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.

In the Wake of a Long Absence

Can it really be that I have not written anything in this space in nearly three months? The state-dependence of memory never ceases to amaze me. A return to a place from which one has been absent is also a return to the time at which one saw that place last. In an instant, three months vanish, and I find myself in the same place. But where was I on the 9th of August? My imagination fails to construct a location in time, and I realize the falsehood of my impression. It was only a brief moment of nostalgia. In a 21-year-old life, three months cannot simply be ignored.

I've read a great many things in these last three months, although there always remains an element of doubt regarding the benefit of much of that reading. I fear that most of what I imagine is the benefit of reading a difficult book is merely the aesthetic experience of reading a difficult book. Even if an essay by Benjamin seems fascinating and provocative, I find it impossible to summarize it or even comment on it articulately to a friend. What did I gain from reading it? Some secret insight to which I will only be granted access later? Perhaps I will have an idea at some point in the future, and at that moment I will suddenly understand the essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Man?" - The thought working retroactively to make my memory of Benjamin's essay far richer and more significant.

I have to admit that it's happened before. It's an experience that has made me reflect on the nature of understanding - on the difference between understanding the semantic content of the words, clauses, and sentences that one has read and the greater meaning - implicit, holistic, ghostly in the way that it exists above and between the words - the meaning that strikes one in a moment of insight, sometimes months after putting down the text. If I try to remember the content of Beyond Good and Evil, nothing comes forth from the inscrutable, formless structure of my memory. But then I read a passage in Heidegger that denies our agency in the origination of thoughts, and I immediately recall the similar idea in Nietzsche. It's a hopeful thought - and I am wont to cling to any believable hopeful thought that - that nothing is ever actually lost in our memories.

But the two preceding paragraphs were utterly tangential, and so they owe their survival only to my permissiveness towards my proclivity for digressions. I am twenty-one years old - this is a fact which my conscience will not allow me to escape during my flights into abstraction and theory. There is a temporal core to truth, say Horkheimer and Adorno, and I agree with them totally (the time for that truth has not passed). This applies not only to epochs, but to individuals as well. Everything I write and everything I think is colored by my context. Nietzsche reminds us that every work of philosophy rests upon the psychology of its writer (usually a lonely, eccentric bachelor), and that all ethical systems aim for the legitimation of the ethicist's prejudices. To recall my earlier remark, then: when we cite individuals to quote "their" ideas - despite our skepticism towards outmoded Romantic notions of genius (that is, the ability to think in a way radically different from one's cultural and chronological compatriots) - all we are doing is uniting an idea presumably created by the discourse of many people with each other (even if that discourse coalesces inside an individual's head) with the prejudices and weaknesses of an individual author (but those are also not just his own - there is a temporal core to pathology as well).

The preceding was an appallingly byzantine sentence. I apologize to anyone who tries to parse it. I experience the desire to add footnotes to this entry, which suggests that academic stylistics are taking over my informal style, which I had thought impervious to the depredations of the Modern Language Association and the like. But I'm not going to pontificate on the stiltedness of academic prose or anything of the sort. One should consider one's critiques in context. It is all-too-easy to join in with a mob venting its bile at a target far less guilty than it presently seems. As a general ethical attitude, I should, with a few necessary exceptions, avoid condemning what is already commonly condemned. - This not to be contrary, but to discourage myself from joining into those terrible feedback loops in which one feels both righteous and comfortable in attacking someone/thing from within a mob. This is why, living in the United States, I tend to argue for Russia's perspective in discussions of geopolitics. There is, of course, not a little emotional attachment to the mythical lost garden of my childhood mixed into that as well, but I think that my rationalization, however divergent from my personal realities, is a useful ethical consideration.

If philosophers can shape profound ideas out of their longings and privations, then why can't I attempt something of the same - albeit more consciously. That an idea is borne in deception, or even that it is false as regards its explicit object, is not enough to invalidate it for other applications.

I will return now to the issue of my age, if only out of formal considerations. Why is it that I continue to think, despite knowing better, that loving someone confers a debt upon that person? The answer, I think, is that this applies validly to considerations of other "positive" relationships. In committing an act of kindness (permit me to rehabilitate the word commit), one is within one's rights to expect gratitude. If I want to become friends with someone, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that person to want to become friends with me. After all, I would not choose a totally incompatible person for friendship, and most people are only happy to make another friend. Romantic feelings are obviously different. Not only are they exclusive, but they are also not unequivocally positive, although they stubbornly continue to seem that way.

Thoughts on this issue continue to follow an economic logic: if I invest energy in having "positive" feelings for λ, then shouldn't I expect something in return - the other end of the transaction? But "positive" feelings are incommensurable. Although I can expect a person to be nicer to me because I have advanced the offer of friendship, I cannot do the same following an offer of romantic attachment. In fact, I can expect to be rather rudely spurned, or ignored, or, perhaps, laughed at.

Most people are perfectly willing to be friends with their inferiors (my fellow students do not seem to fear any effect on their reputation by taking on unflattering friends - perhaps because of the meaninglessness of most friendships). A lover, however, has to be good enough. If it is the comparative insignificance of gratitude or friendliness compared to the commitment involved in even the typically abortive romantic relationship, then I have found the answer to my question, and I must admit that any fool could have told me that. Indeed, this is a perfectly adequate answer, if not a satisfying one. Loving does not entitle one to recompense, either from the object of love or from the universe as a whole. Put frankly, no one gives a fuck. Unrequited love is an absurd screaming into a vacuum.


And so we seek the consolation of philosophy.