«Из неизвестного места подул ветер, чтобы люди не задохнулись» - Андрей Платонов, Котлован

There is no other writer whom I find so difficult to read, and it is not for the depictions of violence, or disease, or despair. It is these tiny moments of quiet compassion that make Platonov unbearable for me.

Many writers of the 1920s combined the linguistic experimentation of an earlier period with the terminological innovations of Soviet power to produce the improbable combinations in which the bureaucratization of metaphysics could take place: the wind howls in Pil'niak and one hears, amidst the whispers of ghosts and the wails of witches - glavbooom!

But how can that compare to Platonov's «А я сама не хотела рождаться, я боялась - мать буржуйкой будет»?


-Баба-то есть у него? - спросил Чиклин Елисея.
-Один находилса, - ответил Елисей.
-Зачем же он был?
-Не быть он боялся.

According to the BBC: The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. The United States is playing a large role in it.

Nothing I say could make my thought more concrete.

A short trip to the Library of Babel

In the Library of Babel, it becomes clear that the meaning of a text depends not on the writer of the text (there is none), but on the context in which the text is read - and the presence of a reader is necessary for this context to be actualized. While it seems that there must be myriad texts in the Library from which no possible language or mode of thinking could derive meaning, there is the rest - all mechanical in their composition - which, when interacting with a particular method for decoding information from text, yield up content.

The existence of a physical limit to the combinations of characters possible in the Library's standardized books points most clearly to the incommensurability between language and its referents. There is, ostensibly, no limit to possible quanta of reality, but the means for their representation in language are limited mechanically.

There is something uncanny about the library in which one could find the answers to any question a human mind could formulate - and so any answer such a mind could understand - but where looking for such answers and asking such questions is utterly useless because what has been revealed is the hideous materiality of language. One returns to the question a child or an illiterate might ask: how can these idiotic little black pictures mean anything in the first place? The answer, in some roundabout confirmation of a basic idea from Saussure, is that this is possible only when there are empty spaces left for the words to fill.

Reflections on Le Père Goriot

Old Goriot is a fascinating book. It could be approached from any number of directions. One of the first which emerges for me is its influence upon Dostoevsky's conception of Crime and Punishment: what does a talented young man do when he realizes that the Social Contract was a swindle? It would not do to take the comparison too far, but Vautrin sounds strikingly like Raskolnikov at times. The odd juxtaposition of the gruesome and the saccharine finds its way into both novels. In one, they meet in the figure of Goriot, in the other - let's say, provisionally - the Marmeladov family (the only nuclear family in the novel). Both have self-sacrificing women, although the poor sisters and rich society women of Balzac's novel are reconfigured as Raskolnikov's sister (who gets her own corrupt and wealthy suitor) and Liza, the obligatory bearer of consummate humility.

Rastignac and Raskolnikov are both young men whose talents brook no comparison with the wretched stop reserved for them by society. More interesting, perhaps, than the difference in responses is the degree of success each meets in defiance of his lot.

But of course Old Goriot is as much about the its eponymous character as it is about Rastignac, who enters from one side of the narrative and departs from the other, his future rather more open than Raskolnikov's after the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. As far as Goriot is concerned, his story might have found a parallel in a slightly more melodramatic Kafka story told from the point of view of the father's disappointment in his inadequate son.

Goriot's love his daughters is as exaggerated as the squalor to which his devotion has reduced him. In his imagination, God's attitude toward his creation compares unfavorably to the old man's regard for his daughters. Several times, our narrator describes his feelings for them as those of a young lover.

The relationship is mutually parasitical. He has given them the fruits of his life's work, but he has denied them the capacity for independent existence. Again and again the daughters lament that they have been given into marriage before they had a chance to learn to think: "Fathers ought to think for us." Both end up in the clutches of avaricious and contemptible men. Both take on lovers as a matter of course, but Rastignac soon discovers that this is not a particularly lucrative position. The relationship of mistress and lover is likewise that of reciprocal exploitation. The father cannot bear to be apart from his daughters, but he has promoted them to circles into which he cannot be admitted. They are at the mercy of a social system which strips them of the money which granted them access to it. In the end he condemns the institution of marriage for separating daughters from fathers and the succession of generations for leaving daughters without the protection of their patriarch. The reproduction of the species and the process of life are obstacles to the feedback loop in which father and daughters are supposed to remain, profiting from each other as they wither away. Given the state of the world, the old man knows that his daughters could never be faithful to him. As is so often the case, he reveals his wisdom in the ravings of his dying hours:

'Neither of them!' cried the old man, sitting up. 'They are busy, they are sleeping, they will not come. I knew it. You have to die to know what your children are. Ah! my friend, do not marry; do not have children! You give them life; they give you death in return. You bring them into the world, and they push you from it. No, they will not come! I have known it for the last ten years. I sometimes told myself so, but I did not dare believe it.'

He invests his life in them, but he expects a return: a lifetime of attention from them both. But he knows it will not come. Like Georg Bendemann's father knows that his son has been plotting his betrayal with the Russian friend.

This relation of parent and children brings to mind that of Vautrin and Rastignac.