Accidental Insights Into Reading
Manash Bhattacharjee The new Seminar issue, ‘A Country of Our Own’ (April 2012), became an interesting prospect when I saw Nauman Naqvi’s name among the contributors. I started reading his essay the night I got the issue, but other matters intervened and I kept it for later. The next day I took the issue with me to read on my way to JNU. I opened the Nauman essay and began to read earnestly. Before I began to read, I vaguely remembered Nauman mentioning in the beginning a “repetitive writer” named Intizar, but I had turned the first page which I had already read, and was eager to go on from the second. I read about Nauman’s summer holidays in his native village in Barabanki where he was joined by Pakistani cousins. He mentioned how as children they were invariably divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups and teams in discussions and games involving the partitioned countries. A few “Indian cousins” would support Pakistan in the cricket and hockey matches to not only stamp their displeasure against Indian Muslims being discriminated against but also from a fear of Islam being under threat in India. When it came to hockey matches, the same cousins would desire that Zafar Iqbal and Mohd. Shahid score goals for India, but that Pakistan win in the end. Nauman slowly realised, in his gradual visits to Pakistan, there being more to Partition than the Hindu–Muslim divide. When he visited Pakistan after the Sikh riots, Nauman found Muslims having relinquished Hindustani for Punjabi, with a majoritarian refrain against the migrant Urdu speakers. Nauman then recollects how his own family was divided between the two nation-states during Partition and how the matter was more complex than children’s games. Nauman pauses to see how even those games as children were coloured in turn by what happened during Partition. With interesting tales about the difficulties of visas to Pakistan, Nauman ends by pointing to the ridiculous problems thrown up by the nation and seriously questioning its legitimacy. I finished reading the essay, glad to know much more about Nauman’s life, and felt a little more enriched. But the moment my eyes drifted towards the next essay, I read: ‘A Secret South-Asian Meta-utopia’ by Nauman Naqvi. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. I turned back the pages to find out whose essay I had been passing off in my head as Nauman’s. The essay titled ‘Family Chronicles’ bore the name Jamal Kidwai. I had met Jamal at a party once, and knew he was from Aman Trust. But I had never read him before. I had never read even Nauman before, though I had heard his video lecture on ‘A Muslim Meditation on Violence’. Nauman, I knew, was from Karachi. So how could I have glossed over the fact that the account I was reading was of an “Indian” Muslim? How could such an error happen? Anyway, an error is simply an error, and all I had to do was re-structure my rational sensibilities, acknowledge the Jamal story as Jamal’s, forget the associations I had made of the story with Nauman, and move ahead to read Nauman’s piece with a better hold on error-prone possibilities. I did read Nauman’s piece finally. I did not, finally, take the rational line of editing out the writing titled ‘Family Chronicles’ from the associations I had developed from it with Nauman Naqvi. In other words, I did not hold my error of reading as an error of judgement or an error of ethics. I found my error simply circumstantial and not burdened by the discourse of truth or truth-reading. I was not reading into any truth; I was reading a narrative signed by a person whose name I merely misplaced. But does that misplacement amount to an aesthetic or ethical crime regarding the author and the author’s name/signature? To my understanding, it is not, because the author, alive or dead, is a singular register only because his name is NOT another name. Nauman is NOT Jamal. At least that part of the error was, willy-nilly, “rectified”. I couldn’t do much about it, but I still wanted to read Jamal’s story with Nauman’s presence in it, as if it was Nauman’s story. And I looked for reasons about why it is possible to do so and take this erroneous reading further. I wanted to see where an error-prone road could take me. Is there anything as a wrong road in a journey where the destination wasn’t chosen in the first place? How to read the signposts then? I decided to go ahead. Does it really matter, in the first place, if Nauman is from Karachi and Jamal from Delhi or Lucknow? The narrator of ‘Family Chronicles’ was moving in and out of India and Pakistan, having family members in both the countries, and it didn’t matter whether he was an Indian moving in and out of Pakistan or a Pakistani moving in and out of India. Jamal’s story is obviously capable of being told in reverse (with slightly different anecdotes) by a Pakistani. The story of Partition was a mix-up of lives and habitats, of lives and histories getting in the way of each other, of memories getting in the way of each other. In this scenario, why couldn’t Jamal’s story be Nauman’s and vice-versa? Jamal’s story accidentally got misread as Nauman’s, but the rational error also gained a larger perspective, as a larger and more complex sensibility got added in the process of thinking about reading, the author’s name/signature, and the relationship between the two. The context being Partition, Jamal and Nauman are two names of Partition, partitioned names, moving in and out of two countries like a name halved into two slices of history. How much did Nauman find himself in Jamal’s story? Maybe he did find a few things, if not in common, in a familiar un-commonness. After all, Jamal was Nauman’s other half, the half who lived in India and visited Pakistan. Maybe
