, whereas the next word 表 biao can mean “the external, what is evident”, so you wonder whether this reading doesn’t relate to the 徼/妙 jiao/miao “externals / mysteries” and 皦/昧 jiao/mei bright / dim contrasts from chapters 1 and 14. But that sense is hard to fit into an already difficult chapter.

For the second word his still leaves us the choice between jing 靜 “stillness”, zhong 中 “the inner, the center, the unbiased”, and zhong 盅 “emptiness”. The first and third of these are important themes in the DDJ and either would probably fit here; jing 靜 “stillness” might be better because “emptiness” 虛 xu has already been mentioned in line one, but perhaps an intensification of emptiness was desired, and both readings should probably be kept as alternative possibilities.

For the third word there are three variants: du 篤 “thick, solid, or deep”; du 督, often a substitute for the above, but also meaning “the spine or central seam” and “to oversee”; and 表 biao “the evident, the exterior”. Biao 表 has already been discussed and makes sense only when paired with情 qing. Du 督, if it is not simply a substitute for du 篤 “solid, deep”, makes sense as “the spine or central seam”, but its verbal meaning “to oversee” is hard to construe at the end of a line. So now we have Keep to the [still/empty/central] [solidity/main seam], and in the context of the DDJ all of these combinations would work.

Translations of this line include “Abide in genuine quietude”, “Maintain utter stillness”, “Preserve the profoundest depths of tranquility”, “Maintain tranquility in the center”, “Cautiously guard the void”, “Hold firmly to stillness”, “Keep to extreme stillness”, and “Watch over stillness very firmly”).

So now we have solved most textual problems while leaving alternative texts in two or three places (and while still leaving many problems of interpretation and translation untouched):

Attain the ultimate in emptiness,
Keep to the [empty and solid / empty main seam / still and solid / still main seam / central solidity / central main seam].
The myriad beings are rising beside me
[And I watch their return / and I sit and await their return] –
The beings or forms of Heaven are teeming,
each is returning to its root….

Finally, I have mentioned a question with 芸芸 “teeming”. There is no doubt about this translation, since this phrase is a common one and since all variants are cognates. It would be easy enough to ignore the variants, except for the Chinese linguistic usage in question.

The phrase 芸芸 is an example of a particular Chinese linguistic form which produces poeticisms. This form is somewhat comparable to (but much more flexible and productive than) the English language’s more or less obsolete vocative form: — “O England, how brave and true are your heroes….”, etc. Functionally the Chinese form is an adverbial modifier which colors the whole sentence. This form is often doubled, either by repeating a word (“AA”) or coupling two similar words (“AB”). It can be followed by one of a number of particles and a van doublet be split: A兮, AA兮, AA然, A兮B兮, A哉!, A乎B乎, and so on. Dobson (p. 8) classifies these forms as impressives, emotives, intensives, imitatives, similatives, etc., but I just call them expressives. What they have in common is that they simultaneously refer to a thing, the experience of a thing, and the feeling that the experience gives you — a grammatical form for the objective correlative. They are evidence for Stephen Owen’s claim that in Chinese poetry, meanings are not private but public. The expressives are part of the common stock of Chinese emotion, a standard linguistic way of representing the experience-feeling couple.

Expressives are notoriously fluid both phonetically and graphically. The various representations of 芸芸 in this passage are phonetically relatively uniform (always wən or wen) but there are six different graphic forms representing as many as five different underlying metaphors. The table below gives the WB, MWD A, MWD B and GD variants, plus two variants from Jiang Xichang. Three of these variants are not found in most dictionaries, and in two cases I give my guesses as to their meaning based on words found in Wang Li’s dictionary. Because of the regularity of the OC phonetics I have guessed at the OC pronunciations but these phonetics diverge in modern Chinese so I did not guess about the MC.
1 Wang Bi: 芸, wən / yun: Flourishing, teeming.
2 Common Jiang variant: 云, wən / yun: ancient version of #3 “clouds”.
3 MWD A: 雲 , wən / yun: clouds.
4 MWD B: 礻 on left, 云 on right: [wən / ?] Soul? Same as 4a?
4a Wang Li: 魂, wən hun: Soul.
5 GD: 員 above 火. [wen?] ? Yellowed? Round and round? Same as 5a?
5a Wang Li p. 665: 熉, [wen?]/ yun: Yellowed.
6 Jiang variant: 員 on left, 云 on right. [wən or wen / ?]: Round and round?
Wang Li, p. 977: 耘, wən / yun: To weed.

The chart gives two unmistakable underlying metaphors and hints of three more. 芸 is a kind of plant, and as an expressive binome this word commonly means “flourishing, teeming” (as do several other agricultural metaphors). In MWD A you see 雲雲 “clouds clouds” which could be a different metaphor for teeming — in many respects a better one in this case since we are talking about changing forms. (云 is an archaic version of 雲; it is amusing here because 云云 is sometimes used to mark ellipses in quotations – “etc., etc.”)

