The visible work of this book is easily and briefly enumerated:

The most compact way I know to express Jorge Luis Borges’s brain-bending irony slides in between the second and third words of the title of his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” The title creates a compact version of the self-canceling liar paradox  credited to the ancient philosopher Epimenides: if the essay’s argument is “new,” time has not been refuted, but if the “refutation” does what it claims and deconstructs time, the modifying word “new” becomes meaningless. So far, so self-consuming. Borges’s essay, like many of his fictions, dances across the edges of veracity and what Jonathan Basile, in Tar for Mortar, his brilliant new open-source reading of Borges, calls “the dream of totality.”

Basile, the creator of the amazing libraryofbabel.info website that digitally replicates the conditions of Borges’s famous story, “The Library of Babel,” brings to this book multiple strengths: razor-sharp analytical skills, precise writing, and a web-master’s experience of wrestling with a digital instantiation of Borges’s thought experiment. He’s written a brilliant book about Borges — that would be enough of a great thing for me — which also has important things to say about intellectual ambition, irony, language, and the things that the Digital Humanities can and cannot reveal.

… An examination of the essential metric laws of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909)

What Basile terms the “dream of totality” turns out, as he cogently shows, to be quixotic in a very precise way: the fantasy never corresponds to reality, but the act of dreaming changes the world in which the dreamer lives. “Totality itself,” Basile observes, “is essentially incomplete” (17). This lack of wholeness redounds upon the dreamer. “In all its forms,” he continues, “the library should lead us to think differently about the possibility of originality or novelty” (17). The limits of both Borges’s Library and language itself — the fact that “even the most unpredicted or unpredictable event is intelligible to us only by means of conforming to pre-existing concepts and forms of experience” (18) — bounds our thinkable universe. The world spreads itself before us, in physical space and also inside the slim & somewhat broken copy of Borges’s Labyrinths that I have sitting on my desk right now. The fragile New Directions paperback is the second of several copies that I have owned, but the oldest still in my possession. My notes in spidery pencil marked the pages in the mid-1980s, when I treated myself to an undergrad course on Borges and Latin American fiction with James Irby, who translated most of the material in this volume. Around that same time that I changed tracks from my plans to major in theoretical mathematics and turned instead to literature, where I remain today.

… A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December 1909)

“I no longer long for a solution” (18), Basile writes after a wonderfully thorough analysis of the possible and impossible structures of “The Library of Babel.” He comes to think that “Borges has an imagination that surpasses lucidity to its dark hinter-side, the mind of what I would prefer to call an anarchitect, whose great vision was an ability to lead us into blindness” (18). At the far end of the paradox lies “Borges’s irony” (18) and his habit of breaking open all conceptions of totality even as he dreams them in their fiercest and most capacious forms. At the end of Basile’s gorgeous investigation and careful parsing of “The Library of Babel,” he arrives at Borges’s auto-ironic not-quite-nihilism: “there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambiguous word” (64). In an odd moment of vertigo that I associate with a lifetime of reading Borges, I noticed when I first read that quoted sentence — at the hinge of Basile’s book — that the passage was one I’d also quoted myself, at the conclusion of the “Brown” chapter I wrote for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology in 2013 — a chapter and book that also marked a redoubling or intensifying of my own ecomaterialist turn.

The broken spine of my undergrad copy of Labyrinths

… almost infinitely richer …

Repetition looks different under a Borgesian lens. It’s not very strange that Basile and I, two American Borgistas, would quote the same resonant phrase. In its playful doubling of universal meaning, the phrase perfectly captures Basile’s argument about irony and totality; I used it to make a similar point about environmental identity and excess. But the echo worked on my imagination as I turned into the second chapter of Tar for Mortar, which moved from an explication of the experience of creating libraryofbabel.info and a comparative reading of “self-contradiction” in Borges and Nietzsche regarding the Eternal Return. Now I started to get suspicious, and I opened the title page of my mid-’80s copy of Labyrinths to the notes for what would become my final paper in that course: “the Eternal Return / see last pp. of ‘Garden.'” I didn’t know much about Nietzsche at that time — I would have benefited greatly from Basile’s cogent explication in this book! — but I foisted on James Irby at the end of that long-ago semester many pages of undergraduate Borgesiana, circling around Eternal Returns and paradoxes of space and time. I’ve long since lost the paper itself, but my memory is that he thought I should maybe read more Nietzsche, but he appreciated my enthusiasm for Borges.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.