Fairly Directly to Death
Prasanta Chakravarty Stanley Cavell’s magisterial memoir Little Did I Know, Excerpts from Memory (Stanford University Press, 2010) begins by telling us that his will be a story of the detours on the human path to death: “…accidents avoided or embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed or transfigured, malice insufficiently imposed, love inadequately acknowledged.” These he has authorization to speak of. In a way it is a story of embracing a certain blindness—like the agnostic philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankelevitch who would not listen to German music or mention German philosophy. It is like keeping one’s eyes closed and moving through a familiar room in order to imagine what it would be like to be blind so that one is able to tiptoe back and forth between remembering and forgetting. Forgetting and acceptance does not mean that the disagreements with the alleyways of life are now agreed with: it means finding a further life—in the practice of philosophy. Philosophy then, is often an abstraction of autobiography. So, Cavell reminds us, how Wittgenstein would habitually think and share ordinary language, not advance theses in philosophy. Philosophy, like autobiography must be for everyone and no one—as Emerson in his notebooks or Wordsworth in The Preludes allude to us. This attitude, this discriminating posture, would seem pretentious to those who write out of a sense of a history of oppression. Not enough representative of culture or race or sex, it would seem. What then is Cavell doing as a Jew? His Jewishness—always marked a tinge sharper in America, in growing up in the East side of Atlanta and then in Sacramento, in his obligations to Semitic purity, his explorations of the subtle biases in European philosophical tradition, are not matters of cultural identity, he tells us, but “identities compacted in my existence.” As he thinks about identities and scruples of purity he simultaneously wonders about his sedation and isolated concentration of lights in the midst of a complicated recent heart procedure, and speculates, might we not all be headed for exciting interplanetary travel? And yet Cavell humbly underlines that his words can be at best excerpts from an American academic’s life—alternating between the common and the singular. In a book peppered with dazzling encounters with some of the sharpest minds of the 20th century, two men stand out. One is the philosopher J.L. Austin. And the other, Cavell’s father: “We see our fathers naked. We men,” Cavell would confide, as he painstakingly details his old man’s ruthless melancholia and acutely vulnerable Jewish relationship to a new country and what he has bequeathed to the junior—dispassion and attachment in equal measure. A bereft and incoherent professor, unsure in things he ought to be an authority on, as we espy quite early. But beneath the raw murmurings and unbridgeable rancor also lie a subtle bond of empathy, like when the unschooled, pawnshop-owner father takes the son to a manufacturer of academic robes when Cavell prepares to defend his doctoral dissertation. It was a private ceremony and the rigorous philosopher, from a distance, wonders about the requirement of such ceremonies in our lives: “Ceremony in human existence is no more measurable by its utility, though philosophers seem to sometime argue otherwise, than the possession of language is, or living in common; you might as well argue the utility of possessing a human body.” And once, when Cavell asked his mother why she ended up marrying his father, she replied, “He is a serious man.” Her silences, Cavell tells us, when not terrifying, were often golden. At its profoundest, this journey of a book is about silences and postponement and the price we willingly, knowingly pay for these decisions. It is a mad world, my masters! And it is these that have always driven Cavell to his readings. The kaleidoscope of subject positions and the inexhaustible joy in trying to relate to those take Cavell to intellectual inquiries. He wonders about Thoreau acquiring wood for his new cabin by destroying the old shack and recalls a particular passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. ‘our investigation seems only to destroy everything important,’ but insists that he is ‘destroying nothing but houses of cards.’ But if the world remains, as it is, pointlessly, what counts as defense against another’s moods? Between these bouts of inwardness, Cavell narrates some exuberant and universal teenage moments too—his awkward awe and sleeplessness at spying a local beauty, naked in a local performance rehearsal, his brave 1935 apple-green Oldsmobile coupe, high school bowling matchups—sometimes played for money, his music band and music album collection that he so treasured and then let go. There is this hilarious anecdote about his own precociousness as a kid as his teachers tested him on skipping him to the second grade a year earlier. After the teachers finished testing Cavell with a string of questions and making him do things with blocks, he shot back: “You have asked me a lot of questions. Now I am going to ask you a question. What is the difference between a hill and a pill?” To his bemused teachers who had no clue whatsoever, after a brief pause, Cavell coolly informed—“A hill goes up and pill goes down.” When he came out, he told his mother that his question was not good enough since a hill could both go up and down. There is a sense that this precociousness, and a keen sense of it, was both a source of pride and perpetual misery to him and to his close ones. While in the hospital after a road accident he felt like Proust’s narrator describing his stages of awakenings! Are accidents, unlike events, disproportionate to causal causes, of threads forever lost? But then he wonders whether accidents, encounters, excuses and misses could at all happen after cell phones. O yes, they could indeed, “what if the cell phone melts or a goat eats it.” Things will continue to happen comically, at unripe times, in the wrong tempo. It is in
