Swallowing Down Burning Coals: Chaos, Impertinence and Treason in the Coffee House
Arpit Kumar __________________ “Yet these will o’er their Jewish Liquor, About Religion Jar and Bicker; And rave till grown as Piping Hot, As the dull Grout o’er which they sot.” ~Ned Ward in ‘Vulgus Britannicus: or, the British Hudibras’ At first sight, the world of the long-eighteenth century English coffee-house is immediately comprehensible and familiar. A meeting place for friends, for leisurely reading and talk over a cup of coffee, for the occasional discussion of news and politics – it is a metaphor for culture itself. The coffee-house has also always lingered in the background of literary criticism of the long-eighteenth century as a space frequented by the likes of John Dryden, Samuel Pepys, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele promised to bring out philosophy out of its sheltered and closeted life to the crowds of the coffee-house. It was recorded thus in accounts of the literature, culture and life of the long-eighteenth century until the publication of Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere(1962; trans. 1989) where it became much more – the focal point of an emerging formation, the bourgeois public sphere, where strangers gathered, outside the structures of the traditional authority of the church and the state, to converse over matters of ‘common concern’ in a manner that nurtured ‘rational critical deliberation’ and eventually validated the legitimacy of institutions of authority. In such a framework, the coffee-house was seen as a converging point for the various energies of modernity – print, secular sociability, consumption and commerce, the scientific temper and a training ground for democracy. In Terry Eagleton’s Function of Criticism, the coffee-house and the various discursive projects that formed around it gave birth to modern criticism itself. These are claims that have since been variously substantiated, contested and, in some cases, rejected but the fascination with coffee-house culture has not only endured but rather blossomed in the twenty-first century. Markman Ellis published The Coffee House: A Cultural History in 2004 that documented the travels of the beverage from the Levant region to London (in 1652) and its life thereafter whereas Brian Cowan published The Social Life of Coffee (2004) where the early life of coffee among the virtuosi and the wits is considered in depth. These relatively recent publications build on the work of other historians of the coffee-house, chief among them is Aytoun Ellis who described the eighteenth century coffee-house as ‘penny universities’ to emphasize the role it played in the education and improvement of the eighteenth century public. A whole host of other literary critics and historians have analyzed coffee-house culture with their own points of emphasis. Lawrence Klein has documented the significance of the coffee-house in the process of defining a culture of politeness that, he believes, existed in the long-eighteenth century. Emma Clery locates the world of the coffee-house at the center of a discursive deployment of the category of the feminine in association with commerce to illustrate its consequences for the social and cultural landscape of England. These interventions have revealed a greater complexity the coffee-house as it becomes more than a transcendental space of reason but rather appears as a space that was as much of the past as of the future. One can attempt to derive from, and build upon, these interventions that have complicated the nature and function of the coffee-house. This complexity lends itself to an extended analysis of the conceptualization of the public sphere, picking up from Jurgen Habermas and his critics, to deepen the concept so as to be able to accommodate a less homogeneous interpretation of coffee-house culture. The fact of the matter is that Habermas’ idealization of the long eighteenth century English ‘bourgeois public sphere’ gets complicated in the face of direct empirical and conceptual queries that prove beyond doubt that it systematically excluded participation. The conflation of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘homme’ is more than misleading; it’s an attempt to pre-empt and settle the boundaries of the public sphere. It doesn’t merely exclude participation but it pre-defines what constitutes ‘matters of general concern’ and the forms in which they can be ‘discussed’ and ‘deliberated’. These aren’t new problems for those critics who foreground and emphasize Habermas’ Kantian orientation.