Basile finds in Nietzsche and Borges examples of “text[s] at odds with [themselves]” (82). The ironic, self-negating core of both authors, and their common sources in the atomist tradition in philosophy, require what Basile wonderfully terms “a sly self-assurance when expressing themselves by means of contradiction” (86). In Nietzsche, the characteristic mode is aggressive “affirmation” (86) in the face of impossibility. For Borges, the characteristic turn exits pure philosophy for aesthetics and fiction: his muse-mouthpieces are not the prophet Zarathustra, but more literary figures, Don Quixote, or his not-translator Pierre Menard. Or perhaps his abiding figure occupies the ironic separation the Argentine author described between himself and “the other one, the one called Borges, … the one things happen to” (“Borges y yo” Irby trans. 246).

Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.

The third and shortest chapter of Basile’s book takes up a question, “In Which It Is Argued, Despite Popular Opinion to the Contrary, that Borges Did Not Invent the Internet.” It’s a smart, witty reply to misreadings of Borges as prophet of digital utopia. Basile makes a compelling case that Borges’s works display “the deferral of presence across several virtualities” (87) rather than an anticipation of digital mediation in multiple modes. He instead argues that the central idea in Borges reveals “the rupture of a ceaseless differing-from-self” (91). In wonderfully compact prose, Basile concludes with an image of Borges as exploring “the lack of totality, the finitude and uncertainty that plague even the grandest project of any cognition shuttling between uniqueness and iterability” (92). But the lingering image with which the book closes is not this conceptual split but “the corner of the smile that recognizes in this finitude the possibility of all play” (92.)

Notes from the 1980s

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

There are a few writers I loved obsessively as a boy — maybe it’s just Borges and Thomas Pynchon for whom I feel this level of intensity — to whom I return eagerly and also apprehensively, with the awareness that what I found in these authors indelibly marked my younger self. I read Borges today with teenage Steve on my shoulder, wondering what he made of these texts then and how they changed him. I wonder how that reading and thinking translated me from a long-ago New Jersey suburb to where I am now. (Actually, I live now in a Connecticut suburb, so maybe I’m not that far away, though the decades and detours feel immense and labyrinthine.) I’m grateful to Jonathan Basile for his rich and brilliant investigation of this writer who means so much to me. All Borgistas, or really anyone who cares about literature, language, and speculative thinking, should read this open-access book. And support punctum books!

[All quotations in bold from James E. Irby’s translation of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”]

The final “elegant hope” of the narrator of “The Library of Babel” imagines some eternal traveler making infinite peregrinations through the Library who would in inhuman time “see the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order” (Irby 58). An universal and cyclical library would suture the paradoxical combination of maximum iterability in linguistic signs, “a number which, although extremely vast, is not infinite” (54), and extension in physical space. Like Basile and like Borges’s narrator, I’ve been turning that possibility over in my head for a long time. I’m so pleased to have revisited it in the good company of Tar for Mortar.

Another gorgeous book by Punctum!

[A copy-edited revision of this book review will appear in the journal Law and Literature]

Kyle McGee, Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology. Earth: Punctum, 2017

During the bleak anticipatory interim between November 9, 2016, and January 21, 2017, Kyle McGee faced a “severest necessity” that suddenly “imposed” on him the composition of this short and resonant book. “This is not,” he notes in his Acknowledgments, “a book I wanted to write” (xiii) – nor, we might concur, a future in which we wanted to live. But a year into the Trumpocene, it’s good to have some guidance.

While we braced for the Inauguration, McGee, a writer, legal practitioner, and author of books on Latour and Delueze, shaped Heathen Earth as a stone to hurl into our present void. His angry opening salvo insists that Trump represents less aberration than the logical and horrific extension of elements of our present era that we fail to look at directly. At the “intersection of two vertigos” he identifies these symptoms as the “placelessness” imposed by globalization and the “landlessness” eroded by global warming. Rip away place and dissolve earth without building adequate responses to these dislocations, and you get – well, we know what we’ve got. Or at least we can feel it.