If #4 is taken to be #4a 魂, which is very plausible, then we have “spirits spirits”, and spirits also teem. If #5 is taken to be #5a 熉, since both characters are made up of the same elements, then we get an entirely different metaphor — “withered and yellowed” rather than “teeming”. In this interpretation the forms of Heaven returning to their roots are dying, and this is definitely part of the Daoist belief. (芸 also is part of the phrase 芸黄, “withered and yellow, and 耘 yun means “to weed”.)

Finally, the 員 element in #5 and #6, though it also can serve as a phonetic here, means “round” (also written 圓), so the phrase could mean “round and round” in cyclic repetition, as Henricks suggests.

What I have just written here seems to resemble the well-refuted century-old character-splitting fallacy of Fenellosa, Pound, and Amy Lowell, et al., and many readers will be skeptical It is absolutely true that in most cases in Chinese a word is just a word, and that you need not think of elephants when you see the word 象 xiang “image”. However, the expressives are in essence poetic and (to us) “subjective”, and it seems likely to me that scribes used their ingenuity to come up with interesting written representations of them — just as authors used their ingenuity in creating sayings or texts, and just as the commentators used their ingenuity in creating commentaries.

One final questions: what is the point of all this? One point is that all this was to a considerable degree unnecessary. What I have just written is an example of the the process that translators and editors go through when translating or editing, and in most cases they quite rightly pass over most of this silently. A further point which is especially applicable to the DDJ is that there is no need to decide every case. Many of the possible readings we have found are good ones, and not only is the Ur-DDJ almost certainly impossible to find, in many cases the plurivocal reading of the DDJ is often the best. And finally, despite all my efforts, the worst problems still remain. 致虛極，守靜篤 remains hard to interpret, and none of the suggested alternative readings of the second line (守靜篤, 守靜督, 守情表, 守中篤, 守盅督) make the task any easier Some of the problems with the DDJ are textual, but many of them are intrinsic to the text.

Crossreferences:

虛 3 5 16 22 53
守 5 9 16 28 32 37 52 67
靜 15 16 26 37 45 57 61
觀 1 16 26 54
狀 14 (16) 21
復
歸 14 16 20 22 28 34 52 60
復歸 14 16 28 52
根 6 16 26 54

The lesson of “Thérèse Raquin”

If you kill the husband in order to get the wife, you thereby become the husband and she stops making love to you.

I get the point. Husbands of the world, rest easy in your beds! You need fear nothing from me, at least not on your lovely wife’s account. Other things, maybe.

In this book they actually did get married, but that wasn’t necessary. The bond between crime partners subject to the guillotine is like the bond of marriage, except that you have to take it seriously.

And also: whenever you’re together you will sense the presence of the clammy, decomposing corpse of your drowned victim, who will also haunt your dreams. I knew about ghosts already already, from Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio, Saxo Grammaticus, The Golden Ass, and Njal’s Saga, but it’s nice to have confirmation from a modern scientific source.

Another reason for me to dislike Flaubert

I read French pretty well, but for a long time I only read nonfiction, poetry, scholarly writing, and occasional internet posts, never fiction. In my experience fiction was slow going because it required too much vocabulary and too much time with the dictionary.

Then I ordered the Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux on the internet, forgetting that the the title of the translation is the same as the title of the original French version, and the French version was what I got.  I went ahead and started to read it, and it wasn’t bad at all. So where’d I get the idea that I couldn’t read French well enough to read novels?

Madame Bovary, that’s where. Decades ago I decided to take a shot at French fiction by reading what in those days was regarded as the best French novel of all time.  But on approximately page two of the book you get this paragraph:

C’était une de ces coiffures d’ordre composite, où l’on retrouve les éléments du bonnet à poil, du chapska, du chapeau rond, de la casquette de loutre et du bonnet de coton, une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression comme le visage d’un imbécile. Ovoïde et renflée de baleines, elle commençait par trois boudins circulaires; puis s’alternaient, séparés par une bande rouge, des losanges de velours et de poils de lapin; venait ensuite une façon de sac qui se terminait par un polygone cartonné, couvert d’une broderie en soutache compliquée, et d’où pendait, au bout d’un long cordon trop mince, un petit croisillon de fils d’or, en manière de gland. Elle était neuve; la visière brillait.

In order to read a single goddamn paragraph about Charles Bovary’s goddamn hat I had to look up “casquette”,  “bonnet à poil”,  “chapska”, “chapeau rond”, “casquette de loutre”,  “bonnet de coton”, “boudins circulaires”, “polygone cartonné”, “broderie en soutache”, “croisillon”, and “gland”,  and half the English definitions were useless. “Otter hat”? “Polish hat?” — I still couldn’t visualize the stupid thing. But for Flaubert, it was “une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression comme le visage d’un imbécile”. The hat pretty much clinched the case against poor Charles, who was now doomed for all eternity.

In the meantime I’ve studied Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese, Mongol, and what not, but I’ve skipped the French fiction. Maybe it was just as well. All those guys — Realists, Naturalists, Parnassians, Decadents, the whole boatload — devoutly believed that the accumulation of visual detail, plus mysterious intuition, gives direct  access to deep reality. That was what Charles’ hat was all about. But to me it just  looks like the effective literary projection of Flaubert’s social prejudices (with a lot of extra-credit vocabulary words thrown in as a bonus).