[1] A detour through Shaftesbury, however, may allow us to develop a closer understanding of the kind of individual subjectivity that sustains Habermas’ proposed public sphere. The politeness and civility of the utterances emerging from the coffee-house suggest a notion of refined and virtuous publics but this chapter will attempt to articulate another template which displaces civility with contestation, controversy and conflict. Nancy Fraser’s critique of the Habermasian public sphere demands a radical re-opening of the public sphere in relation to the participation and issues of a diverse set of stakeholders. It is important to recognize that the diversity of stakeholders doesn’t merely imply a diversity of interests; it also implies a diversity of discursive styles, a multiplicity of languages and an obfuscation of normalized lines of behaviour and action. At all times, in any given ‘public sphere’, understood as a coming together of utterances in dialogue, a gradual concretization of boundaries occurs which results in the identification and categorization of certain utterances as standing in violation of the public sphere. These utterances expose, therefore, the limits of any imagined/real notion of open publicness and become touchstones in the testing of the strength of an actually existing public sphere. In this chapter, the attempt will be to highlight such utterances that emerge from the margins or from ‘the outside’ of the public sphere in such a fashion that they are immediately perceived as threats. In doing so, the focus will be upon multiple dimensions of discourse: the thematic and substantive content of what is said, the ways and means of expressing (styles, genres, and rhetoric) and the difficulty, therefore, of retaining the template of ‘rational discourse’. This multiplicity and discursive variety has always been an integral part of the matrix of language itself but its visibility increases manifold in the age
The Matter of History: Himalayan Mountaineering, its Archives & some Inexcusable Gaps
Amrita Dhar _______________ The Flour and the Porters One summer morning a few years ago I was walking hurriedly across a stretch of Hyde Park in London. I was returning to the Royal Geographical Society for another greedy day with the lantern slides from Eric Shipton’s photographs—and I was running out of time. I would be leaving the country soon, and there was no way I would quite finish looking through the contents of even all of these boxes. I knew that the Royal Geographical Society’s cache of Shipton photographs and documents was by no means exhaustive, but they had slides from some of his most delicious wanderings. Last week, I had spent hours devouring the ones from Kashmir and Garhwal, and there were whole boxes promising others from Sinkiang and the Karakoram. The slides were dusty and out of order within their boxes, the cataloguing was a bit primitive (for instance, captions were inconsistent, and for photographs that Shipton appeared in, there was usually no way of knowing who the photographer had been), and the viewing apparatus was adequate but less than ideal (a flat back-lit board on which you could place the slides, and then you could magnify-by-glass or squint your way through them). But even so, the places and the people jumped out at me. I had stood right there, on the Ganges watershed, looking at Kamet in the distance as I held my breath in the cold air. And I had looked from just there on the Gangotri Glacier, craning my neck a bit to see Shivling. And wow, is that the view from Aghil Pass? No wonder everyone waxes eloquent about it! And what an unreal landscape of ice pinnacles on the Kyagar Glacier. And I had seen this photograph of Pasang, Kusang, and Ang Tharkay somewhere in print. But look at this one with Shipton and Ang Tharkay together—what smiles. And so on. On the way back that evening, it struck me, although without surprise, that I had indeed failed to look through all the photographs I wanted to. I should never have been able to in the limited time I had at my disposal anyway, and to compound it all, I had been distracted by a box of documents. The box was a curious collection of things—from a letter written by a very young schoolboy Eric to his mother from Beaumont House, to a VHS with a recording of Shipton on This Day Tonight by Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television on 31 October 1972, and donated to the Royal Geographical Society by Jane Allen in 2012. I had stopped at a few typescripts and drafts, and at a few letters. Short essays—‘Hunger’, ‘The Cave’, ‘The Long Walk’ typed up and annotated/edited by hand—and a longhand manuscript of That Untravelled World. And letters written to Shipton in 1952 following the curious chapter of his being selected for leadership of the British Everest expedition of 1953, and then having to stand down. Thus John Hunt: ‘I want you [Shipton] to know that I am conscious of filling your place most inadequately’ (in a letter dated 13 September 1952).Or one R.Varvill telling the now unemployed ‘Dear Shipton’ not to wait very hopefully for a job from the Colonial Office: ‘The Tonga job which, incidentally is called “Consul and Agent, Tonga”, will not become vacant