A broken system slouches into view in the wake of neoliberalism. Like many commentators, McGee treats Trump and Sanders as twin exposers of neoliberalism’s tired technofantasies. Trump’s retrograde response to globalized vertigo “sanctifies natus, birth, above all else” (59). Playing on the common compliment paid the leader by his fans, McGee reads being “down to earth” as “an unmistakeable reinscription of certainty into a world…that has become increasingly ambiguous” (60). In this reading, sovereignty emerges less from the Schmittian Decider than through a logic of exceptionalism and tribal / racial supremacy: “sovereign is that which divides the exception from the common” (62). To be included in the exception – to be white, male, rich, powerful, or to believe in the cultural myth of an orange-headed reality TV star who embodies those magic powers – allows uncertainty to be kept at bay, at least temporarily.

So far, so familiar: reading Trump as the ogre that ate the neoliberal consensus seems convincing but hardly shocking. But McGee pulls us one step past twitter radicalism by connecting Trump’s longstanding climate denialism with the collective agenda of both the man and his corporate allies. The project, McGee insists, is geocide, the destruction of Earth systems. Global warming in this view is not an accidental waste project of industrialization but a political gun to the head: “By way of geoengineered global warming, the climate itself can become the principal American weapon in the endless war on terror” (91). Or, put in different narrative terms, “the real Death Star is already here, in our abundant fossil fuel extraction” (98). What else does it mean to have a former Exxon CEO as Secretary of State? Geocide in the Trumpocene mobilizes the state to intensify global ecological crisis because “global warming [is] an unqualified capitalist good” (102). This soiled earth is “heathen” because in its “state of godlessness” it rejects all prior claims to mitigation or shared solace.

But there’s a twist: as Trumpian geocide breaks the world, it cracks open a window for quasi-Leibneizian geodicy. For McGee this vindication of “collective obligation” can only operate through “a pluralism of modes of experience and a multiplicity of arts of sensing and connecting” (104). He shows some sympathy for the non-technocrats demeaned by neoliberalism. “Climate and earth systems sciences,” McGree writes, “need non-scientific allies in literature and the arts, in law and politics, in economics and business, in journalism and media” (113). The total conceptual revolution he anticipates, however, suggests that an adequate response to the forces of Orange must include much more than new allies and new modes of thinking. “Be realistic,” he quips, “demand the impossible” (110).

We’ve heard calls for this sort of “new polity outside of the … state” (144) before, though McGee’s insistence that the right adjective for the state is “geocidal” raises the ecological stakes. The Fortescue-ean proposal that our legal structures be understood as analogous to the ligatures of a human body (124) underlines the fundamental reimagining of the duties of the state that McGee proposes. Alongside a recast politics he seeks a “radical rethinking of the Law of Nature” (125). His radicalism in places broadly parallels the more measured wishes of Jedidiah Purdy, whose After Nature (2015) asks for an “Anthropocene democracy” whose duties and pleasures would embrace humans and nonhumans while also redressing past exclusions. The “necessary couplings between legality and ecology,” McGee insists, “are still yet to be drawn” (127). He gestures toward Bruno Latour’s hopes, as stated in his Facing Gaia lectures (2015), for an international democratic order and an environmental commons to redress the placelessness and landlessness that birthed the Trumpocene. At the inchoate core of McGee’s “democratic weapons” are forces of community: “alliance, assembly, occupation, strike, protest, march, demonstration, above all appearance” (144).

He’s written a smart, angry, insightful, and provocative book to take with us to the barricades.

Books piling up on my desk must be shelved now that spring break is over!  Here are mini-reviews of three I especially liked —

A gorgeous multi-generational novel about the Danish island of Marstall from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of WWII, We the Drowned won the big Danish prizes before being translated into English in 2010 and appearing in the US last year.  A big fat sea epic that’s worth its weight, this one comes with the usual allusions to Conrad and Melville, but unusually it’s not the big whale but Whitejacket that’s on the author’s mind.  The men of Marstall are fishermen but also maritime warriors, and the progenitor of the novel, Laurids Madsen, seems to have sailed with Melville on board the Neversink.
A few quotations highlight the novel’s vast, powerful sweep —

The future that lay ahead of us consisted of more thrashings and death by drowning, and yet we longed for the sea.  What did childhood mean to us? (90).