Sheesha Ghat
Naiyar Masud [HUG is grateful to author Anil Menon for providing us with this version of the story] Sad mauj raa ze raftan-e khud muztrib kunad Mauje keh bar-kinaar ravad az miyaan-e maa Each wave that strikes out to embrace the shore Leaves a hundred more perturbed by its departure —Naziri Nishapuri And with such luck and loss I shall content myself Till tides of turning time may toss Such fishers on the shelf —George Gascoigne After keeping me with him with the greatest of love for eight years, my foster father was finally forced to find another place for me. It was not his fault, nor was it mine. He had believed, as had I, that my stuttering would stop after a few days of relaxation with him, but neither he nor I expected that the people here would turn me into a sideshow, the way they do a madman. In the bazaars, people listened to my words with a greater curiosity than they exhibited toward others, and whether what I said was funny or not, they always laughed. Within a few days my situation worsened so drastically that when I tried to say anything at all, not only in the bazaar but even at home, the words collided with my teeth and lips and palate and bounced back the way waves retreat on touching shore. In the end, I would get so tongue-tied that the veins in my neck would swell and a terrible pressure would invade my throat and chest, leaving me breathless and threatening to suffocate me. I would pant, forced to leave my sentence incomplete, then start all over again after I had recovered my breath. At this my foster father would scold me, “You’ve said that. I heard you. Now go on.” If he ever scolded me, it was over this. But my problem was that I couldn’t begin my account from the middle. Sometimes he would listen to me patiently and at others he would lift his hand and say, “All right, you may stop.” But if I couldn’t begin my account from the middle, I couldn’t leave it unfinished, either. I would grow agitated. Finally he would walk away, leaving me still stuttering, talking to myself. If anyone had seen me, I’d have been thought insane. I was also fond of wandering through the bazaars, and enjoyed sitting there among the groups of people. Though I could not utter what I had to say comprehensibly, I made up for this by listening closely to what others said and repeating it in my mind. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, yet I was happy enough, because the people there didn’t dislike me, and above all my foster father held me dear and looked after my every need. For the last few days, though, he had seemed worried. He had begun talking to me for long stretches of time, a new development. He would come up with questions to ask me that required a long answer, and then listen attentively without interrupting me. When I’d tire and begin to pant, he would wait for me to finish what I was saying, and when I resumed my account he would listen with the same concentration. I’d think he was about to scold me, and my tongue would start to tie itself in knots, but he would just gaze at me, saying nothing. After only three days my tongue began to feel as if it were unknotting a bit. It was as if a weight were being lifted from my chest, and I began to dream of the day when I would be able to speak as others did, with ease and clarity. I began collecting in my heart all the things I had wanted to share with others. But on the fourth day, father called me over and had me sit very close to him. For a long time his talk rambled aimlessly, then he fell silent. I waited for him to pose one of his questions, but he suddenly said, “Your new mother is arriving the day after tomorrow.” Seeing the joy begin to dawn on my face, he grew troubled, then said slowly, “She’ll go crazy if she hears you speak. She’ll die.” The next day my luggage was all packed. Before I could ask any questions, my father took my hand and said, “Let’s go.” *** He didn’t say a word to me during the journey. But on our way, he told a man who chanced to inquire, “Jahaz has asked for him.” Then they both started talking about Jahaz. I remembered Jahaz, too. When I had first come to live with father, Jahaz earned his bread by performing clownish imitations at fairs and bazaars. He would wear a small pink sail tied to his back—perhaps that’s why his name became Jahaz, “ship,” or perhaps he wore the sail because his name was Jahaz. The pink sail would billow when the wind blew hard and Jahaz would seem to be moving forward under its power. He could mimic to perfection a ship caught in a storm. We would be convinced that angry winds, raging waves, and fast-spinning whirlpools were bent on sinking the ship. The sounds of the wind howling, the waves slapping, the whirlpool’s ringing emptiness, even the sails fluttering, would emerge distinctly from the mimic’s mouth; finally, the “ship” would sink. This routine was very popular with the children and the older boys, but was performed only when the wind was high. If the wind halted, however, the young spectators were even more delighted, and called out: “Tobacco, tobacco!” I had never seen anyone smoke tobacco the way Jahaz did. He usevery kind of tobacco, in every way it was possible to smoke it, and when the air was still he would perform such astounding tricks with clouds of smoke that the spectators couldn’t believe their eyes. After producing several smoke rings, he would take a step