until well into 1954; and there is no saying, whether the present incumbent might have his term extended’ (in a letter dated 25 November 1952). Or planning papers for Everest 1953—papers that lay out intentions of a clear departure from the Shipton style of carefree mountain travel—copied to Shipton by the infinitely more dogged John Hunt. ‘The ultimate aim of the expedition, as defined by the Sponsoring Authority, is the ascent of Everest during 1953 by a member or members of the party. This aim may appear self-evident, but it is of vital importance that it should be borne constantly in mind, both during the preparatory phase and, later, in the field. All planning and preparation must lead us methodically towards the equivalent of that aim’ (‘Memorandum on Everest 1953’). And so on. Despite having read Shipton’s own writings, I had not been prepared to so be confronted by these sharp flashes of an intense, lonely, joyous, and restless life. Although I should have learnt my lesson by now, for had I not had exactly this experience while sitting down last week in Magdalene College, Cambridge, with the letters, notebooks, and postcards of Dorothy Pilley, an extraordinary British climber who was active in the early twentieth century in the mountains of England, Scotland, and Wales? Scholars of autobiography have long pointed out how much gets left behind or deliberately excluded or forgotten from a life in the creation of a life’s narrative. This evening I was realizing anew the truth of these observations. Just as Pilley’s Climbing Days (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1935) by no means encompassed everything her climbing days were about, Shipton’s several volumes of travelogue and autobiography too left gaps both in biography and in social history that only sound archival research can fill. I therefore found myself thinking with greater urgency of the need for scholarship, history, and good biography.[1] As a scholar who had long found top-down or peak-centric or genius-ridden or exception-oriented mountaineering narratives to be problematic, inadequate, and even dishonest, I was also, perhaps predictably, thinking of the less visible mountain lives surrounding Shipton’s. By this, I don’t mean Bill Tilman. Tilman’s superlative travels and magnificent books (now collected in the anthology of The Seven Mountain-Travel Books) have their own galaxy of pleasures, intrigues, and problems. I also don’t mean Diana Shipton. Although The Antique Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950) is a delightful read and a heartily recommended volume for any library focused on mountain travel. I was also not thinking just of Ang Tharkay, Pasang, and Kusang, the three Sherpa mountaineers whose athletic expertise and overall versatility had an immense
The Language of Flowers
Michael Taussig ________________ Asked on a radio interview a couple of years back why he drew animals and not people, the great cartoonist Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner fame replied: “It’s easier to humanize animals than humanize humans.” Recently the Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria gave this a twist. Reacting against the stupendous violence in his country, he humanized flowers by photographing them like botanical specimens, replacing the stems, leaves, flowers, and berries with what look like human bones. He called this series of thirty-two black-and-white photographs The Flower Vase Cut, referring to the name of one of the mutilations practiced in the Colombian violencia of the 1940s and 1950s in which the amputated limbs were stuffed, so it is said, into the thorax via the neck of the decapitated corpse. In cartoons we laugh at distortions of the body, suggesting just how close violence is to humor. Indeed the human face when crying can seem very close if not identical to that same face laughing. It is, moreover, almost trite to observe that great comedians and clowns bear the burden of great tragedy as well. As for the cartoon quality in violence, hearken to Michael Herr’s reference to his experience in the Vietnam War; he goes to considerable effort to deny these two elements have anything in common: “No jive cartoon,” he says, “where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed back and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game.” No jive cartoon—indeed! So why bother to raise that specter, only to deny it? Why bother to come so close, only to draw back? Is it because the resemblance is too, too troubling, true but troubling, and by this maneuver we do precisely what is necessary, which is to catch a glimpse of the impossible unthinkable and then close it over again? Well, then, what is this impossible unthinkable that in equating war with a cartoon simultaneously heightens their stupendous difference? Did I say heighten, as does Herr when he refers us to the cartoonish move of being