How come no one ever mentions the meconium of liberating violence, or the lochia?

“And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can’t go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America. ” — Tom Friedman

“There is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, only one means – revolutionary terrorism”. — Karl Marx

To encourage the authors

“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson

Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres — Voltaire

People are always saying that the arts don’t do well under censorship, but actually art and literature flourished under the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and under the Czars. That was even true under Russian Communism — I have friends who read Russian and they’re always discovering great new Russian authors.

By contrast, under conditions of freedom most American literature is crap. The obvious solution would be to kill an American author every once in awhile. I have a few names in mind.

Just to answer the inevitable questions: No, I don’t know anything about contemporary American literature. I don’t read it. Why should I? It’s all crap. And don’t get any weird ideas. We should be thinking of well-known authors handled by reputable publishers, not self-published unknowns like me.

Shen Dao: Text and Translation

I am soliciting corrections, comments, and criticisms of my translation and study. I can send you a printed version: email emersonj at gmail dot com.

 PDF VERSION

慎到註譯

Introduction

 My study of Shen Dao

In 1979 P. M. Thompson published The Shen Tzu Fragments (Oxford, 1979), a careful attempt to separate the actual words of Shen Dao from the legendary and pseudoepigraphical accretions. For reasons of his own, however, when Thompson published his textual reconstruction he chose not to publish the translation which was part of the PhD dissertation from which his book was taken (A Translation of the Shen Tzu Fragments, vol. 3 of unpublished dissertation, U. Washington, Seattle). As a result, the recovered Shen Dao text has so far been available only to those who can read classical Chinese.

In this translation I have used Thompson’s edited text (inserting some of his suggested emendations) and have generally followed Thompson’s interpretations, noting the cases where I have disagreed with Thompson. The greater part of the Shen Dao corpus is unproblematic and can be straightforwardly translated. There are also a number of passages which are difficult only because of a single obscure word or phrase, but Thompson has satisfactorily decided most of these cases.

Mystical bureaucrat: the Chinese philosopher Shen Dao

I am soliciting corrections, comments, and criticisms of my translation and study. I can send you a printed version: email emersonj at gmail dot com. 

PDF VERSION

慎到 

(Shen Dao text and translation here.)

I

Shen Dao was a member of the Jixia Academy in Qi during the Hundred Schools era, sometime between 350 BC and 275 BC. Xunzi criticized him, Xunzi’s student Han Feizi acknowledged him as one of three masters of Legalism (along with Shang Yang and Shen Buhai), and the author of the Tianxia chapter of Zhuangzi discussed him at some length. Details about his life are scanty and uncertain, but at least we can be sure that he existed and was not purely legendary.

The Hundred Schools era was perhaps the most fertile period in the history of Chinese philosophy, but because of censorship and the destruction of war, few of its texts survive, usually in heavily-edited late versions, and many figures are known only as names attached to anecdotes. In the case of Shen Dao, the available material consists of a late text called the Shenzi, the three discussions mentioned above, and scattered quotations and anecdotes of widely differing value. Thompson has carefully edited the materials that remain and I have used his text.

Shen Dao is classified sometimes as a Daoist, sometimes as a Legalist, and sometimes as a follower of Huanglao, but these late retrospective classifications are not very helpful. There were no organized Daoist, Legalist, or Huanglao schools comparable to the Mohist and Confucian schools, and in effect, these classifications merely serve to lump tendencies. Insofar as these three labels mean anything, they are probably all applicable to Shen Dao.¹

The Most Overrated Work Of Fiction Of All Time

Stephen Crane’s “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” is my nomination for The Most Overrated Work Of  Fiction Of All Time. Naturalism is usually lurid, melodramatic, moralizing crap, but Crane surpasses the bunch of them. The story is 50% The Girl Who Was Ruined, 50% Painted Woman Who Wear Skimpy Outfits And Drive Men Mad, 50% temperance tract, 50% anti-immigration pamphlet,  50% anti-Christian satire, and 50% local color (which may or may not be accurate). If you try to fit that much crap into one 60-page story the consequences will be dire.

Ma Johnson is drunk or passed out every minute of her life and spends her waking time beating her husband, beating her children, breaking furniture and crockery, and pawning anything she hasn’t broken yet. Pa Johnson is drunk all the time too, which must make it rough for him, considering he has to refurnish the house a couple of times a week.

These aren’t even the real dirty kind of immigrant — by their name they’re Swedes. The most innocuous immigrants of all horrified Crane. (Yes, he was the son of a Methodist minister. How’d you guess?)

Maggie dies two pages after the moment she hits the streets  and a month or two after being dumped by her seducer. No details are given. Based on what you read, she could have died of pure sexual frustration after failing to get any clients.

Crane didn’t like foreigners: Stanley Wertheim, “Unravelling the Humanist: Stephen Crane and Ethnic Minorities”, American Literary Realism, 30.3 (1998), 65-75.