In Defense of Poetry
Marjorie Perloff One of the most common genres in writing about academia today is the epitaph for the humanities. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Weisbuch–an English professor at the University of Michigan and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation–declares: Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities–it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it–is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries…. As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable. More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities–with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever–has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.1 Devastating as that last comment is, it’s all too accurate. Even the current boom in the economy cannot accommodate the best of our new humanities Ph.Ds. Weisbuch does also offer some “solutions” (he calls them “Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities”): (1) gather data on our departments, finding out where our graduates get jobs so as to insure better planning; (2) practice “doctoral birth control,” using Draconian means to cut down the number of entering graduate students; (3) “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time faculty members rather than adjuncts; (4) “create jobs beyond academe for humanities graduates”; (5) “redesign graduate programs so as to accommodate the new community college market, where teaching skills are more important than scholarly expertise”; and (6) “become newly public”–that is, to make better contacts with the so-called outside world. 2 The trouble with such practical solutions is that they assume that we humanists have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable–that we simply need to convince those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us. But that assumption is untrue. What are the humanities? Consider the answer provided on the web site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): What are the Humanities? The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evident in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on “The Many Realms of King Arthur” at your local library, that is the humanities. When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England midwife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil War, that is the humanities too. What a wonderful justification, this last, for being a couch potato! And this vacuous statement is not an aberration. Just look up the “National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965,” which brought the NEH and NEA into being: 1. “The arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” What can “belong” possibly mean here? I as citizen do not “own” specific art works and philosophical treatises the way I might own stock or real estate. And how does this compare to the sciences? Does microbiology–or protein chemistry–”belong” to all the people of the United States? 2. “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” At best, this statement is blandly patronizing. Imagine someone claiming that “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to the humanities alone, but must give full value and support to those great branches of intellectual activity, the sciences and social sciences”? But further: the assertion that arts and humanities somehow make us better persons and citizens is, at best, implausible. Hitler, let’s remember, was so enraptured by Wagner that he attended performances of Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera House ten times in 1908. 3. “The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” Do the arts and humanities foster diversity? I know of no evidence for this proposition. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are generally held to be classics of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. They aim to define the poet’s unique genius, but the last thing they foster is “respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” But if the NEH’s claims for the humanities are, to say the least, questionable, they are also quite typical. At Stanford, where I teach, the official Bulletin contains this description: The School of Humanities and Sciences, with over 40 departments and interdepartmental degree programs, is the primary locus for the superior liberal arts education offered by Stanford University. Through exposure to the humanities, undergraduates study the ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of the human experience, past and present, and so are prepared to make thoughtful and imaginative contributions to the culture of the future. The language used here is revealing. Whereas the social sciences (according to theBulletin) teach “theories and techniques for the analysis of specific societal issues,” and the “hard” sciences prepare students to become the “leaders” in our increasingly technological society, the humanities “expose” students to the “ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of human experience.” Exposure is nice enough–but also perfectly dispensable when leadership and expertise are at stake. Indeed, the