dropped from heights, flattened out, “then up again and whole and back in the game”?What emotional register, what law of aesthetics and logic is being transgressed by this heightened drop and even steeper fall into . . . well, into what? Not redemption. That’s for sure. Back into war, that’s what—“up again and whole and back in the game.” Is this not also what occurs when Echavarria humanizes not animals but flowers, meticulously duplicating the exactness and whimsy of botanical drawings with his bleached-out photographs of human bones? At one point in an interview, Echavarria says, “My purpose was to create something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it. The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones— something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.” I myself do not see it that way. The flowers are so obviously not flowers. Instead it is the very clumsiness, the deliberateness of the artifice of posing bones as flowers, that perturbs one—and this is of the same order of artifice that makes the mutilation of the Corte del Florero so powerful, too. The flowers in Echavarria’s photographs have stems made of curving ribs or of the decayed long bones of arms. The petals are formed from what appear to be the human pelvis or spinal vertebrae. In some photographs, small bones like teeth or chips of bones lie to one side, thereby disturbing pretensions to symmetry or completeness. A vertebra hangs delicately off a rib, five of which are bunched together like plant stems emerging from a column of three vertebrae glued together, not as in the human spine, but separated from that, like a child’s building blocks, then stuck front to back, Lying on their bleached-out background, the flowers appear fragile, suspended in midair and ungrounded. They could be flying. The law of gravity no longer holds. There is a sense of a world on hold, a painful absence of sound. What we see is silence, the silence of something gone awfully wrong with the human world such that we are all, God included, holding our breath, which is probably what happens when you fall a long, long way. To add to their strangeness, each photograph bears a title like the Latin names used in the plant illustrations of the famous botanical expedition to Colombia organized by the Spanish crown and led by Jose´ Celestino Mutis at the end of the eighteenth century. Echavarrı´a is very conscious of this genealogy. In fact he sees his flowers as its latest expression. The difference is that Echavarria’s latinate names are hybrids suggesting the grotesque, one pelvic bone flower being named Dracula Nosferatu, while another flower made of a curved rib with a bunch of metacarpals at one end, suggestive of petals, is called Dionaea Misera. Although these names are in small, discreet letters, names are of consuming importance to this work, beginning with the name of the mutilation—The Flower Vase Cut. The name is crucial because on viewing the mutilated body without the name, I doubt whether an observer would get the point—as we say of a joke—without the name. All the observer would see would be a bloody morass of hacked-off limbs and a limbless trunk. The mutilation would be incomplete, by which I mean it would lack the meaning that destroys meaning. I do not understand this. Perhaps I am not meant to. But what I do know is that what mutilation registers, what all mutilation registers, is this wave, this continuous wave-like motion of autosacrifice of meaning heightened then dissipated by the name in conjunction with the corpse as a work of art. I think it goes like this: that in attaching
UNTIMELY KAMALKUMAR: A CAMPAIGN FOR A WRITER
Debraj Dasgupta ___________________ Please, no more snippets of memories. Please, we don’t want to hear anymore about portrayals. Allow us a respite from the very refinements of “hearing”. ———— The first literary work of Kamalkumar Majumdar [Lal Juto] was published approximately in 1937. His signature-novel Antarjali Yatra saw the light of the day in 1959 but we had to wait till 2005 for the first comprehensive analysis of Kamalkumar’s literature (which arrived with Raghab Bandyopadhyay). Yet we are very much embedded within the practice of biographical criticism as far as this man is concerned. It is high time that we liberate the spirit of Kamalkumar from the spectral-coop of biographical criticism. We know that a certain kind of grove about him had already been prepared even before the initiation of this particular campaign. A certain aperture initiated from the heading itself, on the printed pages through a assiduous back-end lattice: and we can name that as “Kamalkumar Majumdar”—a tautology, a name unto himself. About which more shortly. A signifier, a referent which has been sealed inside the insulated box of Bengali culture haunts us; a signifier that continuously shuttles from one alleyway of a Bengali cultural hub to another—like