He learned a song that he sang to us for many years.  He said it was the truest song every written about the sea:

Shave him and bash him,

Duck him and splash him,

Torture him and smash him,

And don’t let him go! (97; song also returns on 674)

Perhaps the most intriguing character is Klara Friis, a sea widow who inherits a shipbuilding business and then plans to save the population of the island by bankrupting its fleet.  Writing to her son, who has (of course) run away to sea —

What does…a man do when he is held underwater?  Does he fight to get up?  No, his pride lies in his ability to hold his breath (609)

Great seafaring stuff.  Worth teaching, perhaps, if it were not so long.

Next, Denis Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye, a wonderfully illustrated and brilliant survey of images of the globe from the classical period through today. Empire, he reminds us, is a “cartographic enterprise” (19).  “To imagine the earth as a globe is essentially a visual act” (15).  I’ll be dipping back into this one for years.

Third, and strangest, Elaine Morgan’s The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which argues that the particular evolutionary path taken by the first humans must have involved a prolonged period of semi-aquatic living, rather than only forest or savanna.  She speculates that various features of modern humans, from a layer of fat under our skin to our relative hairlessness to bipedalism to our habit of breathing through our mouths as well as our noses, appear to connect humans to marine mammals as much as terrestrial primates.  I don’t know how much credit she has in scientific circles — she writes like a semi-outlaw, without an academic byline — but it’s intriguing and almost persuasive.

Of course it’s not all that hard to convince me of a special connections between humans and seas.

Roger Deakin’s engaging Waterlog narrates his travels around the United Kingdom in search of “wild swimming.”  It’s become a cult classic among environmentalists and swimmers in the UK, and has spawned various clubs and  a strand of do-it-yourself travel guides.

Deakin begins with ocean swimming in the Scillies, but the heart of the book is about poaching fresh water spots in rivers and harbors that have been forgotten or browned-over by industry.

In the water, including the moat around his Suffolk, Deakin reconnects to the lived experience of England’s land-and-sea history, from the “contingent” (193) coast around East Anglia to assorted trips to rivers, fens, mountain streams, and coasts.  He loves the cold water, and seeks it out as a psychological cure-all:

There is no anti-depressent quite like sea-swimming….I leave my devils on the waves.  (74)

It’s mostly a nature book, full of lush descriptions and lively water-folk, but Deakin also engages some larger claims about water and humans.  Quoting D. H. Lawrence (on Typee), Normon O. Brown, and Elaine Morgan’s writings on the aquatic ape hypothesis, he strains for solutions in the water:

Perhaps we are simply more at home in or around water than on dry land.  Perhaps dry land is our problem.  (149)

As a swimmer, I’m struck by Deakin’s persistent choice of stroke: the breaststroke.  He swims with his head up, immersed but able to see ahead of him.  To some extent, Deakin’s breaststroking reflects the way English men were taught to swim through mid-century — he observes that when he’s breaststroking in Australia, the other men there are shocked, because, “In Australia swimming strokes are deeply gendered” (313).

I’m a front crawl guy myself, with my face down in the water and a pretty small range of vision, though for long open-water swims I raise my head every 5 strokes or so, to see where I’m headed.  Deakin givens a nice picture of the arrival of the six-beat crawl stroke to Cambridge swim racing in the 1920s, as well as the previous history of the “trudgen crawl,” with a sidestroke kick, earlier than that (41-2).

What a difference the choice of stroke makes! Deakin’s in the water and the landscape, looking around him while paddling through old English fantasies about the land.  I can’t seen far when I’m swimming, only a few feet into the water below and ahead of me.  The line on the bottom of the pool, or a sandy bottom if I’m lucky and in shallow water.  But I’m the one, I think, who’s really in the water, all the way.