an industrious, engrossed rabbit. And from such an avowed thesis on Kamalkumar, numerous questions constantly trail such writing. Why Kamalkumar? Why Kamalkumar again? Is it his birthday today? The centenary of Antarjali Yatra perhaps? If nothing, then why read him;why this out of season tease with l’affaire Kamalkumar? Yes, can’t we simply disregard these questions? No doubt these questions have merit; they come from sundry fountainheads. We can look for and garner an assorted arsenal of replies. We can posit counter-questions too: Why always make neat little boxes of our reading of literature? Why this exigency of a classroom or a birthday or a performance for literature to arrive? Why are our habits of reading so purposeful (and therefore so woefully regularizing)? Besides this, in the case of Kamalkumar, there are other disquiets as well. After the birth centenary of Kamalkumar Majumdar, his (alchemical) cult turned truly popular. Is such an untimely remembrance falling into the trap of populism? If not, then why such brisk, hurried commemorations everywhere? Or is it a celebration of an essentialist, Bengali chauvinist, religious figure—trying to force an ally for our inner selves? Undoubtedly, things are not so simple. It is an attempt to conjure up an unseasonable, inexpedient entry. The writings of Kamalkumar require an untimely meditation, simply and foremost to establish that his work did not arrive from Mars. Perhaps quite unfortunately, he wrote within and about our society, our world. A stupid array of adjectives like isolated, irreplaceable, incomparable, unparalleled, unknowable, and incomprehensible (therefore untouchable) and a consistent, restless exercise of non-analysis gradually converted Kamalkumar into a myth, like the Mayan civilization—we sometimes forget whether it was historical or mythical! As if there is no possibility of dispersing Kamalkumar within the hubbub of everydayness. And without being a bunch of hypocrites, let’s admit that certainly we never wanted to get him into that hubbub. As we do to an introverted-bachelor—shun him and make him special at the same time! People just love to say: don’t disturb him, ‘let him be alone’ (ah, make him ‘untouchable’). And then essentially, as in our past, we have kicked Kamalkumar again and again on his arse. Nowadays we are also doing the same in a sophisticated manner by making him into some kind of God. Can you imagine how banal and blunt our habits are? And after this whole pseudo-progressive callousness of decades, we still have a desire to appropriate his singularity within the high conservative environment of the classroom of Bengali literature. In addition, in the classrooms, inane literate clowns with clever faces repeatedly try to understand him as some extraterrestrial phenomenon. And as they do so, I really think that they should not forget that cutting statement of Kamalkumar – “শিক্ষকতা একটি ছিনাল জীবিকা” (the act of teaching is a whorish profession). No, this is not only about Kamalkumar but also about the mountebank reading public of Bengal. We do need an untimely reading of Kamalkumar’s writing in order to take on the humbug morality of the Bengali reading public. Our entry points could be many. One could start from a not so well known articulation from Suhasinir Pometom: ‘সুহার কোলে স্তূপীকৃত দারিদ্র – ইহা হইতে চোখ তুলিয়া সে অন্ধকারের প্রতি চাহিল, রাত্রে আয়না দেখিতে নাই, অধুনা তাহার ঐ অন্ধকারের প্রতি চাহিয়া কেন জানি – গ্রাম্যবালকদের মত বলিতে সাধ হয় “ওগো ডাক পিওন করি নিবেদন মালিক ভিন্ন চিঠি দিও না কখন”…’ ‘Poverty, bunched up, accrues in Suha’s lap – and from there, towards the darkness, she turns up her eyes. At night no one should look at the mirror. Presently, gazing at the darkness, who knows why, like callow village youth she wishes to blurt out “O my postman, an appeal: hand over this letter to none except the master.” If we had not begun from these phrases, we could have started from an infamous preface of a novel by Pierre Guyotar, titled Eden Eden Eden, which was published in 1970. The preface was written by Roland Barthes: ‘A single sentence which never ends’… said Barthes, about that work. Or we could start from— ‘সময়কে flattery করা তোমারও যদি মনোবাসনা হইত, তুই আমি সকলেই অন্তত দারুণ কথা শিল্পী হইতে পারিতাম – তোমার ও আমার মত নগণ্যর এই দোষ যে আমরা পাঠককে ভোট-দাতা বা ইউনিয়ান করে বলিয়া ভাবি নাই ‘। “If you had also willed to flatter our time, at least you and I could have become great wordsmiths; the mistake that poor people like us made was that we didn’t imagine the reader as a voter or union man.” Or, ‘কৃষকচৈতন্যের অন্বেষণ নয় – কৌমজীবন মন্থন করে লুপ্তপ্রায় সাংস্কৃতিক চিহ্নগুলি, তার সাংকেতিক লিপি উদ্ধারও কমলবাবুর অন্যতম কৃত্য’। (রাঘব বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়) ‘Not a hunt for peasant-consciousness, but the salvaging of the obsolete signifiers of community-life and its scriptures through the excavation of it is